I’m fairly confident few people would choose this scheme because otherwise you would’ve already sold your homes and kept the difference…

How does your scheme protect from devaluation? If my home drops say, 200k but you’re going to offset some of that in pensions, okay, let’s put aside the lost equity, how does this stop me losing say, half the equity in my home from some random devaluation?

Providing a living pension doesn’t mean I’m no longer interested in the investment I’ve spent 20 years paying off…

or we could free them from it and have wages rise proportionally or increase corporate taxes.

This is not a napkin calculation, this is handwaving!

I’m not you, I try.

What do you dislike about the concept of free mental health to help the things that clearly bother you?

Not just not open to feedback, but not open to the feedback that he himself solicited!

Except most people aren’t buying second hand, so you’re complaining about a non-existent problem.

Edit: As an amazing proof of concept, I’m in a dive bar, saw a pair of gloves in a wicker basket of lost and found and asked about them. The bartender gave them to me, notinf they’d been here for more than a year. These are easily several hundred dollar gloves.

But if things really got to the point where many people were willing to buy second hand, there are in fact ethical brands as well for those who need new. Myself, I buy few things but as much as I can ethical either 2nd hand or from happy factories. (Though, goddamn I cannot find ethical boxers for a semi reasonable price. If you got tips…)

How is offering to help you find a licensed mental health professional for free trying to piss you off?

And, more importantly, you keep asking “how do you do X, Y Z?” And people keep taking time to help you out!

Oh, neat! I didn’t realize that much like clothes there are ethical internet alternatives. Which do you use?

I don’t think “yeah sure, that’d be great but if we all started doing good things it wouldn’t work!” is a particularly valid critique. We are nowhere near the point of too many people buying second hand clothes.

Yes, cheap stores are common.

But the most valuable brands in America are not at the cheap level, they are things like Nike, Levi’s and The Gap. Hell, even in progressive bastions so many people are rocking Arcteryx, REI etc, none of which are cheap.

Again, go to any downtown, look at the outfits and consider how much they cost. Just the same as people wearing hundreds of dollars in jewelry (yes, there’s costume jewelry but that’s not what most folks are wearing downtown.)

I mean, I guess misery at least is easy?

It just seems so wild. This person seems so unhappy but has zero desire to do anything, even when we try to find them free fucking therapy! “Oh no, I might talk to someone who could maybe help me!”

That’s a silly slogan, I get the appeal but I think it’s just an easy way to avoid taking responsibility for our own decisions.

At the very least, there is better and worse consumption. It is utter nonsense to say that buying something made possible by modern day slavery is the same as paying a local artisan for something.

We have to pay for the speculation otherwise from the homeowner’s perspective, they have again just lost all that value, regardless of how it was acquired. That’s literally the whole issue.

And it’s kind d of odd to say that if you have defined benefits, you won’t mind losing however many hundreds of thousands of dollars you lose when your home value drops. People are doing their financial planning including both their defined benefits AND the values of their assets.

You can’t just hand wave and say there’s infinite money if we just raise wages or tax corporations more. We probably could tax corps more but there’s all sorts of secondary consequences to that.

Yeah. It just bothers me because you can see so many different people have taken the time to articulate solid suggestions, try to be friendly etc and are, at best, met with a “no.” Like, even them complaining about their birthday, so many good people chimed in just to be kind and instead of a thank you or any kind words it’s just this petulant “nooooooooo” attitude, except for literally one post where the commenter posits we’re all insignificant and going to die.

It’s the best and worst of the internet in a single person.

I like that viewpoint, I just don’t think it really applies to most people.

I’m sure many people have causes about which they care but beyond ranting online, I’d suggest very little of it gets translated to action.

I think you’re right, people are tired, have limited energy etc but having volunteered at a few charities and seeing how desperate so many are for volunteers who aren’t retired, well, it makes you a little cynical.

Any second hand store means you’re not contributing to the problem!

And look at what people are wearing on any downtown street and ask how much that outfit cost etc.

Oh, just get into some of them. It’s usually the same pattern of complaining about their life, people offer help, “not like that.”

Eg: https://lemmy.world/comment/14115909

Or: https://lemmy.world/comment/14235653

Or: https://lemmy.world/comment/14385972

Or: https://lemmy.world/comment/13620704

Or: https://lemmy.world/comment/14434981

Or: https://lemmy.world/post/23747812

I think the thing that bugs me is that so many people have taken the time to help in good faith to get a “naw.” And the cycle repeats with another whine/question until there’s enough pushback, then a couple anodyne questions, then back to the same sad self pity party.

I love the notion of a Mcdonald’s employee needing MFA.

Or that the only reason people buy smartphones is for MFA (in the years before widespread MFA, I’m sure they were getting them because they knew MFA was just around the corner.)

Edit: I think it’s just easier to admit people don’t really give a fuck about other folks if it would cost them anything. Walk down any street, most people are wearing clothes they know to be made by children who occasionally burn to death and many of those same people will happily fork out $200 for the “coolest” versions of those same child slave made clothes.

Check OP’s history, it’s all complaints/whines as questions.

Oh man, Asians hate so many other Asians so ferverently it’s impressive. I knew a Japanese girl whose mom threatened to disown her if she dated any “Chinese hell bastards” (which was in fact, every Chinese person.)

Consumers: Well, that’s fine!

If you use pensions to pay the complete difference, that gets insanely expensive. Just some rough calculations:

Let’s just look at 10 million homes. (There’s somewhere between 14 and 16 million but let’s knock a lot out just to not quibble.)

Again, we’ll take a very modest price decrease, 200k that doesn’t make housing affordable per se but would be an impressive market correction.

That totals to 2 trillion dollars, significantly more than all the federal taxes received in the last decade (Total fed tax revenue was about 180 billion for 2023)

So, we clearly can’t afford to just offset the loss in equity with a publicly funded pension, or even half that.

People might be able to survive on a much lower amount but even giving back a mere 10% of the lost equity would be more than literally the entire Federal budget and still leave most people pretty upset about the lost 90% difference.

These ideas usually sound good until you poke around at the numbers.