Since I started keeping up with all this locally, here is what has happened.

• About 20 years ago, there was a ring of realtors who would were actively manipulating the prices by buying and selling to themselves. They were caught eventually, but they had already caused the damage they set out to do, artificially hiking prices for their buildings.
• About 15 years ago, the government realized that people needs to take more loans for the economy to grow because when you get rid of taxes on the rich there isn’t enough money pumped into the economy to make it grow. So they gave away thousands of social housing units to their friends (private entities) for free who then sold them back to the public.
• The landlords has since been running an “upgrading” scheme of apartments and houses all over the place with shitty things like a new fridge or a new and improved window or whatever have you, which allows them to increase the rent considerably outside of the limitations the law specifies. Of course this sounds like a bad idea because if you aren’t renting to anyone you’re losing money - but when the price of renting is 3 times the original price, it means they will still be profitable if they lose 1 in 3 renters. Not surprisingly, people have started to complain there is nowhere to live because of these conditions. The government isn’t stepping in, because they need these people to buy properties rather than rent - forcing them to take loans, and bolstering the economy. It’s why they started giving away apartments in the first place and causing this issue.
• As a response to demand though, and show of good fate, the government promises to build more houses. By giving contracts and money to private entities (their friends) to construct new homes. And to “fix the issue with cost”, they promise a 20% discount on the price per unit to any buyers who invests into buying the apartment before it is finished construction. Naturally, the buyers of these houses and apartments immediately sell once the unit is finished, netting a 20%+ profit on their investment. Now suddenly there is a huge upswing of houses and apartments, none for rent of course, and average people can’t afford to buy them. Investors though, they keep buying up everything, much of it is empty and not used, and sit on it for 3-5 years, and sell it to the next guy (or if they find the illusive average person who can suddenly afford it).

This is not to mention that the door was opened for american and chinese investors to buy up properties and land, shooting the average prices through the roof. Together with the government (of course a rightwing government has been in power for the past 20 years, causing all this to happen in their quest to privatize and let their friends milk tax money, reduce taxes on the rich, and balancing it out by forcing your average joe to take a massive housing loan), reducing the loans to just 3% to make them “affordable to average people”, which further spikes prices upwards and it ain’t coming down until something catastrophic happens.

i don’t understand the question. what does it matter what they do with it when the point is to make housing affordable again, in a permanent way.

i’m so tired of this bullshit. all because of greed. the only real solution to all of this (without completely bricking the economy) would be “one family one home policy” (married/legal) made into law. no more landlords, no more nonsense. got 3 homes? too bad, time to sell. market oversaturated? well go the fuck down in price to the damn value you bought your houses for 20 years ago. own an apartment complex? too bad, it’s now owned by the habitants council (those who actually live in it, like it actually works in many places). and make hotels the sole exception to the rule.

no more homelessness.

no more shelters.

no more trailer parks.

no more need for social housing.

no more assholes buying up property abroad and fucking the locals.

everyone’s happy except the 0.001% landlords and market gamblers. who now have to get actual jobs. or have well paid jobs already and didn’t need to sit on 4 houses because they got in early.

the problem is privatization for things that doesn’t even make sense to privatize. if the cost of discovery is too high for a private entity then why are they the ones to supply it? they aren’t actually doing anything but taking the foam from the top of what everyone else have collectively created. it’s like the privatization of energy, a natural monopoly that literally runs into negative value through surplus. or the privatization of mandatory services that cannot be sustained at cost such as nation wide mail delivery. if it doesn’t make sense the right choice is the only choice yet here we are lol.

what’s wrong with MX? isn’t it basically just debian stable but with xfce as default?

even if fuel is cheap it’s still has an upfront cost per production and can be manipulated based on demand to ensure prices never drop and always go up.

or i mean, super, nuclear is obviously what society needs, because energy supply is a natural monopoly and nuclear uses fuel you can burn based on demand and guaranteed awesome profit as a private entity unlike infinite energy resources that produces surplus energy and only benefits society and not the shareholders and owners who are the only ones who obviously matter.

whatever russia says, they mean to do the opposite. they’ve been pulling this nonsense from the start and this is no different, and we know this because they are STILL THERE. if they wanted peace, THEY’D LEAVE. ukraine doesn’t have a choice, they have nowhere to go. they can’t pull out of the conflict because they are literally the one being invaded. there is no logic to this argument. it’s like ordering cheese and wondering why you are served cheese. it’s plain and dumb.

using cinnamon. and yeah base software is largely fine. but non-base productivity apps are largely built in electron. cinnamon even offers a webapp tool so in some cases i can at least avoid it.

people who like fast apps should care because like 99% of current software developers are building electron apps instead of giving us something that actually lets your high end computer behave like a high end computer.

the only modern chat application that doesn’t run electron today is Telegram.

the only cloud note taking app that doesn’t run electron is …uh. doesn’t even exist.

the only…

i can’t even think of something i use that was released after 2016 on my computer that doesn’t run at a crawl because of electron. fuck electron.

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not even “still on facebook”, since 2020, the surge of people moving TO facebook instead of away of facebook has increased tremendously.

the traditional second hand market sites are dying because facebook marketplace is taking over.

traditional websites and helpdesk/support channels are dying because companies are switching to facebook pages and messenger/whatsapp.

old school forums have more or less been entirely replaced by facebook groups.

alternative chat platforms have more or less died because of messenger.

branding is nearly gone everywhere and has been replaced by instagram.

the list goes on.

and imo the worst part is, facebooks policy and technical offering is inferior to the alternatives people are moving away from. and the only reason everyone is moving to facebook is because everyone is moving to facebook.

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the day Mastodon offers Groups, I will be advertising the move to Mastodon and shortly shut down the groups I run. Though, Groups was supposed to be out already last year and yet we’re in 2024 and nothing is happening. If they had managed to stick to schedule it would have been a golden opportunity because a lot of people were looking for alternatives (but found none), when facebook went ham on their policy. but as there was no alternatives, everyone’s back on facebook just circumventing the policies (for now).

except in theory they can borrow from the bank with their stock as leverage and would never actually need to liquidate anything (and they do just that).

yes, it’s a good reminder that capitalism doesn’t actually work and needs to be propped up with bailouts to ensure it doesn’t collapse and gets replaced.

your example is irrelevant and makes little sense as a counter when all research and innovation globally is still paid for by taxes. no business will spend billions on new ideas, they spend billions on commercial application of public (tax paid) ideas in order to profit.

got news for you, all innovation happens on the tax roll. and because it’s free and public to use, companies take it, stick licenses on it, and sell it back to you (gotta love paying twice).

sweden is well known for bowing to US requests. just look at the history of the unlawful attacks on the piratebay and the sham court they were passed through to get sentenced on no broken laws.

not to mention Sweden’s constant bullshit in other data related sectors pushing american (hollywood) agendas into EU (and thankfully failing). the pay to take action against the will of the people IN A DEMOCRACY must be the recipe for immortality or some such because i don’t see why they would otherwise be able to legally betray their countrymen.

you got a cult bombing your public buildings for years, and attempts to identify and prevent such attacks by standard means have failed.

how do you stop it?

not at all. mint offers a bunch of features ‘exclusive’ to mint as an integration with their system. of course it’s all open source and you could install it on any other system. but the key important factor with mint is that everything ‘just works’ with a fresh install, no customization necessary - which is something that can’t be said about any other distro, including Ubuntu. it is the only distro i recommend for non-pc users as there is no chance they will brick it.

regardless, KDE is just a DE. you won’t get the same mint experience of course, since it isn’t officially supported (and indeed, only cinnamon offers the complete mint experience), but installing KDE on mint is easy enough if you insist on using it.

frankly, the US is STILL fighting in the middle east after 9/11. the chinese has shown more restraint and milder treatment towards their local terrorist group. so i’d say they’ve handled it better than the west ever could.

Linux Mint is hands down the most stable linux distro out there and has been for years. zero tinkering needed. everything just runs no questions asked.

My only grief with Mint is the most recent update where they changed the software centee and now it’s slowed to a crawl. Why they would do this is anyones guess.

I’m recommending MX until such time that Mint sort their crap out - unfortunately I doubt they will, seeing as this change of software center was to resolve some other issues they (but not is end users) though they had.

MX is basically debian but with a lot of improvements. Sure it might have a bit of a learning curve for those primarily used to Ubuntu based systems, but it beats running any of the other Ubuntu distros by miles since they all struggle with the crap Ubuntu puts on top of Debian.

Manjaro is another great option if you don’t want to deal with debian based stuff, and KDE is the default DE with most stuff under reasonable control. You can also use all the Arch resources if you ever run into trouble so it’s a lot less of a headache than what I’ve experienced running OpenSUSE (i want to love OpenSUSE but I just can’t).