yogaballcactus

Not that I’d be opposed to everyone making a lot more money, but increasing wages won’t solve the housing crisis. If everyone got an extra $1000/month then the cost of housing would just go up by $1,000/month and there were be no reduction in the amount of homeless people or in the number of people struggling to afford rent. If you want housing costs to go down then you have to build more housing. And not just a few more houses or one apartment building. If you want to make a dent in the problem, you have to build a metric fuckload of additional housing everywhere where it is physically possible to build. Your best bet to making this happen is to vote for politicians at the state and local level who will remove zoning restrictions and squash NIMBY opposition to higher density housing.

Nothing is artificially restricting the supply of food. If we all suddenly become wealthier then farmers will raise more cows and chickens. The price of meat might spike in the short term, but supply will increase to match the demand and the price will go back down in the long term.

The housing market cannot increase supply. Local zoning laws restrict high density housing in most of the US. You can’t tear a single family home down and replace it with a duplex. If you want to develop undeveloped land then you usually have to build single family homes. You can almost never build an apartment building.

What happens to the ones that don't eventually become actors?

Quite frankly, if your parents hadn’t wanted higher density housing then they shouldn’t have had kids. It’s absolutely insane that people will pop out a bunch of kids and then complain that more housing needs to be built so their adult children will have a place to live.

This isn’t really the gig economy. The drivers are employees - just not employees of Amazon. So they would get all of the benefits protections required by law from their employer, but that employer is not Amazon and does not have to provide any of the protections Amazon provides to its employees above and beyond what’s required by law.

This is different from gig economy jobs, where the workers are independent contractors instead of employees. Gig economy workers do not get any of the benefits or protections the law gives to employees because they are not, legally speaking, employees.

Of course, both ways of doing it are kind of fucked. But the Amazon drivers (who are actually not employees of Amazon) are less fucked than Uber drivers. Also, the “benefits and protections required by law” are pretty bare-bones.