Like in a housing shortage you’re hoarding property and profiting off it.

Housing shortages are caused by bad government policy: namely, low-density zoning. Direct your anger towards the entity that deserves it, and make them fix their fuck-up.

(Note: I’m not making some kind of Libertarian “all government is bad” argument here. I’m saying that in this specific case, the laws need to be changed.)

ITT: folks who think Linux is too complicated or whatever, but are perfectly willing to jump through endless hoops to work around some of Windows’ deliberate hostility.

The Stockholm syndrome is real.

So it would’ve been fine and dandy if the cyclist had been killed by someone driving a Prius?

'Cause that’s what you imply by placing this bullshit emphasis trying to single out big trucks in particular. Comments like yours reek of implied small-car apologism, and I, for one, am getting sick and hired of it!

There’s a reason this community is called “fuck cars,” and not “fuck big trucks” or something. it’s because the problem is cars — all of them!

Any car, even the smallest, can turn a pedestrian or cyclist into a red smear when driven negligently.

Every car, even the smallest, takes up an entire lane on the street and an entire parking space.

Every car, even the smallest, contributes to car-dependent urban design.

Singling out big trucks as if they’re materially worse than all the other death machines is nothing but a distraction from the real problem at best, and an active disinformation campaign at worst. Our goals should be to get people out of cars entirely, not just into smaller ones!

The really fucked up part about that situation is the “strip mall across the highway from her neighborhood” part.

Car-dependent urban design has really done a number on every generation since the Silent Generation.

Georgia has more counties than any other state*. We’re fuckin’ overflowing with counties 'round here!

(* Edit: except Texas, which I forgot about, but which doesn’t count because having a lot of counties makes sense for a huge state)

What do you mean, “most?” Electron apps are the vast minority of desktop apps.

Aww, alternativeto.net isn’t that bad…

If it doesn’t conform to the format, you should pick a different one that it does conform to and use that instead.

I keep trying OpenStreetMaps based mapping apps, but giving up on them because they can never seem to find locations I search for by address.

Considered in and of themselves, permissive licenses are “fine.” They confer all four of the freedoms the FSF lists here, so there’s nothing wrong with them from the perspective of the person receiving the code as an end-user.

The problem is that, unlike copyleft, they fail to bind that recipient to the same conditions and guarantee those freedoms will be maintained for all downstream users who receive the code in the future. They are thus exploitable by those who would take without giving back in return. This makes permissively-licensed code popular with the exploiters, but is bad for the users in the long run.

See, for example, MacOS and iOS: in theory, they’re just BSDs with fancy proprietary UIs, but in practice they can be made so locked-down and user-hostile there’s an entire movement devoted to creating new laws to force Apple to stop bricking people’s property because they needed to replace a bad hardware component. Those four freedoms I referenced earlier are definitely no longer being upheld by Apple, even though Apple itself benefited from them to make the software in the first place.

There’s a reason why copyleft-licensed Linux is so much more popular than permissively-licensed BSD, and resistance to selfish bad actors (even as flawed as it is, what with the “tivoization” exploit of the GPLv2 and all) fragmenting the community with proprietary features is undoubtedly part of it.

I’m not particularly militant about Linux distros, but Alpine is one distro I disapprove of in particular. The reason is that it isn’t GNU/Linux – it strips out (copyleft) GNU libc and coreutils and replaces them with permissively-licensed alternatives. I think that (whether intentional or not) it caters too much to corporate interests that exploit “open source” without truly respecting the users’ freedom, and therefore its popularity is potentially harmful to the Free Software movement in the long run.

This is one of this things where I can’t decide, is it more sad, scary or stupid.

It’s criminal. Locking up capabilities of hardware you already bought and trying to extract rents for them is literally no different than a mafia protection racket. These car company execs deserve to go go prison for racketeering.

Virgin car ownership

On the contrary: letting manufacturers extract rents for capabilities that the owner already paid for by virtue of having bought the physical device is the opposite of “ownership,” and that’s the problem here!

Using mass transit is great, but it does nothing to stop this attack on our property rights.

I still own only cars from the '90s and 2000s because of this issue (along with stuff like telemetry spying on you, etc.). However, even if just driving old cars forever works for me, it’s hardly a solution for society in general simply because there aren’t enough old cars for everybody to have one, let alone all the other problems with it.

These companies are trying to destroy our property rights in order to engage in unethical and abusive rentiership. The correct solution is legislative, not just to ignore them and hope they’ll stop!

Although I enthusiastically agree, that’s a little off-topic to be the takeaway from this particular kind of article.

In this case, the issue to be outraged about is that the corporations are violating our property rights in order to engage in illegal rentiership. As owners, we have the right to modify our own property, including to unlock the full potential of the physical machine, and no amount of DRM or the DMCA anti-circumvention clause should be allowed to change that!

That doesn’t need any kind of new “right to repair” or anything either; it is inherent to the definitions of what “property” and “ownership” are! I mean sure, we should impose requirements for products to be better designed for repairability and have documentation and spare parts available, but lots of people seem to think what Mecedes etc. are doing is currently within their rights, and that’s just crazy talk. These things aren’t legitimate subscriptions; they’re a protection racket! Trying to hold capabilities hostage that the device owner already paid for (by virtue of having bought the physical device) is literally criminal and company executives ought to be going to prison for it.

Anyway, to get back to addessing your comment: even if we do fix the zoning code to make cities walkable (which we definitely should do, by the way) and cars become a niche product that only rural people and folks who have to drive around as part of their job have, it still doesn’t fix this issue because (a) it’s important to protect the rights of owners even of niche products, and even more importantly (b) cars are hardly the only product category that manufacturers are trying to pull this shit in anyway.

TL;DR: stopping the erosion of ownership and fixing car dependency are orthogonal issues, this article is concerned with the former, and your suggestion only addresses the latter.

The real bottom line is that when you create an underclass of people whose neighborhoods get firebombed or bulldozed when they get too affluent (see e.g. “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa and Auburn Avenue (formerly “the richest Negro street in the world”) in Atanta, respectively) and had generations of absent fathers due to persecution for things like “vagrancy”, of course they’re going to stop giving a shit about laws that bind but do not protect them! It’s entirely rational that people systematically excluded from being able to get ahead while acting within the law, and whose behaviors are deliberately criminalized in order to target them, would end up committing crimes at higher rates than the people benefiting from their oppression did. In other words, even if it’s true that they actually commit crimes at higher rates (as opposed to being accused at higher rates or being less likely to avoid conviction, as you pointed out, which just make the statistical bias even worse by compounding on top), even that is disingenous because it ignores that the disparity is caused by classism and institutional racism, not anything intrinsic to their race itself. The fiction that it’s somehow their own fault is like a society-wide version of “stop hitting yourself.”

I’ve only really used Gentoo, Debian and Ubuntu (in that order!), each for years at a time over the past two decades. I suppose it shows how progessively fewer fucks I give about the inner workings of the system.

I also tried to install a copy of… TurboLinux 6, I think? that I got from a Ham Radio swap meet as a kid sometime in the '90s, but I never got it to work.