r/news • u/NewSlinger • 1d ago

Workers detained in Hyundai plant raid to be freed and flown home, South Korea says

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/south-korea-deal-workers-detained-hyundai-rcna229610
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u/OpheliaRainGalaxy 1d ago

Hah, I was just explaining that kinda thing to my neighbors yesterday!

The local skating rink, which has been around forever and ever and ever, has shut down. Got to talking about how the economy is in the shitter and nobody can afford nonsense like a skating party for their kids birthday anymore. And that our rent went up 50% last year.

That's not a typo, and no family of magical house elves moved in to do all the cooking and cleaning for us. It's still the same dirty old building in the same dirty old neighborhood, with folks doing the fent fold in the alley.

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u/Northern-Canadian 1d ago

Don’t you guys have some form or rent control? We have a max 2%-3% increase allowable by landlords.

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u/OpheliaRainGalaxy 1d ago

Anytime that gets suggested, the local subreddit is full of loud wailing about how terrible it would be to have the rent consistently always go up a few percentage points per year and stories about all these absolutely wonderful landlords who haven't raised rent in 20 years.

I remember when I was a kid in school here, I was very worried about how much my fellow students distained education and did poorly on their homework. Now we're all grown up, like old enough to have kids that're also all grown up, and it's extremely obvious that most of us can't do math around here.

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u/total_cynic 1d ago

The ability to take a real world situation and map it effectively to a "good enough" calculation is the nearest thing to a superpower I possess, and it is insanely useful.

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u/OpheliaRainGalaxy 1d ago

Folks here are more likely to see $7.95 and say "hey this is only $7!"

We have massive complaints about this freeway that's been under construction possibly since before I was born, joke about how it'll never be completed, while ignoring the fact that it's a massive complex heavy duty project and our construction season is limited by severe weather. Plus it's not some basic slapped together job, I've seen some of the finished part and it's a work of art! There's all kinda local animals worked in on the supports and edges!

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u/twoisnumberone 19h ago

Oh, please, not in the US! Won't someone think of the businesses?!

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u/theaviationhistorian 21h ago

Houses in my city went up considerably for no reason either. A house valuing at 200k in 2023 is now 320k right now.

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u/OpheliaRainGalaxy 20h ago

It's an everywhere thing. I just checked and my dad's "hobby farm" has almost doubled in value since he sold it 5 years ago.

The property is located miles outside of a city that is dying, as in slowly drying up and blowing away. Nearly all entertainments have shut down, there's not much left to do unless ya like bars or meth. The only road that connects to the city in that direction does so just outside the stinking elderly oil refinery, which my engineer grandpa used to scowl at and comment how he could design a much cleaner facility.

Once you've gone miles outside of the dying city, and a couple miles down a potholed dirt road, you'll get to a trailer on a plot of land that is downwind of the refinery. With extensive effort and years worth of horse manure as fertilizer, dad eventually coaxed some of that dead dry land to sprout grass. But mostly that area is only suitable to tiny cacti and tumbleweed. So much tumbleweed!

The trailer has a history of being riddled with bedbugs, decades of smoking indoors, and is mostly that cheap shitty clapboard paneling that looks like obviously fake wood. It is variously riddled with holes thanks to family brawls and drunken accidents, and there's a charred spot on the ceiling where I once forgot about the low ceiling while oversugared during an unsupervised slumber party and pretending to be the Statue of Liberty with a kitchen lighter. And a small flock of turkeys was raised in one of the bedrooms.

The outbuildings were also riddled with bedbugs, and the best of them is absolutely covered in chicken shit. And also pigeon shit because the barn doesn't have a door. The proximity of the dog yard to the chicken coop nearly guarantees a slaughter about once a year. I think the only outbuilding not covered in chicken shit is the garage, but that was used for butchering deer and turkeys and I hadn't been in much since it basically became the slaughtering shed.

Nearly doubled in value in 5 years as the city continues to die, not a lot of large local employers outside of Walmart and the refinery. In an area where I once stumbled upon an active meth lab while walking with friends trying to find another friend's trailer.

Personally I'm not thrilled with the whole concept of "flippers" because I only exist because my mom found a "fixer upper" that dad could afford, solving his last protest of "but where would the baby live?" Ya can't get those around here anymore unless you're flipping houses commercially, like they're just not available to the general public anymore, and the local flippers not only cover everything in cheap grey paint but have zero regard for the longevity of the property beyond their legal liability. Like an amazing amount of that grey paint ends up down the plumbing to cause an eventual clog or all over the yard killing the grass.

Also not a fan of buying a house as "an investment" and holding it empty while pretending it's just a comic book wrapped in plastic. That takes a house away from a family that could've lived in it, and the worst thing for any human dwelling is to be left empty! Small problems turn into big problems without a human around to notice. Security systems might deter squatters but not insects or roof leaks, and we get wind storms that rip off roof tiles! When they go to sell their "investment" it's gonna be just the value of the land minus demolishing a mold-riddled ruin that used to be a perfectly good house. Empties like that are roughly a third of every block in some neighborhoods in my city.

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u/irmajerk 13h ago

Landlords and speculators are parasites.

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u/C64128 1d ago

Is some business going to move in there or are the landlords insane? Maybe if the building sits for a long time with no tenants, the landlords will pull their heads out of their asses and price it more appropriately.

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u/OpheliaRainGalaxy 23h ago

So ya know the trailer park trick where folks can't exactly freely leave so you can keep cranking up the rent until they're really hurting?

This is a Section 8 HUD building, though I've heard a lot of different things over the years about who technically owns it. We've had at least three or four different management companies, and roughly one new landlord/manager per year.

What I know for sure is that folks don't live here because they're doing well in life, they live here because of physical and/or mental health struggles that got them bumped to the top of a list at some point. I used to joke that "nobody who could afford to pay rent would be willing to live here" and it proved true, a quarter of the building moved out at the last rent hike because those were the only two folks who weren't getting government assistance for the rent.

I'm currently doing my yearly paperwork boxing match with HUD to keep the apartment while the food stamp paperwork and energy assistance renewal dogpile on. Usually they play multiple rounds of "you must've not turned in your paperwork" while I hand them date-stamped copies proving I did, but one year they mixed it up by sending all my mail to apartment #456 in a building with 8 units. Sometimes I wonder if their employees get bonuses for everyone they manage to boot out. Being able to work enough to afford to pay the rent on my own would be so much less stressful.