The best way to abolish private renting is, of course, to go after land ownership via land value taxation. Punishing equity and wealth hording is the first step to a society that works properly.

Alternatively you could keep higher costs on business but pay people the difference, which would increase consumer spending, lower consumer debt and increase quality of life.

Renting is not a free market. Abolishing private rent would allow for a significant on-paper wage cut whilst costing the worker nothing, making businesses more productive.

One of my "favourite" stats: take the average take-home income of a working adult in a London borough. Double it, then divide the average rent of their borough by it. Check a few boroughs. Usually ~0.3.

Rent is inelastic - the average landlord charges the maximum that the average tenant will bear.

Getting shit set up and done on the Plasma desktop is fast, but then you have to spend ten minutes on a Reddit thread to get 5.1 audio working, but then you do and Plasma then goes "oh you have five channels? Here's easy-to-access volume sliders for all five fam, have fun :)) ) and meanwhile Windows

Bazzite is close and rapidly closing; it's just getting _enough_ people on a distro to hit critical mass. But Bazzite does suffer from being still a v. small team.

I flip to and from Windows atm on several machines and Bazzite is easier to use 95+% of the time. Windows just has a lot of mass.

Essentially no safe off-ramp from the bubble, and it is continuing to build for political reasons more than capital ones (when it goes bang, the US gets clapped by a massive recession).

My bet remains that one of the main cloud providers defaults, as they are all too big to fail.

My hunch - current bubble is a subprime property bubble pretending to be a tech one. Gambit is that once enough bad debt is in the system the government has to step in. Someone fails to secure funding to keep a datacentre switched on, goes bust, pollution chain forces government intervention.

Why can't be Trans Day Of Invisibility. I would do _so_ many crimes

Two fast movie reviews:

Project Hail Mary - cozy.
Hoppers - I want to know what the pre-Trump script was, because it's been self-censored to death.

Artemis is a relatively poor book because Weir spends too long during it trying to figure out what genre it's in (crime/heist? adventure? mystery?) AND because he fell down the stairs trying to force himself to write a protagonist with only a video game-level understanding of writing women.

Whereas an unexciting or uninteresting book in a genre is usually one where the writer either fails to understand the pillars they are writing for (e.g. there is a reason crime novels have such consistent arc formula)

Maybe another way of putting it - you can get good books from authors who dislike a genre who come in with a hostile view of its tropes, but you also get damn good books from people who passionately love a genre who want to kick it really hard to see how far they can make it fly.

FWIW I don't think this is consistently true - if "progressive" is a genre, finding ways to manipulate the genre - to gently challenge the reader - is the mark of a good writer.

Matt Dinniman's a progressive writer but you'd be very hard pressed to figure out where DCC is going whilst reading it.

This sucks.

(This is a good restaurant but this is very funny)

I am at a posh restaurant at a Dutch theme park. The plates are small. The candles are edible. The wine smells of bacon.

I grew up in Accrington.

Please send immediate aid.

I genuinely want someone to get one of these demos and flip away and back to the same character maybe five or six times with something like a slightly varying lighting effect

It's DLSS - Drugged on LSD and Shrooms Simulator

I am in the slop mines, there's so much goddamn slop, I am the slop queen

These are supposed to be the same woman in the same game

I can't really stress enough that in any sense of the word "photorealism" you can't get that with an AI model slapped on top of the render output of a video game engine. Video game cameras are not your eyes, are not a film camera, and are not a digital camera.

I'll just surface my point here - the models' not just bad, it's not just sloppy, or offensive to the eyes, or any number of things - it makes the character look like their chest is bigger. It's not just bad, it's grotesquely sexist.

I had to make a short video on the DLSSlop stuff. I'm sorry. It's not only fatiguing and sloppy lighting, it's just weirdly creepy. Watch to the end for the punchline.

Is there a decent place to put a video I want to share on Bluesky that isn't Youtube?

This is correct - you pay for a month's access 12 times. After you pay for the final month you have 30 days to cancel without being slapped by a fee.

This would be fine if they just cancelled it after the year or did what phone contracts do and put you onto a rolling contract.

Anyway, Photopea is free and easier to open for quick image editing, Clip Studio is a better drawing tool, Affinity's suite is better for photo editing and Aseprite is better for pixel art.

In fact, every prior year had the same text about it being the sub renewal window. The last similarly-titled email, in October 2021, was this - you may note it is nothing to do with price changes.

Oh and the prior year's email? Note the different renewal date and the different, more informational title.

It's a phone-style contract dressed up as a subscription to a tech product, auto-renewed at a higher rate without explicit consent, without having to notify of the consequences of renewal should I notice the higher charge, inside an email called "Updates to your Creative Cloud Photography plan"

However Adobe would argue I agreed to an incremental payment of a yearly subscription, and thus I owed them money to cancel it.

As for why: these schemes prey on indecision and people with autism/ADHD like me can end up collecting subs like Pokemon cards.

No to the credit card (it used my on file account) and given this was cancelled in February, this covered nine months. The charge is £67.45, or ~50% of the remaining time. So "extra" in the sense that I was forced to pay to cancel a contract I had long-since forgotten was annual (ADHD moment).