You’re being facetious. Rent is not capital harboured for the maintenance of lands or buildings. From Wiktionary:

Noun; rent (countable and uncountable, plural rents); (economics) A profit from possession of a valuable right, as a restricted license to engage in a trade or business.

I want to make this point absolutely clear: landlords in Australia have been a cohort that’s been cultivated by the capitalists as a bulwark against labour domestically. In law and in economic-systems privileges have been carved out solely for them, to the detriment of the industrial-capacity of Australia to produce tangible goods.

Australia has a housing crisis–which is not a state that is unique to Australia. Housing is a human right. Australia’s government acknowledged this and promised to act on it. It has failed in every domain–deliberately!

The right to housing is clearly supported by international law, indeed at the very foundation of the international human rights system in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This Declaration, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, establishes an internationally recognised set of standards for all persons without qualification. Article 25 of the Declaration provides, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including … housing”.

—Chris Sidoti, Human Rights Commissioner, 4th of September, 1996.

Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Australia is a party, recognises the right of all people to adequate housing and commits state parties to take appropriate steps to ensure the realisation of that right. Article 11 recognises, “… the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing…” and that “States Parties will take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right”.

I do encourage readers to read the linked document (especially Australians). It will help shed light on why the privileged children of Western-democracies are looking back at the USSR as an ideal to work towards whilst they face worsening material conditions with the political classes unanimously declaring: it will get worse; deal with it. Users such as whoisearth@lemmy.ca are being, I think, disingenuous.

The children of Australia are aware that the adults (that are in privileged positions now, shaping Australia’s future political- and economic-landscapes) were the recipients of public-housing, cheap private-housing and free tertiary-education, whilst ending those same programs for them. This injustice is further inflamed with the deliberate inflation of asset-classes, of which housing has become an overwhelming salient sore-point in the Australian context.

Rents in Australia do not go towards the maintenance of the property. They overwhelmingly go towards the financing of new mortgages. A rental-property is a political-license to freely create private misery for your tenant as you attempt to extract unjust amounts of capital to finance a mountain of new mortgages in an attempt to join the politically protected class: landlords.

I pay $300.00 AUD a week to rent a room, with no access to laundry or cooking facilities. Meanwhile the property fails Australia’s national-standards for housing. There are no smoke-detectors in the bedrooms. A glass-panel in one of the windows has a hole in it. The bathroom’s exhaust fan does not work. Mold is a never-ending issue. These conditions are illegal, but good luck getting the landlord to meet his legal-obligations! If you live in Australia you know tenants are treated as an underclass.

Tenants are supposed to maintain the building and the land, not the rent. That’s the expectation and the reality here. It is certainly different to what I’ve read of European-tenancy expectations. I can only defend Australia by saying it’s a young, naive nation led by lazy and entitled morons.

In Australia homelessness is increasing. Asset-classes are over inflated. Rents are crippling. Wages are insufficient. The leading thought of the domestic political-class is that A.I. will increase productivity, leading to higher wages which will erode that asset inflation, leading to a nice, comfortable equilibrium. Of course this ignores the fact that the historical gains of increased productivity have gone towards profits, not wages. Somehow the future gains will be different! Everyone knows that’s a lie, which means the current cohort of leaders are promising nothing. No change. We will continue this course of destructive neoliberalism.

What the USSR accomplished was remarkable. What the Chinese have accomplished is astonishing. All under the frame-work of socialism, working towards communism. Meanwhile the Western-democratic nations seem to be in endless internal-squabbles, external-wars and domestic degradation.

I agree. Disclosure of A.I. use should be mandatory.

My main concern with A.I. use is its ability to hide incompetence. If a new agent introduces code that was entirely written by illegal-software that violates copyright law–A.I.–then that should be made clear, even if competent-programmers review the new inclusion and approve of it. Otherwise people are left with the impression that this new agent is a competent programmer. A.I. use–undisclosed–creates false reputations.

The disclosure being encouraged and not mandatory is purely to protect the egos of programmers currently utilizing A.I. products.

However I do respect their decision and I maintain projects should be self governing.

The American intelligence apparatuses had been using this line of reasoning to legalize their illegal operations from the start: computers collecting data on citizens are not committing ‘surveillance’. If a human needs to assess that data then they apply for a rubber stamp from the state to allow surveillance of a human, but for the computer to collect and asses? There was never a need to seek authorization: it’s not surveillance. Computers collecting data and autonomously acting on that data–even to kill–can never be illegal. Welcome to the United State of Ammerikkka.

That’s to say: it never mattered. The verbal affluent to legitimize what they’re doing is just that. To people ignorant of computers it may have sounded reasonable back then, given it was dressed up enough, but in the day of computer-controlled economies and warfare I don’t think it can stand anymore even to a moron.

It can’t change though as changing would necessitate all the current political and economic structures to change: to voluntary put in excruciating effort to give up power. Not only are you asking those in power to debase themselves, but to also debase all those around them. It cannot happen.

What can happen and what should happen is that you should act. You are in control of you: liberate your computers. Not only is this something that is possible, but you are also empowering yourself. When you do this you inversely disempower the polities and economic controls that are superstructures built on this foundation of computer-surveillance and -manipulation.

I see something in the commentary I can’t exactly define. It’s probably bigger than a single word can encompass. Regardless of how revolutionary and forward thinking the leaders of a polity are they are still leading groups and individuals who have their own cultural beliefs, of which their positions would be inherently antithetical towards revolutionary ideas–if they were not the revolution would have occurred earlier. There’s a cultural threshold that must be passed before revolutionary activities can occur, but that threshold may be with a minority of people who can enable those activities to start. They will still be leading a majority who simply do not care intellectually. Most people do not give a thought towards the economic system they live under.

A white-class who materially benefits from a black-class’ oppression will be racist towards that class regardless of what the leading mouthpieces say, especially if that benefit has been enforced throughout many generations. “Equality feels like suppression to the privileged.” When a strong revolutionary polity enters a territory they–by definition–are fought against. It’s intellectually lazy to call this push-back the “suppression” of religion–ethnicity, sexuality or any other category–by the revolutionaries.

Revolutionaries were on the correct lines. One cannot attack the revolution’s failings on the actions of uninterested participants or more accurately: counter-revolutionary actors. The communists were more socially progressive than the capitalists. That’s a fact not up for debate. Communists are more socially progressive than capitalists.

Rents should be abolished. It’s a tax and I do wonder why taxes are still in use by national-governments today. They’re inefficient and create absolutely needless friction and dissent amongst payers. Money has long left the bounds of reality. Of a nation state to issue money, but then tack back a small fraction due to cultural-legacy, should it not be ridiculed? Likewise the ill effects of landlords has been well documented economically: their patronage is solely for the oppressive effects on you–the worker.

matlag

Actually yes. I did not know they released this. I still think my point stands: it’s a self imposed burden that is not relieved by spending loaned capital. That only has increased their burdens, because not only do they have to continuously pay for a large quantity of computer resources they have to repay debts and find a way of financing all of it sustainably.

I don’t know a lot about signal. My understanding was open-source clients existed, but the server’s software was proprietary. I’ve since read the Wikipedia page and Signal’s servers were once federated: “Signal’s server architecture was federated between December 2013 and February 2016.” That later date is when they ceased federation, claiming it held back the project.

I don’t like Signal. The people behind it are the benefactors of looters that reside in Silicon Valley. The project purports to be a non-profit, but burns capital that was accrued in and by Silicon Valley. It could not exist without surveillance-capitalism. Though that’s a critique of, perhaps, the entire software economy. Its members are too closely related to its major players though, being ex-employees.

For encrypted communications I would like to direct readers to GNUnet. The entire internet is incompatible with the ideals of privacy and security. You can mount applications on top of it, but the underlying framework is not appropriate. GNUnet is an attempt at creating a secure, decentralized internet. It’s a worthwhile project.

You’re not wrong, but it’s really American-software companies. Google would not allow a non-American business to be listed on Google maps without providing restricted-data that included: a) a video demonstrating how to access the business, b) passwords for logins to the software they used, c) & codes to physical safes that resided at the business’s location. Ostensibly this was to prove that the entity requesting a business addition to Google maps was the proprietor. They refused. I mean, it is the sort of information a thief would want.

I have to state that the above was told to me by the store manager and even I felt it could not be true, but I could not discern a reason why they’d lie about this particular thing whilst I could see why Google would want such information. It would help with credibility: that the individual really did have a link to the business in question, but then if Google used that information to verify it was correct they’re hacking other businesses to do so.

It also has to be mentioned that Google (and any major American-software company) embeds itself into the United State’s surveillance operations and apparatuses.

If anyone has more information about how businesses register on Google maps I’d be interested in reading. I’m specifically interested in foreign businesses outside America, not domestic American listings inside America.

A self-inflicted burden because they refuse to liberate the server side code. Besides, they can’t be burning through that reserve as they need to pay it back and how on earth are they going to do that?

Hang on… that’s not a gift. The hard work is making money from free software. You’ve indebted a foundation to the sum of $100,000,000.00 and you’re telling them:

A) pay it back

B) via commercializing free software

How the fuck do you do that? You can’t. What the fuck does a piece of software need that exorbitant amount for anyway? I guess that’s why Signal never really was libre software. There’s too much money to be made in spyware.

The thing that has struck me the most is the complete lack of opposition. Not of the incessant quibbles online, but real opposition in the streets by everyday people.

Users are never given an option in capitalist-American-spyware & -malware–suspicious ‘software’. You either accept unfair terms or… no. There is no option to decline. There’s always just an “ok” button. The fact that governments (the supreme body that is supposed to… well, um… govern) have just left this space, completely vacant… is very fucking odd. There are no governing bodies for software or for consumers of software. It’s a pure capitalist hellscape of no-choice. One giant monopoly that offers you not convenience, because there’s no choice. How can something be convenient when there’s no choices? I bring up convenience because it’s the term most brought up by users in their complicit use of totalitarian software. It’s the same as being dictated to by a communist-thug and mentally deluding yourself that you comply out of an overwhelming sense of it being convenient. You don’t get a choice.

The jab at communism isn’t out of place, because the cold war rhetoric stays in living memory and were we not told the communist states–even those too shy to admit it, but just brave enough to self-subscribe as socialist–were we not told they had the secret police? They had no consumer choices–only one brand of toothpaste; only one brand of shoe; only one brand of car: all brandishing the state’s logo. Yet look around you and it’s a global duopoly of America’s Apple & Google. You don’t get a choice. You have to comply, as any freedom loving capitalist would. You will accept American-spyware. The American-spyware-corps will look after you. You just need to comply, because it’s convenient. You don’t have a choice.

Yes, use libre mobile-computers, but the need for public governance of technology is now. Countries need to have software sovereignty. It’s embarrassing for a non-American state to publish their ‘apps’ only via American spyware companies. It’s ludicrous. To give them an exclusive contract in distribution and to pay Apple or Google to supply, whilst they turn around and tighten the hatch: making it harder for users to install packages that do not originate from their monopolistic ‘market places’. It’s a joke.

If you’re a developer do not publish on American spyware platforms. Do not do it. Do not compromise. Fight these duopolies.

I urge users to become participants and contributors. As Kongar has written, we have access to sophisticated hardware, but we’re not deploying it. If mobile-computer operators contributed to a mesh-network we’d be in a position to discard subscriptions for telecommunications access. Before this can happen the expectations of users needs to shift from contributing capital (paying for a mobile plan for instance) to contributing resources: running voluntary software on their machines.

The requirements needed to participate in mesh-networks are not just technical knowledge. If a user deployed a program like Briar they’d notice something rather swiftly: participating in mesh-networks demands more resources than not participating. The most obvious effect of this is that the mobile-computer’s battery will drain faster. Carrying a spare battery seems to be common already and that’s without participating in a voluntary mesh-network. The users’ expectations would need to shift before they could adopt such software.

I’ll refrain from commentary on Apple’s iOS (though I expect it to be similar), but Google’s Android is hostile towards user-software that needs to run constantly in the background. It will terminate those programs, even if the user has granted it ‘permission’ to run in the background.

Desktop and laptops provide a much more fertile environment in comparison. It is the norm to have long running user-programs. Even commercial operating-systems do not find anything amiss because it is the norm here. For the user in such an environment I do not see any possible objection to running such programs other than an increase in data usage, but even then these programs often allow for deployments that have a fixed quota.

Why then do we not see mass adoption of software like i2p, hyphanet, GNUnet and so forth? I exclude tor because it reinforces the status quo that must be changed. It allows its users to exit the tor-network and access the web. It’s a good technical precaution against network surveillance, but the majority of that network’s userbase want to exit the network. To contribute to the tor-network is to run an exit-node and that is not financially feasible for the vast majority of internet users. It is not democratic, but exclusionary and elitist. User-contributed nodes that run on the hardware they have, with the data connections they have, will see their nodes deprioritized in routing if not outright dropped. The other projects I’ve listed do prioritize peer-to-peer communication whilst tor’s network has just become a way to access the web anonymously. I2p is technically superior to tor’s for in-network communication; it supports tcp and udp. You can torrent within i2p’s network. You can not torrent in tor’s: you lose udp.

In my eyes the major issue of the current ‘web’ is the rent-seeking economy that upholds it. Technically we all have the tools to self-host a blog, e-mail, lemmy instance or whatever it is you want to share. We have a glut of cpu-capacity, storage and bandwidth. The hindrance isn’t in the property we own, but in the capital expenditure demanded from a perpetual rent-seeking economy that’s evolved around the ‘web’. Users are behind cgnats and need to rent whitelisted servers. Users aren’t allocated a static ipv4 address and need to rent one. Users then need to rent domain names and before Let’s Encrypt they had to pay for a SSL certificate that had an expiration date–a perpetual expense. Completely arbitrary, artificial scarcity to create an economic system of rents. It’s all absurd.

Software like lemmy isn’t revolutionary either. It’s retroactive. It wants to shift conditions back to when web-masters had privileges. Privileges that were taken away by the new-style of business that superseded them. If you want to run lemmy you need to pay your dues to the domain registrars and whitelisted server admins. The revolutionary act is to run i2p or gnunet and do whatever the fuck you want, but once you realize Alice and Bob can communicate with one another without paying tolls to DNS registrars or whitelisted server-admins nor subjugate themselves to that third-line–the forum administrators–lemmy becomes superfluous.

Users shift responsibility to the server-admins that run the lemmy instances they interact with. In exchange they give them all their content. That content has value. Lemmy is still a value extraction mechanism because everything on the ‘web’ has devolved into economic rent-seeking. To exist on the web is to participate in that system. It is the ‘web’ that needs to be ditched. Of the alternatives GNUnet is the design that makes the most sense, though it is still juvenile.

It’s rather ironic that some commentators are just not listening, whilst claiming the other’s deafness to be detrimental. I’d like to raise awareness that the effectiveness of antidepressants is similar to placebo and exercise–none of them are effective for treating treating chronic depression. Claiming exercise is as effective as antidepressant-drugs isn’t the remarkable truth that it’s being framed as: they’re both terrible antidepressants. We don’t have effective treatments that are applicably uniform–people are fundamentally different–don’t be so asinine as to dispute this, nor obtuse enough as to state the normative behaviours of healthy populations as being the cure for diseased individuals. B-b-b-but it does help. Thank you; your contributions towards aetiology have been most illustrious.

Something something… free markets… capitalism–no! Not like that!

You write entirely dishonest trite! That ‘revolution’ was preceded by the Gwangju Uprising, a massacre. The protestors retaliated with violence. It is this history–the threat of violence–that underpins ANY political power. There are no peaceful revolutions. Anyone who attempts to frame something as peaceful to prove that there is such a thing looks at an event myopically and dishonestly.

Read your own fucking articles. There’s nothing peaceful about killings and torture. “On June 11, the National Police Agency defended its actions on the previous day, describing rallies as illegal, and as violent “disorderly conduct”, and declaring their intention to crack down on further unrest.” You: but-b-b-but it was a peaceful protest. You are a liar and a bootlicker.

Personal experience with the Christian-cult: mentally-ill individuals who refuse medical help corralled by narcissistic abusers. Being mentally-ill they make disastrous life-decisions creating hell-on-earth for their progeny. You people are clowns. My disdain for you can not be overstated. Your pastas are narcissists. Stop re-reading the same book that’s been repeatedly translated through the eons into different languages–with more edits than any Wikipedia article–hoping you’ll find an esoteric cure to soothe your self-loathing. You won’t. Leave your cult. Find medical help.

From the outside it appears these people are walking contradictions: they’re the most hateful people you’ll meet, yet they preach goodness to all men. Once religion was decoupled from the state it became a voluntary institution. The cults of Christianity attract self-loathing individuals who feel they need an external structure to keep them in line. That’s why you find so many pedophiles in these cults. They’re mentally ill.

Cults should be taxed. Doomsday-cults with a sole focus on expansion (like the cults of Christianity) should be disbanded by force. Healthcare is a human right. States should be providing appropriate care for the mentally-ill. Education is a human right too and cults are a road-block in the state’s pursuit of a universal education.

A daily reminder for Australian comrades: Sanitarium is the for profit arm of a doomsday-cult. Do not fund them through the purchase of their products. Do not buy Weet-Bix™, Up & Go™, etc… Advocate for cults to be taxed.

Cults have flourished here. They’re dangerous and degenerative to society. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/feb/13/the-family-great-white-brotherhood-australia-melbourne-cult-anne-hamilton-byrne

From their flock are selected the most deranged for political office. From their financing we get absolute mongrels in politics, like the insipid Scott Morrison: holder of every privilege, but never accountable. Shirking every responsibility placed on him. He would not hold a hose if you were on fire. He’d watch you burn; he’d do everything to not do anything whilst sending thoughts and prayers; he’d then go on a holiday and bill the tax-payer for it and removed that people didn’t want to shake his hand.

It’s time to put a stop to all these demented cults. Never entertain them. The Catholic cult drains our coffers. Tell them to fuck off.

I’ve been interested in tracking my own sleep too. I wonder how useful these commercial products are in producing data that is correct. They come from technology companies who primarily want to collect data, as much data as possible. They’re not at all interested in providing their users with an honest interpretation of anything. A lot of them probably don’t even have the expertise to interpret whatever they’ve gathered.

I’ve been involved in sleep studies in the past and none of them involved using a smart-watch or other commercial wearable. They used electrodes (?) that were stuck to my body and fed into a computer. What data was being collected and how to properly interpret that data is beyond me.

Making a DIY device is probably feasible, but again, I wouldn’t have a clue on how to interpret the data gathered. I don’t think it’d be too complicated though.

Tools built specifically to monitor one signal are probably better than a generalized thing, such as a smartwatch, from a company that produces surveillance equipment for marketing purposes.

You glossed over the fact that it came from Israel’s intelligence-community. Its design is woeful–that’s the protocol, regardless of client or server implementation. The project reeks of a state-backed program to get ahead of the increasing desire for encryption in everyday communications. Yet encryption has always been an after thought within that program. All those bridges to funnel different protocols into the program.

Scuba-gear will be the fashion. Subscribe to FreshAer™ for a discount on breathing-tanks.

I think the most optimal way of doing this would be a self-made shell script that expresses your preferences. You could then run it from whatever live-environment you choose and the result would be a familiar setup. The /home directory being on a separate partition from the rest is useful for preserving large-quantities of user-data.

I’ve been impressed with the capacity of microSD cards. The idea of mounting /home to a microSD card and having a materially-portable home has been a novelty I’ve so far resisted.

I used to think I had aphantasia, but after starting ADHD medications I’ve found my ability to recall visually has improved. I now can walk-through a place visually, though not at all clearly. My ability of recall has improved in every domain overall. Prior I only had access to abstractions, mainly relationships. Recalling words to describe those relationships could be difficult, even if I knew the word. The recall function would just fail, causing great difficulty communicating verbally.

I would hasten to add that I don’t definitely have the condition named ADHD–there is no definitive diagnostic tool and doctors have expressed concerns of autism. I’ve been subjected to traumatic brain injuries too, with one leaving me temporally blind. This leaves me doubtful of being a natural example of a developed ADHD human (one not intentionally harmed and allowed to develop optimally), but of a human that has received multiple traumatic brain injuries expressing qualities of a ADHD inflicted human.

I’m aware of a condition informally named sledhead: a condition that occurs in bobsled operators (drivers?) that induces depression and often leads to suicide. I have a pet-theory that the vibrations in motor-vehicles do cause minor brain injuries as those found in the more extreme environment of bobsled racing, only differing in scale. I wouldn’t be surprised if time-spent inside motor-vehicles–especially poorly maintained ones that exhibit more intense-vibrations–correlates with poorer health outcomes overall.

It would be of interest to me if anyone were aware of research that describes links between mental-imagery, autism, brain-damage, ADHD and stimulants. It’s my impression that aphantasia is an expression of a deficiency in the human-brain.