Since I started keeping up with all this locally, here is what has happened.

• About 20 years ago, there was a ring of realtors who would were actively manipulating the prices by buying and selling to themselves. They were caught eventually, but they had already caused the damage they set out to do, artificially hiking prices for their buildings.
• About 15 years ago, the government realized that people needs to take more loans for the economy to grow because when you get rid of taxes on the rich there isn’t enough money pumped into the economy to make it grow. So they gave away thousands of social housing units to their friends (private entities) for free who then sold them back to the public.
• The landlords has since been running an “upgrading” scheme of apartments and houses all over the place with shitty things like a new fridge or a new and improved window or whatever have you, which allows them to increase the rent considerably outside of the limitations the law specifies. Of course this sounds like a bad idea because if you aren’t renting to anyone you’re losing money - but when the price of renting is 3 times the original price, it means they will still be profitable if they lose 1 in 3 renters. Not surprisingly, people have started to complain there is nowhere to live because of these conditions. The government isn’t stepping in, because they need these people to buy properties rather than rent - forcing them to take loans, and bolstering the economy. It’s why they started giving away apartments in the first place and causing this issue.
• As a response to demand though, and show of good fate, the government promises to build more houses. By giving contracts and money to private entities (their friends) to construct new homes. And to “fix the issue with cost”, they promise a 20% discount on the price per unit to any buyers who invests into buying the apartment before it is finished construction. Naturally, the buyers of these houses and apartments immediately sell once the unit is finished, netting a 20%+ profit on their investment. Now suddenly there is a huge upswing of houses and apartments, none for rent of course, and average people can’t afford to buy them. Investors though, they keep buying up everything, much of it is empty and not used, and sit on it for 3-5 years, and sell it to the next guy (or if they find the illusive average person who can suddenly afford it).

This is not to mention that the door was opened for american and chinese investors to buy up properties and land, shooting the average prices through the roof. Together with the government (of course a rightwing government has been in power for the past 20 years, causing all this to happen in their quest to privatize and let their friends milk tax money, reduce taxes on the rich, and balancing it out by forcing your average joe to take a massive housing loan), reducing the loans to just 3% to make them “affordable to average people”, which further spikes prices upwards and it ain’t coming down until something catastrophic happens.

i don’t understand the question. what does it matter what they do with it when the point is to make housing affordable again, in a permanent way.

i’m so tired of this bullshit. all because of greed. the only real solution to all of this (without completely bricking the economy) would be “one family one home policy” (married/legal) made into law. no more landlords, no more nonsense. got 3 homes? too bad, time to sell. market oversaturated? well go the fuck down in price to the damn value you bought your houses for 20 years ago. own an apartment complex? too bad, it’s now owned by the habitants council (those who actually live in it, like it actually works in many places). and make hotels the sole exception to the rule.

no more homelessness.

no more shelters.

no more trailer parks.

no more need for social housing.

no more assholes buying up property abroad and fucking the locals.

everyone’s happy except the 0.001% landlords and market gamblers. who now have to get actual jobs. or have well paid jobs already and didn’t need to sit on 4 houses because they got in early.

the problem is privatization for things that doesn’t even make sense to privatize. if the cost of discovery is too high for a private entity then why are they the ones to supply it? they aren’t actually doing anything but taking the foam from the top of what everyone else have collectively created. it’s like the privatization of energy, a natural monopoly that literally runs into negative value through surplus. or the privatization of mandatory services that cannot be sustained at cost such as nation wide mail delivery. if it doesn’t make sense the right choice is the only choice yet here we are lol.

even if fuel is cheap it’s still has an upfront cost per production and can be manipulated based on demand to ensure prices never drop and always go up.

or i mean, super, nuclear is obviously what society needs, because energy supply is a natural monopoly and nuclear uses fuel you can burn based on demand and guaranteed awesome profit as a private entity unlike infinite energy resources that produces surplus energy and only benefits society and not the shareholders and owners who are the only ones who obviously matter.

whatever russia says, they mean to do the opposite. they’ve been pulling this nonsense from the start and this is no different, and we know this because they are STILL THERE. if they wanted peace, THEY’D LEAVE. ukraine doesn’t have a choice, they have nowhere to go. they can’t pull out of the conflict because they are literally the one being invaded. there is no logic to this argument. it’s like ordering cheese and wondering why you are served cheese. it’s plain and dumb.

electron slows everything on your computer down (by design). for each individual electron app you’re running concurrently, you’re burning another huge volume of resources and sacrificing performance that normally would have been shared. even well-optimized electron apps can’t do anything to avoid this due to the inherent design of electron. because each runtime of electron has to load all its junk separately from one another. it’s a burden on your hardware that developers just don’t give a shit about because electron makes it easy to push out apps with minimal coding effort and let you ignore native platform support. if they did give a shit they wouldn’t use electron. electron basically makes a flagship computer behave like a 90ies computer due to lazy convenience of the coder. i’d propose that any developer who opts to us electron can’t be trusted because they obviously don’t care (or know) enough to develop real software. almost every electron app is basically a patchwork put together from various github sources and frameworks.

regardless. even if i wanted to use one of the privacy focused applications despite electron, i would have a total of 0 users to chat with, making the chat app useless. people want their modern features and are beyond willing to pay with their privacy. so not only does telegram offer a non-electron native client on all platforms. they also offer all modern features and design elements users have come to expect.

and as said. if i had to pick one chat application i’d prefer over anything else. i’d go with delta chat. since i wouldn’t need to convince anyone to install it and still be able to chat with them. but it’s unlikely the delta chat developer will rewrite it. heck, most of the actual interface is just another lazy copypaste. so, i do me.

both use Electron (which is the problem and why Telegram is literally the only modern option on the market) so they aren’t options either. If Electron wasn’t a problem in and off itself, I wouldn’t use either of those anyway since I could use DeltaChat, be secure, and not need to bother to “convert” anyone to use the client since it’s literally a chat client built on the email protocol (which everyone on earth has).

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there is only really nheko in development among the non-electron alternatives and it’s unstable. can’t convince people to use software that only works half the time.

closed source.

plain text unless activated.

agreed. but chats are there to keep in touch, collaborate, and communicate. so we don’t have much of a choice, especially since most people just don’t care about security and stick with Messenger or similar. in my circles though, it’s a lot easier to convince someone to use Telegram unlike one of the many XMPP clients, and seeing as it runs natively, it’s my only real choice.

personally, I’d be all over DeltaChat if it wasn’t running on electron. brilliant idea for sure, as there would be no convincing necessary to keep in touch with practically anyone on the planet.

mobile is not the problem for many reasons. one being that apps offload so there is no system wide slowdown like you experience on a modern high end computer, caused by electron.

all those protocols only offer shitty electron apps on desktop.

i have a top end m1 mbp and it can handle 2 electron apps running concurrently at best. i won’t even install electron apps anymore because i need to be able to actually use my computer for work. which is a bit ironic as most modern utility applications which would be useful for work can’t even be used on most computers unless run as the single active app (great workflow, lol!).

oh sure. ban the ONLY modern chat client not running on electron.

get fucked, spain!

fairphone is doing pretty well. their new one is quite competitive spec-wise too.

an online store could operate from places where such laws don’t apply. most people nowadays mainly do their shopping online anyway and physical stores have largely disappeared unless it doubles as a warehouse. i guess australia and NZ has the advantage of stringent import laws though.

but i suppose this goes for my earlier argument as well.

we have phones that don’t break easily and we can repair them and replace the battery; with long-term support.

what we need are laws that makes it mandatory for all.

except in theory they can borrow from the bank with their stock as leverage and would never actually need to liquidate anything (and they do just that).

yes, it’s a good reminder that capitalism doesn’t actually work and needs to be propped up with bailouts to ensure it doesn’t collapse and gets replaced.

no surprise really, Safari on mobile has been broken for months now. The back button crashes the tab you’re using so you can’t really navigate the web.

even if Firefox etc uses webkit on iOS, at least the back button works.