It's too bad we can't mix and match parts of releases as desired. If I could have OS X 10.9 Mavericks (last Aqua release) with 10.6 Spaces and modern macOS integration features (Continuity, etc) I'd be in heaven.
The issue for me is how buggy the modern features are. Continuity with the clipboard: sometimes I copy text on my phone, and it just never pastes on my Mac. Why? No idea. It's not even like text is a complex format. It just... never pastes.
Or this morning I spent ages trying to connect to my phone's personal hotspot. It was a foot away on the table. It kept saying it could not connect. Turn things off, turn them on again, turn off, on again... I eventually moved to where I have wifi. It's a nice day today and I wanted to be outside. Annoying.
And repeated grinding failures like this form a slow, slow, growth of real frustration and annoyance with Apple. I know I don't hold the same attitude to them these days that I used to, and I think it's the whole set of changes since they dropped Aqua. It's not a good OS any more.
If I'm not mistaken, to keep native titles running, they need to continue to haul around x86 versions of the majority of the system's libraries and frameworks, in which case there's little reason to not continue supporting Rosetta 2 as a whole since the delta between the two library/framework sets is minimal.
To keep games in WINE/CrossOver/etc working all they need to keep around is the x86 translation layer and maybe the x86 slice of OpenGL. Everything else x86 related can be deleted.
From the corner of the industry visible to me, junior hiring was quite weak even prior to the pandemic. It existed but took considerable searching compared to mid-level and senior roles. Most companies wanted someone who could hit the ground running and not need much training or guidance.
Yes, the churn they bring to products that were complete over a decade ago is ridiculous. So much change for change’s sake (or more likely in pursuit of promotions internally) and so little thought to quality, what makes a product good, and what would make users happy.
The trick if own can pull it off is to mortgage in an area with cost of living a step or two down from where one had previously been renting. This was easiest during the proliferation of remote work but can still happen with some persistence.
This way one’s housing costs feel like a bargain and savings (including repair reserves) quickly rack up unless the individual in question has serious problems holding onto money.
On the other hand, renting comes with hidden (and some not so hidden) costs too.
The main one for me is the inherent precariousness that comes with renting. You don’t know how much longer you’re going to be able to stay in your apartment, whether that be due to rent hikes or the landlord deciding that they want to give the apartment to their nephew or any number of other things. The constant low level stress of knowing that you might need to go through the hell of apartment hunting and moving annually is awful.
It’s been much nicer to have a mortgage with more or less locked in monthly payment, even with the maintenance costs that come with the territory. It’s more predictable and frees up mental bandwidth for other things.
I would argue against this. I'm not sure owning is that much better. At the very least it's just as bad as renting if you bought in the past few years... I bought my home in 2023 and since then my monthly HOA payments doubled, my insurance premiums (nearly) tripled and my property taxes have gone up about $1000. Homeownership went from 35% to 45% of my monthly income. If you bought in the past few years, owning has absolutely been nothing short of a liability.
Buying into an HOA means you're effectively renting a portion of your living arrangements. And if the dues doubled in just three years then you bought into a mismanaged HOA, which makes it worse. There's not much you can do about insurance premiums (assuming you've shopped around for better rates) and property taxes, but definitely check the financial situation of the HOA before you buy, or avoid them entirely.
> And if the dues doubled in just three years then you bought into a mismanaged HOA, which makes it worse.
Not necessarily true. Our HOA fees doubled precisely because of drastic insurance premium hikes. There wasn't much that could be done by them to avoid that, and in fact they worked hard to reduce some of those premiums the following year, which resulted in a lower monthly fee for everyone.
I own single family homes in a few different states. None of them are seeing the HOA + Insurance + Tax increases you are describing in the last 2 years.
I'm guessing you bought in a place that is seeing a rapid increase in property values, which I saw in 2020-2022 by owning in a zoom town. That would explain why insurance and taxes are increasing.
It's probably Florida or some other gulf state with weather risk. Could be California with wildfire risk but then they wouldn't have tax increases. In both of these states insurance is going crazy without the property value cause you mention. If it's a condo then insurance can single handedly explain HOA rates (since they buy insurance too) as well as HO insurance rates.
Florida's median property tax is about $2,500, so it's unlikely to go up $1000/yr. Places with high property values within the state of Florida like Miami Beach are mostly seeing decreasing or flat home values in the last couple of years.
I don't want to speculate too much on this poster's property, and I'm not super familiar with gulf real estate. I just wanted to highlight that I have a very different experience even though the post made it sound like their experience was the overwhelming popular one.
Comes down to area and luck. I bought in 2021 and while there have been increases, they’ve been modest. Certainly much less than I would’ve had to deal with had I continued to rent.
For context, property values have gone up 40-50% since 2021. Additional expenses are much easier to digest when you're not already paying an arm and a leg for a house at much higher mortgage rates.
If the market can bear it, those increased costs typically get passed down to renters too. Landlords are usually averse to covering expenses that don't go towards equity. If they can get away with it, they want to charge rent greater than mortgage interest + insurance + maintenance + taxes.
The HOA is something I could fight, but mine is currently cheap. The taxes, however, are infuriating. I’m getting taxed on unrealized gains after having paid taxes when buying the home. There is nothing I can do about the taxes, and if I do not pay my home will be taken. Essentially, I cannot own my home in any meaningful sense.
The road, water, sewer, and various other public services that make your house valuable are not free.
I would familiarize yourself with your city’s municipal budget before complaining about paying taxes. You’re likely being subsidized by urban dwellers if you live outside the city center.
I pay water, sewer, gas, and power to those utilities directly. The taxes to my county don’t pay for roads as that’s handled by the state DOT. The bulk goes to county police, fire, and schools. Yet, these haven’t seen increased costs, the people in those jobs haven’t received pay raises (which, my God, why not?) and overall, I can’t see why my taxes then got raised.
Buying a house with or without a mortgage is definitely a hedge against inflation. I have a couple of siblings in their 60s who are renting and the rents are going up much faster than their social security. Now in both of their cases the rent is about $300/mo higher than their social security. Adding in food, utilities and other expenses they're blowing through their meager savings.
I'm the UK at least, it's also common for the renter to pay council tax, which is analogous to property taxes in other countries.
I imagine this is also likely passed through in the cost of rent in other places.
That said, it's totally possible to have a legal and fiscal framework that makes renting affordable and safe.
The government, particularly in Western countries with insane pressure on the rental market, needs to act as a homebuilder and landlord of the last resort. It keeps supply up, prices and risk down.
We've had a couple of generations locked into the housing market as an investment, and it's causing demand crunches which have artificially inflated prices and are choking and dividing our societies.
I'd happily spend my life in a rental if it was affordable and safe, and part of a considerably more fair society.
I prefer corporate rentals precisely because there is less idiosyncratic risk. They boringly have a strong incentive to keep you renting the same place as long as possible.
The cost of owning absolutely does increase over time. The mortgage payment is just one part of the fully burdened cost. Furthermore, there is a real risk of an unexpected $20k expense that you have to pay for. Owning is less predictable than renting because the liability and risk surface area is much larger.
You can buy home repair insurance if you want to transform unexpected repair expenses into predictable monthly payments. It's a bad idea for exactly the same reasons renting is worse:
Someone else has to approve repairs and contract the labor.
My experience with corporate landlords is that they're incentivized to maximize income, which is emphatically not the same as keeping you renting the place as long as possible. Realpage for example optimizes for higher income at the cost of turnover and lower occupancy.
The sweet spot is a landlord who used to live in the house and still considers it “theirs” and trusts you as a steward, so they repair quickly (or even trust you to get the repairs done and send them the bill) and don’t want to deal with vacancies.
> You don’t know how much longer you’re going to be able to stay in your apartment, whether that be due to rent hikes or the landlord deciding that they want to give the apartment to their nephew or any number of other things.
Absolutely. I had three landlords in a row promise all manner of things. "We're never coming back, moving to the country" (followed by "my wife hates it, we're moving back"). "We're looking to do other investments, we'd happily sign a 5 year lease with you if we could" (WA law limits residential lease lengths. Just as well for them because they decided "the property market is so hot it'd be irresponsible of us not to sell").
Being forced to move in the middle of the school year because the owner want to sell the house kind of sucks, though 5 years of a month-to-month was a bad idea. More landlords are asswipes than not, being able to control your own destiny has advantages. After all, you are paying all of the costs plus a premium for the rental, and you don't even get the paint or floor covering you want, let alone nice things.
that's the nice thing about renting in germany. there this would not work, the owner can sell the house but they can't kick out the tenant. so whoever is buying is taking over the tenant. and while you can ask a tenant to move out if you need the house for yourself, that too has to consider the needs of the tenant. if they have kids in school it is almost impossible to remove them unless you go out of your way to help them find a new place and they are not forced to switch schools.
That’s a very nice theory. Decent real estate first buyer will not even consider rented property. But there are enough unscrupulous shady people who will buy the property at a great discount and get the tenants out. You will be right according the law, but still mistreated. Will you enjoy abuse waiting 3 years for a court? Probably not. It’s not their first rodeo.
most rented property in germany is owned by large firms who make renting out homes their business. for them, that is not an issue. most homes that people buy for themselves are not even available on the rental market. as you say, people who want to buy a home for themselves will not consider rented property. i believe that is true in germany too. if it happens then it is a rare edgecase, and they will be able to find out in advance if the tenant is willing/able to move out.
When you inherit property, it comes however it comes. I've been displaced twice by heirs. A lot of rental houses in the Bay Area are second/empty nests.
Is the landlord obligated to renew the lease at the end in perpetuity? Or does the landlord just need to wait for the lease to expire and then choose to not renew?
in germany by law every lease for private homes is always in perpetuity. the concept of renewal does not even exist. it is always month to month until the tenant decides to move out. you can't not renew a lease. you can raise the rent, but only in small steps. exceptions are if the tenant fails to pay for a few months, damages the property or misbehaves in other ways.
That sounds like a really awful law, TBH. I would never rent to someone if it meant that I was powerless to decide to end the relationship. I'm all for protecting tenants to some extent, but that law strikes me as abusive of the landowner.
i don't agree that it is abuse of the landowner, but you also have to consider that in germany private landowners renting out are extremely rare. always have been.
maintaining rental properties was always a business.
as an individual home owner i would also not want to rent out either unless there are exceptional circumstances. but german cities do not have suburbs like in the US, and any popular area will build up multi tenant apartment blocks. people owning their own house are out in the countryside where noone wants to rent anyways. and any multitenant building is by definition a business. and that's the majority of all rental properties in germany.
you have to keep in mind that germany has the highest ratio of people renting vs owning. renting has become our culture. with so many people renting, laws have to be strict, otherwise we would have chaos. austria is similar. my mother in vienna lives in an apartment that has been rented by someone in our family since 150 years ago.
> any multitenant building is by definition a business
Not inherently so, at least in the US. Lots of multi-family structures in the US have multiple independent owners of their own spaces. Townhouses, condos, and the like are often a collection of individually owned spaces with their own deeds and property rights. There is usually a shared organization, such as an HOA, that is in charge of the management of the joint property. This isn't really a "business" though, it doesn't look to make a profit and is chaired by residents.
As an American it just seems strange to me to have people paying a corporation for the same home for 150 years and still have no real ownership stake in it. Like, over 150 years, wouldn't your family have paid many, many times the actual value of the property?
An important qualification: if you rented as a kid, and now your kids are old enough to rent, your maybe-not-horrible experience is dated and probably no longer applicable. Apartments have largely gone corporate, and I assume also been taken over by private equity. Even cell-phone companies could learn a thing or two from their tactics.
I have had very good experiences with corporate apartments. They tend to have their shit together. Compared to renting from some random old guy that wants to “fix things himself”
Also, if you're a marginal renter, e.g. can't make 3x the rent from a W2 and don't have a co-signer, credit issues, etc. then the randos are more likely to work with you.
My sister was a sex worker for a while when she was younger, and trying to do things like rent was difficult because her income fluctuated a lot (always enough to cover rent, but she'd save during good months for poor ones) and she was technically self-employed. Or if you're on any form of disability, or if you had a medical issue that trashed your credit, etc. People getting out of prison, and so on.
If you stray from the happy path, woe unto you when dealing with large companies.
I'm only in my place because when I moved in, it was owned by a friend of my aunt's.
At the time, I was legally limited in the amount of money I could make because I was relying on Medicaid and subject to income limits. I have MS and not having access to MS drugs is very, very bad and risks permanent consequences. The drugs also are ridiculously expensive (I think my monthly medication is about $30k/dose).
I had money, it was just all earned under the table on the grey market. Not a situation a corporate landlord is going to deal with, but I never missed a rent payment and I'm a very good tenant (clean, report issues promptly, read and adhere to the lease, etc).
I'm no longer subject to those income limits and I have a W2 job now and could qualify for an apartment based on that, but for a long time that wasn't true. On the margins, you end up having to look for the small time landlords, employers, etc. because if you're decent and you can talk to them, you can get a shot.
That's interesting. I suppose you can't run that kind of thing in an S-corp and pay yourself the regular salary. It's what I do. You have a W-2 and everything. But I'm doing the other kind of SW: software.
I had that experience with the last house we rented before we bought.
We were quiet, predictable, don't-rock-the-boat tenants, and the rando owner mentioned that they valued that enough that raising rents wasn't worth the potential risk of new tenants who might cause them more hassle.
I live in an apartment owned by a larger company, the rent raises really slowly in my experience, Like 3% per year. I have been at my unit for 15 years now, never had any problem or regret anything about it.
If I could design society, we’d all live in RVs or other trailer type things, own the structure and rent/buy land as appropriate. But I’m aware this is an unusual opinion.
It just seems nice to be able to customize the structure without being tied to a particular location.
This is not universally true, my lease is indefinite and we have stayed here through ownership changes. My neighbor has rented the same apartment for close to 50 years.
Vote for a better government who cares about you and provides you with proper rights.
It depends on the landlord and type of place. A long-term lease comes with additional considerations for the landlord, mostly in terms of a long-term lease often requiring slightly different legals and a loss of optionality.
While I've had landlords that were not prepared for a long-term lease, I've never had an issue getting one anywhere I've rented. I've also had this work against me i.e. rents actually decreased halfway through the contract.
Because as soon as you sign that longer lease, the landlord will only ever do the absolute minimum repairs because you're stuck in that lease. We have been reporting our leaking roof for years...
They tend to just keep increasing it until you leave then just dial it back a little and get someone else in. Far worse than individual landlord that if you're a good easy tenant is gonna prefer you to an unknown, corporate don't care about that.
There's not much else a new owner is going to do with an apartment complex other than continue to rent out the units, other than possibly tear it down and rebuild if it's very old.
You lease remains in force even with a change in ownership. So in most cases there will be no immediate impact to tenants.
Yeah if I’m sick, I’m gonna stay home if I can help it. Doesn’t matter what is is or how innocuous I think it may be, what gives me the right to spread it around and multiply the misery?
The weight gap between EV and ICE is often exaggerated.
In fact, within ICE vehicles, the gap between sedans/hatchbacks/compact crossovers and giant SUVs and trucks is larger, and yet for some reason we aren’t taxing drivers of Suburbans and F-150s accordingly.
If we applied this logic fairly we should be pushing people to right-size their vehicles regardless of fuel type.
Keeping things simple and calculating the axle weight to the fourth powers of both vehicles, the F-150 causes 5.4x the road wear of the Honda Accord while using only 1.6x the gas.
The reason this doesn't matter so much, though, is that the types of trucks used for shipping goods, when loaded, cause on the order of 10^4 the road wear, dwarfing any differences between standard commuter vehicles, which is why commercial trucks have to stop at weigh stations.
The big trucks also have a lot more tires / tire surface area, to mitigate that. IIUC, the weigh stations are to ensure they aren’t overloading the truck, so that road wear is comparable instead of being that vastly greater
Does this fix the layers palette? Last I knew, in stock GIMP the way it operates is utterly bizarre, supporting none of the multi-select interactions that have been stock in scrolling list views across platforms since the 90s.
iTunes/Music has its merits but in my opinion has been in decline since between versions 6 and 10 depending on the aspects being spoken about. For most of its existence it was subject to constant bloat and always felt a bit "off" compared to other Mac apps due to its nature as a cross-platform Carbon app full of bespoke UI widgets, and though its feature set got pared down and it technically became AppKit-dominant in the transition to "Music", it still doesn't feel right and is out of step with the rest of the OS.
A proper AppKit iTunes-style player with the best parts of iTunes across versions but without the bloat would be a beautiful thing. Even better if it's FOSS so it doesn't get abandoned a few years down the road, as paid players tend to. While there's several apps in this general direction like Doppler[0], nothing really nails it satisfactorily.
It's too bad we can't mix and match parts of releases as desired. If I could have OS X 10.9 Mavericks (last Aqua release) with 10.6 Spaces and modern macOS integration features (Continuity, etc) I'd be in heaven.
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