Spasmolytic

It might be Little Shop of Horrors. Definitely freaked me out.

I vaguely remember crying when the cat was electrocuted by chewing on Christmas lights in the Griswolds Family Christmas.

Thank goodness. I'm sick of having a huge phone.

I can't even imagine who might do them justice, but some of the books in Iain Banks' Culture series could be a real treat.

To each their own. Everyone is a hypocrite about something. 😉

I use Boost too! Good stuff.

I always find myself coming back to Vivaldi. Extremely customizable browser. Yes, it's chromium-based like so many others, but I like it a lot and it's always gaining fun new features. I keep Firefox as a backup, but often have (relatively minor) performance issues with Firefox, particularly on Android.

I'm in the USA, so if they're only considering an ad-free offering in Europe as described then my outrage stands. 😉

They're missing the damned point. I have never used Facebook, but on any service if I'm paying a monthly fee it is to remove myself from the ad-based enshitification.

It's also what drives me crazy with respect to Microsoft products. I pay for MS 365, and I'd even be willing to pay for Windows if they'd leave me the fuck alone. I pay for ProtonMail and they do leave me alone, so I'll always stick with them. Any app that I use for which I can pay to remove ads, I do it... unless it's a subscription and I can't quite justify the perpetual expense, like for my preferred weather app MyRadar.

Hell, I almost bought into the MyRadar investment pitch until I saw that giving them $400 still wouldn't net me a lifetime subscription.

Right, but do the faux revolutionaries in this thread know the difference between a good landlord and a bad one? They seem to enjoy basking in righteous anger and not to care for nuances.

Good landlords hate bad landlords too. There's a lot of common ground to be shared.

That's why this is such a frustrating conversation, and it's similar to many other hot button issues. It gets treated like a black & white problem and folks start slandering whole groups when the issue usually arises from some sub-set of opportunistic assholes, or extreme bigots/mysoginists/what-have-you. (I my mind I'm also thinking about social issues that pit left-leaning people against right-leaning people, where everyone treats the other side as if each person were an example of the most extreme in that camp.)

So in this thread there are folks talking about overthrowing landlords en masse, when it's the large investors from outside the local community (plus some scumbags in the local community) who are adding to the suffering in the world.

Small landlords of the sort that you described are indeed just making long-term investments that are likely to yield a decent return or become a source of stability as an appreciating asset. It's the kind of investment that we should want lots of people to be able to take advantage of.

We need a more efficient way to get to the heart of the matter in these conversations because just scrolling through the comments it seems like a lot of ignorant or misguided anger.

That's why this is such a frustrating conversation, and it's similar to many other hot button issues. It gets treated like a black & white problem and folks start slandering whole groups when the issue usually arises from some sub-set of opportunistic assholes, or extreme bigots/mysoginists/what-have-you. (I my mind I'm also thinking about social issues that pit left-leaning people against right-leaning people, where everyone treats the other side as if each person were an example of the most extreme in that camp.)

So in this thread there are folks talking about overthrowing landlords en masse, when it's the large investors from outside the local community (plus some scumbags in the local community) who are adding to the suffering in the world.

Small landlords of the sort that you described are indeed just making long-term investments that are likely to yield a decent return or become a source of stability as an appreciating asset. It's the kind of investment that we should want lots of people to be able to take advantage of.

We need a more efficient way to get to the heart of the matter in these conversations because just scrolling through the comments it seems like a lot of ignorant or misguided anger.

That's why this is such a frustrating conversation, and it's similar to many other hot button issues. It gets treated like a black & white problem and folks start slandering whole groups when the issue usually arises from some sub-set of opportunistic assholes, or extreme bigots/mysoginists/what-have-you. (I my mind I'm also thinking about social issues that pit left-leaning people against right-leaning people, where everyone treats the other side as if each person were an example of the most extreme in that camp.)

So in this thread there are folks talking about overthrowing landlords en masse, when it's the large investors from outside the local community (plus some scumbags in the local community) who are adding to the suffering in the world.

Small landlords of the sort that you described are indeed just making long-term investments that are likely to yield a decent return or become a source of stability as an appreciating asset. It's the kind of investment that we should want lots of people to be able to take advantage of.

We need a more efficient way to get to the heart of the matter in these conversations because just scrolling through the comments it seems like a lot of ignorant or misguided anger.