It’s possible to use rising home values to your advantage without selling, by borrowing against that value to start a business, purchase a second property, etc.

Leverage is obviously risky, but you shouldn’t leave this out in your analysis.

There are other advantages too, like the fact that home ownership can act as a good counter against inflation, since hard assets like houses tend to be inflation-proof. Or the value of a home in estate planning, since (here in Canada anyway) when you die you don’t have to pay capital gains on a home you pass to your heirs.

The red flower is a Tithonia (mexican sunflower) or maybe Zinnia. The feathery herb looks very much like Dill, but that should be obvious if you rub and smell it. If it doesn’t smell like dill then I dunno… maybe Cosmos?

Meanwhile something like 30% of all online orders (and way more in the case of clothes) get returned, and a majority of that then goes straight to landfill/incinerator.

God forbid our endless feed of cat pictures and black and white telephone poles gets polluted!

Keep in mind too that the beekeeping craze has been particularly strong here in North America, where honeybees are not native.

Link without paywall: https://archive.ph/2UrBg

The majority of the electorate — 65%+ — own homes, and 75%+ of Canadians’ wealth is tied up in real estate.

There is absolutely no way this can get fixed politically in our democratic system. Any party that tries to deflate house prices in any meaningful way is committing its own suicide.

The only hope is that prices level off (or … you know… at least stop doubling every 3 - 4 years?) and the rest of the economy somehow catches up to make houses affordable again.

But I can’t see how that’s going to happen. We’re going to have to have a nasty recession to sort this out, and that won’t be because of anything whoever is in power at the time did intentionally.

The majority of those unionized employees in China belong to government-controlled unions. The Chinese government has the last word on all this, and the employees’ “rights” are ultimately subject to the CCPs whims. Basically both the company and the union are ultimately controlled by the same entity.

It’s absurd, as it defeats the whole point of a union.

This is what eventually seems to happen under every attempt at communism that we’ve seen so far.

Keep in mind most of that machinery nowadays is made by workers elsewhere in the world, primarily in China, where the union membership rate is something like 45%.

Gelsinger, McKeon, and Lavender do have a nice ring to them.

Maybe not, but it definitely put the hammer and sickle symbol on everything.

A while back, I (with a few others) built and sold an innovative tech company to a large “enterprise”. What you’re describing is exactly why they bought us and how things played out post acquisition. I’ve since left, but the thing we built is now in shambles, buried and suffocated by bureaucracy and institutional ineptitude. The parent company has learned nothing, continues to keep buying smaller tech companies, and can’t seem to figure out why things always turn to shit.

DataGrip is the one JetBrains IDE I can’t work without and continue to pay for. I’d love to find a pure OSS alternative, but there’s nothing else like it.

I’m a socialist, generally vote for socialist or at least left-leaning candidates, support socialist policies and agree with the premise that record profits are basically unpaid wages.

But, seeing the hammer and sickle pop up in my Lemmy feed makes me really uncomfortable. I grew up under communism, and a good chunk of my family was killed and oppressed by people in uniforms with that symbol. To me it represents all that can go horribly wrong when socialism is stripped of empathy and compassion and married with violence and intolerance.

For me, it’s a bit like seeing a swastika. Really hard to get behind it, even though I know the symbol predates the NSDAP.

Is there really no better alternative for symbolising modern socialism?

The other day I used Apple Maps in my car for the first time in a few years. I gotta say something about it felt nice.

Maybe it’s the aesthetic? The names of towns and geographic features are in big letters and flow across the map nicely — the name of the peninsula I was driving across was stretched along the length of the peninsula itself — and it felt a bit like I was traversing an old timey map, maybe like in an old Indiana Jones movie.

If I need to find some obscure business, I’ll still use Google Maps, and if I’m on a well known commute I’ll still use Waze, but for just general ambient map display, I think Apple Maps might be it now.

Def the other way around.

Writing a privacy policy generally forces a company to make commitments about what they will and won’t do with data they collect about you.

No privacy policy means anything goes — they didn’t say what they will or won’t do, so you can’t sue them if they do something sketchy.

But many jurisdictions require companies to publish a privacy policy, so just about any company these days will have one. The devil is in the details though, as this article points out.

Because Apple’s core business is selling their stuff to you. Google’s core business is selling you to other companies.

Google’s consumer software and products literally serve no other business purpose than surveillance to figure out how to turn you into a more lucrative advertising target.

Apple has realized they can capitalize on this by making privacy a core selling feature for their stuff — one that Google cannot challenge them on as privacy is directly at odds with the core premise of their entire business.

Well no, a lease is literally a lease. People do lease houses too you know. When people “buy” a condo, that’s not a lease.

The point I’m making here is that the housing analogy doesn’t work (“Imagine buying a house and not being allowed to X”) because people literally “buy” houses and are not allowed to do basic things that you’d assume come with house ownership.

I’m not defending that this is ok. For me buying a condo would be as ridiculous as buying a DRMed Tesla.

Sweet! Now do some earth-size exoplanets and primordial black holes!

Those clouds…