Ya, remember some number of them are bots or underpaid people who’s job is to spread frustration and essentially commit information warfare.

Since I moved to Lemmy I’ve gotten into the habit of blocking the bad actors after it was clear they are incurable and unsaveable. The ones who seem to live for pro-russian messaging or refuse to have a dialogue like these TLDR people.

The whole of Spain. I grew up with a lot of people who loved Europe but had never been to it or really anywhere else. Spain for some reason got a lot of love and attention in my social circles but I didn’t engage with it meaningfully so I didn’t understand it. I started my international travels in “the east” and had a wonderful time. By the time I visited Spain I expected a normal travel experience but definitely not the elevated grandeur my highschool years would have had me believe. I had average expectations.

Then I got there and every meal was bomb. Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona - I couldn’t go wrong I loved the local food. Worse, I loved at least Madrid and Barcelona’s ability to recreate other cuisines too. Some of the best sushi I’ve ever had was in Madrid and I make a point of getting quality sushi where ever I go (including practically gorging myself into a food coma in Japan).

Then I went to an art museum and it moved me, found some artisanal stores, got fresh orange juice at multiple grocers, saw a movie in a decent theater, you know the normal like “show me what it’s like to live uniquely here” stuff. Ya, Madrid stole my heart for what it was and Spain as a whole surprised me.

Ya, I live right next to where this happened. It’s an immigrant heavy area. These guys planned, and a similar group the following day, to protest right next to the people they hate and want evicted from the country.

I agree, no one should be stabbed for their beliefs and free speech (to a degree) is important. But if someone came to my neighborhood and spent the whole day shouting out of a loud speaker that I didn’t belong, my family didn’t belong, my neighbors and friends didn’t belong, despite some of them living here for multiple generations - I’d be upset, I’d feel threatened.

Now couple that with doing it in a poorer district against a specifically marginalized group who has been historically treated poorly for decades with talking points that are clearly racist and easily disproven - idk. No one should get stabbed but even if I believed those awful things I wouldn’t do what they did unless I was looking for trouble.

Idk, my roommate and I have been talking about it all weekend. Yes we believe you should be allowed to punch Nazi’s, no we don’t think we should be allowed to stab anyone, yes 20% of the German population roughly hold dehumanizing beliefs that are dangerous and we should be educating them, no the government isn’t doing enough to better everyone’s situation and therefore racism and fascism are growing at an alarming rate.

I’m stoked, the ARPG genre feels stale. Hopefully they keep up what seems to be engaging combat. No rest for the wicked is still in early access and D4/LE/POE1 have very unrewarding combat IMHO.

This can’t come soon enough.

Let’s call it a draw. 😂

Well I wouldn’t describe myself as a capitalist per se. I don’t believe there’s infinite resources but I do believe there are better, more efficient ways of distributing them - especially with housing. We definitely live in 3d space, I don’t really know what this comment is referring to or it’s use.

Probably a bit of both, insane and delusional, but I also think imagining a better solution requires a smidge of both.

Again, your loan comment doesn’t make much sense to me because you failed to contributing a meaningful comment - you could elaborate but I suspect you don’t believe government financing is a thing? Or that interest rates can be zero? I’m not really sure, but I can elaborate my original concept - because I’m not an Internet troll and I genuinely want people to imagine and work towards a better future.

Houses are expensive products, we can agree on that, even if they weren’t investment vehicles it takes a team of people months to construct a good house and a lot longer for an apartment or larger complex. Since everyone should be able to own their home, pretending for second we went so far as to abolish the concept of renting, we would need people to be able to afford housing immediately upon becoming an adult and choosing to live somewhere else. Normally we think of this as rent, we pay someone else’s mortgage with our money because we didn’t have the capital to purchase it directly in the past. I. My proposed future, there’d be no landlords to pay mortgages for, so we’d take out our own mortgage to pay for our housing.

Now I think this is where people imagine today’s mortgages and systems being imposed on an 18 year old and think that’s foolish. That’s why i clarify housing as a product instead of an investment vehicle is cheaper, and housing as a right or a goal of society means mortgages aren’t for profit. So someone buys a home that costs less than todays home using a loan who’s interest is less than todays interest - likely the first from the previous owner, construction company, or the government and the second from some level of government.

It’s how loans work but instead of for profit they’re for the betterment of society. We do this all the time for various reasons today. The PPP loans being forgiven is one example, so is 0% student loans, and if the government wanted to charge 1-2% interest for a good reason we have historical precedent to that as well. Idk what about this is so hard to understand for you but hopefully this helps. :p

When a house is an investment that grows in value society attempts to maximize scarcity, fewer houses or higher demand means more growth in their value. But imagine we lived in a society where we had more houses than we need, a surplus, because we valued housing people whenever they needed housing and we knew roughly how many houses we needed to do that.

You could move anywhere and find a house to own at a cost you could afford. Imagine housing wasn’t a massive store of value such that multiple bureaucratic steps were created to nickle and dime the transaction. Buying a home could be easy.

You could find a vacant house or one that has leaving owners, inspection papers were regulated and up to date, you could buy it off of them using your money or a loan from the government, and you could move in just like if you were renting.

You don’t have to save up for money to buy a home in a society where housing people is a priority. Housing would be cheaper, cost of living would be lower, purchasing power would be higher, and we could have methods in place for transitioning ownership without requiring a lump sum of cash cause no one’s expecting a massive windfall immediately. Ya know, loans.

Living on the street would be a fictional concept, encouraging homelessness is a societal choice - we could house everyone on the streets within the year if we wanted to. Does that mean long term hotels wouldn’t exist? No. That’s an actual service being provided.

I’m just saying, if landlords served a purpose we could enable that service as a society but if housing wasn’t an investment vehicle it’s pretty clear the number of landlords would plummet over night and we’d quickly realize relatively few people liked the “service” they were receiving.

I played it on launch with friends. It was an arpg with better combat than most and pretty great graphics. Those are ALL of the positive things I have to say about it. It was so buggy it was hard to play without crashing. We lost progression multiple times. The servers were atrocious, the first 6 hours of playtime were trying to log in and not crashing. We ended up refunding it obviously.

Unfortunately the ARPG genre is super stale right now and we were looking to support any project we could. No rest for the wicked is the best thing to come out in ages and it’s still got a ways to go in EA before I give it a proper play through.

Your lifetime of experiences does not consistute a meaningful sample size when compared to everyone else’s. It can leave you feeling or believing something completely different than everyone else, for good reason, but that doesn’t make it true.

Most landlords own property because it is a vehicle for wealth growth. And if someone owns something because it makes them money every year they are likely attempting to or interested in maximizing that return. That means cheap maintenance, little to no improvements, and an increasing price tag like an investment vehicle instead of a decreasing price tag like a consumable good.

If landlords were systemically good, if the overwhelmingly majority of landlords were good, rent would go down every year as the building and utilities get used - only going back up after real meaningful renovations.

My last flat had an awful kitchen design, very aesthetic but a nightmare to actually cook in. Can you imagine living in your own home and hating something you Interface with everyday multiple times and not changing it despite knowing you have the money and skills to do so? I can’t. But because I have a landlord, because people have landlords they are stuck with the decisions of someone who either makes absolutely or relatively bad decisions all the time. My current flat the bathroom is a nightmare to live with because a quarter of the room is a bathtub and yet there’s no place to put your toothbrush or plug in a water pick/hair dryer/razor. I’d happily change the entire bathroom, renovate it to include a decent sized shower, add electrical outlets and kitchen sink that isn’t just a bowl - but again I can’t because that isn’t putting money into my landlords pockets and because they’re not planning on living here ever again (if they ever did) they don’t care how it is to live in. That’s what being a landlord does to someone naturally, it’s understandable but the reality is you care less about a place you’re not living in, you’re spending a lot of money for a place you’re not living in so you want to make that money back so you can improve the place you are actually living in so you’re naturally getting more stingy and cheap at your other properties, and over time the incentives of the system realign your values and behaviors.

No, I don’t think your lifetime of “good landlord stories” is a meaningful data point to change what the overwhelming majority of people experience every day of their lives nor the systemic logic/reality of the situations. Good people can become landlords with good intent but they can’t stay good and be a landlord because being a landlord is inherently an anti-productive thing to be in society - overtime the incentives change people into doing things that hurt others for their own interest.

You’re right, there are good examples out there. The point is they’re statistical anomalies not the rule. Landlords by and large serve very little societal purpose.

Surely if that statistic is true it can’t mean that on average after solar panels are installed people are taking more energy from the grid. I imagine it’s also pretty easy to single out individual groups, like software engineers or something, who on average might use more electricity or reverse that and say people who use more electricity on average are more likely to get solar panels installed.

I only bring this up because sustainable energy initiatives, even individuals installing a handful of panels, should be praised. There’s nothing better we can do right now than clean up our energy generation (and maybe go vegetarian? Lol).

I just switched to Kagi because I liked the idea of a paid search engine who’s aim was to remove the internet’s clutter, not use any profile besides the one I create to show me results, and where I could weight certain sites that produce good content.

Reading the blog post the issues allegedly are:

1. Privacy is not guaranteed, like with a 3rd party audit
2. AI usage is growing not shrinking
3. The business seems to be poorly run and could have a short lifespan

Is this correct?

This video was fantastic and I hope they keep this series up. I’m switching to Kagi from ddg because of this vid and I’ll spend time this weekend looking into ente/immich and all the DNS options highlighted here.

Super excited. It’s weird paying for email or search engines given they’ve always been free in my lifetime but the services have been noticeably worse as of late and I miss an Internet constantly bombarding you with things you should believe or buy.

It’s not about capitalism vs something-other-than-capitalism, it’s about all the small systems that make up our way of life. As a simple example, housing shouldn’t be a vehicle for profit seeking. It should be illegal or so greatly discouraged that owning an unhealthy amount of properties is non-viable because if house prices must always go up and everyone needs a place to live - the cost of living must always go up. A subsystem of capitalism that needs fixing, not “a new system that isn’t capitalism”.

And I’m not suggesting people not have 401k’s or not invest or not save money, I’ve got my retirement fund too. But we have to realize that that system isn’t doing it’s job and it’s harmful to society and the more we participate the more incentivized to keep it harmful, to keep it around. So participate like an intelligent person and then leverage your power and position to better the systems for everyone - eventually at an expense to yourself.

You got to remember, most of the wealth is still in very few hands. So telling yourself “the stock market also benefits the people who are retiring” makes it sound like there’s a good side to this when really it’s only a silver lining to an otherwise meaningless and arguably downright hurtful event.

The economy is as bad as it is, we’re seeing fascism rise as much as we are, partially because our major economic systems aren’t designed to actually benefit the people they’re built on sucking value out of.

So no, I don’t care that everyone currently cashing out of the system just got a little bit more money or more time out of the recent layoffs and the recent COVID profitteering and the recent inshitification. I think we have to be careful defending bad systems even minorly, despite that being rational and logical, because it feels like we’re coming to a tipping point and minor defenses like that make it seem as if we can extend the shelf life of these systems a few more decades, a few more unnecessary deaths, a few more degrees of warming, etc. Idk, only politics is weird. At least you’re participating, so thanks for that.