aesthelete, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I took a few minutes to select a few ginormous American megacorps in various industries and asked chatgpt to help select the best non-US analogs to compare to.

LOL

I looked at Verizon and Vodafone, and then GM and Toyota, before I decided to actually do some real work on this and put some real data together. My results were inconclusive: verizon is kicking vodafone’s ass, but then again telecom is absolutely fucked in this country so no big surprise there. GM and toyota split the metrics pretty evenly; one better in one area, the other better somewhere else.

What the fuck does any of this have to do with the margins in rental apartments?

So I’m not convinced yet profit margins are abnormally fat in this country compared to international business. It’ll take a lot of data points from a lot of companies over a lot of years to really get a satisfactory picture of whether your point is truly accurate.

There’s hardly a more friendly business environment to stage your multi-national from than the United States…and that’s not only because we have people like yourself trying to thoroughly research how good they have it in order to prove a boot-licking point to some random stranger on the Internet, but also because here, unlike in all other countries, if you don’t like the regulatory environment you can quickly and easily buy yourself a congressman (or two)…oh and you can just send any manufacturing costs such as labor out of the country.

I think you’re missing the forest for the weeds here truly. I’m talking about a specific area and you’re trying to extrapolate it to the entirety of the world. I’m sure that there are some industries where the margins in the US are a bit thinner than they are elsewhere (especially when it’s not possible to move your labor too far from your business such as in retail), but what’s truly unique is how defeated and broken and used to giving it up to business we are in this country. Or to add one of my favorite Vonnegut quotes for color:

semi-related Vonnegut quote___ America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register. ___

On the specific point about rental rates and margin, and I’ll go even more specific into the locality…there’s scarcely a better margin business than taking a large complex full of 550 SQ FT apartments in southern california and charging an ever increasing amount of rent, pet rent, shit fees, and requiring more and more other things from renters every year (deposits, pet deposits, etc.).

California, “liberal” state that it is, managed to pass a huge restriction on this though…you can’t raise someone’s rent more than 10% year-over-year without giving the renter in the unit 90 days notice much to the horror of the landlord class who roused every rabble they could in protest.