Try not to be racist challenge: impossible.

Publicly-owned and controlled housing is the solution to this problem, yes. Then rents, upkeep, and all housing questions are determined at the level of public/political decision-making and not by petty tyrant landlords acting only in the interests of profit.

Lazychinese is really the only good channel / site that I’ve found. But it needs a lot more content, especially at the beginner levels. I’m having trouble making the jump from beginner to intermediate, because there isn’t enough content there yet.

There’s a YT channel called comprehensible mandarin that has a lot of content, but unfortunately none of it is organized by difficulty, which makes it impossible to use. You should really be understanding like 90% of the content, and if you can’t, you should bump down to a lower difficulty.

If anyone has any other good recs, I’d also like to know.

“Communist says murder is bad… not true look at how much murder there is!”

For a lot of them, they don’t even care if there’s tenant turnover, especially if its a high-demand area. There’s no incentive to fix a broken AC; the tenants already signed the year lease. They can get to it next year when its time to clean up the place for the re-listing.

Owning 1 slave: Okay

Owning a dozen slaves: Okay

Owning hundreds of slaves: not okay.

/s obviously

/uj

Of course slavery and landlordism aren’t identical in every respect, but they both are based on a parasite class doing no work, and extracting labor value from people who do. Large-scale vs small-scale doesn’t make landlording any more ethical.

Both of course, but as a life-long musician, listening / reading / getting input is the first and most important step.

If someone has never heard a guitar before, and you hand them one, they’ll have no basis for how or what to play. Instead how people learn, is they listen, then imitate, just like language. Mastery comes not through try / fail / correction, but through listening then playing a lot of different music, so that it becomes completely internalized and occurs without active thought. They call this the suzuki method, and its much preferred nowadays over the traditional method of memorizing scales, the circle of fifths, , which I unfortunately wasted years of my early music learning through.

After playing jazz for a few years now, I couldn’t even imagine how skinner’s method would work for that. Jazz is too complicated to think about or logic your way through, just like language.

This is a never-ending struggle. Trying to educate people crushed by decades of propaganda, mis-education, and historical ignorance, who get their entire political identity from harry potter and marvel movies, takes near infinite patience.

The tenants can do upkeep themselves, or pay people to do that. Rent-seeking can still exist even if the rent-seekers promise to do maintenance (which in reality they don’t have much interest in doing, especially if it doesn’t add value to the property). Tenants often have to live for months with broken ACs, appliances, because their landlords have no desire to upkeep temporary items. The yearly lease is signed, and they’re getting their money.

We don’t have an instance stance on landlord apologia, but maybe we should make one, based on the number of people from other instances defending these mooching rent-seeking parasites.

Children babbling then being able to talk after a long time period of input doesn’t disprove anything. CI just says that talking isn’t learning, which is true, because you’re not receiving any information. That’d be like trying to learn geography without looking at a map, or how to play a musical instrument without hearing anyone play it before.

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Krashens hypothesis is just that people acquire languages by understanding messages. Not by studying grammar, memorizing vocab, and “traditional” learning (IE based on skinner’s method, of error=punish, correct=reinforce).

Not only is CI backed up by evidence, and by the many polyglots who have successfully learned many languages through CI / immersion, you’d also need to show evidence of babies not learning their first language this way to refute it (IE show evidence of babies learning their first language by studying grammar and doing flashcard study).

CI is the correct answer. The ppl at dreamingspanish have a great breakdown of why it works. Chinese is a bit tougher because its much harder to find CI content, especially for beginner, but I’ve made faster progress in both spanish and chinese than I have with any other method.

I tried all the other methods people suggested below for years (flash cards, audio courses, reading); none of them worked. You might memorize words, but you won’t actually be able to understand someone speaking to you. I have a friend who has a duolingo 3+ years streak (meaning she uses it every day), and still can’t understand a native speaker talking at a beginner level. If she’d have spent even 1% of that time doing comprehensible input she’d be much further along.

Its messed up how in the US, the real economy (IE jobs, goods produced, production facilities, wage rates, costs of food, cost of housing, eviction rates, homelessness numbers), is so completely divorced from the “imaginary economy” of the finance sector and the stock market. The WSJ can choose financial metrics and fabricate almost any story they want to, because “success” is never demonstrated not by domestic production, but adjusting the time-span width of plots of the stock market to show booms, or labor rates that don’t include those who have dropped out, or who are in the gig economy and without stable employment.

The transition from an industrial economy to one based on finance capital and real estate is pretty much complete. Most countries don’t import much from the US, because it produces nothing of value. The only thing I hear all the older boomers in my home town talk about, the only game left in town, is real estate speculation, not actual production.

since the USSR was a historical failure and Marxists claim China isn’t actually Communist but Capitalist

Both of those claims are false.

• Capitalism doesn’t work (USSR acheivements at the bottom)
• Is China capitalist?

This short video on obstacles to the China path in Latin America gets into exactly what we’re talking about, the abolition of the rent-seeking parasitic sector of the economy that the Chinese revolution abolished.

Exactly. Georgism could be studied as an interesting historical curiosity, but it never took off, and was a historical failure, whereas Marxism especially in the USSR and China abolished land-owning rent-seeking, and the massive economic drain that caused.

This whole “no good landlords” reeks of the same mentality as “no good lawyers.”

Not the same at all, as lawyers do work to get paid.

Landlords rent-seek by charging access to important and scarce property that they themselves don’t use. They extract value through ownership alone, and add no labor value of their own to the process, that the tenants as owners couldn’t do for themselves.

If somebody wants a temporary living situation by themselves or with one partner, what is wrong with them renting an apartment from me?

What gives you the right to these people’s paychecks? If you’re not using it, then sell it, and don’t rent-seek.

There is nothing defensible about being a landlord. Its not exactly the same as owning slaves or owning capital, but all three are based on absentee ownership and extracting value from working people.