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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • I’m not from the US so correct me if I’m wrong - didn’t the governments of US and Canada give away land in what was essentially “bumfuck nowhere”? Isn’t land still cheap in comparable locations?

    If only people who live on the property are allowed to own it then prices might go down a bit. Say 50%, a number that I’m pulling out of my ass. I genuinely don’t believe that demand in cities will let prices go down by even that much. But even with a 50% crash, a shit ton of people would never get to live in a city (someone who just moved out of their parents’ home, someone who is recovering from a loss due to a bad business, someone who just immigrated etc.)

    So what would be the solution to those people? Live in a few hundred kms away from the city and commute every day?

    As much as I’d like to own property in the city that I live in, I don’t think banning landlords will lower prices enough for me to buy a house here. So, I’d rather rent and live in the city than go live in some village.


  • overcast5348@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldFacts
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    14 days ago

    Okay, ignore race, consider only religion.

    People are born into a religion and are free to leave it or embraced a different religion. It is completely in their choice.

    Similarly, people can be born into a family that owns zero to two properties, are free to acquire more or sell what they have. It is completely in their choice.

    Why is it okay to judge one group by the actions of “a few bad apples” and not the other?


  • overcast5348@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldFacts
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    15 days ago

    No, I’m saying that it’s unfair to criticize an entire group of people for the actions of some people who happen to belong to the same group while the rest are perfectly fine contributors to society.

    On the other hand, if the sole purpose of the group is to spread hate/cause unrest/violence then I’d be okay with hating the entire group.

    Hating landlord-ism as a concept makes sense to a certain extent, but I’m yet to see a realistic alternative provided by anyone. Hating landlords is something that I don’t agree with. --> this seems to be a controversial stance.

    Along the same lines, I hate religion but I don’t hate all religious people. --> this isn’t that controversial a stance. They’re both essentially the same to me.


  • overcast5348@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldFacts
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    15 days ago

    I’m a renter, and my parents have never owned a house, so I’ve dealt with landlords all my life. I don’t agree with “landlord bad”. Are there shitty landlords? Yes. But it’s a leap to go from that to “all landlords are bad”.

    Can you imagine the backlash from the same left-leaning group that goes “landlord bad” if you applied the same logic to a racial or religious group?

    Landlords serve an important purpose in the marketplace and any uncontrolled rampant exploitation is a failure of the government and not the entire group of people who sell the service.





  • I live in Toronto, and I don’t have a car. I use buses and subways for most of my commute in winter. Along with these options, I use bikeshare (public bicycle rentals) in every other season. There are people who bike even in winter but I’m nowhere close to that hardcore.

    I’ve spent maybe $250 on uber in urgent/lazy situations in the last one year - that would’ve been a monthly auto insurance payment.

    I waited for a bus for around 20 minutes in -18°C a few weeks back. The biggest problem was that I had overdressed so I started sweating and had to unzip a layer.

    An important fact that people who have only ever lived in suburbs miss is that you don’t have to commute thaaat far thaaat often when you live in walkable cities. My cousin who lives in a suburb, drives for ~20 minutes to get to the closest big box store. I have 5 options for groceries in a 1 km radius and one of them is just one block over. So, I don’t even need a bus for groceries, let alone a car. We have seniors who definitely shouldn’t be driving walking around with grocery carts on the sidewalks. So, reducing car dependency improves mobility - not the opposite.




  • ELI5 of certificates:

    The “s” in “https” in urls like “https://wikipedia.com” stands for “Secure”.

    When you connect to Wikipedia’s computer to read something, how do you know if the content you get back is what they actually sent and wasn’t altered by your friendly neighborhood hacker?

    Wikipedia can “sign” the content before sending it you. They also give you a certificate telling you how they have a particular signature which has been verified by someone else whom you already trust, and how long this particular signature is valid for.

    If a hacker tries to alter the document returned by Wikipedia, they wouldn’t be able to sign the document correctly. If they tried to give a certificate with a different signature too, you would catch it because they wouldn’t be able to fake the verification of the “someone you trust” so you’d catch the fake certificate.

    Browsers handle all this stuff for us. If it detects something fishy, it’ll just show an error along the lines of “could not verify certificate”. In some cases, it’s genuinely an issue where you/the website is under attack and you may get a virus.

    In some other cases though, it’s an issue of the certificate expiring and the guys at Wikipedia not being proactive about getting a new signature and certificate. If you are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that you’re just dealing with a lazy developer and not a malicious hacker, you can tell your browser to ignore whatever issue it detected and show you the content that was returned by Wikipedia.

    Thanks for attending my TEDx talk.



  • This guy S_20xxxxxxx has a holier than thou comment ranting about the “assholes from reddit being pieces of shit on lemmy”, ironically, on a thread about people being aggressive on lemmy.

    A few hours later, he replies to some comments of mine - every single one of them makes him sound more unhinged than the last.

    I went through his comment history and his comments swing between these two extremes of being preachy and being unhinged. I decided that blocking him and moving on was better for my sanity than continuing to engage.

    There’s no point in engaging with such people, do what’s best for you, and move on. Cheers! :)



  • An example of search engines failing me miserably last month:

    I wanted to hire a photographer, so I started searching using keywords like “wedding photographer MAJOR_CITY_NAME”, “photography MCN”, “event photographer MCN”, etc. The top results I got were all mostly along the lines of “top ten wedding photographers in MCN” i.e. listicles with links to a few photographers who probably paid the listicle creator? There were maybe one or two links to a photographer’s website itself in the first page.

    I’m okay with ignoring the first page of results and moving on to following pages. But rather than giving me individual photographer’s websites in subsequent pages, I started getting listicles for “top ten wedding photographers in OTHER_CITIES”. I’d click through multiple pages of results to find maybe 5 direct website links.

    What actually helped me find a photographers eventually was entering the exact same key words on Instagram. Almost every single one of them that I found on Instagram had an excellent website and the city name, and their addresses were mentioned clearly on their websites. So, it wasn’t a case of them not having enough information on their website. It’s just that search engines chose to prioritise listcles of photographers from other cities rather than giving me links to individual websites of photographers in my own city.

    In this case, I got lucky because photographers have a presence on Instagram which has a functional search engine. What if I want to find a plumber, or someone else? I’m forced to just trust a listicle creator because search engines don’t want to give away links to single purpose websites and only want to keep us on websites with a shit ton of content (that may or may not be what you need) and ads.

    /rant