So what you’re saying, is you’re renaming the word to “rent” to “land contract” and move a few conditions around and somehow it’s not rent? It is rent, by a different name.

Sites are lazy and greedy. They throw dozens and dozens of 3rd party javascripts into their headers, that punish and annoy people for not using an ad blocker - they slow the site down, bloat the memory, consume energy, track the user and festoon the page with garbage. As soon as people hear that an ad blocker is a thing, then of course they leap at the chance of using one.

It would be straightforward for sites to insert ads into their content - make the ad urls, images and links indistinguishable from actual content. i.e. serve them up from the same domain, from non predictable paths and use html structure where ads and content are intermingled. Even if an adblocker wanted to block the ads, there are no patterns that work and every single site would require different rules. But that requires effort. I suppose we should be glad that sites don’t do it.

I can only speak of personal experience but I rented when I went to university. I rented during my first 3 jobs. I rented when I relocated to another country. I rented when I was contracting for 6 months in another city (I had already purchased a house elsewhere). In every case I had no intention of buying a(nother) house. I rented because I wanted to, not because of greedy corporate overlords forced me to.

Most people renting are in similar situations. They want to be somewhere for a year or two, to make plans or move on, but not be tied down with debt or obligations if they want to leave. There is nothing stopping them buying a property but there is a commitment and obligation they don’t want to get into.

So rent is not going away any time soon. Legislation is necessary to curb the worse abuses, but pretending people don’t want to rent is is a failed argument.

Renting is an option and convenience for a lot of people, that’s why it exists. Some people don’t want to be tied to a mortgage and might have reasons they only need a place for 6 or 12 months - temporary employment, contracting, studying or whatever.

Anyway renting can work as a model. Germany has a very large proportion of property which is rented. But they have strong tenant protections and place limits on rent hikes, evictions and so on.

I don’t think an outright freeze is a good idea but rent controls and tenant laws would help. As would making casual letting (airbnb etc) a bullshit onerous proposition so that more housing stock is sold or converts into long term rent which lessens rent pressure.

If the UK were entirely owned by Murdoch it would still be compliant otherwise it would have been fined out of the wazoo. Ofcom isn’t fucking around when it expects news reporting to be impartial.

Well that was another thing - Elon did the usual bait and switch, promising a vehicle one price and then delivering something costing nearly double. He did the same with the Model 3 - promising 30k but launch price was nearer 60k.

Anyway I don’t think this vehicle is worth 40k either. At least the Model 3 was fundamentally sound design unlike the Cybertruck.

It is very interesting to compare Sky News in the UK vs Australia.

Sky News UK is a relatively normal news channel. That is because UK broadcasting is governed by codes of conduct and Ofcom (the governing body) can reprimand, heavily fine or shut down channels which violate its rules. The rules require fairness, impartiality, the right of reply and other safeguards in news reporting.

Sky News Australian is rabidly far right channel that exaggerates and lies about everything. It punches down on minorities because of religion, ethnicity, sexuality or any other reason and does so with impunity. It is not required to be fair or impartial and never is. That is because Australia has no similar code of conduct.

So the issue here is Australia needs to get its broadcasting rules sorted out.

I think Musk drew this thing on the back of an envelope and forced it through to production against the protests and objections of everybody in Tesla. It sucks as a truck, it sucks as an EV, it costs way too much money, it’s so dangerous that it is banned in most of the world, it’s impractical, costly to repair, uninsurable and it falls to bits. It’s no wonder the thing failed.

You’re getting it the wrong way around. People aren’t arrested for the phone they have. This is a complete nonsense by a clickbait article. They are arrested based on observation or intelligence of criminal activity. After the fact, when they are arrested they are found to have one of these phones flashed to use a privacy OS. Do you think such a phone convinces the cops they got the wrong person or not? The answer quite obviously is it convinces the cops this person is a criminal and is attempting to hide what they are up to.

It would be absurd to think cops are staring at people’s phones to initiate arrests because they are not.

This is not hard to understand.

Having a phone installed with an OS favoured by criminals doesn’t exculpate a person arrested for criminal activity, or make the cops think they’re innocent.

The cops quite obviously don’t think owning a Pixel makes somebody a drug dealer. But if they arrest or detain a suspect then owning a Pixel flashed with GrapheneOS isnt exactly a sign of innocence. Even if nothing could be extracted from the phone, I’m sure a judge and jury could be convinced what they were doing if they have such a device in their possession.

Also, regardless of the security the OS claims to have, most criminals are not the brightest and I bet some can be squeezed to hand over the key or the phone can be unlocked with a face id or fingerprint. It also motivates the cops to do what they’ve done in the past where they have compromised supposedly secure operating systems or apps and installed backdoors.

While I wouldn’t want flakpak going deep into the OS I think the advantage of using them on the desktop is obvious. Developers can release to multiple dists from a single build and end users get updates and versions immediately rather than waiting for the dist to update its packages. Plus the ability to lock the software down with sandboxes.

The tradeoff is disk consumption but it’s not really that big of a deal. Flatpaks are layered so apps can share dependencies. e.g. if the app is GNOME it can share the GNOME runtime with other apps and doesn’t need to ship with its own.