Those companies would deploy this shit anyways even if the logs were perfect.

I want to say that businesses are famous for spending enormous amounts of money to fix a solved problem sarcastically but I’ve been working too long to believe it.

Still, so much of the problem isn’t with the monitoring but the annoying middle-management response of stack-ranking all the drivers. Rather than just playing your hand, big employers are constantly trying to reshuffle and “optimize” staff in order to squeeze out an extra ounce of profit. And the end result is everyone being immiserated in order to give someone with a marginal fluctuation in performance a raise.

Anything to blame the employee can and will be deployed.

Shit rolls downhill.

What is a revolution if not a lot of small reforms happening all at once?

What other means is there for primary accumulation if you’re not finding vacant land or taking occupied property?

Are you creating new real estate from nothing?

popular / market opinion will make some properties more valuable than your fixed number, and some properties less.

What happened to price being set by individual willing to buy? How did we get back to anonymous markets again?

You can talk “market rate” or you can talk “biggest sucker”. But the wholesale rate is very different from individual sales made under false pretexts.

you’ll have the overpriced properties abandoned and the underpriced properties fully occupied.

You’ll have the “overpriced” properties fill up after the “underpriced” properties, with some uncleared inventory unless demand exceeds supply.

But surplus housing is preferable to homelessness.

Programs like low cost housing currently cost a great deal of political capital.

They cost physical capital. They generate political capital, as they create a consistency that will support the politicians who support the program.

Social Security / Medicare are the Ur-examples. Enormous constituencies that love to punish politicians who in any way threaten their benefits.

But what is the cost of housing?

Land, labor, and materials.

Where do the materials come from to build the housing?

Via natural deposits of resources.

Where does the labor come from to build the housing?

Via expertise accumulated by individuals through education and practice.

And the land for this housing, is that obtained from the free market?

No. Primary accumulation happens when individuals occupy vacant real estate or through violent expulsion of existing residents.

Once this housing is built, it transforms from “cost” to whatever the market is willing to pay.

Again, no. That’s not how public housing is allocated or valued.

And, the opposite situation, when the public housing isn’t in a desirable area, and the residents don’t maintain the housing, who pays for the maintenance?

Areas become desireable through their improvement. Public housing transforms vacant real estate into a desirable place to live.

On the flip side, residents do a poor job of maintaining housing when they lack the time, the expertise, the resources, and the energy to keep it up. This is not unique to public property by any stretch. Private homes also fall into disrepair when the owners lack upkeep skills or the money and time to provide proper maintenance. State and municipal governments pay enormous sums to affect “Slum Clearance” in order to evict and renovate low-income housing into property desirable for high-income investment. And federal governments subsidize the financial wing of real estate even more heavily.

We’re happy to spend absurd GDP-buckling sums to financialize real estate to the benefit of a handful of magnets. Surely you can see the virtue in paying a fraction of these sums to mobilize a professional workforce capable of maintaining property at-cost.

Easy to hand-wave a solution, harder to make it fit in the real world.

It is exactly the opposite. Given the political authority and the financial resources of a major metropolitan city, providing at-cost housing and maintenance is downright trivial. But acquiring that political capital is the challenge, as you are fighting the economic propaganda of a thousand fiscal parasites who have all grown fat off privatization.

Damn. Can’t believe a media company would be driven by greed.

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Drink Verification Can To Continue

I’m sorry, did you say Netflix is going to be pirated aggressively for the few shows that aren’t complete slop?

That has nothing to do with what someone is willing to pay

It has to do with what one is capable of paying, which plays into willingness.

Extortion isn’t involved in free market transactions.

Extortion is an extension of monopoly pricing. If you can threaten someone’s access to a necessary good/service, then you are functionally extorting them.

That’s before you get into cartelization, vexatious litigation, and other hostile business practices

Plenty of people are willing to mortgage their future for something they want now but have no current liquid assets to purchase it with.

As an alternative to renting in a hostile rental environment sure.

But offer them a real supply of public at-cost housing, and I think you’ll discover quite a few people don’t want that mortgage after all.

Even price gouging, particularly in the field of end stage medical care, is a sort of willing payment.

If you need to threaten someone’s health or safety to extract payment, it isn’t willing.

I’m not so familiar with promotion that creates the illusion of scarcity

:-/

Okay, sure.

Traditionally, a business without clients is called a hobby.

someone is willing to pay is the sum total of what a business gets income from

Except credit changes the math on that significantly. You aren’t constrained by your income, but by your risk of default (and even then… glances 2008-ward) Then you can afford to buy more by paying a higher interest rate.

the capitalist marketplace, is 100% correlated to income willingly given vs cost of obtaining that income

“Willingly” is doing a lot of lifting, given the degree to which fraud, extortion, and price gouging play a roll in the national economy.

What shocks me about much of the U.S. economy is how much is spent on marketing, promotion, advertising, and sales. 0% value derived from such activity, but frequently over half the cost of things that are purchased in the U.S. is sunk in promotion.

Promotion (and deception and intimidation) drives sales. They create the illusion of scarcity and transform luxury into necessity.

They add perceived value among the unwitting and create implicit value through absence of harm.

something is worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it

That’s a naive short-term approach to valuation.

Real value has to be measured in some kind of revenue generation, or - at least - cost mitigation. Otherwise what you’re describing isn’t value but expense.

the willing buyer is the key to the whole valuation equation

The willing buyer is the key to perceived value. But suckering someone doesn’t increase the utility of what you sold them.

Every registered voter can say Elon deserves to be in jail and guys like Merrick Garland will just kinda drag their heels, wave their hands, and insist there’s nothing to prosecute him on.

Meanwhile, we still have people in Guantanamo Bay from 20 years ago who have never stood trial.

Haha. Yeah. Stupid Republican voters.

shuffles feet through the tattered remains of all the liberal broken promises

Yeah, Trump’s making America great by killing white collar industries

True(ish).

and offering factory jobs

Flatly false.

I started my own company because I was sick of it.

I’m genuinely curious to hear how you’ve found it easier to land clients than employers. In my experience, you really need a good in with a bigger firm if you’re going to have any hope of launching a business. Unless your old employer is jettisoning their contracts as quickly as they jettison their staff, that can be tricky.

If not for the battery with a disturbing history of exploding, it would be the vehicle’s worst feature.

Welcome to the Marketplace of Ideas!

That’s a great idea you’ve got there. Would be a shame if something happened to it.

“Zero Emissions” has never sounded so sinister.