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.

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.

Probably easier way of defeating pick pockets is to carry a decoy or purse wallet with a painful surprise in it.

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.

Not surprised. Many of these high end GPUs are bought not for gaming but for bitcoin mining and demand has driven prices beyond MSRP in some cases. Stupidly power hungry and overpriced.

My GPU which is an RTX2060 is getting a little long in the tooth and I’ll hand it off to one of the kids for their PC but I need to find something that is a tangible performance improvement without costing eleventy stupid dollars. Nvidia seems to be lying a lot about the performance of that 5060 so I might look at AMD or Intel next time around. Probably need to replace my PSU while I’m at it.