Rolling averages are used to smooth-out graphs with high-frequency noise. Since measuring the stabbings per month only gives you some 50 stabbings on average, maybe one month you’d get 30 and the next month 70 due to stochastic reasons, and so to make the graph smoother and more readable and long-term trends more visible, you can do a rolling average.

As for the “starting in 600”, that’s common practice and it’s good as long as the axes are properly labelled, which they are.

Isn’t the outcome the important thing? Like, clearly fewer people are dying/being hospitalized by knife attacks, isn’t that ultimately the relevant metric?

If it wasn’t for that we would either be homeless or be all living in my grandparents’ house

Or you could become tenants from a wholesome small landlord! I wonder why that wasn’t in your possibilities?

Are we the assholes if we rent our house in order not to force my parents to work 200 hours a week since salaries here barely reach 800€ a month?

So the people renting your apartment will be the ones working 200 hours a week instead? The lifestyle of your parents depends on other people paying them rent and you still can’t understand why private rent is theft?

what we need is strong national regulation, not banning renting houses altogether

The “stronger national regulation” needed is the expropriation of rented housing to a collectively owned rent organization, and the masse-construction of affordable housing for social rent, and the rent of all of this housing stock at production+maintenance costs.

To be clear: most people would do what you’re doing in your situation. But the fact that your family is escaping overwork and poverty through renting one of their flats simply means that another poor person who can’t afford to buy a flat is subsidizing their lifestyle. It’s not that your family are intrinsically evil people, it’s that private rent is exploitative by its very nature.

And how exactly will they purchase a home in Ukraine if they’re spending their income to pay your mortgage?

You can blabber all you want about the great leap forward, the fact still stands that Mao liberated China and Korea from Japanese occupation, removed the fascists of the Kuomintang, and doubled life expectancy. Mistakes happened, but his mandate was still overwhelmingly positive and material life prospects bloomed as a result. How many people died of starvation in China during Maoism, and how many in India in the corresponding period?

You can spread your anticommunist propaganda as much as you want, I gave you numbers and facts.

the government would also have to pay for it. That means rising taxes

Not necessarily. The government literally prints the money with which workers can be paid, there’s no need to increase taxes to pay for such housing. Modern monetary theory is cool!

But at the moment, we are quite far from that. I’d already be pretty happy if the government would stop selling their governmental buildings

Yes, we’re far, but that doesn’t make reformist measures more likely, they’re impossible to carry out without huge worker organizing through unions and socialist parties.

He didn’t starve tens of millions, millions of people starved yearly in China before Mao since it was a preindustrial country. Mao found a China with below 30 years of life expectancy, and left a China with 55+ years of life expectancy, Chinese communism literally saved tens of millions of lives in that era if you compare it to comparably developed countries such as India

They also had an incredibly corrupt and repressive society

I’ve yet to find any serious study talking of “widespread corruption” in the USSR compared to countries of equal level of development. This is entirely vibes-based.

the poor struggled paid most of their income to basic necessities and the rich paid hardly anything

Income inequality was the lowest in the USSR in the history of the region, by a long shot. Again, you’re making stuff up:

housing in desirable areas and cities are hardly abundant

Yes, but housing was primarily accessed through the work union. Housing near a factory went to the workers of said factory, people mainly got to live near where they worked.

You wanted off the waiting lists, you had to bribe someone

Again, as if bribes don’t happen in capitalism. In capitalism, you don’t “bribe” someone to get a house, you’re just poor enough not to afford it and you rent for life instead. Waiting lists, while unpleasant, are the more egalitarian solution. How else do you propose distribution of limited housing in a rapidly industrializing country that’s moving tens of millions of people from the countryside to cities?

But I mean, yeah if you wanted to be miner in Siberia and live in a shack housing was cheap. Not so much if you wanted to live Moscow or St Petersberg

Care to share any of that wonderful data about housing prices in Soviet Leningrad or Moscow? Regardless: your analogy of “being a miner in Siberia” is dumb. Lifestyle in the countryside and in smaller cities was highly subsidized, but that’s a good thing. Now hospitals are closed, roads aren’t maintained, and schools are left underfunded everywhere outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg, making life especially in non-Slavic regions of Russia much worse than it used to be. It’s not that people want to move to Moscow, it’s that there are no jobs or infrastructure outside three big cities, and that’s really bad for many people. I don’t see what you have against living in relatively minor cities like Murmansk, Ulan-Ude or Tomsk, provided there are jobs and infrastructure (which there were).

The many recent examples of mucipalities and states passing regulatory policies to improve rent under capitalism

Can you tell me generally big examples of places where this has happened and things have gotten better? As a European, the only cases I know of are the Berlin referenda for rent caps and expropriation, and both have had no lasting effect because higher courts have sabotaged them and declared them illegal (I don’t understand how a referendum can be illegal).

the total constructed of 2,900,000,000 sq m

Are you sure this is flat-area and doesn’t need to get multiplied by number of flats per building?

So, build the housing socially by legal mandate. Only in capitalism “housing is too cheap” can be a bad thing

Why the fatphobia? No need to insult Mao based on his body.

Tankies still to this day praise him for executing landlords

Rightfully so, too. Life expectancy in China doubled under Mao. If India had had its own socialist revolution, it wouldn’t be very different from China in terms of life outcomes, unfortunately for them they didn’t have one.

Source for the 7mn Khrushchevki? That number seems entirely too low. Maybe you’re not counting Brezhnevki? Because I remember figures of more than a million housing units being built yearly.

While “US becoming communist” is not achievable on the short term, “regulatory policy to improve rent under capitalism through reform” has even less of a background if you ask me. Like, housing is getting worse everywhere under capitalism, and better nowhere. What makes you think reformism is a more likely scenario?

The USSR had such dorms for students and people in waiting lists for housing, idk if they were technically free but the fee was ridiculous if it existed. Rent, for example, was 3% of the monthly incomes. I do think we should have such social housing, both in flat-form and in dorm-form, for whoever wants to rent a very cheap housing unit.

The post: “rent is a tax that poor people pay TO RICH PEOPLE[…]”. The problem is obviously private landlordism, not social housing in the form of rent

I edited my comment and added the second paragraph, not your fault you didn’t see it :)

Communism doesn’t actually say anything about wanting everyone’s income equal, I’ve only seen this claim by anticommunists before. Communists simply believe that people should earn according to their labor, and not according to the exploitation of others’ labor. For example, the Soviet Union had widespread use of work quotas which, when exceeded, granted workers a higher wage. As an example, the Stakhanovite movement did wide promotion of work effectiveness and of rewarding exemplary workers, both through monetary and through social incentives.

I personally don’t believe there’s much place for capitalism at all, but that’s a very deep ideological topic that’s far beyond the scope of this post. If you’re interested on discussing this, however, I’m very open to this topic!

a world without rent entirely is a really stupid idea that only ever seems uttered and promoted by Tankies

Meanwhile, in the USSR, nobody owned housing privately, most housing was accessed through the work union, and was rented at about 3% of monthly costs. You clearly, CLEARLY haven’t ever engaged with a Tankie (such as myself) on the topic of housing.

fair

market value

Choose one

I’m renting it to a family of Ukrainian refugees. They basically pay off my mortgage

Holy fuck, my sides. How can you be this BLIND to reality? You fucking said yourself that you have A FAMILY OF WAR REFUGEES PAYING OFF YOUR MORTGAGE. In 30 years time, you’ll own a house and those refugees will own what exactly?

For reference, when the war broke out I was a tenant in Germany. You know what I did? I HOUSED a Ukrainian refugee in MY OWN DAMN HOME for NO COST, because I’m not a piece of shit

What’s “a fair price”? 1% over production + maintenance costs is already exploitative, in the sense that rich people who can afford to buy the flats will do so because they will get passive income from it, and poor people who can’t afford housing will be forced to rent at prices higher than otherwise.