Having a CC doesn’t mean you have debt…

“Why the HELL should I have to press 2 for English?”

— bumper sticker I would see on my bike commute back in the day.

The bank doesn’t own the house, they just have a significant lien against it. Maybe a potato potato situation (how are you supposed to spell that phrase 🤔), but it is an important distinction.

Landlords can get pissed if you paint the walls/change appliances/remodel/etc., but so long as the property is properly insured (and you make your loan payments on time) the bank probably isn’t going to bother you.

Landlords can — and do — place restrictions on quiet hours, guest policy, who is allowed to live there, etc. Owning is definitely different.

My $4k piece of carbon and $3k hunk of titanium would like to have a word…

I would bet just about anything that the only reason profit margins could possibly be higher for a car is due to volume — which, if everyone rode bikes, wouldn’t be an issue at all.

Absolute profit, sure — cars are more expensive, so they’ll win out.

Deja vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

The lack of logic is astounding.

These are the same people who think abstinence only education works. Safe to say they’re a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

I, read this like, William Shatner, in his, role as, captain, Kirk.

I’m gonna try to guess the most likely LLM response to your post, trained on reddit data:

“This.”

How’d I do?

I miss the days when that X font was only associated with Xorg…

Unity centered around what?

Participation. Making things a tiny bit better when possible, and if not that, then minimizing damage.

Making things better nationally is hard. But locally, change can be efffected — my city (San Francisco) has ranked choice voting for local offices. It’s awesome, and I vote for who I want first. It’s small, but it’s a start.

Yeah, without being a policy junkie I think a reasonable step would be to have Prop 13 only apply to primary residence — investment real estate would be subject to a “wealth tax,” but folks wouldn’t get priced out of their primary home due to gentrification.

Right, that’s a huge downside for sure.

Property tax is on the one hand a wealth tax, which sounds like a great idea; but on the other hand, it’s a wealth tax that disproportionately affects people with the bulk of their assets tied up in real estate — which often means middle class homeowners.

So while you can certainly look at prop 13 as “good” in that folks don’t get priced out of their existing homes, it of course gets used to the advantage of rent seekers, etc.

It’s…complicated.

California disagrees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Property tax is assessed when there’s a sale, and otherwise changes very slowly. It’s a controversial measure.

But this is a weird thing to lie about — the only reason to implement toner DRM is to get people to buy your cartridges. But if your public statement is, “it’s ok to buy off brand cartridges,” then…well… that’s kinda weird.

Not saying you’re wrong, and they could be trying to have their cake and eat it too (court the anti-DRM crowd but also scare people into sticking with their toner). I’m just saying your snarky/sarcastic response seems unwarranted here.

Brother deny the claims: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/brother-denies-using-firmware-updates-to-brick-printers-with-third-party-ink/

Lemmy is not encrypted, my comments are public, your comments are public, we both know that. Anyone with a raspberry pi or an old netbook can scrape them.

If I use an encrypted service and all of a sudden everything that I thought was encrypted was decrypted by the service provider without my consent? That’s breaking encryption.

If on the other hand I use an encrypted service and they tell me that they can no longer offer the service, my data will be destroyed after X days, and I need to find another way of storing my encrypted data because of privacy invading government policies? That is not breaking encryption.

Did the DNC’s strategy work? No? Then the Democrats were wrong.

So you’re saying that no matter what happens, it’s never my fault. Yay!

(/s)

The voters faced a trolly problem. While Trump was busy tying more and more people to the track, the Democrats left a few on the track, and the voters decided that they couldn’t stomach the choice, so they sat it out. And now we get this.

The Democrats have blood on their hands, sure, but so does every person who didn’t vote yet bemoans the Trump presidency.

For many things I completely agree.

That said, we just had our second kid, and neither set of grandparents live locally. That we can video chat with our family — for free, essentially! — is astonishing. And it’s not a big deal, not something we plan, just, “hey let’s say hi to Gramma and Gramps!”

When I was a kid, videoconferencing was exclusive to seriously high end offices. And when we wanted to make a long distance phone call, we’d sometimes plan it in advance and buy prepaid minutes (this was on a landline, mid 90s maybe). Now my mom can just chat with her friend “across the pond” whenever she wants, from the comfort of her couch, and for zero incremental cost.

I think technology that “feels like tech” is oftentimes a time sink and a waste. But the tech we take for granted? There’s some pretty amazing stuff there.

Seriously, it is the lowest-latency and highest-bandwidth communication method we have, when used appropriately.

What’s the alternative? Strong arm a democratically elected — even if stupid at times — government to change policy? That’s a terrifying precedent.

The other alternative is to backdoor or otherwise compromise users in other jurisdictions. Glad they didn’t do that.