RickRussell_CA @ RickRussell_CA @lemmy.world

was RickRussellTX @ reddit

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2 yr. ago

She’s obviously pretty frustrated, it’s just not clear to me that she’s been permanently silenced, that’s all I’m saying. She said specifically that she doesn’t want to be ammunition in an ideological war between east and west, so perhaps she anticipates a relaxation of the restrictions after a cooling off period.

EDIT: Honestly, I may be misreading her. We only get a few sentences from Naomi Wu herself, but she seems at the same time dismissive of Western attention ("we’re just signs for people like you in the West to wave at each other in their ideological war"), and seems to think her notoriety in the West was keeping authorities at bay ("Literally the only thing that was keeping me online for the past few years was they were worried it would make China look bad if they cracked down on me").

Anyway, I hope the authorities back down, it's not clear what agenda they are serving by restricting her video & social media access.

Because it’s a restricted participation class, and like it or not the details of those restrictions are important to the participants.

If the class exists because women want it, then it’s reasonable ask women participants what they want.

If someone proposed a restricted class limited to PoC, it would be entirely appropriate to ask PoC what they think about the proposal.

The renter does not determine the price when the alternative is to move elsewhere or live out of your car.

The renter is the person who pays the rent, not the person who can't afford it. If someone gets evicted because they can't pay rent, they are replaced with someone who will.

You're on the right track, though. Over-regulation, opposition to new construction, and opposition to multi-family construction are the reason buyers are willing to pay more and more in HCOL areas.

it's a signal suggesting that a significant portion of western media may be increasingly compromised by Beijing's influence

Maybe? It's only been a month, and Naomi Wu has been fairly clear in the past that she doesn't want too much scrutiny of her personal life. It's possible that her allies in Western media (and she definitely has some) have adopted a wait-and-see attitude about it. If the government is putting heat on her (or her partner), the last thing she wants is an international kerfuffle over it.

True, there is a "frictional" effect on occupancy rate, that causes property to be idle for some time. I'm about to buy a house that was built by somebody else, but they decided they couldn't afford it, and backed out, so it's been sitting there new & idle for a couple of months.

When there is a lot of economic dislocation, or major demographic changes, that frictional rate of idle property may spike up (e.g. in the wake of the 2008 recession/real estate bubble, when some owners decided they would rather wait for recovery than find a buyer at a huge discount), but it's a transient effect.

If the first time buyer cannot afford a house, it means another buyer showed up with a higher offer. It doesn't really matter who owns the house.

The “investors” are the buyers/customers, and they aren’t reselling these houses–they’re renting them out.

Renting them out is still selling them, just another kind of selling. The company can only charge rent if there is a renter willing to pay. Again, the buyer determines price -- if rent is too high, there will be no renters.

You can't afford steak, you eat chicken, you can't afford that, you eat beans. You can't afford that, you're in trouble.

I didn't create the system, man. I get it, it's hell to be poor. But corporations buying and flipping homes doesn't have much to do with the plight of people who can't afford studio apartments. If somebody else is ready to pay a higher rent than you are for the same apartment, they're gonna get it. Doesn't matter whether the landlord is a friendly grandma or a faceless megacorp, nobody is gonna willingly sell something for less.

I'm not saying I like it, that's just how it is. As a consumer of housing, like anything else, when you can't afford what you want you have to get something less.

Or leave the area for lower prices somewhere else.

With respect, you're missing the point.

Sellers don't determine price. Buyers do. "Investors" (big, small, whatever) are selling homes at those prices (or renting, or VRBOing) because there are customers ready to buy the next available unit. If customers aren't willing to buy at that price, then the seller will lower the price. Or never build the big house in the first place. Or never renovate. Who would spend money on an investment when nobody will buy it?

They can only sell for those prices because buyers are ready to buy.

Economists have a concept of "economic value". Regardless of price, "economic value" it what the next buyer is willing to pay for an item RIGHT NOW. People have a lot of weird ideas about what the "value" of something is, and they'll include all sorts of non-monetary factors because they think value is a feeling or concept of utility that particularly applies to them. They value "walkability" or "views" or "quaint antique design", or whatever.

But inasmuch as "value" has any objective meaning, the best one economists have managed to come up with is economic value -- the price that a unit of something will sell for at this very moment. And I humbly suggest that the economic value of housing in your area something is determined entirely by the buyer: the person or entity that is willing to buy the next available unit of housing.

investors buying up housing is a huge problem for people that are trying to own their own home, especially first-time buyers

If those buyers can't outbid all the other buyers, then they weren't going to get a home anyway. This has nothing to do with the seller.

https://todayshomeowner.com/blog/guides/are-big-companies-buying-up-single-family-homes/

I feel like this article didn't do a great job of answering the question. They didn't really determine whether big corporations are buying homes, they determined that investors are buying homes. The actual text:

According to data reported by the PEW Trust and originally gathered by CoreLogic, as of 2022, investment companies take up about a quarter of the single-family home market. Specifically,investor purchases accounted for 22% of all American homes in 2022.

Those two statements are not equivalent. "Investor" could be a single individual buying a home with the intent of offering it as a vacation rental when not in use. It could be somebody who bought a duplex and rents the other unit out until their parents retire. It could be a house flipper who does 1 house at a time -- each time registering an "investor purchase".

Even "corporation" doesn't really mean anything; a "corporation" could be an LLC with one employee, the owner.

And even when big corporations buy single-family homes, it's not clear to me that this has a lasting economic impact. It sounds like a lot of these investment companies are renting the the homes or flipping them. Ultimately, demand is still demand. Somebody has to be there to buy or rent the home for these investments to make sense, so any price increase resulting from this investment activity is not an external, artificial pressure. It's a real representation of economic value, it is a price that the next occupants are willing to pay.

I could totally see the Federation getting involved in a war with the best intentions, believing that they need to act to prevent a powerful, implacable faction from gaining the upper hand and tipping the balance of power across many star systems & potentially exterminating/enslaving multiple less advanced civilizations, say along a Federation border.

And the whole thing starts going sideways, and the Feds won't commit fully to the effort but a dedicated faction of true believers keeps it going on a shoestring.

Like all humans, I consume organic matter and I am covered in skin.

My own skin, that I grow, from my body.

I made the move 15 years ago.

I'm certainly glad to be in a society that isn't hostile to females, LGBTQ, etc.

Does it affect my day-to-day? Eh, probably not. I certainly could live in a regressive state without any personal risk or penalty.

True. Possible that the victim's lawyers wanted to wait until the formal guilty verdict before bringing a civil action, or merely use the guilty verdict as a negotiation tactic at the bargaining table.

Employing a minor in a dangerous profession is apparently a misdemeanor under state law. It sounds like he avoided jail time as part of a plea deal.

But, we don't know what arrangement he might have made regarding civil liability. It's not in the article and I can't find it reported anywhere.

Obligatory hardware details:

root@pop-os:/home/rickr# for dmi_file in /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/*_{name,version}; do echo $dmi_file; echo -n ' '; cat $dmi_file done

    
    /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/board_name    878A
    /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/product_name    OMEN Laptop 15-ek0xxx
    /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/bios_version    F.14
    /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/board_version    17.29
    /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/chassis_version    Chassis Version
    /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/product_version

  

My laptop (HP Omen Intel i7 + Nvidia 2060) lost the discrete graphics after the PopOS updater installed Nvidia driver 535.

I was able to fix it by re-installing driver 470. However, I'm still having problems with the discrete graphics going dark after screen blank or suspend.

The above info is interesting, and I'd love to use it to fix my issues, but even as something of a UNIX/Linux power user, I have trouble parsing the jargon.

What does this do?

        sudo apt purge ~nnvidia


  

I don't understand the use of the tilde and double-n notation. I know that tilde is used as a home directory shortcut, but that's not how it's used here? I haven't been able to Google anything on it either, none of the other apt purge examples I found are using this notation.

I definitely have issues with the graphics failing to wake up after suspend. What do the hybrid graphics commands do? With respect to GC6 and Suspend S3, how would I know whether I need to do anything about those? I understand that they are some kind of power saving modes, but how would I know whether they are causing problems?

I'd love to be able to use the latest drivers & for suspend to work right, but I have to admit I'm out of my depth.

I need you to explain that with a simple analogy.