Saik0Shinigami

Forget for a second that your original premise is basically completely wrong... You realize how fucking massive the USA is right? Based on the smugness I have to assume you're European. The USA is effectively the same size as your whole continent. The country is the size of your continent. Let that sink in. And unlike the Continent of Europe... Much of the middle of the continent has no notable landmarks on many maps.

Most people can absolutely give you the general area they live if you put a map of the USA in front of them. They may be off by a bit, but that's simply a function of how massive the scale of the map is you put in front of them.

Fuck outta here.

Nah, he's right. You have a phone. It has a camera. Video the place before you move your shit in, preferably with their manager in the video even (when they show you the unit, or start the video when they hand you keys). When they claim that shit on move out show them the footage. If they bullshit you still. Small claims is like 30-50$ in most places.

This is an easy premise. I still have the move-in and move-out pictures from previous apartments that I lived in from over a decade ago.

Some of this, I can kind of understand... However, you don't have to be rich to understand that refundable deposits are meant to be refunded if you take care of the place.

Those 10 or so places that I mentioned while in the military... I was enlisted. I made between 20-30k... With some money for housing allowance. I wasn't rolling in dough.

But they don’t get as much use here

You should clarify "here" a bit more. In AZ tile roofs are EVERYWHERE.

We end up replacing the underlayment more often than the actual tiles... unless the specific type of tile is no longer made and too many cracked for whatever reason.

Why are you all getting your homes inspected?

Required by many mortgage companies when you buy a house, primarily so they know that you care about paying the mortgage. If you buy a house and it turns out the foundation is completely falling apart and a wall falls down... you might just skip your mortgage and now the bank repossess a shitty house they lost money on. Also just a good thing to do overall before you purchase a house.

Edit: It's used primarily on the buyers side of the transaction prior to the actual purchase to validate the house is in good shape... Or oftentime to identify issues with the house that can be used to negotiate on the price a bit. Eg... someone is asking for 500k on a house and you found that the corner of the roof has some water staining on it (probably needs to be looked at). You can ask the Sellers to fix it, or negotiate the price down 2-3k based on the findings of the third part inspector.

Let me help you.

I've never once claimed I didn't have shitty landlords. You seem to assume a lot of shit. It's called "due diligence". Take pictures when you move in. Submit the shit on the maintenance requests within a couple weeks of moving in. And don't fuck the place up in the mean time. Take pictures when you leave. This isn't a hard process and virtually everyone has a cellphone with a camera to do it with. Boom deposit kept.

Comparing literal due diligence for moving into a rental to rape is fucking outright stupid. You should be ashamed of yourself.

I can promise you that the towns outside of military bases are almost always shitholes. I've had bad landlords. I've had one apartment complex that wouldn't fix an exterior wall hole (that was present when we moved in). I've just never found myself in a position where I didn't document something on move-in, and that they tried to claim that I did while I was living there because I didn't keep my house like a shit-sty.

I never made a claim that I never had a bad landlord. Just that I did my due diligence on move-in and move out and have never needed to give up my deposit. In my mind, you have to fuck the place up to lose it.

Yeah. I can't think of a single place I rented that I didn't get my deposit back on.

Always makes me wonder what other people do to their houses to fuck them up so bad.

I only had one time where they even tried to keep the deposit (out of about 10 or so places, I was in the military, so I moved a bit). I talked to them in person for all of 5 minutes and they gave up and gave it back.

Or dash cams...

Invidious: News to me. My instance has never been down.
GrayJay: News to me... https://github.com/futo-org/grayjay-android I can see the full source... and the license seems pretty "free" to me... https://github.com/futo-org/grayjay-android/blob/master/LICENSE.md with only caveat being that you can't distribute it for payment. I'm fine with that... and most others should be fine with that too.
ytdl: depends on the service using it. https://www.tubearchivist.com/ uses ytdl and gives you a little frontend for it. Works fine for watching and you can set it to watch for uploads from channels.

or invidious, grayjay, ytdl, etc...

I'm sure you were... But what does that have to do with what they said?