Covid, WFH, Musk, The fall of Twitter, Netflix plateau, Reddit Blackout, Crippling interest rates, Trump, Decentralisation, Tech Antitrust, Ukraine
Adding in Edit: AI, Climate Crisis, Nazis, Fascism, Democratic backsliding, automation, mass unemployment, rising homelessness, wild fires
How are you feeling these days?
We sure do live in interesting times
The cyberpunk stuff I was reading back in the 90s is happening now. We are in cyberpunk.
Ok, so I live in a third world country but I am from America.
My wife and I moved to a new part of the city and were walking around to check out the area.
Well there is this massive condo complex. Like earlier 30-40+ floors. There have to be thousands of units and there are a few building like this in their compound.
It’s right next to the river and you walk past them when you walk over the bridge.
Well directly on the other side of the river there were a few young teenagers picking the fruit or maybe it was the leaves off of the tree for food.
It was super dystopian.
Additionally at night most of the lights in that condo complex are off. The building must be 95% empty.
Depressing walking past the newly-built housing that is out of reach for almost all of us. Family member lived in a modest apartment with their partner in 2019. They moved out, we check it now years later, it’s almost twice as expensive per month to rent.
The country where I live, prices have not really increased but there are tons of vacant units.
I still get energy bill alerts for the old property I lived in and close to a year later it is vacant.
I think property developers made all these condos and sold them to people who wanted an investment property. But they sell price was too high so the rent price is too high.
Since there are all these vacant places, rent is cheaper than buying by a significant amount.
If I purchased my current condo with 20% down, my rent would more than double.
Empty overpriced housing makes me sick honestly. It stifles the economy and social mobility of everyone so much as well (by design probably lol).
When they offered to sell the house, at first I was excited, but then then the selling price was like 3x more than I expected. I didn’t even respond to the realtor. There are also a bunch of vacant units for run and for sale.
I think the price is so high because rich people were tricked into buying an investment property which they could not rent and now they are stuck with a huge loan.
And I don’t mean rich like they can afford to lose 200k. I mean like upper middle class who really need to sell for the amount of their loan.
Wintermute is going to destroy Tassier-Ashpool, won’t it?