As a rule, files never get deleted… They get over written. So it depends on whether that process has happened to any loose images.

I failed maths, but I’m great at logic, which I consider to be the more important proficiency for programming.

Israel’s United Nations ambassador displayed a yellow star on his chest Monday as he addressed the Security Council, provocatively pledging to wear the badge until members of the body condemn Hamas “atrocities”.

Issued on: 31/10/2023 - 01:47Modified: 31/10/2023 - 09:23

2 min



His wearing of the badge, which has come to symbolise the oppression of Jews since its imposition in Nazi-occupied Europe, was swiftly criticised by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, which urged him to wear the Israeli flag instead.

They were building like five a year or something ridiculous because it’s Musk’s pet project, and so nothing was designed in a mass production friendly way.

They fail the safety standards in most countries that aren’t the USA.

Light can’t melt steel beams, otherwise all the buildings would collapse. /s

Couldn’t this also incentivise China to consider invading Taiwan more seriously.

Edit: apparently people don’t see anyways that the US denying chips to China could be an extra incentive for them invading Taiwan.

No, I’m not really fine with banks profiting of mortgages, but I am more fine with it than I am private individuals. This is for a couple of reasons:

Banks are easier to regulate.

Banks are more directly related to the life of a currency, they’re responsible for the buying of government bonds which enables the money supply to be increased.

A disparity between the wealth of banks and the wealth of private individuals is already an stable established norm.

It’s not common for banks to be owned by private individuals.

Banks can be owned by unions.

Land is a finite resource, and I’m not sure anyone has cracked how best to manage it. I like some of what Vietnam does, where if you live in a rural area and can prove that you know how to raise crops (via a standard test) the government will allocate you a plot of farmland to farm. This has resulted in 70% of their population being farmers, and 86% of the population owning their own homes. So ultimately I think the state and probably a state bank, or state land bank, should probably be responsible for managing mortgages.

The word mortgage actually breaks down to death’s pledge by the way. It’s the kind of thing designed to take someone a lifetime to pay off.

It’s all pretty dark, and really I think housing should be a human right. I think if people were responsible for their own homes we’d see better upkeep, and that to some degree housing, shelter, and land should be seen as a nexus point between the citizen and the nation which is made up of the geographical area parceled out and built on to live in.

The less public housing is made, and the more like a private speculator’s market it becomes, the greater wealth disparity we’ll see. Housing is tied up with homelessness which is a key indicator of how in decline citizen’s feel their society to be. Leaving that up to the free market is insane, and represents just how “sold out” our lives can be.

It’s part of maintaining the physical, financial and mental health of the population. We shouldn’t leave it up to profiteers.

I can understand having a death’s pledge to the state. I can’t understand paying off someone else’s death pledge with your life, so that they can buy more and more houses and do more of the same. What are these, soul collector’s?

Societies with a narrower wealth disparity (a smaller gap between the richest and poorest) tend to be better off, more unified, more humanitarian, more democratically capable, and less tolerant of injustices. Making sure the rental system doesn’t become a speculative investment market is an important aspect of a society’s success, empathy, and of the quality of life and peace of mind of citizens.

Sorry if I sounded harsh to you earlier. Hopefully one day in the future, neither of us will rent.

Just seemed to have no logical end point. Like stop, you’ve got yours, retire from the game before you die… Well, now she’s going to die early. That’s heavy but it’s the path she chose.

Interestingly enough, something like 86% of Vietnamese people own their own homes…

In part it’s because 70% of the population are farmers, and if you live in a rural area and pass a test on raising crops the government will just assign you a plot to farm.

I imagine home ownership is also very high in Japan, where they’ve had a negative interest rate and deflation for 25 years. Their housing bubble burst with their aged population explosion and the total population being in decline.

Would a community-minded individual buying a second home in their own neighborhood to rent out cause them to become less community-minded?

Probably, because it would probably cause them to become entitled, or have an overly endowed sense of entitlement or control over the area (by valorisation of the owning more of it). They’d probably bring it up whenever they could, especially at council meetings as of its an act of charity when it’s still rent seeking.

That sense of entitlement is generally termed “being a Karen” these days, and is a Common phenomena among financially sucessful liberals

Would being transparent with the renter about the total cost of owning the property, like the mortgage payment, property taxes, insurance, etc., then basing the rent payment off that total cost plus 10% or something be ethical?

What? Rubbing the renters face in the fact that they’ve got them paying off a mortgage that the renter could probably afford themselves if they only had the CAPITAL outlay for a down payment on the place they’re now forced to rent?

No, the ethical move would be to place the house in the renters name proportionally as they pay it off - because they’re the ones actually paying the mortgage. Making the false claim of “oh look how much of YOUR MONEY this is costing me” isn’t some how more ethical.

This is the nature of capitalism, it privileges people with CAPITAL. Rubbing the renters nose in that fact doesn’t suddenly make it ethical. Most renters already know they’re paying off someone else’s mortgage - or in some cases second or third mortgage - that’s part of the whole problem. That’s what “rent seeking” is, the creation of a false middle man who collects rent without doing the work of the actual person charged with paying.

You can’t make it ethical simply by telling the victim that that’s what you’re doing. No.

A mugging doesn’t become more ethical if the mugger explains what they’re doing and how much of the person’s cash they’re gonna spend on what.

but I also recognize that many people don’t want the commitment that comes with purchasing a home.

That’s not a thing. You’ve made something up, and it sounds like you’re feeling a suitable guilt for your rent seeking behaviour.

People WANT the commitment, security, and stability of owning their own homes, they just can’t find a bank to offer the Capital outlay, or can’t find an available property within their means because HOUSING HAS BEEN MADE INTO AN INVESTMENT COMMODITY. That the wealthy wittingly or unwittingly use to take advantage of the poor people paying off their mortgages. So you need to get real on this issue.

How can the need for those people be met without landlords existing?

By banks determining who can have a mortgage by who has a healthy record of paying rent on time. If someone is consistently the source of the cost of the mortgage THEY should be trust worthy enough for their own similar mortgage. That’s just common sense.

But instead HOUSING HAS BEEN MADE INTO AN INVESTMENT COMMODITY that the wealthy (wittingly or unwittingly) use to take advantage of the poor people paying off their mortgages… It’s rent seeking behaviour.

Would it be through something like cities mandating a certain ratio of SFH’s to apartments/duplexes, then only allowing landlords to own and rent apartments? Although that seems like it would conflict with community-mindedness.

Yeah, seems like something that just privileges the moneyed Capitalist class.

More on topic, yeah. Personal feelings on the death penalty aside, this is what a country not bowing to the billionaire class looks like. As an American, it’s honestly refreshing to see someone with that much money held to actual accountability for their actions.

Yes, it doesn’t happen so much in America because America is a Capitalist oriented feudalist system designed with poverty as a feature of the system. Gotta have someone for the upper class people to exploit.

I’d love to tell you different because it’s clear you have a conscience even though you’re living your part in the system… But I can’t.

Thanks for trying to make an “Ethical Capitalism” but there can seldom be such a thing (it’s a bit of a contradiction in terms). Australia is trying to get a thing called HAFF (the housing future fund) up and running, where building unions pay for starting the construction of new housing but the housing is still sold on the open market of Capitalism as a commodity to whoever has the largest Capital outlay… So yeah.

The UK has more co-op housing, where subsidized housing is owned and ran by the tenants… but it’s still not quite ethical and pretty hard to get into because it’s not a large program.

Congrats on being a home owner (I assume). Maybe you got lucky and under other circumstances you’d be on the other (less pleasant) side of the equation.

Doing a multi billion dollar realestate fraud, in a semi-communist “Socialist Oriented Market Economy”…

…yeah the penalty is gonna be on the steep side. Landlords, rent seekers, and fraudsters aren’t looked upon nicely anywhere, but particularly so in a country with that relationship to communism.

Landlords aren’t generally considered communal minded. Fraud isn’t good for the community, it’s not done for the collective good.

The immune system of the masses has weeded out the what was going on here, and will deal with it via putting the perpetrator to death. Making sure this outrageous and damaging conduct will not continue or be encouraged.

It’s a tough call, and they’re making it.

Everybody can use whichever pictures they like as far as I am concerned.

Not really, it’s a shared data set to make sure colours appear at uniform levels across different media and types of software in order to maintain stable image formats that can be sent over internet protocols…

…the whole point is to have a catalogue of standard test images to compare transfer and compression results to globally.

Yes, I’m saying in a more sexually liberated society, one that’s more comfortable with nudity and the human body, people might go: “Oh of course we can include nudes in the data set, here’s a bunch more!”.

You’re saying in a sexually liberated society one more comfortable with nudity, people would still be viewing this in a state of discomfort.

You came here to say this, regardless of anything I said, and so are yourself not interested in the consent of all parties in this very conversation (which is with a person by the way).

I am just a prop, and you simply don’t need to listen to me. Because you will say what you have to say and will mutilate whatever was being said in order to return to the status quo regardless of the comment you were replying to.

This isn’t about me, it’s about what you have to say. So I hope you feel better about having a one sided and belittling conversation.

I find you inadequate as an intelligent chat partner, so will block you now. I suspect that you will gain satisfaction from this, as a repressive. So enjoy.

I think in a more sexually open society …their opinions about sexual content would be considered.

Like how I said in my original comment “switch Lena’s photo if she doesn’t want it in there anymore”…

So as you can see, I was already saying a sexually open world would be considerate, even though you’re phrasing it as if we’re disagreeing. Perhaps this is because you wish the conversation to go to an oppositional and hence repressive/aggressive place.

I think that would be a reasonable response if one felt subjugated and traumatized, injured and trapped by the current patriarchal systems of sex and power imbalance, and it might be difficult to see how sexuality, nudity, and pornography could be sociologically dealt with, understood, or theorised about outside of that framework.

Thus a dream of a better world can be stolen and held back be the pre-existing and persisting traumas of how we treat sex, bodies, nudity, and self-image in this one.

But there can be sex positive and body positive form of sex, sexuality and pornography that include being comfortable with nudity, and even taboo. I was proposing such a parallel world…

But you continue to cast it as the same as this world. That is your choice, but to continue to make that same choice is an act of killing communication and hence progress on the issues of this world.

The nature of fiction even in a passing comment, like the one I made, is to explore the possible and impossible. So beware what you make impossible.

Yes and I’m saying in a more sexually open society we’d just admit that people lust after people of all genders, and include some others in the data set.

Teenagers were always mentally ill, we just make more efforts to report such nowadays.

The education system is not a place of mental wellness, and the transition to adulthood is innately disturbing.

Some people are triggered by nudity. On another timeline the conclusion of this “scandal” would be to include a retro photo of a naked dude in the test image data set (and maybe also switch Lena’s photo if she doesn’t want it in there anymore).

The shoulder belongs to them, and they are a woman, so it really doesn’t matter in this informal setting.

Language is about being able to communicate, not whatever trip you’re on.

Yes the US has a 10 year agreement where they pay Israel $38 billion to maintain the apartied, and in exchange Israel agrees to switch to more and more US military and arms suppliers.

It’s an Obama era deal. That kicked in 2019. Pays out $3.8 billion a year for ten years.

Meta also own Instagram and Threads… And you don’t have to link those two services either.

…that’s a lot more account separation than Google gives you. It’s gets some people’s phone, email, location, and search history.