Alien Nathan Edward

Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • this, but doubly so with Eve. You’ll notice that we often skip over Cindy and Dave and go right to Eve, so often that I don’t even know off the top of my head whether Charlie and Deandra are the conventional names for persons 3 and 4 in this construct. That’s because this construct is used a lot when talking about secure communications and the convention is that “evil” “eavesdropping” Eve is the person trying to destroy, intercept or alter the communication between Alice and Bob. Her role is built into her name.



  • Let’s say your three months in on a new rental home. Landlord may be averages $100-$200 per month profit, so reasonably they’ve only collected $600 in total profit from you. AC now breaks and needs a $10,000 replacement. Who pays? Have they collected enough money from you so that you are paying for it?

    This only seems to not make sense if you assume that the landlord hasn’t rented the property in the past and won’t continue to rent it in the future, and also that you assume that revenue is the same as profit, which it fundamentally is not. If they’re only making $100-$200 in profit how do you account for the rest of the money that’s paid in rent? There’s no way they’re renting me a house with central air for only $100-$200/mo, is the rest of the money I pay in rent maybe, and hear me out here, going to cover expenses like a new AC unit?

    you might as well start arguing that every business ever pays for things because of money, they’ve collected in their patrons.

    I’m arguing exactly that, that every business pays for things with or in anticipation of revenue. It’s built into the idea of seeking profit. I’m a W2 employee and the business that employs me pays me with revenue they bring in and in anticipation of being able to use my work to bring in more revenue than they pay me. It’s kinda fundamental to the rationally self-interested profit motive that’s supposed to drive this whole economic system.



  • Where does the landlord get the money? Do landlords often rent property at a loss? Is being a landlord a charity, where someone takes their own money and uses it to subsidize a stranger’s housing costs?

    Of course not. Landlords set the rent such that rent - costs > 0. The money to repair a rental home ultimately comes from the renter. The landlord may pay up-front, as in your example with a derelict property, but that’s with the intention of making back what they pay and more in the form of rent. Like all businesses, the cost of doing business plus all the profit the market will bear gets passed on to the consumer.