Obviously you get a hard product when you get a meal. You get someone's labour when you ride and Uber and consume gas and car.

When you rent, you basically are buying someone else a house. You don't get any service in many cases, as the landlord can contract our 100% of maintenance and repair and still make massive amounts of money.

When you eat at a restaurant you are in the very same way also buying them a restaurant. That food will only satiate you for a few hours and eventually you will have to eat again, having nothing to show for the service. In the same way you can rent a house from someone, have shelter from the elements for a time and once that business has concluded have nothing to show for it.

I don't' advise eating out too much or renting long term if you can avoid it. I also don't advise living in a major city. You can more easily take the first two pieces of advice if you take the third first.

No, you're absolutely not buying them a restaurant. They are fundamentally making money because they provide labour in exchange for it.

A landlord is not providing labour. They are acting as a middle-man between you and the bank. They provide no service to society. A restaurant is, as they provide cooked food. One is a zero-sum game, the other is actually producing something.

Your advice is frankly shit on the societal level. There is no way for everyone to avoid long-term rentals unless we do things you are opposed to. Equally it's impossible for everyone to avoid living in big cities, the entire economy would collapse. It's senseless to punish people for doing things that are necessary for our common prosperity and interests, such as living in major cities.

‘ A landlord is not providing labour.’ All built structures undergo entropic decay so maintenance would count as labour being done in both cases, the apartment and the restaurant using the textbook definition. These costs would be packaged into the rent and the price of meals.

Plenty of landlords subcontract maintenance, actually. There is landlording, and there is maintenance, some landlords do both, many do no maintenance themselves.

So through market calculation we can deduce that maintenance is only a small part of rent, the majority of rent is derived from being a middleman with the bank.

This is not the case for a restaurant, you'll find that all of the value in takeout comes from the labour and the capital necessary to make that labour efficient.

Would any landlord sign an agreement stating that you would do all the maintenance and then allow you to live there for free? Of course not.

> Would any landlord sign an agreement stating that you would do all the maintenance and then allow you to live there for free?

This happens frequently enough that you can find a number of articles on how to approach that very arrangement from a tax perspective[0].

[0]https://homeguides.sfgate.com/record-work-done-rental-proper...

That's not what work done in lieu of rent means. Work done in lieu of rent will only replace part of rent. For example I might get annoyed that repairs aren't getting done and offer to do them instead of paying on month of rent as part of a yearly lease, but no one will allow you to only do maintenance and never pay rent.

Show me someone who, on the open markets, offers to allow you to live in a property in exchange for nothing else.

>no one will allow you to only do maintenance and never pay rent.

> Show me someone who, on the open markets, offers to allow you to live in a property in exchange for nothing else.

Property caretaker

A property caretaker is a person, group, or organization that cares for real estate for trade or financial compensation, and sometimes as a barter for rent-free living accommodations.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_caretaker

‘ you'll find that all of the value in takeout comes from the labour and the capital necessary to make that labour efficient.’

Last time I checked kitchens and kitchen equipment are not immune from entropy…

Kitchens and kitchen equipement are necessary to allow cooking, but repairing the kitchen by itself provides zero value to anyone.

Huh? Even a kitchen not in use provides value as all tools do. Unless you don’t believe that tools have latent value?

Don't many restaurants rent? They're stuck in the same predatory situation.