If someone can charge you for using things you already bought and 'own', then average man has no property rights. The fee could be increased at any time, or new fees could be introduced.
As the housing crysis deepens, average person will never own a home either.
So average person will be in the same position as a medieval serf, conpletely dependand on the whims of the lord, probably living in debt starting from the student loan and dying in debt.
I was ranting about this 2 years ago and a lot of people laughed it off...
I cited an auto start feature o VOLVO cars that required a siriusXM membership.
It's unfathomable that we reached this point of monthly subscriptions being implemented on things that we've already paid for. It's the first sign that we're in for a wave of not feudalism, but outright economic slavery. There is no rational consumer protection against many predatory business practices, and many are eager to be a part of monthly subscriptions for useless services for lord knows what motivational reason.
Mike Judge was a genius for making the movie Idiocracy, it's our future. No way around it now. :[
This is something that bothers me as well, implementation decisions are what drives this a lot. I have a nest thermostat and it seems like the app decides to log me out randomly every once in a while and I have to go through the whole login/2fa process, sometimes in the middle of the night when trying to adjust the temp! There is no need for internet connected thermostat most of the time, I would much prefer Bluetooth with no login needed ever.
My Tesla Model 3 _can_ remote start the air conditioner via the cellular network, but it can also work via bluetooth if I'm within maybe 20 to 30 meters of the vehicle.
I'm only familiar with the systems where the fob is still just a proprietary remote. It also has a phone app, and that's what costs extra. The fees are too high, but the existence of a fee is sensible.
well there is good faith implementation and a bad faith one. implicit in the clubbing of satellite radio & remote start is a bad faith revenue milking where they are trying to sell a rather undesirable feature with a very desirable one. I have a volvo and an older acura. I f*king hate this because my older acura can be remote started and volvo wont as I refuse to pay $15 a month for a already working & paid for feature they disabled after a few years.
what they really want is install a bunch of these leeching monthly subscriptions on your credit card that you forget about and they keep billing you for almost no marginal value.
It is free when the vehicle is parked at my house and has access to our wireless guest network. It can download updates just fine. This is purely a money decision by Volvo.
$300 a year is crazy. I never even turned that feature on.
volvo does not require siriusxm (which is satellite radio) for auto-start. it requires Volvo On Call subscription (you get one for free for first 3 years). And it's kinda reasonable, because Volvo On Call works via LTE and somebody needs to pay for it
Why can't we? The American Founders literally wanted us to take up arms and kill people who violated our essential liberties. You can read this in their own books and papers. They were extremely clear about this... it isn't even up for debate, unless of course you're talking to a moron that's never actually read Jefferson, Washington, Madison, etc.
If we reach a point where we can't even restate what our Founders said, we're already in our twilight as any kind of civilized liberal society.
Now we can argue about what constitutes an "essential liberty". I'm not sure I'd put, "Heated seats in my BMW" in that category.
I hate when people say that. This has literally nothing to do with the historic institution of feudalism. Its is the opposite of actually educating people on actual feudalism.
Its just using historical terms that people call not to be 'bad' so you don't actually have to explain the problem.
We are literally talking about people who can buy a BMW. Did BMW promise them heated seats when they sold it to you? Would you feel better if the service worker at the dealer would rip out 5mm of tubes to 'break' the heated seat? Would that make it Ok?
Also, this is the extreme, extreme minority of features from an extreme minority of cars, by the extreme of car manufactures. Calling this 'rapidly moving to Feudalism' is way overly dramatic.
> As the housing crysis deepens, average person will never own a home either.
High amount of home ownership is not the same as having a high quality of live. And its also not really accurate.
> So average person will be in the same position as a medieval serf, conpletely dependand on the whims of the lord,
The lord who sold the serf a BMW?
> probably living in debt starting from the student loan and dying in debt.
Many people manage to pay of their student loans and don't have to live in debt if they don't want to.
Many people want to take on debt in order to consume now rather then later, being in debt is not actually necessary bad.
This is a weird take to read when you're someone who dropped out of college when the debt load got too scary and had learned enough to gain a marketable skill and enter industry. Paid my debt off in a couple years. This was less than a decade ago, too, I'm not that old.
Tuition has been frozen at my university since I left so the kids there now have the same exact choices I had
The big difference between me and my peers was that I did poorly academically my first year and it forced me to enter the work force and learn the value of the money I was borrowing, and after that I borrowed the minimum I could to remain in school, for the minimum time, as it was so expensive.
I'm supposed to believe that it's impossible to avoid... When I avoided it?
I even got screwed by federal assistance because my parents seemed financially healthier than they were. I paid for 90% of my own educational costs, by working part time. And like I said this was the late 00s, early 10s, I'm not telling a tale from the 70s
My wife has a similar story, but started out much poorer. Now we're both professionals sans degrees making over six figures, no debt. But that's impossible.
I get it, these are anecdotes. But student loan debt is a choice, and it's one we both avoided, so it's definitely possible to do.
> I'm supposed to believe that it's impossible to avoid... When I avoided it?
Being possible isn't the same as being scalable, for the vast majority of people debt is extremely difficult to get out of, and it's in the interest of the creditors (quite literally) to encourage lending to people who are likely to find it difficult to break free of the compounding interest, because it maximises their return.
Even assuming everyone was individually instantly capable of recognise and managing the risks of their debt, there would be massive reduced opportunity for ways to escape it, and the interest might be higher in order to satisfy the creditors who would otherwise not get as much return... it would be much harder to escape in that situation - From that perspective you should count yourself lucky, had everyone been as "smart" you might still be in debt.
Congrats, you're the exception that proves the rule.
I know a lot of people who were, frankly, railroaded into college. Middle class kids who never had to worry about money, did good to excellent in school, never worked a serious job, were told by their schools, parents, teachers, television and the internet that any degree was a path to success. Then the clock strikes midnight on their 18th birthday and they have no idea how to make informed decisions, so they just do what they've been told by everyone they've trusted for their entire lives.
They mostly ended up with history, sociology or some other useless undergraduate degrees and working at Starbucks if they're lucky and five to six figures of student loan debt with no way to pay it off. And by the time they're wise enough to actually handle money responsibly they're already trapped.
Also most universities are not freezing tuition, and I'm wondering where you went to college and what your part time job was, and how much assistance you got. You're not paying college tuition by working the counter at California Pizza Kitchen part-time. Plus Tuition has continued to inflate every year even since the early tens, although the rate of inflation has decreased in recent years.
https://www.in2013dollars.com/College-tuition-and-fees/price...
Nonsense. Student loans are not some kind of enforced slavery or whatever. You are getting a education, you are investing in human capital and that will increase your earnings potential for the rest of your life. Just like every other investment.
You are like gone be working for 40 years, to spend some of that paying back university is not a horrible deal. People here act like you get absolutely nothing for student loans as if you were born a debt slave.
One can make an argument of course that another system is better, a system where everybody (including people who don't go to university) pay more taxes and you pay more taxes in order to pay for higher education. That argument can be made.
There are many improvements that could be made, less people should do formal education and more people should be doing apprenticeships and then part time further education. That would produce much less debt without actually fundamentally changing the system.
However to act like this is some draconian feudalism is crazy.
no, it's simply the reality that there's quite a bit of range from the the constant late-stage-capitalism crowd's doomsday worldview to the libertarian/alt-right/whatever crowd's "snowflakes just want to have 30 genders and don't want to work" narrative.
yes, things could be better. (yes, a lot better if people suddenly were suprarational.) yes, there are metrics that regressed in the US, or even in the world in general (civil liberties for example)
but it's quite possible to look at each issue in context, and this approach is a lot healthier and more useful than adopting either extreme. (student debt is basically the perfect issue for this, because without context we can just throw anecdotes or useless overly general statements at each other. there's not even consensus about what's the problem. yes, tuition costs are high, and rising. yes, many people have trouble servicing their debt. and so on. but these are different - though of course interconnected - problems. nor is there consensus about who is most affected. should society instead focus on those who did not even have the opportunity to apply to collage? should we focus on those who dropped out due to financial hardship yet ended up with debt? both? neither? and so on.)
If it works for BMW, why wouldn't it work for Ford, Toyota and GM? The financial incentive will cause these user-hostile subscriptions to spread, and probably to more than just heated seats, if/when the model is proven.
The analogy to feudalism might be stretched in the literal sense, but most people use the term as a substitute for "you own nothing and are subject to the whims of the owner".
And there's a lot of truth to that for the average person, compared to conditions even 20 years ago. With regard to heated seats, my 22 year old car has heated seats. They have never required a subscription, and they are mine for as long as they function/are repairable. Now you can argue that, theoretically, car companies could charge less for the car up front and make it up on the subscriptions, so the consumer will see increased customization and savings, and the car company will make the same amount of money instead of more money! If you believe that I have a subscription to a bridge to sell you for $19.99 a month.
Life has been good in the west for a long, long time. But looking at how my great-grandfather lived (through the depression), and his point of view is massively different.
Economically things look rather grim. Goods will get more and more expensive. People will have less money to spend on frivolous items. Before they'd ignore minor expenses, now they will look for the best possible deals.
Subscriptions only work when people don't pay attention. BMW will be OK because it's just a rich person's toy anyway. I don't see it working for mass-market cars.
> this is the extreme, extreme minority of features from an extreme minority of cars, by the extreme of car manufactures.
the problem is you don't see the big picture: all modern tractors are internet connected and farmers are not allowed to repair them.
all TVs are smart, you cant't buy a new 'dumb' TV. Philips recently added adslvertisements to TVs people bought years ago.
This isn't some niche thing that won't affect you, this is a paradigme shift like we haven't seen in a century.
if you rent an apartment in 2050, it will come with a smart oven, frisge and toilet. The oven will be brans-locked to wallmart and if you buy food somewhere else it will refuse to turn on with the warning "unauthorised substance detected"
Sounds like someone is trying to morally justify their success off the back of those sweet, sweet subscription revenues.
Heated seats is a luxury, sure. But what about music? Kitchen appliances? Movies and TV? Productivity software? Transportation?
All these things are things we own much less of (or "own," as it were, since we got to keep physical custody of the bits, and they didn't try to authenticate against a web service)
The situation is positively feudal, people are sharecropping increasingly large parts of their lives. And the lords sit in their castles, surrounded by yes-men, pushing the limits of legality and ignoring the cries of the people that make their businesses happen.
> Sounds like someone is trying to morally justify their success off the back of those sweet, sweet subscription revenues.
I implied nothing about myself. I myself did not go to university.
> Heated seats is a luxury, sure. But what about music? Kitchen appliances? Movies and TV? Productivity software? Transportation?
Subscription is just one way to pay for things, sometimes it makes sense sometimes it doesn't. Public transport have been using subscription for decades and people somehow don't think that's a bad thing.
For cars people usually use loans, and that ends up being just another form of monthly payment.
They have advantages and disadvantages depending on many factors. To have moral outrage because something in particular uses subscription makes no sense.
The waste majority of the things you named the waste majority of the time don't need subscription. And the reality is that while you don't need a subscription for music for example, people do actually prefer it in some cases and that is fine.
> people are sharecropping increasingly large parts of their lives
Comparing digital goods to land ownership is a terrible analogy.
> And the lords sit in their castles, surrounded by yes-men
You have a real flair for storytelling, next you will add some more fantasy element and you will tell me they have 'greedy grins' or whatever. Makes for good drama I guess.
> Many people manage to pay of their student loans and don't have to live in debt if they don't want to.
Probably varies a lot by location. IIRC, the UK government's own report on their current university fee/loan structure anticipates a large number of people paying off their loans so slowly that they will end up being written off.
I think this counts as both a stealth tax and stealth government borrowing.
It's some weird mindset of can't-do speaking there. Maybe a sliver of truth but just failure dialling in to HN. They never offer anything useful, just want to feel important in their nihilism. They are a disease.
Feudalism was more like slavery. Serfs could not marry, move or own land without permission. Serfs could be sold (not individuals but entire villages). Comparing it to BMW ownership is disgusting!
Conversely, I been seeing more people then ever riding, building and modifying electric and motorized bicycles. You can modify a regular $200 mountain bike with a $200 motor kit from amazon and have a $400 motorcycle that you don’t need a motorcycle license for. If you really don’t want to burn fossil fuels, a $1000 bafang mid drive ebike kit can turn a regular bicycle into a hill crushing monster and can be installed with almost no specialized tools.
The housing crisis is definitely a tougher nut to crack, but I don’t believe the auto manufacturers have quite the same leverage over the American population long term, especially if gas prices and electric vehicle prices keep skyrocketing significantly faster then inflation.
> If you really don’t want to burn fossil fuels, a $1000 bafang mid drive ebike kit can turn a regular bicycle into a hill crushing monster and can be installed with almost no specialized tools.
I love electric bikes and want to install the bafang kit myself, but lets keep things in perspective - it's not gonna get my pregnant wife to the hospital.
Commenter provided one obvious example.. that doesn't imply a lack of other examples.
Hypothermically cold/wet days, if you suffer a physical injury, going anywhere with friends, trips to IKEA, groceries that last more than a week, vacations, or the reason I stopped cycling:
a car driver randomly forces you to pay for a new bike while also giving you a concussion and 7 stitches to your face then drives away.
Happier now with my 'cage' than with the ego I used to have.
Yes, that was the theory as I understood it at the time. As a single man in my late 20s with a remote job, I moved to the most densely populated neighborhood of the largest city in the region, bought a bicycle and a transit pass, and signed up for a car-sharing service, expecting car-free life to be easy. Instead, I found that it was... possible.
I got through a full year before giving up and buying another car. I have never been motivated to repeat the experience, though I still love city life and try to keep car usage to a minimum, getting around primarily by motorcycle.
There are many people who would happily pay 4 years of car ownership if it means difference between safe birth and unsafe one. If you think its rare mindset, see what happens if (very frequent when I look around) miscarriage happens, how it fucks up people in most fundamental ways and insecure they become.
And obviously there are tremendous use cases to enjoy weekends, do groceries/other shopping, helping friends and family and so on and on...
I come from Europe, currently living in Switzerland which has best rail system in the world and general decent public transport... but still owning a car is a must for 4 of us, travelling anywhere with kids is a chore and amount of stuff for weekend is impossible to carry in public transport (stroller(s), child bed, all clothing, food equipment etc. and thats just kids).
Sure you can spend all weekends in the same place if thats your thing, but it certainly ain't ours, not when we have alps just in the backyard.
With some exceptions (especially in places where car ownership is a real financial/hassle burden like Manhattan), my observation is that people who choose not to own a car even in an urban environment with good public transit end up making a lot of lifestyle compromises. Even leaving aside trips to the emergency room, sick pets, etc., they just don't head to the mountains/beach/etc. because it's too big of a hassle. And especially once you get past a certain age, you can't rely on friends with cars like we did undergrad. Perfectly valid choice but, for the most part, you just don't do things that are a pain to do.
Baby on a bike is easy (well, once they're big enough to hold their heads up). Ours (one and five) pretty much want me to take them on the bike everywhere, unless the weather is brutally wet or cold (< 25˚F for me, though a friend here takes his kid on the bike down to about 15˚).
When the weather's sufficiently bad, we take the BMW with heated seats instead =)
The EU's prediction is that population is about to reach its peak and will then decline slowly until the 22nd century or so. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D... Imo there will be new niches populated by middle aged and old people with no kids.
More people than ever maybe, but that is a tiny fraction of the number of cars, at least in the U.S. It is like saying more people than ever are turning vegetarian/vegan. Yes, it is true, but it is still a miniscule number in the grand scheme of things, and the the change is way too slow/small to have any real impact, at least in my life time.
I love Jetbrains products, it was irritating when they went subscription model. Tableau did the same. I guess it is just a matter of time before everyone started doing it, both in digital and real world. Next would be what? 10 bucks for my washing machine that I own, $10 for my fridge, $10 for my air conditioning, stove, vacuum cleaner...
I don't know how we can fight back. They will keep pushing and pushing trying to eek out every possible cent. There are products we can simply stop using, but cars (at least in the U.S) are much difficult to avoid, outside of cities like NYC. Much of the country is built for cars
I thought the JetBrains subscription was actually a good example of a subscription - when you buy an annual subscription, you get a 'perpetual fallback license' for the version at the time of purchase - i.e. you can continue to use that version forever without further payment.
Isn't that basically a traditional (90's style) software purchase?
But not only that, they went through a couple revisions with the customer to determine what the right model is.
The software that JB produces as has massive value, but it is also fragile in that it needs to be kept up to date as the ecosystem evolves. That value is fragile in the face of constant change unless you pin yourself to a snapshot of the language and all its dependencies. The JB subscription model allows for this while also enabling constant upgrades.
The way that JB handled the outcry about the original subscription model is the real innovation.
Not to mention the yearly price breaks for continuing to subscribe to their services. I think I pay less than $15 USD a month for their All Products pack, and it's worth every penny. Much more economical than buying every release of Visual Studio.
> Next would be what? 10 bucks for my washing machine that I own, $10 for my fridge, $10 for my air conditioning, stove, vacuum cleaner...
This was already happening with planned obsolescence.
The EU fought that by implementing a new law that requires big home electronics to have a 10year warrant. I guess the next step for vendors is bundling “service” features for subs
That makes no sense.
Before you payed for a version of the IDE and a year of updates.
Now you pay for a year of use and you get the most updated version of your last subscription day for ever.
Basically the difference to buying every year is that you don’t keep old versions. You still get to keep/own the version of your last paying day. And you get discounts…
Unless there are really bad feature changes, there is really no reason to prefer the old model
First they tell me I can use their IDE forever if I pay for it. Then they go back on their word and prevented me from using the thing I already paid for. They’re being spiteful to their customers
The built environment in most of the US is based entirely around the idea that you get in your car whenever you want to go anywhere. It's going to take a massive re-engineering of society to fix that, but it's totally worth it.
I have to disagree because at the end of the day, the consumer has a choice. BMW, Stellantis and other car makers are charging subscriptions for features. I see an immediate solution: buy another car.
I see this argument a ton, people complain that new cars are too expensive, super high monthly payments and subscription features. Yes these are all problems but they are only problems if you choose to buy a new car. Seems that folks forget in these arguments that there is a sea of affordable, reliable used cars without any of the bullshit they add to new cars these days, at a fraction of the cost of a new car.
Yet. Because if there is money in subscription services, they will add those — or go bust if they don't because, as you've said, it is one of the most competitive sectors in the world.
Or they’ll realize there’s a market of people who don’t want subscription services and they’ll price their car at a profit making level without subscriptions…
...which will still lead to lower profits than if they instead tried to push into the higher-margin section of the market. The Innovator's Dilemma, you know?
Sure, but there’s competition in the subscription car space, just because you make one doesn’t mean it will sell. Businesses will make products that people want when they are in competitive markets.
For now. The problem is that anticonsumer grift will eventually pervade the entire space. If not prevented legally then it will just be a matter of time, because incidental cooperation between all competitors is just so much better for them than trying to compete on this point.
And this is an industry where starting a competitor is simply not feasible without incomprehensible amounts of capital.
> The problem is that anticonsumer grift will eventually pervade the entire space. If not prevented legally then it will just be a matter of time
This isn't a guaranteed thing.
Toyota makes money hand over fist selling decade behind the competition vehicles for high prices based on a premise of reliability that the overwhelming majority of buyers will not keep the car long enough to take advantage of and HN never misses an opportunity to praise them for it.
I feel very confident saying that the market for cars that don't include SAAS-esque BS subscriptions will be large enough to sustain a decent number of offerings in the same way that the sedan market is still healthy despite the crossover-ification of everything and the hatch market is stronger than it's been since the 90s.
but something as big as an auto purchase is a amalgamation of many decisions into one. what they are relying on is that the pain of subscription does not out weighs the rest of value a BMW provides. esp if they can bury this in details and give it away for a couple of years like volvo does.
My suspicion is this will become a lot more pervasive & render every auto purchase to choke full of these under the surface sour decisions.
Kind of true but also not as true as it was pre-COVID. Used car prices skyrocketed during COVID to the point that people are selling their 2-3 year old cars for more than current new MSRP. And a 10 year old Corolla is often more than $10k. Prices are just now starting to come back down, but probably not to pre-COVID prices.
Used cars are now just $3k USD more than new cars, on average.
There should be absolutely no reason to buy a used car anymore.
I feel like I'm living in a bizarro world b/c everyone seems to claim buying a used car is the much better financial decision. It isn't for me, by a long margin.
There honestly hasn't been much reason to buy a new car since the GFC. It's really felt like new cars were subsidized because they were necessary to create used cars. With the last several cars I bought, or tried to buy, the negotiation ended up with the new car price being the same, or lower than 1-2 year old models with the same options.
I feel like most used car buyers look at inflated MSRP and judge the "discount" for the used car based on that. They don't factor in the sometimes massive discounts (pre COVID, of course) that practically every new car would have. So a used 2018 model looks $3k cheaper than an identical new 2019, but the 2019 has $4k on the hood, plus better financing, lower miles, and better legal protections (lemon law). Granted, "certified pre-owned" cars often come with better sounding warranties than new ones, but I'm sure there are some fine print details that make them worse than the factory one.
Granted, the post-covid market is all kinds of skewed.
I bought a new car recently because of problems with my existing car. I didn't have a lot of negotiating leverage on the new vehicle but I was shocked by the tradein I was able to get on my existing car and was even able to negotiate it up by about $1K.
I think the value proposition with stuff like Spotify is different. a.) there are still services where you can own your copy of the music, there is still - at least some semblance of - consumer choice. b.) the amount and variety of music I listen to on Spotify and pay per month is WAY more than paying for individual songs (at least personally)
And I think there's some value in not actually having the music in physical form, at least as we knew it. I have fond memories of the music I discovered and enjoyed on tape and CD (only owned 2-3 records), but I don't miss the CD towers and shelves of video tapes.
Even if you cart around audio files on 5TB portable drives, or have a drive per key location (home, office, etc) there are advantages to streaming. One less drive I need to maintain.
Losing everything when you unsubscribe is shitty though. I guess that's the choice made.
>Losing everything when you unsubscribe is shitty though. I guess that's the choice made.
Yes. There's nothing keeping anyone from buying the music they like even if it's just digital. Music is probably the thing that there's there's the greatest choice between renting and very reasonably buying.
I have a big library which I got in order a couple years ago. But I made the decision that there was no need--at this point--to buy any gaps. I'd just stream and could always buy pretty much anything I wanted at some point if I wanted to. (My interests are mostly very mainstream.)
> There's nothing keeping anyone from buying the music they like even if it's just digital.
Unfortunately this isn't true anymore. If you want to buy a song there's beatport and bandcamp but they're missing a ton of music, Amazon Music is only available in a few countries and Google Music doesn't exist anymore. That leaves just iTunes which is a terrible experience and only available on macOS and Windows.
This exactly. I am constantly exploring and consuming new music, many of which I wouldn't buy the CD of, but I will listen to for a while before moving onto something new. Nothing really beats being able to go through an artists entire discography over a few days. I've started buying the CD's of the stuff I really love again, but the price would be astronomical compared to my streaming service if I did that for everyone I listened to.
What’s funny is how ethics around this get compartmentalized. I still refuse to use spotify because it’s only a viable model for the biggest artists (I buy digital albums mostly).
But then I don’t seem to stop myself from using Netflix.
> If someone can charge you for using things you already bought and 'own', then average man has no property rights.
it seems a natural progression once you've saturated the market and new avenues are closed to further growth; you find a way to add subscriptions and "value adds"...
If you want to know more about the history of IP laws and how it relates to this concept of modern age feudalism where someone owns all the rights on anything of value, this is an excellent book: https://thenewpress.com/books/information-feudalism
The goods that are sold are available to be sold based-off what people have chosen to buy or what is seen as a solution to a problem.
Example: Manual transmissions available for sale in the United States vs Europe. Europe has many more available to be sold new than the United States at maybe 3% and dwindling.
I see the only reason that smart-TVs are some prominent now is that the market for those eclipsed the market for dumb-TVs. While there are individuals that would like a dumb-TV, I've seen them post on HN, outliers don't make a sustainable market for revenue.
If individuals don't purchase the subscription, it won't be a revenue stream and then decision-making individuals should make decisions to change it.
The housing market is another conversation altogether.
I was reviewing my Steam library recently and thought to myself. How would I access these games without Steam? What happens when I die? Can I sell my Steam library? I realized I don't own anything other than a temporary license to use the software.
A quick check with Uncle Google tells me that games are non-transferable as they are bound to your account. So I suppose if in your legal will you wanted to designate someone as a benefactor (lol) then that's your prerogative.
That said, if you're asking that kind of question, I just assume you're trolling but then I thought about it and realized it was an earnest inquiry.
the same thing with games and that you only own a license of a game and not the game itself.
Started with WoW and getting kicked for "using" exploits which are ultimately just faults in a product that I purchased - why should I as a customer know and care for what an exploit is and what not?
No, people having a meltdown about some luxury car brand charging a subscription for heated seats is how regular people dismiss real concerns about privacy and ownership rights. Wait until you hear about how Sirius is disabled without a monthly fee.
Do those that 'own' a home today in the US really own it?
You still have to pay property tax against the "property value" which is a completely arbitrary number set by an outsider. If you don't pay, you lose your home - that is not my definition of ownership.
But where did you get your definition of ownership?
Property taxes in the US predate the US as an independent country. Do you think the owner should be able to set the value? Should anyone be able to declare that their property is worth $0 and therefore no tax is owed?
Because it's a very misinformed opinion. For 1 it isn't arbitrary and it isn't a random person. It is elected officials that set the tax and the price is based on the community budget. Where I live we have high property taxes but we don't complain because we vote for this. We want nice schools, clean parks that are manicured, frequent refuse and recycling service, clean streets, a well staffed police force and fire departments, a fancy 4th of July parade, etc. This stuff isn't free and we choose to fund it with property taxes instead of income taxes, etc.
If you won't or can't pay your tax then you have to sell your property to someone who can. This is what the community that lives in an area agreed on. You can take your house with you though. It's totally up to you to lift it, put it on a truck and put it on a different piece of land, considering the bank doesn't own it. Feel free to find land with no taxes and put your home there.
No, they will be worse off than serfs. Serfs could still grow their own food (though of course they had to pay tribute to the landlord) and they had way more festivals and days off.
If someone can charge you for using things you already bought and 'own', then average man has no property rights. The fee could be increased at any time, or new fees could be introduced.
As the housing crysis deepens, average person will never own a home either.
So average person will be in the same position as a medieval serf, conpletely dependand on the whims of the lord, probably living in debt starting from the student loan and dying in debt.