Look, even Wikipedia admits it!
Passive income is a type of unearned income that is acquired with little to no labor to earn or maintain.
"I work very hard as a landlord"
"I am a leech on society"
I've seen some landlord tiktok where one minute they go "I love my passive income, look how relaxing and luxurious my life is
" and the next minute go "Don't you understand how much hard work it is to be a landlord!? 
"It's funny in general that whenever you say landlords are useless someone always says ”but they do X and Y, it's not just collecting the money every month”, but every finance bro pro tips for life article always has
”Invest in property, it's a good way to have passive income!” in it.They hold both these contradictory ideas in their heads simultaneously without any kind of introspection or synthesis.
Oh there is synthesis, it’s just they’ve squared the contradiction with: “works good for me, fuck you, got mine!”
they do X and Y
Goes to any forum for landlords: "How can I avoid doing X and Y for my tenants?" "Is there any way I can force my tenants to do X and Y or pay for them?"
Landlord tiktok is only something I want to look at if I find myself not hating capitalism enough
It is truly one of the most infuriating and cursed things on the internet, and I've only seen it through youtube videos making fun of it
I feel like a lot of it is tongue in cheek to generate ragebait, but at the same time, they genuinely believe in their superiority
That's like me and watching Ben Shabibo shit. His whiny voice and attempts at wit are infuriating. I can't hate watch it even if it's someone mocking him. It's like he's figured out how to use his own intellectually stifling brain prison as an offensive weapon.
I literally can't even watch videos making fun of little benny his fucking voice is just too obnoxious to listen to.
I was able to watch the Wet Ass P-Word remixes of Shapiro rapping, those were pretty funny
You’ll probably enjoy Gotfield. Conservative media pundit gets his own standup routine segment on fox news lol. He’s apparently a fan of that one hyperpop duo (forgot the name)
Capitalists defending capitalism say it rewards hard work.
Capitalists giving financial advice say avoid labour, get passive income.
Their advice is always full of incongruous shit like that. "Capitalism rewards risk."
Like bros you made medicine a for profit industry where the real money is in the insurance side of things. Where is the risk. One day people are going to decide not to get sick? Fuck off.
Without their Ayn Randian WILL and VISION insulin would be as cheap as orange juice
The diabetes causing me to go blind will make it easier to replace my eyes with Randian Vision.
That’s a skill issue. My passive income is earned income that is acquired with little to no labor to earn or maintain because I take shits on company time, take long lunch breaks, and clock out from my phone when I get home
Hell yeah brother I read 5 novels on the clock this week, look at us passively incoming just like real capitalists
One time I had a position at my job for about a year that probably shouldn't have existed and didn't really require more than an hour or two of work a day.
I read all of Worm and Pact that year, which for reference is about the same as reading the whole ASOIAF series and then going half way through it again.
Good year.
🎶 Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I shit on company time. 🎶
Had a coworker complain he was "only" getting a 4% return on the condo he bought in another city that he pays someone else to manage for him. I just told him he deserved worse but didn't elaborate, because I am a lib.
I wish all the passive income pricks a very sudden and kinetic outcome
I don't work either tbh. Ofc, I also don't earn passive income.
Be lazy the right way kids!
I don't think that's a fair or accurate definition. If I programmed a paid piece of software*, or a paid API, that I don't intent to upgrade much, that's passive income, which is earned.
In this scenario you have made something and it is available for purchase. A landlord creates nothing and will not sell so that they can benefit from scarcity.
In this scenario you have made something and it is available for purchase. A landlord creates nothing and will not sell so that they can benefit from scarcity.
He's basically talking about the digital equivalent of "what if i built a saw mill and then got income from people using it." Just because he created something doesn't mean the income received after is not a form of rent seeking, it's profit derived solely through ownership of the thing that was made despite the labor that made it potentially having already been paid for multiple times over, and since all this income accrues passively with no labor input beyond the initial creation, it's passive income
Sure, but it's still passive income. Being a landlord is not the only way of having a passive income. And I'm criticizing the way it's defined.
idk, this reads like using a semantic difference to run cover. The app isn't passive income because you did something even though the creation of it is over, passive income comes from owning something as opposed to doing/making or anything else of actual worth.
In this case the passive income is like landlording off the intellectual property rights of the API, it is a form of rent seeking, and im pretty sure the good socialist take here is "it's fine for a person to get fair compensation for their work but not okay to own and profit from that ownership for literal perpetuity so that they can be paid for the same dead labor over and over again"
Yeah, there is some depth to it but mostly to prevent exploitation of the time it takes when considering the uncompensated education or experience that allows it
Please see my other comments in this thread, you have a wing definition of "passive income", please look it up.
Passive income is a type of unearned income
Serving APIs that anyone would pay for requires constant work and maintenance
You choose to ignore the key point of the comment. I also listed apps/games. Technically, I may choose not to maintain the API. It might not remain relevant or profitable for very long, but I can just ignore it.
Besides, being a landlord also requires constant maintenance. It's just that the income is arguably disproportionate to the work done.
Technically, I may choose not to maintain the API. It might not remain relevant or profitable for very long, but I can just ignore it.
Wow damn that's crazy it's almost like it requires constant effort and is a job unlike owning a property deed and failing to hire a contractor when my AC breaks down again.
Regardless of your views on whether or not landlords deserve their income, it's irrelevant to the point I'm making. The are other ways of having a passive income besides being a landlord; ways that are arguably "earned".
Then it's not clearly not passive income, "passive income" is definitionally simply reaping where one has not sown. If you're doing work it's not passive income, it's a job. Software Dev work is not so easy.
No it's not. It's "definitionally" income that's passive, i.e. you're not actively doing anything for it (any more). In other words, you can put a some or a lot of work in advance and then receive income over time, passively. A short list of examples:
- royalties from intellectual property, like books, music, acting, patents etc.
- automated business, where it's developed to the point that requires almost no input
- ad revenue from online content, like websites, blogs, vlogs etc
As a software dev I know what it entails. It can be your job AND your passive income.
Technically, I may choose not to maintain the API. It might not remain relevant or profitable for very long, but I can just ignore it.
But that's the key difference: you actually are doing labor to maintain it, and you did all the labor of creating it in the first place. It's not passive in the way you're making it out to be, especially in contrast to income earned simply from owning assets and extracting interest or rent from it.
You just have a skewed definition of "passive income". All passive income implies at least some* ammount of work in advance. Yes, even "being a landlord" passive income requires you to do some work in advance, depending on the circumstances. You need to save enough capital to purchase a property, then make it rentable and find tenants. Is it a lot of work? Depends on the landlord, but some is required.
Besides, being a landlord also requires constant maintenance
As if most landlords do that themselves.
Idk. All of my "landlords" did it themselves. But I've never lived in the US.
But again, it's not my point. See my other comments for the explanation.
Let's say I spend two years carefully hand-crafting 10,000 widgets, then decide not to make any more. I sell those widgets for $100 each, but will only sell one per day. Is the money I'm getting from widget sales passive income on your definition?
You say it like my definition is the weird and unconventional one. The term literally says "passive" income. The conventional definition is "you did something once and profit from it over time without putting any or very little effort".
In case of your weird and unnatural example, if the sale process is automated, and you can go do other work in the meantime or just sit in an arm chair and sip beer while watching TV, then yes, it's passive income.
Your example also implies that you had some other income to sustain you while you were working on these widgets and you shifted the income from what could've been active income to be passive income later.
In other words, you invested into these widgets and are now receiving dividends.What I'm trying to tease out here is whether or not you think that passive income just means income for labor that is temporally separated from payment, which it seems like you do. That seems like not a particularly useful category of cases to talk about, at least to me. I don't really think there's much point in arguing about the "standard" definition, because it's a buzzword, not a precisely defined technical term.
The complaints on this thread are mostly treating "passive income" as a synonym for "rent seeking" (which is a rigorously defined technical term). Your definition includes things that aren't rent seeking, and just involve getting paid in the future for labor you did today. Again, I'm not saying your definition is wrong (because there's no precise definition to be wrong about), but it's talking past the other criticisms on this thread.
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