Social media and on demand media hijack the emotional triggers that would usually be resolved by talking to people. Some examples:
* In line at the BMV, bored and feeling lonely. Should resolve loneliness by talking to strangers in line... mostly chit-chat, but sometimes you make a friend! Social media turns this into doom scrolling.
* Sitting in the living room by yourself, feeling a little lonely. Should result in calling up a friend or relative, or heading to get a coffee/beer where you can interact with people. On demand media turns this into low risk watching shows (yes, old school TV was an option, but on demand, there's always something on that is interesting).
So the trick is to make yourself ask if you should give someone a call or go somewhere public when you are pulling out the phone with intent to scroll or watch a show. When you find something you are interested in because you are watching lots of videos about it, or replying on forums, force yourself to engage in the real world. If you are arguing politics, find a group advocating your position and get involved (I've got to meet three majority leaders and two Presidents, plus a bunch of congresspeople you see on the news all the time as a side effect of getting involved because I was pissed off on the internet about business taxation issues). If you find a hobby, find a local group that does that. Learning to play the guitar from YouTube was fun, but jamming with other musicians? Off the charts fun and far more educational that just playing along with videos.
Finally, and this is the big one, try to never eat meals alone. Never say no to going to lunch with coworkers. Join stuff that meets for breakfast. Dinners are hard, but it's surprising what happens when you invite a couple people over for dinner and a beer once in a while.
> fact that you put too much food in your mouth (and probably the wrong kind of food)
I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes five years ago. I radically changed my diet to a hard keto diet with a cap of 50g of net carbohydrate per day (carbs - fiber = net carbs). My caloric intake quadrupled due to fats being high calorie. My weight dropped by 48 pounds. In every measurement, I'm healthier despite being older. My diet is also expensive and difficult:
Most foods in the us are high in carbohydrate. Cereals, added sugars, fake sugar free (sugar alcohol instead of sugar), and foods that have lots of integrated carbs... sandwiches, tortillas, etc. There's a huge preference for bad foods baked into the culture. It's hard to eat well. So culture is as much of a problem as any other factor.
After using Tahoe for a week, I've found I leave it in my bag. Window operations are painful and it feels like a bad try at a tablet os without a stylus or touch screen. Fortunately, my Mac is now the auxiliary laptop and I can do everything I need to do with my linux laptop.
Since 2008 I've been on linux as my daily driver. You'll find two laptops in my backpack: a macbook air and whatever linux machine I'm using for development. I'm almost to the point with the mac, I use it maybe once a month. So much works better on linux. The Mac (and occasions where I've tried Windows) is not nearly as easy to deal with as it was. Far too many decisions for the user to make, and far too many situation where you just aren't allowed. For example, I once fired up my macbook, only to be jarred by Apple News notifications about a gristly mass murder. While I sympathize with the victims, I do not want my routine broken by news out of my control. So I tried to get rid of Apple news only to be told by Apple support that was not possible.
My computer is mine. I do not want the manufacturer or author of the OS controlling it. Ever. Full stop.
> e never seen big corporations own single-family rentals en masse.
I just sold a house to a big corporation that owns about 12,000 homes. There's a whole industry for enabling these buys, opendoor, offerpad, etc... It's usually a wash selling your home as is to a wholesale deal vs. prepping your home and selling it, the difference being done about 60-90 days faster than via retail.
The company I sold to already owned four houses on my street. It's crazy.
I could have a principle and live in a falling apart money pit in a declining neighborhood or move to a brand spanking new home in a neighborhood on the way up.
Part of the problem is how hard it is to sell a home in the first place. I'm not interested now, but for a while I was looking at needing to move states, and that was going to involve selling my home and buying (or renting) in the new location. And all the math was saying that anything other than getting really lucky with a sale just before moving was going to cost me a LOT of extra money and be a drain and a hassle on top of all of the stresses involved with moving to a completely new state.
I really hate the idea of selling to these "we'll buy your home fast" shops, but I have to be honest that had I needed to make that move, it would have been a very real possibility.
> Additional property tax if you do not live in your home fulltime.
In states I've lived in with property tax there is a homestead exemption for the house you live in. In my current state that's about twice the tax.
The effect: Rent goes up to cover the tax and margin is added, so the rent goes up more than the tax.
>Rich investors and companies effectively get to buy homes at a discount vs average joes.
Usually the difference is that the big investor bought the property at lower price, and your rent is based on the lower valuation. Annual rent increases are usually are much lower than market increases - there's a lot of value in keeping a tenant year over year.
> The effect: Rent goes up to cover the tax and margin is added, so the rent goes up more than the tax.
Well-established effect and it applies to everything. A huge portion of all technological improvement/productivity gains and nearly all public investment money ultimately accrues to land rents which we then later just call "the cost of living."
You are right to call this out, and is why the legislation for this idea will require a lot of thought. But the important part of this idea is that only the "big" landlords will have a significant increase in cost.
In order for the economy to function there has to be ~ SOME ~ landlords. In my experience the random people that rent out their second property are usually good landlords, whereas the massive players treat people poorly. If this tax were implemented well, the latter group would be taxed more forcing them to stay honest. The small landlords would have a competitive pricing advantage over the big players, which should go a long ways to keep rents fair.
As long as costs are marked up and passed on to the consumer, this is a non starter. Also, government charging more taxes just gets paid by the consumer. Money is fungible. Small landlords have significant advantages in their being able to be more agile, use different rent structures (i.e. rent to own, short term, barter, etc, leverage owner elbow grease to get more profit). The key is to make sure the big guys don't have a financial advantage.
> In my experience the random people that rent out their second property are usually good landlords, whereas the massive players treat people poorly.
I don't think there's really all that much of a difference. Small landlords have low cash problems (slow repairs, stupid disputes on damage deposits, etc...). Big landlords have policy and bureaucracy problems (we forgot you were disabled and removed the ramp from the deck, we evicted the wrong property).
The 2560x1440 is QHD which is kind of a happy medium: high resolution enough to look really sharp, but not so high resolution that you have to scale it up like Macs do on retina displays. Having had retina Macs (and been very happy with them) since they came out, I've been using 16" and 17" QHD panels on my linux laptops for about five years... and they are actually just fine.
Takedown notices need to have a refundable processing fee. The fee should be refunded if the targeted publisher agrees the content shouldn't be online. If the takedown notice gets a counter notice, then the hosting provider/platform should split the fee with the targeted publisher.
The problem with DMCA notices is that the party trying to takedown content has zero incentive to behave in good faith. A $10-$30 fee would provide an incredible disincentive for the worst sort of trolling and over-broad shotgun takedown notices while protecting legitimate IP holders (who would see their fee refunded almost every time)
This doesn't make a lot of sense. It would make the DMCA completely useless if enough people decide to pirate your work because you wouldn't be able to afford to issue the takedowns.
Counter notice means I'm ok with defending a lawsuit. There are some big costs there. The problem with the current system is there's no protection for false/bogus DMCA takedowns and those do real economic damage to legitimate content owners and creators. I've had IP protection companies file takedowns on my own code and my own artwork and that was highly disruptive to my business.
* In line at the BMV, bored and feeling lonely. Should resolve loneliness by talking to strangers in line... mostly chit-chat, but sometimes you make a friend! Social media turns this into doom scrolling.
* Sitting in the living room by yourself, feeling a little lonely. Should result in calling up a friend or relative, or heading to get a coffee/beer where you can interact with people. On demand media turns this into low risk watching shows (yes, old school TV was an option, but on demand, there's always something on that is interesting).
So the trick is to make yourself ask if you should give someone a call or go somewhere public when you are pulling out the phone with intent to scroll or watch a show. When you find something you are interested in because you are watching lots of videos about it, or replying on forums, force yourself to engage in the real world. If you are arguing politics, find a group advocating your position and get involved (I've got to meet three majority leaders and two Presidents, plus a bunch of congresspeople you see on the news all the time as a side effect of getting involved because I was pissed off on the internet about business taxation issues). If you find a hobby, find a local group that does that. Learning to play the guitar from YouTube was fun, but jamming with other musicians? Off the charts fun and far more educational that just playing along with videos.
Finally, and this is the big one, try to never eat meals alone. Never say no to going to lunch with coworkers. Join stuff that meets for breakfast. Dinners are hard, but it's surprising what happens when you invite a couple people over for dinner and a beer once in a while.
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