circuitfarmer

One more example of a private service being used as if it were a utility.

This one is especially egregious considering it’s an Amber Alert, but it isn’t necessarily unique. Despite the internet being designed as open, it has been taken over by private entities, and any popular service is ultimately controlled by such entities.

It’s a hard problem to solve. Look at federated platforms like Lemmy: they take a long time to populate, and their usefulness is partly a function of how successful that population is. By definition, a free, open platform will not have the advertising, reach, or “it factor” of a corporate service. When given the choice between an open platform and a corporate one, we see people choose the corporate one time and time again.

We have taken our open network and handed it, willingly, to private enterprise.

Between this and Tim Cook’s generous personal donation to the Trump inauguration, those folks seem strangely silent.

The personal donation part is weird. This sounds like a deliberate attempt to appease the fascists while trying, desperately, to maintain Apple’s image.

Never played Shadow of the Colossus, but it has been on the list for a while!

Arthur Morgan’s death scene in RDR2 really got to me. But perhaps even more so, when my horse was killed right before. I remember pausing the game for a moment because I had had that horse for so long and somehow it felt like a major deal that happened so quickly.

Never had a game affect me like that before.

And it can be even more keyboard focused with Pop Shell over the top. That adds tiling and window focus by shortcut, similar to i3-wm.

But of course. He isn’t even hiding it.

The single, solitary thing that gives me some hope is that the everyday MAGA folks (not the rich ones, but the ones that usually vote against their own interests) seem to really care about H-1B, since it is a clear effort to replace American workers with immigrants. It is good to see a pro-worker response, even if it is from a group which otherwise misaligns with me on other issues.

Curing cancer is bad for business.

Good luck getting capitalists to do that for you.

Such a Brian Thomson thing to do

None of that work is a service.

Again, all those things you mention directly impact your profit as a landlord. They have nothing to do with your tenants. It is not a service.

If I want to be able to drive a car, I have to get a license. But that doesn’t mean that getting a license is a service to anyone who might ride in my car. It’s overhead that I have to perform in order to drive a car.

Hearing landlords complain about paperwork while sucking up their psssive income calls for the tiniest violins ever. But, thanks to that income, they probably haven’t had a real job in so long that the difference may be difficult for them to comprehend.

Note that being a waiter or a flight attendant requires activity which directly affects the client – just like other services. Not true of landlords.

Owning a property and renting it out does not intrinsically equate to providing a service. In fact, the only activity one has to do (in many cases) is collect rent, which is a service to the landlord only. Landlords can offer services – improving the property, for example (though it’s a service which does also benefit the landlord) – but this is not intrinsic to property renting in the way of any service you mentioned.

And it certainly isn’t a job, in the traditional sense of having a boss and a schedule etc. I guess in some sense it is closer somewhat to independent contracting, except that you ultimately get to kick out your “clients” if you want to, and you don’t have to do anything they ask. Even by that interpretation, it’s money for nothing. “Job” suggests effort.

I assume you’re about to try and claim that paperwork and government hoops that landlords may have to work through means that they must, by definition, be a service. And to that, I would say: things that give you income are meant to require effort. But I’d gladly take over the paperwork for my landlord if it meant I didn’t need to keep giving him half of my active income every month for doing literally nothing, and I don’t think I’m alone in that at all.

Renting is not a service. It is a passive income.

People playing a song or driving a car for someone else are performing a service.

Of course you don’t own the car when you get an Uber. Not sure the point of the comment.

Edit: I’ll also note that hedging on this issue of passive income is one reason why the wealth disparity in the US is so astronomical. If we treat passive incomes as services, we ignore the fact that they produce value from nothing. Every dollar made from a passive income came from an active income.

Passive incomes like property rental also make it exceedingly easy to contribute to generational wealth – one more way that wealth gap gets wider.

We must stop pretending that housing (and healthcare) can work using traditional business models.

All landlords, regardless of how many properties they rent out, are ultimately producing nothing. They sit on property and leech money off of the economy. The scale at which it is done does not change the core “product” (which isn’t a product at all, in the traditional sense, because it is not produced). It’s a classic grift.

So, yes: all landlords.

Edit: in some sense, all forms of “passive income” follow the same pattern. Capitalism relies on money being exchanged for goods and services. Passive income is a perverse adulteration of that. Free money is not a thing.

Yes all landlords.

8 kbps should be enough for anyone