So your landlord was renting your apartment to you at a loss?

But it's also probable that the loan is fixed at a lower rate than you can get now, the maintenance costs less if you put a few people on salary vs hiring them for one off repairs, and the utility bills are lower because it's a smaller space.

Losing money sets a floor on rent because the landlord loses money is going to be looking at selling the place, possibly even at a loss, just to get out from under the burden and so that place disappears from the market. If profit is high, they'll be looking to build a possible, maybe not your landlord, but someone will, and if there's no place to build for whatever reason, then rent is just going to go up.

Do you have any evidence of that causal connection, or is that just an assumption? The US also accepts large numbers of immigrants and temporary workers.

But they are in fact full-fledged human beings living physically in the United States. They are buying groceries, paying rent, getting their haircut.

Once you realize they are fully participating economic actors, it is much less clear whether they are a net positive or negative.

As if your (very American) bosses wouldn't find another to put you down and wrong everything they could from you. Today ICE is going after immigrants, tomorrow Pinkerton is going after you.

This isn’t true. A business owner completes tasks with the help of employees, but unless he is indebted to a lender, he is still ordinarily thought of as being independent. Independence is a spectrum, and people who require that the world be re-engineered so that they can access it are generally on the lower end of that spectrum.

> The difference between their dependence and mine is not that mine exists. It is that mine is visible. […] A person who drives to the grocery store is considered independent, although the car depends on fuel, roads, mechanics, insurance, and a global manufacturing network. A person who orders groceries because they cannot walk through the store may be considered dependent.

The author is conflating two kinds of dependence. Lots of people rely on food delivery. If a food delivery system breaks down, it could be an existential threat to both parties, the difference is that the able-bodied will tend to have a greater level of optionality in how they respond to this kind of breakdown.

Someone suffering from kidney failure is obviously more dependent on the supply chain than someone who is not suffering from kidney failure. There is a debate to be had about how much this gradation matters if both categories of people are still mortally dependent on a system; am I independent if I can cross the street by myself but don’t know how to grow enough food to feed myself?

The idea, a business owner must be "independent" refers to them being financially independent regarding their income streams relative to "dependent" employees.

That doesn't necessarily hold true in all cases, it's an over-generalization to begin with. But it also is independent from your "lower end of the spectrum": you can be disabled and own a business. And demands of disabled people aren't worth less?

So, (in)dependence is context-dependent. Hence your spectrum. But the author's point is, it's not the same as (it's independent from) autonomy.

Shaping society based on vaguely defined/understood concepts leads to undesirable outcomes.

You’re making an implicit argument about the nature of worth. I am using a simplified model based on economic value; if the author has a certain lifestyle that she believes she is entitled to live, and she cannot provide this lifestyle for herself, then the obligation to provide it will necessarily fall on other people. Disability advocacy groups obscure this detail constantly; they want to purchase their dignity using other people’s money.

I think there is a strong case to be made that a just society would be organized around these sorts of principles, but where disability advocates have failed is in wanting to put these obligations on others while resenting the idea that the disabled should even have to show gratitude for the gift they are being given (because this would, in their minds, diminish their dignity). Social justice in the 2010s was built around this idea that marginalized minority groups could treat the majority of the population as workhorses simply because it was considered to be the right thing to do. The model fell apart when people realized they could game the system by claiming marginal status, and also led to a trend of people traditionally tasked with serving as workhorses checking out of the workforce altogether.

This is an extremely boring way to engage with others.

> There is a thing called human dignity and it involves granting everybody the basic right of dignified sustenance.

I think I am still obligated to throw you the life vest even if I don’t personally like you, but if after the fact you then scream at me that I didn’t do enough, I think you’ve committed a transgression. Screaming that no one is doing enough is by and large all that comes out of these circles and why they ended up fading into irrelevance. People were discussing this issue during the Obama years; you haven’t brought anything new to the discussion.

> The author details how you yourself are dependent on that society you denigrate here.

I’m not sure where you got the idea that I was arguing to the contrary. My premise was that the word independent is semantically meaningful and that the article is making an attempt to undermine that meaning in order to further an agenda. I don’t disagree that e.g. someone who buys their food at a grocery store is dependent on the logistics system in a way that someone who is dependent upon having an oxygen tank delivered is dependent on others, but like I said, this is a spectrum based on the ability of the dependent to make substitutions between the person or thing they are dependent upon. It still makes semantic sense to say that so-and-so is independent of his father, but the children of so-and-so are dependent upon their father, even if so-and-so’s existence is ontologically dependent upon the existence of his father.

You appear to over-generalize personal experiences beyond their domain of applicability. Then you ignore the crucial points I made, pretending to know it all already, contradicting the absence of rational arguments on your part.

Because you do. You take your own vague "meaning" (that you never specify sufficiently) and lament how it's not being adhered to by others.

The meanings of words are context-dependent. You ignore that here. Dependency in particular has many different meanings. Nobody "denies" you the specific ones you use there.

Your own agenda, that you argue in favor of, is somehow invisible to you? It contradicts the essence of the article, clearly the source of your antagonism here.

Which areas are you referring to?

MRAs were a minority of a minority of users; even when the site was mostly white and Asian men talking about computer science, it was overwhelmingly liberal. There are far more who fit into the MRA category now but those have come about due to the cultural trend towards sexual doomerism among Gen Z men, who inherited it from millennial incels (most of whom fled the site around the time of Ellen Pao’s tenure). MRAs were mostly Gen X and elder millennials.

> I assume the actual political makeup of the user base hasn't changed that much in that time

Why? The site used to have a minority of right-leaning users (/r/conservative, /r/anarcho_capitalism, /r/DebateFascism, /r/TheDonald, /r/altright, /r/darkenlightenment, /r/politicalcompassmemes, etc.). All of these communities are completely marginal now; half of them were outright banned from the site. Reddit doesn’t have a positive reputation among people who are even moderately conservative because of how heavy-handed the moderation is. It has always had this reputation, but there was a brief time from around 2014 to around 2017 when conservatives could actually engage with parts of it in a way that they just don’t bother to do anymore.