Veraxus

Ohhh, I'll have to check this out. I've been gradually moving away from Ubuntu toward Debian (w/ GNOME) for a while because Snap is hot garbage and I don't want to have anything to do with it. Were it not for Snap, I still really like Ubuntu.

If you want the file to be directly human readable/editable:

1. TOML
2. YAML

If you never need to look at it or edit it manually:

1. JSON

Intel or ARM?

The battery life on Apple Silicon (at least on MacOS) is so good it's bonkers. I've been curious about how well Linux does, but I haven't successfully gotten a Linux distro w/ desktop fully running on my M2 MacBook yet (driver issues).

Steam Deck's secret sauce is the software. Steam Deck's software isn't all OSS yet (it's NOT the same as the publicly available SteamOS), so the alternatives are all running on Windows which... is not good (especially for a handheld).

Honestly, just get a Steam Deck. The "power" differences are just not meaningful at that form factor right now.

This is pretty basic math. Just think about Monopoly (yes, the board game).

Housing is a finite resource. You can buy it or you can rent it. When you buy, you build equity. When you rent, it's pure expenditure.

So what happens when nobody can buy? They are forced to rent. Demand for rentals rises, which allows landlords to raise their rents.

So how does someone with very deep pockets turn this to their advantage?

First, starting one metropolitan area at a time, you buy up everything you can. If you coordinate with other investors, all the better. The goal is to strangle supply for buyers and prevent anyone who can't pay cash upfront from making a purchase. When people are unable to buy, they are forced to rent. So for buyers supply is down and costs are WAY up, and being locked out of buying means demand is up for rentals.

Now, renters also aren't building equity; when means it is perpetually more difficult for them to buy in the future as long as they kept away from that equity-building opportunity.

So as an "investor" you can now have a lot of different levers for manipulating both the supply and demand sides of the housing market. For example... what happens if you have more rental property than people willing to pay your asking price? Won't you be forced to lower your prices? First of all, that rarely happens - because as an investor, you target places that already have reliable, consistent demand (e.g. big cities and metropolitan areas). If you have to occasionally let a property go unoccupied for a few months, it's still no biggie... you keep those prices high and do not, under any circumstances, devalue the market (for your own sake as well as your investment cronies). Now, if there were competition, prices might be driven down... so how do you avoid competition? You collude. But that's illegal... so to avoid accusations of collusion and price fixing, you farm out your rates to a third party service that all your cronies also use: RealPage. It's not collusion or price fixing if you use a middleman. So now you are making bank on rental rates that will see a full return on your (higher than the properties value) investment in 15 years or less.

This has been going on for well over a decade, and these "investors" are now printing money on some of their earliest purchases, with no intention of EVER putting anything back on the market.

TL;DR; Buy all the supply, force plebes to rent, control the prices, profit. Just like Monopoly.

They are not being bought by regular people like you - they are being bought by investment companies, hedge funds, and filthy rich investors... all for the the sole purpose of turning them into rentals.

By turning them into rentals, they keep supply low which increases prices... which prevents people from buying, keeping rental demand high, which also lets them charge exorbitant rental rates. They are gaming both sides of the system to ensure that us peasants can be milked dry over a fundamental human need.

That article completely misses the forrest for the trees.

It’s a complete game. It was created with vision, passion, love, and complete creative freedom. It has a great story and interesting characters. It provides lots of player agency. It is unflinchingly candid, mature, and uncensored. Your choices, actions, and inaction ACTUALLY MATTERS. There is no DRM. There are no live service strings. You can play alone and/or with friends. There are no strangers or PvP to ruin your game. And yes, there are also no micro-transactions.

The lesson that BG3 offers isn’t just one thing… it’s a LOT of things. But the best way to sum it up is: it’s a great game and it treats players/customers with respect.

The phrasing is terrible. After reading the article, what they mean is that the ending was a full reset that lets them start over.

They consider the Tom Holland trilogy (so far) an “extended origin story”.

Historically I’ve done exactly that. Debian for servers, Ubuntu for workstations (because I like GNOME). But my hate for Snap runs so deep that I’ve started using Debian w/ GNOME more and more often over the last year or so.

I had planned a WDW vacation before COVID scuttled those plans. Now that it's safe to travel again, I have no plans to visit Florida for any reason whatsoever for the foreseeable future. Still taking the family on that vacation; we're just doing it in California instead.

Orion is GREAT. It’s even better at privacy and ad-blocking than Firefox with uBlock Origin.

It’s a shame it’s Mac only at the moment.

Not listed in there is Kagi, the only non-Google search engine I’ve ever used that provides genuinely great results. The catch is: it’s not free… but that’s because you are the customer, not the product.