openpgp4fpr:E0C3497126B72CA47975FC322953BB8C16043B43
still going to undercut the competition as best I can
I and surely many others thank you for that. I didn’t mean to criticize your goodwill; instead I wanted to stress that our housing crisis is a systemic issue and that fixing it is beyond our individual choices and requires policy.
If I charge $675 a month and the competition jumps their price to $1,000 a month, who is everyone going to come to?
You will get, among others, people who can afford $675 but not $1000. Compared to people who can afford $1000, people who can afford $675 but not $1000 are more likely to find themselves or already be in a precarious financial situation, which could mean missing rent payments. Compared to people who can afford $1000, people who can afford $675 but not $1000 are also more likely to suffer from mental illness as a consequence of their more precarious financial situation, which could mean neglected facilities, conflict with other tenants, pests and a host of other issues for you, the landlord.
You may be willing to both forego higher rent income and assume the increased likelihood of financial losses, and that would make you a good person, but not everyone is — at least not to the extent necessary to make that choice.
If the competition suddenly goes to $3,000 a month and I stay at $675, and I maintain my place so it isn’t a shit hole, I’ll have lines around that block of people wanting to rent.
Given the housing crisis in many of our cities and towns, you likely already have loads of people ready to rent your property, with enough reliable tenants among them. More applicants won’t benefit you, because you already have enough reliable tenants. What are you going to do with all the additional applicants? Screen each and every one of them to pick the very best one? One that is marginally more reliable than you would otherwise have found?
In fact, raising rent and prices often serves as a sort of ‘customer filter’. Instead of screening your applicants in depth, you can just check their financials and safely assume that whoever can afford a monthly rent of $3000 is also a reliable tenant.
You seem to assume a rental market made up of individual landlords. Although that is a reality in some places, most properties are rented by for-profit corporations. Such corporations compete against each other for capital; they need money from investors and investors want returns. Whenever such a corporation foregoes profit, another usually takes it and uses it to expand, often acquiring its smaller peers. Over time, this sort of natural selection yields the most ruthlessly profitable corporations.
The problem here is not that individuals make the wrong choice, but rather the framework in which they operate, the systemic incentives.
My point still stands
Yes, it does, and I agree with it. I should have stated as much in my comment. I didn’t because I generally prefer upvotes to “well argued” or “I agree”.
respected foreign news source like Le Monde or Die Welt
Die Welt is not or should not be respected. It belongs to Axel Springer SE, a European media corporation comparable in both reach and tone to Fox News Media in the United States.
Die Welt’s latest controversy –one among many– saw them publish an opinion piece by Elon Musk endorsing the AfD, which further legitimized the party and weakened the already debilitating cordon sanitaire around it.
In the German-speaking world, Die Welt is mocked as the “wannabe’s Bild”. Bild is a tabloid published by the same company that constantly engages in both misinformation and disinformation. Although Die Welt isn’t as blatant as its tabloid sibling, it still pushes a disingenuous narrative and should be avoided.
Germany, too, is poised to follow suit at the upcoming elections in February.
Git is overrated.
That’s interesting to read; I wasn’t even aware of the existence of Darcs — or any other alternative to git supposedly worth considering, for that matter. Would you elaborate on it?
On the one hand, one Raspberry Pi would not really suffice. As @theherk@lemmy.world argued, you would need legitimate email addresses, which would require either circumventing the antibot measures of providers like Google or setting up your own network of domains and email servers. Besides that, GitHub would (hopefully) notice the barrage of API requests from the same network. To avoid that and make your API requests seem legitimate, you would need infrastructure to spread your requests in time and across networks. You would either build and maintain that infrastructure yourself –which would be expensive for a single star-boosting operation– or, well, pay for the service. That’s why these things exist.
On the other hand, although bad programmers might use these services to star-boost their otherwise mediocre code, as you suggest, there are other –at least conceivable, if not yet proven– use cases, such as:
You seem to imply bad programmers use these services to star-boost their otherwise mediocre code. That might be the case, but there are other –at least conceivable, if not yet proven– use cases for these star-boosting services, such as typosquatting, the promotion of less secure software as part of supply chain attacks (with organizations sticking to vulnerable libraries or frameworks in the erroneous belief that they are more popular and better maintained than alternatives, for example) and plain malware distribution.
If I understand them correctly, @geography082@lemm.ee’s point is not that it is wrong to monetize FOSS, but rather that companies increasingly develop open source projects for some time, benefiting from unpaid work in the form of contributions and, perhaps most importantly, starving other projects from both such contributions and funding, only to cynically change the license once they establish a position in their respective ecosystem and lock in enough customers. The last significant instance that I remember is Redis’ case, but there seem to be ever more.
For reference, there is codeberg.org, operated by a German nonprofit and based on the open source Forgejo, among other open alternatives.
They feign concern about the national debt.
Exactly. Government debt promotes wealth concentration: instead of paying tax, the rich lend their money, earning interest on it. They do not advocate for less government spending to “balance the books”, but to (a) make people more reliant on their employers and thus supress wages (“labour cost”) and (b) weaken the state agencies that check their power. I’m convinced every Republican threat of a government shutdown is a bluff.
Russia being able to source silicon for their rockets was not enough of confirmation that sanctions are just a PR tactic along with minor inconvenience?
That Russia keeps sourcing Western chips for their rockets does not mean sanctions are “just a PR tactic along with minor inconvenience”. By forcing Russia to buy chips through intermediaries, each of which marks up prices to turn a profit, sanctions (a) drive up their cost, thus limiting what Russia can spend elsewhere, and (b) improve the negotiating power of the states harbouring those sanctions-evading intermediaries at the expense of Russia’s, which further weakens their already shaky international standing.
I see. I find it sad and alarming that a disease, however infectious, would reach Antarctica and wreak such havoc, but then again, all ecosystems are ultimately linked and little ever stays local. Thank you for replying and linking a source.
That article is a sobering read. I wasn’t aware of the extent of the spread and thank you for sharing it.
If pigs get it […]. That’s how the “spanish” flu started in the USA.
That is indeed a theory, hypothesized in a paper from 2005 and mentioned on the Wikipedia article about the Spanish flu:
[The hospital] also was home to a piggery and poultry was regularly brought in from surrounding villages to feed the camp. Oxford and his team postulated that a precursor virus, harbored in birds, mutated and then migrated to pigs kept near the front.
Because pigs are more readily infected with avian influenza viruses than are humans, they were suggested as the original recipients of the virus, passing the virus to humans sometime between 1913 and 1918.
[I fact-check as much as my time and preexisting knowledge allow. I post what I found to vouch for your comment and save other people time. I hope I don’t come across in the wrong way.]
penguin populations in the arctic
There are no penguins in the Arctic and the article you linked to doesn’t mention them. Where has bird flu infected penguins?
To be fair :P, English is not my mother tongue, so I don’t necessarily realize how pedantic some expressions I use come across. Fair enough?
To be fair, fearing for one’s life is understandable in a society where gun ownership, social injustice and mental illness are not only relatively widespread, but correlated, and the chances of being hurt in even simple altercations correspondingly high. The solution, though, is not allowing police to resort to violence routinely, disproportionately and indiscriminately, but to address the root causes of the danger with socioeconomic justice and safeguards, proper universal healthcare and at least some restrictions in gun ownership. Those who either aren’t willing to solve these underlying issues or deny their existence outright often resort to the charge of terrorism as both a convenient deflection and an instrument of suppression and oppression. It is in our interest to push back against such misuse and keep the public discourse centered on the origins of conflict.
If I understand your quotation correctly, unlawful gathering warrants the charge of terrorism only when “intended to […] (a) influence the policies of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion and (b) affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping”. Then again, (a) and (b) seem redundant and the law and the judiciary might see intimidation or coercion where we do not.
Intelligent analysis I concur with and thank you for. I sometimes wonder what myths our flawed present may pass down to our uncertain future. Who knows? After two millennia, our descendants might think of Trump the way we conceive of Narcissus while they recall the new flood myths we are delivering them.
For anyone else who, like me, didn’t know: Trump once referred to Tim Cook as “Tim Apple”, as described in the Wikipedia article on Tim Cook:
In a meeting for the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board with President Donald Trump in March 2019, Trump referred to Cook as “Tim Apple”.
Fact-check that, Sugar-Mountain!