The winter is finally over, weather-wise. It's beautiful out, and this makesme happy. I anticipate a lot more pleasure walking for me, in the eveningand night, and also a long-overdue airing out of the apartment. The runningof bare feet through grass, and running more often. The curse of the north islifting, the wanderer returns from Hades on her yearly cycle. It's not quiteshort-sleeve weather, but it's close. Huzzah!
J and R just bought a house! This is quite cool, and the way they managed itcost them very little money. If I could manage to find a place that's similarlynear Squirrel Hill, I may try to do the same. I'm not sure if I could borrowmoney from family, but it couldn't hurt to ask.
Unfortunately, at work, it turns out that we've been doing some analysisincorrectly -- we can fix it, but it involves basically restarting our analysisback from the raw data. I may be spending a few long nights in the office toget this done in a timely way, for my studies.
I've been thinking recently about landlording, specifically whether it's agood thing for society to be buying a property one intends not to use.I worry that when too many people decide to become landlords, it crowds outpeople who want to own property and raises real estate costs. That's not agood thing. As problematic as land ownership can be, capitalist land ownershipis considerably more problematic than private land ownership, as it providesanother way for people to be exploited, provides less incentive to care aboutneighbourhood, and perhaps more importantly, provides people a means to makeor supplement a living through exploitation. Of course, all forms ofinvestment do this in a sense, and I'm not presently willing to condemn themall wholly (although Islamic banking makes interesting steps towards this,and perhaps a strict interpretation of Marxist ethics would push that way aswell) within the current system, but landlording seems to be a particularlystrong and clear example of a harmful practice by people, either to avoidproductive labour, or to supplement productive labour with exploitive andharmful ways to make additional money.
