VM

That still doesn’t solve 99.9% of my issues, it just tries to solve a problem for which I already have a solution actively in-place: a KVM.

In that way it’s become adversarial.

Back in the 2000s, I was able to say that while a fundamental install took only about a half hour to set up, usability tweaks and a full fleshing out of functionality took another 4-8 hours depending on what the user was going to use the machine for.

I just did a Win11 24h2 install. It took nearly 24 working hours before I considered it even minimally functional for my needs. Cycling through Win10Privacy two or three times was particularly frustrating. Registry work alone took me a good 8-10 hours of trying stuff a step at a time and then rebooting to see how it worked.

At this point, the only reason why I am still running with a Windows rig is for those half-dozen programs that don’t have appropriate non-Windows variants. It’s why I’m also running a Mac Mini and an OpenSUSE tower through the same 4-port, 6-head KVM.

IIRC his family is already “wealthy”, just nowhere near overwhelmingly wealthy.

Why are the contents of that sack shaping it into what looks like a nutsack? Are there, like, two soccer balls in there?

Exactly. And when you look at warming trends, we just went completely off the reservation, BEYOND the worst-case-scenario path. Humanity and science are very much in uncharted territory at this moment, and indications are that we will get shockingly close to +3℃ by about 2035… yes, we are now seeing an unprecedented and terrifying acceleration in warming.

So what does +3℃ entail?

Think lethally high wet bulb temperatures striking most regions between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, where 4B people live. Not constantly lethal wet bulb temps, but frequently enough and for long enough that it becomes a “migrate or die” proposition. For FOUR BILLION people.

Think chaotic weather, bringing either too much or too little precipitation to the entire planet, when over 80% of all agriculture is absolutely dependent on getting the correct amount of rainfall at the right time. Extremely conservative projections are seeing up to 2B - one quarter of the world’s population - starving to death before 2040. And that’s just in the equatorial belts, where food insecurity is highest.

And those are just two of the high notes. We have additional calamities that have become foregone conclusions, such as the collapse of the AMOC - with a “most likely” date by the 2050s - that will plunge most of Northern Europe into a deep freeze and play additional havoc with weather around the planet as it whiplashes into a “new normal” over a decade or three.

I thought that most of the plunge of modern civilization would occur after I die of old age. Even with a functional healthcare system I will be lucky to make it to 2045, much less later. But with America in the active process of collapsing, and threatening to export it’s madness and chaos to other countries like Canada, it looks like I’ll have a front-row seat after all.

The MacOS link for Iridium Browser goes straight to a 404.

Anyone have a direct link to the latest DMG?

Wow. When a church tells the GOP to fark off, that’s gotta be a bad situation. Most churches are deep into the ChristoFascist end of the political spectrum, so McCormick must have pissed off Rev. Edward’s something bad.

Our civilization demands that I be profitable to a parasite who leeches a majority of my labour’s value in order to accumulate obscene levels of wealth.

Without exorbitant amounts of time spent maintaining that profitability, I will end up poor, homeless, and eventually dead from exposure. This leaves vanishingly little time to spend on open source work, regardless of how intellectually and ethically attractive it may be.

A woman’s cycle varies between 15 and 45 days, averaging 28.1 days, but with a standard deviation of 3.95 days. That’s a hell of a lot of variability from one woman to the next. And the same variability can be experienced by a large minority of women from one period to the next, and among nearly all women across the course of their fertile years.

On the other hand, the moon’s cycle (as seen from Earth) takes 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes to pass through all of its phases. And it does so like clockwork, century after century.

Of the two, I am finding the second to have a much stronger likelihood of being the reasoning behind the notches.

Strange how gender-bigotry style historical revisionism and gender exceptionalism seems to get a wholly uncritical and credulous pass when it’s not done by a man.

Posted in a Canadian channel before, because I am Canadian:

The housing crisis arises out of one problem, and one problem only:

Housing as an investment.

That’s not to say foreigners are to blame - at less than 2% of the market, they don’t have any real impact. British Columbia’s laws against foreign home ownership is nothing more than a red herring, a bullshit move designed to flame racism and bigotry. Yes, some of them are just looking to build anchors in a prosperous first-world country, but most are honest buyers.

A better move has been the “speculation tax”. By taxing more heavily any home that remains empty, it encourages property holders to actually rent these units out, instead of holding out for people desperate enough to pay their nosebleed-high rents.

But all of this misses the real mark: housing used purely as investment.

Now, to be absolutely clear, I am not talking about landlords who have a “mortgage helper” suite, or who have held on to a home or two that they previously lived in. These are typically the good landlords that we need - those with just two or three rental units, and that aren’t landlording as a business, just as a small top-up to their day job or as an extra plump-up to the retirement funds they are living off of. By having many thousands of separate landlords instead of one monolith, healthy competition is preserved.

No, there are two types of “investors” that I would directly target:

1. Flippers
2. Landlords-as-a-business.

1) Flippers

The first group, flippers, also come in two distinct types:

1. Those that buy up homes “on spec” before ground has even been turned, and then re-sell those same homes for much more than they bought shortly before these homes are completed. Sometimes for twice as much as they paid.
2. Those that buy up an older, tired home, slap on a coat of paint, spackle over holes in the walls, paper over the major flaws in hopes that inspectors don’t catch them, and shove in an ultra-cheap but shiny Ikea kitchen that will barely last a decade, then re-sell it for much more than they paid for it.

Both of these groups have contributed to the massive rise in housing purchase prices over the last thirty years. For a family that could afford a 3Bdrm home in 2000, their wages have only increased by half again, while home values have gone up by five times by 2023.

And this all comes down to speculation driving up the cost of homes.

So how do we combat this? Simple: to make it more attractive for owner-occupiers to buy a home than investors.

A family lives in a home that they own for an average of 8 years. Some less, most a lot more. We start by taxing any home sale at 100% for any owner who hasn’t lived in said home as their primary residence for at least two years (730 contiguous days). We then do a straight line depreciation from the end of the second year down to 0% taxation at the end of the eighth year. Or maybe we be kind and use a sigmoid curve to tax the last two years very minimally.

Exceptions can exist, of course, for those who have been widowed, or deployed overseas, or in the RCMP and deployed elsewhere in Canada, or where the house has been ordered to be sold by the court for divorce proceedings, and so forth. But simple bankruptcy would not be eligible, because it would be abused as a loophole.

But the point here is that homes will then become available to those working-class people who have been desperate to get off of the rental merry-go-round, but who have been unable to because home prices have been rising much faster than their down payment ever could.

This tax would absolutely cut investors off at the knees. Flippers would have to live in a home much, much longer, and spec flippers would be put entirely out of business, because they can’t even live in that house until it is fully completed in the first place.

2) Landlords-as-a-business

The second group is much simpler. It involves anyone who has ever bought a home purely to rent it back out, seeking to become a parasite on the backs of working-class Canadians in order to generate a labour-free revenue stream that would replace their day job. Some of these are individuals, but some of these are also businesses. To which there would be two simple laws created:

1. It would become illegal for any business to hold any residential property whatsoever that was in a legally habitable state. This wouldn’t prevent businesses from building homes, but it would prevent a business from buying up entire neighbourhoods just to monopolize that area and jack up the rent to the maximum that the market could bear.
2. Any individual owning more than 5 (or so) rental units (not just homes!) would be re-classified as operating as a business, and therefore become ineligible to own any of them - they would have to immediately sell all of them.

As for № 2, a lot of loopholes can exist that a sharp reader would immediately identify. So we close them, too.

• Children under 24 “operate as a business” automatically with any rental unit. They are allowed ZERO. Because who TF under the age of 25 is wealthy enough to own rental units? No-one, unless these units were “gifted” to them from their parents, in an attempt to skirt the law. So that is one loophole closed.
• Additional immediate family members are reduced by half in the number of rental units they can own. So if a husband has the (arbitrary, for the sake of argument) maximum limit of five, the wife can only have two herself. Any other family member who wants to own a rental unit, and who does not live in the same household, must provide full disclosure to where their money is coming from, and demonstrate that it is not coming from other family members who already own rental units.

By severely constraining the number of investors in the market, more housing becomes available to those who actually want to stop being renters. Actual working-class people can exit the rental market, reducing demand for rental units, and therefore reducing rental prices. These lower rental prices then make landlording less attractive, reducing the investor demand for homes and reducing bidding wars by deep-pocketed investors, eventually reducing overall home values for those who actually want to buy a home to live in it.

Plus, landlords will also become aware of the tax laid out in the first section that targets flippers. If they own rental units that they have never lived in as their primary residence, they will also be unable to sell these units for anything other than a steep loss. They will then try to exit the market before such a tax comes into effect, flooding the market with homes and causing prices to crash. They know that they are staring down two massive problems:

Being stuck with a high-cost asset (purchase price) that only produces a low-revenue stream because renters have exited the market by buying affordable homes, allowing plenty of stock that is pincered by the spec tax that heavily taxes empty rental units, thereby lowering rental prices well beneath the cost of the mortgage on the unit.

By putting these two tools into effect at the same time, we force a massive exodus of landlords out of the marketplace, crashing home values to where they become affordable to working-class people, thereby massively draining the numbers of renters looking for places to rent. Those places still being rented out - by owners who have previously lived in them, or by investors who couldn’t sell in time - would significantly outnumber renters looking for a place to rent, thereby crashing rental prices as renters could then dictate rents by being able to walk away from unattractive units or abusive landlords.

Full disclosure: I own, I don’t rent. But I have vanishingly little sympathy for greed-obsessed parasites that suck the future out of hard-working Canadians who must pay 60% or more of their wages for shitbox rentals to abusive landlords in today’s marketplace. Most people (and pretty much anyone under the age of 30) who don’t already own no longer have any hope of ever owning a house, as their ability to build a down payment shrinks every year, while home values accelerate into the stratosphere.

I keep on forgetting that “threads” (in lowercase) is frequently being used to refer to “Threads” the Facebook thing, and not separate sub-communities within the Fediverse.

Was getting all confused as to why Fediverse instances were internally blocking each other.

Y’all all need to learn capitalization, yo. Helps reduce confusion by turning certain things into the proper nouns that they actually are.

If your business model requires the economic exploitation of your workers, your company possesses no legitimate reason to exist.