I work for an ISP in the southeast USA as a field technician and it’s dirty work sometimes. Fixing rodent damage to fiber connection boxes for businesses, placing temporary cables when underground lines get cut, working in dusty equipment closets, etc.

It’s not bad or hard work most days.

Never ask a company to pick between the right thing and profit.

It’s fundamentally impossible for a publicly traded company not to choose profit over ‘The Right Thing’, fullstop. Shareholders feel that have a fundamental right to growth, and if Google’s CEO were to choose ‘The Right Thing’ over profit, the shareholders can oust them in favor of a CEO willing to choose profits.

Enshittification is where every public company ends up, because the line MUST go up, no other alternative is acceptable.

Even if law enforcement can get a warrant, unless there’s a backdoor in the encryption then the data stays private. That’s the whole point of encryption.

The fundamental problem is law enforcement feeling entitled to snoop on private communications with a warrant vs the inherent security flaw with making a backdoor in encrypted communications. The backdoor will eventually get exploited, either by reverse engineering/tinkering or someone leaking keys, and then encryption becomes useless. The only way encryption works is if the data can only be decrypted by one key.

Anyone else remember when TSA published a picture of the master key set for TSA approved luggage locks and people had modeled and printed replicas within hours?

In a system rigged to support one party over another.

I think my favorite part of swapping has been forgetting how Windows does things. I’m so embedded in Linux and how it works every day that I don’t remember where to go for certain things in Windows without having to search.

I remember some power user shortcuts like run prompt shortcuts (appwiz.cpl or control userpasswords2) but I used to be able to walk people through how to get certain pages in the Windows UI, and I couldn’t do it today.

I made the swap after they forced Windows 7 update behavior to change. You used to be able to download updates but you got to choose when to install them. Then they changed it to either they’re on and fully automatic, or fully off.

At the time, I was running a computer repair company, and my work computer running Win7 was running a data recovery on an accidentally formatted drive for almost two days. After I had left and the program finished, Windows was all “Oh, the computer is idle now. Let me give you a 15 minute warning that I’m going to install updates and reboot if you don’t cancel”.

After the second time, I formatted my work computer. Shortly after, I did the same to my gaming PC. Haven’t looked back once.

Some of us manage to break the cycle, but despite how much I love Linux (ups and downs) I understand that it isn’t for everyone currently.

What most people want is a stable system they can just use without understanding much if anything about how the underlying systems work. They don’t care that wifi drivers can be fixed through a few terminal commands, they rail against the fact they have to do much of anything at all besides click [Next >]. And I can’t blame them; that’s what Microsoft has trained them for.

So many people with random toolbars and junk extensions in their browsers because the [Next >] button is how they get past whatever problem they have. The average user isn’t very tech savvy, and it takes someone with a desire to learn to truly thrive in a Linux environment.

I’ve converted my mom to Kubuntu, and she does well, but she’s also an outlier (she has an expired CCNA certification).

Linux suffers from a catch 22: there’s not enough users because there’s not a lot of commercial support because there’s not enough users because… And the people who are donating their time to make it better are saints as far as I’m concerned, but there’s only so much people can do for free. Things truly have gotten better, but until more typical user types can adopt Linux with little to no fuss, not much will change.

And that fact hurts my soul.

Obviously there has to be an incentive for Jim-bob to tie up his retirement savings and credit worthiness in a house that he doesn’t live in. You may not like the fact that people have to qualify for bank loans to buy property, but this is the world we live in.

Obviously if I think landlords are a leech on society, then I must also be in favor of free property for everyone! There’s no issue with having to qualify for a loan for a house, but don’t piss in my shoes and call it rain. All landlords do is drive up the price of living for someone who could have potentially bought the house they’re renting. If they’re able to rent it, then they’re clearly able to afford the mortgage payments, upkeep, taxes, etc. Plus extra to support the living expenses of the owner.

Oh, your anecdotal evidence about your parent’s home surely beats my Nobel-prize winning economics study citation.

I sure missed any citations in your post. Unless you think just naming a publication counts as citing it.

Because I have anecdotal evidence for someone who bought a house for $400k in 2004 and then later sold it for $280k after the real estate crash.

cool story bro. There’s always cases of people losing out because they buy high and sell low, but in your anecdote, what would the $400,000 home be worth today had the homeowner held onto the property? There is no stock portfolio that would appreciate in value the same way houses have.

No, you get different scam calls which you assume are the same but are definitely not, since these ones just go out to names on lists of property owners, not random residents.

Tell me more about the phone calls I receive and how they’re not ‘real’ scam calls.

The tenants are able to live in a house that they can’t afford to buy because they don’t have credit and credentials that satisfy the bank.

So they should pay the same expenses, PLUS extra to support the landlord who could meet the bank’s criteria for a loan?

The tenants are able to move out with a couple months notice if they get a job elsewhere. They don’t have to worry about selling the house or finding a way to pay double mortgages when they move elsewhere…

They also don’t have to worry about cashing in on the appreciated value of the house since they moved in…

The tenants money is not tied up in a property, they are able to invest it in the stock market which has a higher rate of return than home ownership (which only keeps pace with inflation on average, per Case Schiller).

Funny joke. My parents bought a house for $90,000 in 1993 that is worth ~$400,000+ today. What percentage of investments could offer such a yield in the same time-frame?

The tenants don’t get constant calls from scammers claiming they want to pay your property for CASH TODAY.

I still get those same scam calls despite not being a homeowner.

Got anything else?

You make that sound like anyone who’s able to rent a place is able to buy a place

Call me old fashioned, but if you’re able to pay for the full cost of the mortgage and maintenance of the property, plus your ‘share’ of the living expenses of your landlord then yeah, I think you’re able to afford the property without the landlord.

All your landlord adds is making the property more expensive so you can support their lifestyle.

Sure maybe all housing should be free

Damn, that’s a hell of a jump to make from my argument. Where did I say that housing should be free?

A place to live without having to handle maintenance/upkeep themselves, to be approved for a mortgage, save up for a downpayment, or to have to sell (and navigate all the mess of that process) when they need to move.

And you end up paying for all of those anyway, plus extra. Minus the equity increase as the house appreciates in value over time. The only party it makes long term financial sense for is the Landlord.

the maintenance costs passed to the renter are dispersed across time as well, so they aren’t having to foot the full cost of say, a new fridge suddenly.

But the landlord charges enough above the mortgage payments to cover that cost, on top of the extra added for profit. The renter could save that extra money, cover the sudden cost of a fridge or washing machine, and have money left over vs renting.

I’d say there’s a difference between renting out a portion of a house the landlord also lives in and purchasing whole other homes and renting them out.

Besides, no matter how nice the multi-home-owning landlord is, the reality is they don’t purchase homes and rent them out without making a profit on all expected costs, maintenance included. The better deal for the renter renting a whole home would be to own the home and maintain it, because then they’re saving the profit the landlord charges.

A nice polite leech is still a leech.

Sure, everything you purchase in a capitalistic society has profit added to it, but normally there’s also added value. You pay more in the brick and mortar store vs buying online because the added value is getting the item immediately. You pay more for the car part at the mechanics shop vs doing it yourself because having a professional install it adds value.

What value does Jim-bob owning 5 homes and renting them out to make a living add to the tenants?

Betty and Bob are in an unfortunate situation, but they’re taking a thing of value and charging money to cover all costs, and make a profit. The tenant is therefore paying the mortgage and all repair costs, and then even more to support what amounts to a leech.

It might be a good arrangement for Betty and Bob, but it makes living somewhere more expensive.

Which is the general point. I can be sympathetic to Betty and Bob, but landlords buying houses leaves less houses for everyone else for a ‘job’ that doesn’t add any real value to society. It just props up someone with the economic means to buy multiple houses and make them a living while hanging the rest of us out to dry.

AFAIK, the unilateral nature of TOS/EULA agreements in the day of Software as a Service hasn’t been litigated. Which means there isn’t a court’s opinion on the scope or limits of a TOS/EULA and what changes can be made.

Currently, Adobe has the full force of contract law to initiate this change without any input from consumers because a case about this has never made it to the courts.

It’ll be interesting to see where this goes, but Adobe will likely backpedal on their language in the TOS before any case gets to a Judge because the last thing any company wants is for a TOS/EULA agreement to be fundamentally undermined by a court.