anaximander

A lot of food places, particularly eat-in restaurants, are just perpetually struggling. Half the staff are on minimal pay, or the owner’s friends and family helping out. They struggle and lose money for a few years before finally folding. A regular who has no idea about the industry buys the place and keeps much of it the same because they always loved it. The process repeats.

If prices go up, and stay up, eventually things like salaries have to go up too, at least a bit. If you need a certain amount per month to live when last year you could get by on less, you’ll need a job that pays you enough to live. In theory if the price of goods has gone up then the value of whatever you’re producing for your company has gone up so they can afford to give you the extra (in practice they take a lot of the extra as profit and pass on just enough to retain employees and no more). Of course, it’s the same physical item, so eventually it all sort of balanced out.

You can see this if you look at it in the long term. In 1970 the average salary in the UK was something like £1200 per year, and a house cost £4500 or something. Today the average UK salary is over £27,000 and a house is around £285,000. The houses haven’t got 61 times larger or anything, that’s just inflation. So, yeah, you kind of are just stuck with it.

Let’s imagine there was somehow zero rental market. Imagine there was a law against purchasing a dwelling and then not actually using it as your residence. People still need to live somewhere, so there would be a demand for housing. People would see a profit in meeting that demand, so someone would build and sell housing. Currently, those who can’t afford to buy a home have rental as a cheap alternative. Without that, there would be an open niche for something to meet the need for housing. There would be a market pressure to solve the discrepancy between the price of housing and the available capital of the average person. House prices might be forced down, salaries might be forced up, I don’t know what would happen precisely but there would be a pressure to make it possible for people to live somewhere.

You can see evidence for this in what happened in a lot of major cities. People have been able to use one home that they own as collateral in buying a second, and then use the income from renting it out to pay that off plus a little profit. That leaves them with two properties as collateral and a little cash spare, making it easier to do it again with a more expensive place. Rinse and repeat and you’ve got wealthy landlords buying up all the properties so there’s no need for the people selling those properties to drop prices to where first-time buyers can afford them - the usual dynamics of supply and demand that keep prices in reach of buyers have been disrupted, and the two types of buyer separate into two tiers that get pushed further apart, getting harder and harder for people to jump from the lower tier to the upper. This is how you end up with people paying £1000 in rent while the bank tells them they can’t have a £700-a-month mortgage because they can’t afford it, and that £1000 a month leaves them nothing left over to save up for the £30,000 deposit they’d need anyway. The market pressure that led to this situation are obvious, and reversing those pressures is the most obvious way to fix the situation.

A lot of the punchlines are “ha ha, aren’t they weird?”, which hits totally different if you’re the sort of person who the character is an obvious caricature of. Doubly so if the weirdness in question is associated with some form of neurodivergence. For some people - myself included - a lot of the laughs in that show feel very much like they’re laughing at you, not with you. It’s only funny if you identify more with the people on the other side of the joke.

Very much an industry of two halves. Some companies absolutely do not care about you and will drive you to do more with less and for longer hours until you burn out, and then replace you with the next poor sucker. Offers will bend over backwards to look after their people and maintain a working environment where everyone gets a say and is happy and able to be at their best. Which one you get can be a total coin flip, and even sat talking to them in a job interview it’s sometimes easy to mistake one for the other.

If people who break laws can’t vote, and the government decides what the law is and appoints the judges who enforce those laws, then the government currently in power can decide who gets to vote. Obviously there’s an incentive there to make laws that disproportionately affect those who weren’t going to vote for you, and thereby remove most of your opposition’s votes. That way lies dictatorship.

It also makes it hard to change bad laws. For a random example, there used to be laws against homosexuality. How do you think LGBT acceptance in law would be doing if anyone who was openly gay or trans lost their right to vote? How do you improve access to abortion if anyone who has an abortion, provides an abortion, teaches young people about abortion, or seeks information about abortions becomes unable to vote? How do you change any unjust law if the only people who can vote are those who are unaffected - or indeed, those who benefit from the status quo?