David J. Shourabi Porcel @ djsp @lemmy.world

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Joined

9 mo. ago

I hope they train AI with this.

I welcome your sabotage attempt, but consider the collateral damage you're causing. I sprained a few neurons reading your comment.

Fact-check that, Sugar-Mountain!

still going to undercut the competition as best I can

I and surely many others thank you for that. I didn't mean to criticize your goodwill; instead I wanted to stress that our housing crisis is a systemic issue and that fixing it is beyond our individual choices and requires policy.

If I charge $675 a month and the competition jumps their price to $1,000 a month, who is everyone going to come to?

You will get, among others, people who can afford $675 but not $1000. Compared to people who can afford $1000, people who can afford $675 but not $1000 are more likely to find themselves or already be in a precarious financial situation, which could mean missing rent payments. Compared to people who can afford $1000, people who can afford $675 but not $1000 are also more likely to suffer from mental illness as a consequence of their more precarious financial situation, which could mean neglected facilities, conflict with other tenants, pests and a host of other issues for you, the landlord.

You may be willing to both forego higher rent income and assume the increased likelihood of financial losses, and that would make you a good person, but not everyone is — at least not to the extent necessary to make that choice.

If the competition suddenly goes to $3,000 a month and I stay at $675, and I maintain my place so it isn't a shit hole, I'll have lines around that block of people wanting to rent.

Given the housing crisis in many of our cities and towns, you likely already have loads of people ready to rent your property, with enough reliable tenants among them. More applicants won't benefit you, because you already have enough reliable tenants. What are you going to do with all the additional applicants? Screen each and every one of them to pick the very best one? One that is marginally more reliable than you would otherwise have found?

In fact, raising rent and prices often serves as a sort of ‘customer filter’. Instead of screening your applicants in depth, you can just check their financials and safely assume that whoever can afford a monthly rent of $3000 is also a reliable tenant.

You seem to assume a rental market made up of individual landlords. Although that is a reality in some places, most properties are rented by for-profit corporations. Such corporations compete against each other for capital; they need money from investors and investors want returns. Whenever such a corporation foregoes profit, another usually takes it and uses it to expand, often acquiring its smaller peers. Over time, this sort of natural selection yields the most ruthlessly profitable corporations.

The problem here is not that individuals make the wrong choice, but rather the framework in which they operate, the systemic incentives.

My point still stands

Yes, it does, and I agree with it. I should have stated as much in my comment. I didn't because I generally prefer upvotes to “well argued” or “I agree”.

respected foreign news source like Le Monde or Die Welt

Die Welt is not or should not be respected. It belongs to Axel Springer SE, a European media corporation comparable in both reach and tone to Fox News Media in the United States.

Die Welt's latest controversy –one among many– saw them publish an opinion piece by Elon Musk endorsing the AfD, which further legitimized the party and weakened the already debilitating cordon sanitaire around it.

In the German-speaking world, Die Welt is mocked as the “wannabe's Bild”. Bild is a tabloid published by the same company that constantly engages in both misinformation and disinformation. Although Die Welt isn't as blatant as its tabloid sibling, it still pushes a disingenuous narrative and should be avoided.

Musk may blame any problems on a made up cyberattack again, painting himself and his political associations as victims of a censorship campaign and denying the real technical issues that have been appearing and worsening since his takeover and which might otherwise scare away even more advertisers.

I understand your comment as implying that Trump will make Musk eligible for the US presidency. If that is what you mean, I agree with you there.

Most of the ultrawealthy seem to prefer having someone else in the political limelight and pulling the strings from the backstage, probably to keep a semblance –however faint– of democratic legitimacy. Musk is being a loud exception, meddling in broad political daylight all over the world, and I would not put it past Trump to enable him as his successor if the two of them stay on good terms and Musk does not become too much of a toxic asset.

Germany, too, is poised to follow suit at the upcoming elections in February.

Since the US election I have been hoping for a fallout with Trump as Musk's Icarus moment, but I would be willing to forego the symbolism. I like your direct approach to the matter.

Please, I beg you — South Africa has enough problems as it is. Can he not go to Mars instead? He has always been very enthusiastic about the planet and he would be safe from the “woke virus” he so dreads — a win for everyone?

the one who should go to the slammer over this […]

Why not both?

Don't underestimate capital's ability, through owned press and social media, to create the next Trump. The incentive is there: although the man himself, with his incredible ego, would likely reject any form of successor, the political phenomenon he has spearheaded, with its seemingly boundless capacity to divide and rule and weaken checks and balances, benefits billionaires too much for them to just let it fade into history. In any case, the social soil that has been such fertile ground for Trump will not just disappear when he dies, and the party has been irreversibly remade, with Republicans either falling in line or getting pushed aside. I wish the nightmare he represents would die with him, but I doubt it will.

Git is overrated.

That's interesting to read; I wasn't even aware of the existence of Darcs — or any other alternative to git supposedly worth considering, for that matter. Would you elaborate on it?

The price of goods going down is not contained to one country. […] Deflation would be global.

That contradicts both present reality and future expectations as far as I understand both.

In the past two years, China has been grappling with deflationary tendencies at the same time that much of the world has been experiencing extraordinary inflation.

China's current deflationary tendencies stem from a combination of relatively low domestic demand and an ongoing decrease in exports. This decrease in exports was mostly caused by US protectionism, which is set to expand in both rates and scope under Trump.

Looking forward, the divergence I aluded to –deflation in China, inflation elsewhere– seems poised to continue. Further protectionism and the looming tariff war –not only with China, but possibly with Canada, Mexico and others– are expected to both fuel inflation in the United States and further reduce imports of Chinese goods. That would strengthen deflationary tendencies in China unless the government pulls off a stimulus package for their domestic economy more effective than the ones deployed thus far.

On the one hand, one Raspberry Pi would not really suffice. As @theherk@lemmy.world argued, you would need legitimate email addresses, which would require either circumventing the antibot measures of providers like Google or setting up your own network of domains and email servers. Besides that, GitHub would (hopefully) notice the barrage of API requests from the same network. To avoid that and make your API requests seem legitimate, you would need infrastructure to spread your requests in time and across networks. You would either build and maintain that infrastructure yourself –which would be expensive for a single star-boosting operation– or, well, pay for the service. That's why these things exist.

On the other hand, although bad programmers might use these services to star-boost their otherwise mediocre code, as you suggest, there are other –at least conceivable, if not yet proven– use cases, such as:

• the promotion of less secure software as part of supply chain attacks, with organizations sticking to vulnerable libraries or frameworks in the erroneous belief that they are more popular and better maintained than alternatives, for example;
• typosquatting; and
• plain malware distribution.

You seem to imply bad programmers use these services to star-boost their otherwise mediocre code. That might be the case, but there are other –at least conceivable, if not yet proven– use cases for these star-boosting services, such as typosquatting, the promotion of less secure software as part of supply chain attacks (with organizations sticking to vulnerable libraries or frameworks in the erroneous belief that they are more popular and better maintained than alternatives, for example) and plain malware distribution.

If I understand them correctly, @geography082@lemm.ee's point is not that it is wrong to monetize FOSS, but rather that companies increasingly develop open source projects for some time, benefiting from unpaid work in the form of contributions and, perhaps most importantly, starving other projects from both such contributions and funding, only to cynically change the license once they establish a position in their respective ecosystem and lock in enough customers. The last significant instance that I remember is Redis' case, but there seem to be ever more.

For reference, there is codeberg.org, operated by a German nonprofit and based on the open source Forgejo, among other open alternatives.

Thank you for expanding on your point. What I did not and still do not understand is the following part of your original comment:

China owns large parts of the debt of the US. Deflation makes them stronger.

Deflation in China –that's where deflation might occur or even be occuring– would not make the US Treasuries held by China more valuable, would it? Only deflation in the US, with the dollar appreciating, would have that effect, right?