I’d love to see the numbers on this. I suspect that the middle class families buying a rental to Airbnb are largely inconsequential to the housing crisis compared to the corporations buying thousands of homes to cash in on rent for the rest of eternity.
Anecdotally, I can say in Florida it’s people renting them out and not living in them. The locals are priced out.
I can afford it, but non tech/banking (the normal people) have moved inland to much worse spots. I only have 2 live-in neighbors on my floor of 8 units; the rest is Airbnb/Some guy who bought the unit to ‘invest’.
I talk with the owners because they occasionally need my physical presence to do something. But all these units would have been families - like they were in the early 2010s.
their claim. Developers built to the market, the market being people wanting an investment rental property. The prices got so high that no one can afford to rent them so investors are losing money. It used to be, mortgage payment = $x. rent = $x+($500-$1000) but now it's rent = $x-($500-$1000). Further, they aren't sellable because they were never designed to be a good place to live long term.
at least that's my summary.
They didn't explain if all this is true why the prices haven't dropped 30-80% to the price that people might be willing to buy things they don't really want. As in "hey, this place is way smaller than I want but the price is really low and the location is great". As it is now it's more like "this place as way smaller than I want and even if I could afford it it's not worth the price"
I'm curious if the same thing happened in other cities.
Towing cars at all without a very crucial reason should be illegal in general.
Taking someone’s transportation that they assume they have access to, without their knowledge, and without them being able to find out until the very second they need that transportation is dangerous. Emergencies happen.
If you’re taking someone’s car you better have a damn good reason. And “you accidentally parked in the wrong parking spot doesn’t clear that hurdle. That’s what tickets are for. “Really wanting to see the recordings from your car camera” doesn’t clear that hurdle either.
Regarding #2 is that not an OPTION that may or may not get turned on?
Regarding #1 you are correct that DRIVING is a privilege however property ownership is a RIGHT and I'm assuming we aren't talking about a vehicle in motion when we are talking about the police unable to contact an owner.
Imagine trying to go to work and you don’t have your car. Are you going to say “well I guess driving is a privilege and not a right so its fine that the police repossess my vehicle at random times” or are you going to be livid like a normal person?
Tumblr is one website. Not 500,000. Even though 500,000 people have a blog there, it is still tumblr.com. Even if you do set up a subdomain such as my-blog.tumblr.com it still just redirects to tumblr.com/my-blog. Counting tumblr as 500,000 websites is like counting everyone’s Facebook profile as its own website.
The relevant number is 500,000,000, which is 1000x larger than the number you're citing. But also your comment about subdomains is wrong: redirecting to tumblr.com/my-blog is an optional setting, with the default being to use a subdomain. You can also use custom domains rather than a tumblr.com subdomain. Tumblr has had this functionality for almost its entire existence.
Yes, and the user I directly replied to above incorrectly said "500,000" three times, which is only 500 thousand. Tumblr exceeded that blog count well over 15 years ago.
Your original comment, about how a Tumblr migration would double the WP site count, was correct. That isn't what I replied to above.
I'm fairly confident that's not how WP.com does it. On WP.com - via WP multisite - each site has it's own instance of WP and therefore each counts as a site running WP.
Tumblr's injection would result in a significant increase in the number of websites running WP.
Do you have to have seen a human die to know that a human could die? Surely Cain had seen plenty of animals die. I think you might not be giving Cain enough credit (or maybe too much credit) by assuming he couldn’t have put 2 and 2 together
> However very few individuals are more important than thousands of octopuses
What do you mean by this? Are you stating this as an opinion? Or something people generally agree upon? Or something else?
I think most people, if forced to choose, would save 1 human at the expense of thousands of octopuses. Not saying this is right or wrong. Just wondering what metric you’re using to gauge importance.
Do you have a source for this “almost certainty”? Because Musk says they are offering it for free because they can no longer accept payments (due to the bank freeze) and they don’t want to cut off peoples internet in remote areas.
* More than anything, I think it's good for things to end! I figured interest in the site would die off over time (and it started to), and I thought it was better to close things out providing a special experience for the people that used it than to keep it up to get a few more users
* Costs started adding up; donations stopped matching them. I coulda figured out how to lower my costs but I wasn't excited about it.
* While the site was up I felt an obligation to make sure someone hadn't found some trivial workaround to deface the thing and I didn't want to do that anymore.
I'm very pro ephemeral stuff! So I feel good about the decision. But it's a good question.
I enthusiastically agree - and really all that matters is that you feel good about it. As a software engineer who's built (and shut down) many projects, I have always been envious of art forms in which the artist gets to create a piece of work and then "finish" it. We are often at the mercy of perpetual maintenance.
My parents put it as “it’s best to quit while you’re having fun”. Took me years to appreciate it. I’ve passed it on to my kids. They’re finally starting to get it.
Firefox is usually great for me, but with Chromium-based browsers having such a massive market share monopoly I do occasionally find a website that doesn't work properly on Firefox. But, I will stick with Firefox as long as possible.
Yeah I keep hearing this but it never pans out, seems like in my experience a lot of people don’t know they might have to turn off an extension or two (ublock, built-in trackers, etc) to get a website to work.
Huh? I use YouTube all the time on Firefox and it's fine. Better than fine, really, thanks to the YouTube improvement extension I have loaded. Never heard of the other two though.
Google is essentially using A/B testing methods to slow it down for one group of FF users while keeping it absolutely fine for another. Funnily enough, I've been placed in this 'slowdown' group even though I am a Premium subscriber ever since it launched (post-Red renaming) and another channel on the same Google account has 0 issues in the same browser on the same PC etc.
Mozilla has a range of different priorities now and most of these do not revolve around the flagship project which Firefox should be.
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I remember reading news in 2005 saying that Mozilla has established its Corporation subsidiary - and I had a bad feelings about it at that time. And years later we can see the effects - what's the revenue, how browsers market share looks like. Now, every time I'm reading that project, foundation xyz is creating "for profit" branch, subsidiary I know that this most likely won't end well. Profits will go over users needs, wishes each time and those at the project will change as well. It's like a magic wand appears and turns open-minded contributors into some mindless corporate drones with an arrogant attitude.
I want to still like Firefox but in last 14 years Mozilla managed to seriously deteriorate trust in its capabilities of handling their main product. And I also cannot fathom how they managed to screw up promotion of the browser and let Google dominate the market. That didn't happen overnight but Google at some point started to bundle their browser as "additional offer" in almost every software installer for Windows, while Mozilla did nothing similar.
Thanks for the information. I'm the last person who would spread right wing stuff, the link came from a search, however in this case the problem about the overpaid Mozilla CEO and developers being sacked is real and well known outside politically involved sites.
Not your parent commenter but I love Firefox more after discovering that you can't even customize the toolbar buttons in Brave. That's such a basic functionality that I'd taken for granted, until I tried to move out of Firefox for a brief time.
Lack of sufficient customization and lack of extensions I want. The customization is a big deal because I dislike the Chromium UI and want to be able to fix the worst of it. My dislike of the UI is also a source of grumbling from me about modern Firefox, which has picked up a lot of Chromium and which is also less customizable than it used to be, but I can still fix a lot.
I also want to be able to use the same browser at work as at home, and my workplace banned the use of Brave when it started including a VPN.
The fact that it's Chrome is the problem with Brave. What you call "bugs and missing features" I call necessary diversity to avoid Google dominating the standardization process more than they already do.
With the massive tide of browsers converting to Chromium under the hood, I wonder how long Apple can hold out. Fingers crossed they keep allocating budget for it.
Apple can hold out indefinitely. If a website doesn't work on Apple devices, that's not Apple's fault, according to legions of Apple users. And they're kinda right: there really are a lot of them, and they do tend to spend more money than other users, so websites that somehow manage to stupidly not work on Safari (presumably by using Chrome-only functionality and never testing) are potentially losing a lot of users and business.
I'm not normally a fan of Apple at all, and I have no interest in using Safari myself, but here I am glad that they've so far refused to jump on the Chrome bandwagon: it's good for keeping the web standards-based so we don't have a repeat of the IE6 days.
Kind of wondering what you’re talking about here? Firefox still works great for me, did I miss something in the news? Is there some sort of big change coming down the pipeline?
Not OP, but Firefox didn't have to lose nearly all its market share to Chrome. Mozilla could have course corrected and righted the ship, but instead they got distracted on dozens of unrelated and often controversial projects and ended up burning most of their credibility.
Mozilla is a husk of what it could have been, and that's hurt Firefox.
What, specifically, should they have done differently that would have made Firefox not lose most of its market share to Chrome, and how do you know it would have worked?
Keep Firefox in focus instead of losing sight of the browser and getting distracted on a million side projects, most of which had only a tangential relationship to the internet. Raise money to support the browser rather than to support politically divisive causes of the month.
I can't say for sure it would have worked, but I know that what Mozilla actually did do was actively counterproductive.
Firefox is working just fine for me, not sure why people seemed to think that it was a problem.
I think Mozilla is poorly managed and feature may have been slow or "lagging behind". But for me the lack of those shiny new things might as well be a feature than a bug.
I'm concerned that if Google ever stopped paying Mozilla to be the default search engine in Firefox, Mozilla would not be able to afford continued development on Firefox.
brave a lot more shady and just wont say anything or let you opt out. many examples in the past. imagine if they were anywhere near a quarter of googles size it wouldnt be pretty imo.
All settings in Brave with an impact on user privacy are opt-in. They even inform you of their product metrics, when you first start it, despite having a paper on how they anonymize that data. Versus Firefox, which never bothered. Firefox, which also added metrics for ads, similar with Privacy Sandbox, without informing users.
I've never seen a browser with such a strong focus on privacy, the only contender it has being LibreWolf.
The hate against Brave on this forum is completely unjustified and based on falsehoods, as if the issue isn't about Brave itself.
> Brave has received negative press for diverting ad revenue from websites to itself,[30] collecting unsolicited donations for content creators without their consent,[43] suggesting affiliate links in the address bar[49] and installing a paid VPN service without the user's consent.[58]
These are the primary issues I hear about regarding Brave on this forum.
It's also founded by Brendan Eich who was forced out of Mozilla for his strong and vocal opposition of same-sex marriage. I tend to be a bit idealistic, but this is a strong reason for me to avoid Brave, especially when they are injecting content into pages.
Not that it makes him any less opposed to same-sex marriage, but I think 'vocal' is very much not the right word here. The only quotes I can find from him on the subject are him saying he's not going to talk about it.
Basically, we got played, Eich made a private political action, someone used that to get rid of him and then Firefox starting paying 10x as much to their CEO, doing all sorts of anti-user stuff, acting in advertiser's favour (but not too overtly), and ultimately ditching their engineers so they could maintain the CEOs stupid pay. All while begging users for money.
He was opposed to it as a private citizen, not as Mozilla CEO. His beliefs and supported causes as the former are nobody else's concern; had he been discriminating in terms of employment or otherwise making public statements it would be a different story. Or are we now witch hunting people for wrongthink?
I don't think it's "witch hunting people for wrongthink" to suggest that those in a position of power are able to use that power to influence public opinion.
Especially when that position of power is the CEO of a browser that replaces content on web pages.
Mozilla went hardcore political and Chrome copycat long after his time. There was no such controversy there under Eich, and even now as Brave's CEO he isn't doing anything to 'influence public opinion'. Browser CEOs aren't newspaper editors or activists, Mitchell Baker excepted.
This goes both ways for people. I switched from Mozilla to Brave when the latter first released because to me Mozilla's political positions seem at odds with an uncensored and privacy focused browser. I actually support universal marriage equality but don't consider it relevant to why I would choose a browser.
I can't remember all of the details but Mozilla made a blog post regarding 1/6 and their commentary didn't align with a browser that would try and protect users from state, NGO and "just research" edu adversaries.
BAT was what kept me from trying Brave for a very long time, but I eventually tried it nonetheless (I'm back on Firefox now). In fairness to Brave, you can disable the BAT stuff and never have to see it.
In terms of using BAT, yes. But at least when I started using Brave, you had to change things to get rid of the cryptocurrency-related UI elements. That's what I was referring to.
> "collecting unsolicited donations for content creators without their consent"
Those "donations" were from handouts of BAT. What they "collected" was their own BAT that they've donated to users of Brave. And it wasn't long lived. At least they've been trying to create a business model that's privacy preserving and that benefits content creators. Firefox has been selling their users to Google for years.
> "suggesting affiliate links in the address bar"
You mean like what Firefox also did?
> "and installing a paid VPN service without the user's consent."
I've never seen a VPN service installed with Brave. Is this a Windows thing? If you're talking about the VPN functionality in Brave itself, isn't this what Firefox also did?
> "It's also founded by Brendan Eich who was forced out of Mozilla for his strong and vocal opposition of same-sex marriage."
He never talked on the topic. And did you know that, at that time, both Obama and Hillary Clinton were also opposed to same-sex marriage? Times change, people's minds have changed. Whatever beliefs he still has, he keeps private, as he should.
But yes, this confirms my suspicion that this is a US-politics thing, and for non-US citizens, it's getting annoying. While we are on the topic, don't you find it problematic when Mozilla engages in political activism, promoting Marxism? Or when they promote cancel culture?
For me, these were never reasons to avoid Firefox, but seeing that this is how the world works now, maybe they should be. And I'm sorry for pointing at Firefox right now, I used it for years, but I'm sensing a serious double standard. So let's talk of Chrome ... have you surveyed the political beliefs of Chrome's developers? Because it's the big, faceless corporations that benefit from this kind of polarisation the most.
> I've never seen a VPN service installed with Brave. Is this a Windows thing? If you're talking about the VPN functionality in Brave itself, isn't this what Firefox also did?
> For me, these were never reasons to avoid Firefox, but seeing that this is how the world works now, maybe they should be.
Yes, you are absolutely entitled to "vote with your money" (or free usage / market share, as the case may be.) Boycotts are an integral component of free speech and self-expression.
(Smalls does at one point talk about "class struggle". He makes it explicit what he means: he thinks there is an opposition between "99.9% of us" and "the billionaires". This is not Marxism even though it uses one phrase that Marxists also use.)
> Or when they promote cancel culture?
The link you provide in support of this (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...) is to a blog post titled "We need more than deplatforming". It mentions deplatforming but doesn't advocate it (though it doesn't condemn it either), and the actual things it calls for are all Not Cancel Culture: "reveal who is paying for advertisements", "commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms", "turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation", "work ... to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms' impact on people and our societies".
You might reasonably disagree with those proposals; for instance, the next-to-last one could be anywhere from "excellent" to "dystopian" depending on what exactly "amplify X over Y" means and how "factual" versus "disinformation" is decided. But none of it is advocating cancel culture.
As for the "deplatforming" in the title: the specific case it's talking about is the idea that a social media platform should ban a particular user who had for some time plainly been breaking the platform's rules, and who (according to some) had used the platform to attempt to organize an antidemocratic coup. "Social media platforms should be encouraged to ban users who blatantly break their rules, even when those users bring them a lot of traffic" and "Social media platforms should not let themselves be tools for antidemocratic insurrection" are positions one can take without being a fan of "cancel culture".
(Not necessarily correct positions. E.g., if you hold that the insurrection in question was not antidemocratic, that it was a response to blatant election-rigging, then you will likely take a quite different view of how a social media platform should respond to it. I don't myself think that's a credible position, and I doubt the good faith of most of the high-profile people who endorse it, but I know it is something many people believe. Anyway, my point isn't that those positions are right, it's that they're positions many reasonable people take, and that getting from those to "Twitter was right to kick Donald Trump off" doesn't require any sort of endorsement of "cancel culture", and that therefore the fact that an article mentions the possibility of doing that in a not-obviously-disapproving way does not amount to "promoting cancel culture".)
I wouldn't count the Privacy Sandbox doublespeak as "telling you". Brave is not my browser, but it seems completely unjustified to just put them on the same (or even lower) level as Chrome.
That doesn't make a bit of sense. There's plenty of browsers, there's chrome, brave, firefox, opera, edge and safari, those are the big ones. There's also a ton of spinoffs like ice weasel or that browser Kagi is developing that I can't remember the name of.
Way more than just two chromium browsers in existence.
i mean theres really only 2 relevant ones and the other one is because its owned by the most popular phone manufacture and is the only option. ofc we can use anything we want but in terms of real world relevance. and i guess the other one is forced by the most popular OS.
