I honestly think that philosophy is fine. Before the major social media sites all came about, the Internet was filled with much smaller communities that didn't need to be profitable or scalable - they could be run by an individual as a hobby project. I think returning to that (possibly with the use of federation so these small communities still have a good amount of content) could keep things free, ad free, and privacy conscious
Housing prices increase faster than inflation. Why do you think that is? Certainly not because housing is seen as an investment vehicle where corporations buy as much as they can just to rent out, increasing the demand and therefore price of housing beyond what the market rate would have otherwise been.
I think it's clear that landlords are making money (and even if they're not, they're at least gaining equity which will eventually make the whole thing profitable), with most of that profit coming from the mere act of owning the property and withholding it from those who need it in order to survive unless they pay - which is inherently coercive in nature, and a fork of violence against the working class performed by the owning class. Sure, there's a nominal amount of effort fees and effort, and I'm not going to knock property management, since that is actual work, but landlords primarily get their money from rent seeking (that is, however much they charge beyond their expenses).
I think the US would be a massively better place to live in if we massively taxed housing owned by corporations, or at least any properties owned by a single entity surpassing 1 or 2. The goal is to make it not profitable and not appealing as an investment, such that black rock et al see fit to unload most of all of their properties. The housing prices would and should crash, and finally be affordable again. The government might even buy a lot of them up and expand our socialized housing. Sure that last point might not be "fair" to existing home owners, but consider they are hy definition already well off enough to afford their own home and bought their homes during the time when it was still seen as an "investment" that by definition means it comes with some amount of risk. At least going forward, housing would no longer be a vehicle for investment and well on its way to becoming a human right, like it should be.
Oh, this game got posted earlier today. It didn't make it in time for April 1st, but is still an April fools game. https://turtletennis.itch.io/mole-transactions
This week's been pretty occupied with a non incremental game my friend worked on, called Millennia. It's been very time sucking, but in a good way.
I've also been working on mocking up this fictitious app about digital gardening, and in general improving how the Internet communicates with you, with the goal of making it healthier. The idea for this app is it would be able to connect to matrix chat, email, RSS feeds, and potentially other sources and then you can write rules to categorize these: stuff like direct messages, stuff about that school project you're working on, online content creators you follow, and perhaps a category for just stuff you're interested in but don't need to know about every update for. These categories will be able to be assigned priorities: basic stuff like whether or not to send notifications, but also whether or not to show a count of items in that category. Some categories might feel more like a todo list, like DMs, but others should just collect things for you to occasionally check up on, without the pressure of a number or unread dot.
You'd still be able to chat and email and stuff from within the app as well. It'd integrate concepts like chat glue in chat threads (when supported by the data source), and make it easy to copy data over to your personal "garden", which will work similarly to a personal wiki. The garden would be a collection of thoughts in varying states of growth - incomplete thoughts to entire articles, all collected in a way such that you can easily see related thoughts and navigate the garden like a web (to mix metaphors haha). Overall I think it's a cool idea, but one that'd be too big for me to complete. But the mock will help with giving something that can be spread around so people can get interested in helping out, or at least providing feedback on the idea. I'm quite excited about it!
Good point, I guess we should just let the homes remain empty and the homeless on the streets?
I get that having your home squatted in sucks, and if you were only out for a week long vacation and come back to a break in then you have my sympathy, but the message here is ultimately pointing out that houses have been commodified and turned into vehicles for investing by the rich, rather than a right like they should be. We have more empty homes than homeless people, and that simply isn't just.
I'm still playing check back mod - now I'm level 82! I'm also still playing through USI, and just did the last reinforce (the one that got added this week). Other than that, been working on major changes in profectus. Gearing up to be one of the biggest releases it's had, but I think it'll be so much easier to work with :).
Hey, we had a similar thread earlier this week!
My week has involved, amongst other things, setting up this weekly thread because of how much use the thread that was cross posted from the subreddit got. This is now a thread that will automatically post every week, and I've made it so the subreddit equivalent won't accidentally get cross posted in the future.
As far as games, nothing has really changed since Monday. Although I'm playing sharky incremental on my phone :)
To answer honestly, it's because the first sentence only uses common and easy to spell words.