Free gravel for life. Just become a gravel wholesaler. Corner the market instantly.

This isn’t unethical. This is why you use animals.

… this meme is making fun of the communists here.

I got chased away from actual social media to the fediverse before shitloads of people came here in protest

Not the sick burn you think it is

Fearful that a high-level national hero might be killed, Soviet officials banned Gagarin from participating in further spaceflights. After completing training at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy in February 1968, he was again allowed to fly regular aircraft. However, Gagarin died five weeks later, when the MiG-15 that he was piloting with flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin crashed near the town of Kirzhach

Commies smh

I live in the real world, in which the Tesla turnaround happened before the self driving shit

Elon is (maybe was) very much good at what he does. Twitter is a bad example because that whole shit show was a dick measuring content from the get-go.

Fact is, SpaceX wouldn’t be SpaceX and Tesla sure as fuck would not be Tesla without his leadership.

He’s a piece of shit as a person, and I’d never want to work for him, because his work ethic is unhealthy to say the least (and I personally have a pretty extreme work ethic), but it’s schoolyard nonsense to claim he’s somehow bad at business. Leading a business may be the one thing he is good at. It’s tossing shit just to toss shit.

You can not like him and acknowledge he is good at things.

Also you can tie it directly to Jobs, because when he was gone for a bit, apple fuckin tanked, and then he came back and they came out with the iPod.

That’s not an accident.

Fun fact: all unions are inherently rent-seeking.

I say this as a supporter of unions - true is true. Rent seeking is inherently bad but the sum of the union equation is that they do more good than bad.

The police union, of course, is also uniquely bad in other ways.

Not if they can’t get a loan they can’t. Not if it’s a fucking apartment building.

Seriously you guys are gonna have a weird time in the real world.

People who rent are not generally people who can purchase houses

What you’re missing is they were literally lords, who literally owned land, and extracted rents from shit like charging to harvest kelp on their shoreline, or charging a toll to navigate down a stream, etc.

Ie. not contributing any benefit (preventing access to a natural resource/mode of travel otherwise possible)

It has nothing to do with providing homes, which is a distinct economic benefit.

This all comes from this very long bit of Adam Smith’s work, which I will link in its entirety and encourage you to read, with the above definition of a literal landlord in mind.

https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/chapter-xi-of-the-rent-of-land

As a similar confusing distinction, though a modern toll road may seem similar to extracting rent to navigate a stream, a modern toll road explicitly addresses the externalities of using the road (ie. Damage to the road), and is a non-negative use of rent seeking.

An example of rent-seeking in a modern economy is spending money on lobbying for government subsidies in order to be given wealth that has already been created, or to impose regulations on competitors, in order to increase one’s own market share.[15] Another example of rent-seeking is the limiting of access to lucrative occupations, as by medieval guilds or modern state certifications and licensures. According to some libertarian perspectives, taxi licensing is a textbook example of rent-seeking.[16] To the extent that the issuing of licenses constrains overall supply of taxi services (rather than ensuring competence or quality), forbidding competition from other vehicles for hire renders the (otherwise consensual) transaction of taxi service a forced transfer of part of the fee, from customers to taxi business proprietors.

The concept of rent-seeking would also apply to corruption of bureaucrats who solicit and extract “bribe” or “rent” for applying their legal but discretionary authority for awarding legitimate or illegitimate benefits to clients.[17] For example, taxpayers may bribe officials to lessen their tax burden.

One would assume they would list… You know… rent, if it applied

You not liking landlords doesn’t change the meaning of words. You can still dislike landlords, and just use words properly.

I’d strongly recommend you consider reading the entire thing, because that is not his take at all.

Consider at his time, “landlord” literally meant a lord who owned land, and much of the rent he discussed (often negatively) is shit like, charging people to harvest kelp near your house.

Landlords aren’t necessarily rent-seekers (though some individuals conceivable could be) as economists use the term, and your lack of understanding of economic rent-seeking is something you can fix.

Rent-seeking is a concept in economics that states that an individual or an entity seeks to increase their own wealth without creating any benefits or wealth to the society. Rent-seeking activities aim to obtain financial gains and benefits through the manipulation of the distribution of economic resource

Providing a home is a benefit to the society.

Credit processors (what you’re calling “banks”) provide a service to merchants. They are also not rent-seeking.

Adam Smith justifies the existence of rent as improvement in the value of land.

https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/chapter-xi-of-the-rent-of-land

Perhaps you’re misunderstanding the term ‘rent-seeking’ which is a different concept entitely

“Rent-seeking” as an economic concept is not when you collect rent, as a landlord does.

Falling implies the thing is bad.

Am I falling when I play MarioKart with my kids? That’s fun and similarly dangerous.

No I end up doing fun things when I want to do fun things

I’ve done this regularly. Went from every day use to quitting for a year before becoming a teacher, and have regularly stopped for 6 months to a year for various reasons since.