Memes

Unless you live in a city with rent stabilization, yes landlords will do that. Groceries will likely not have that problem, because of other market conditions. The first to increase their rents will be luxury apartments. Once the Internet is done laughing their asses off about $5000 rent, other landlords will use realpage to gauge the market and increase in tandem. Landlords literally do not care if their property is occupied, because the money is in the land and we've commoditized housing.

Have you seen how housing prices rose when interest rates were low? Markets work that way because consumers outcompete each other, at least in the housing market. You need a surplus of supply, like the corn market, to keep costs low.

Like @espi wrote, you need fierce competition in all markets.

It becomes more and more meaningless when you start to talk about any form of regulation or extension of basic rights. Plenty of countries are coming around to the idea that housing is a basic right. It's hard to raise prices when your competition is literally free. UBI + market regulations + basic human rights are all required. No solution exists in a vacuum and anyone who considers it as such is missing the point

We literally just witnessed this with COVID shutdown. Im not sure why you think people getting handed money will not increase pricing as that is usually how things work.

So you want to tell me that companies aren't buying out competition and with a monopoly they then rise prises as they want?

Explain to me how markets work if the only company selling or renting houses is not lowering their price when demand lowers? Or when they intentionally are not renting flats in order to keep demand high?

We should do away with using money for necessities. You want a pool, pay for it. A safe and sanitary living space? Free. Stop making people rely on something with no inherent value.

The ideas of „you can only own a building you live in“ and „companies can’t own residential buildings“ keep popping up in my head. Any reason that can’t be the solution?

It's a fantasy though. An extremely competitive market would be nice, but in reality it would be a race to the bottom and those who started with more cash would win out, buy up or starve the competition and monopolise, giving them the extra space to be lazy and pass on profits to their shareholders, who dictate increased prices to increase their margins.

It's super frustrating that my state banned the ability for cities to have municipal internet, it makes organizing to make gigabit Internet a municipal utility much harder

I wish all cable cartels a very Nationalize that shit

Yeah, why TF is the internet so shitty in US? I get 500 Mbps down/10 Mbps up for $80/month. It's disgusting. I'd rather have 100 Mbps symmetric. Or better yet, 500 Mbps symmetric. My parents pay around $20/month for that, and they live in rural India. Even they got fiber, but I have to deal with fucking coax cables. The only local provider with fiber and symmetric speeds doesn't operate in my side of the town. Why does everything in US have to be designed to fuck the end consumer? It's really frustrating.

I like the idea of UBI too. I hope it happens and that we transition into a UBS model once its success is shown to the world. That being said it's important to front that with me not being in support of the neofeudal UBI that silicon valley techbros push for. That would be a disaster.

You can't really compare US and Norwegian unions apples to apples. They don't work the same way. In Norway they're way more mainstream, work closer with the government, and they don't employ people. There are no "union shops", and no vote to join a union. You just join one while employed directly with your employer.

You can still negotiate your own compensation, but the union may also negotiate raises for the entire workplace separately (including for non-members). In a way you could say the union negotiates a workplace-specific minimum wage.

The risk of union workers getting fired and replaced with scabs is far less in Norway, because there is much stronger worker protection. These protections apply to everyone, not just the unionized workers, but they were achieved due to unions, years ago.

I don't think you necessarily can draw any conclusions about strategy for Norwegian unions based on experience with US unions, or vice versa. They're just different beasts.

Note: Apologies if some of this is mildly incorrect, I have not been directly involved with union work in either country, and so I only have a high-level view of it all. Someone more experienced should be able to give more detailed information about union strategy in either country.

IMHO this strategy helps to prevent chewing. Workers will say "I need this union for a high wage" instead of "what do we even need these union dues for anymore".