You don’t need to get rid of private property to undo a lot of the damage done by landlords. You can build subsidized housing to compete. You can write tax codes to make it unprofitable for people to own more than one house. You can tax land by area instead of by built value to encourage building high-density housing.

There are a lot of levers that other countries have been willing to pull that partially counteract the damage of landlording, but the US has been reluctant to touch.

It’s the humidity. Whatever is water-soluble in the dust absorbs water and becomes sticky. Then the water evaporates and it’s like you’ve glued the dust to the wall.

Among tech companies, RTO has primarily been about one thing: maintaining real estate investments. This was likely the primary reason Apple began RTO much earlier than most of its peers (Aug 2022). Apple has enormous RE investments in Apple Park, in San Diego, Austin, and a bunch of other locations, and RTO was a way to ensure their values stay up, and they can remain qualified for tax credits by bringing commerce to those areas.

The fact that RTO also causes the most expensive people to leave was a fortuitous bonus. In 2023, interest rates went high, and money (and thus revenue) became tight, so companies like Amazon enacted RTO to force their most expensive employees to leave.

Make no mistake: Apple, too, used RTO as an attrition tool. They fully expected some single-digit percentages of their engineering workforce to quit due to RTO.

Protip: Do not connect your TV to the Internet.

The armaments held by private citizens are laughable in the face of the weapons in the Military.

Any “civil war” in the US would likely be in the form of constant terrorism, not all-out gunfights.

I don’t think Ridley Scott knows how AI works.

DMCA is such a shitty law. But companies like Google choose the safe route and believe every DMCA claim without first using humans to investigate them (because that will cost more money), and this is the result.

I pity the independent creators and makers who get fake DMCA takedowns all the time while Google does nothing to protect them.

If Google really wants to save themselves from this kind of trouble, maybe spend some lobbying money to get DMCA repealed.

Hi, are you new to Apple?

Misleading headline: it has not yet passed. It passed both the house and senate, but has not been signed by Gavin Newsom.

Slow news day at Business Insider, I see.

Yeah, I really don’t see the issue. If the device works as advertised, so what if it’s full of air?

Because you have lots of BT devices around you!