I disagree, though I know I’ll get roasted for it… Landlords do serve a purpose to a point. Not everyone wants to own property. Owning property ties you to a particular place, makes it difficult to leave. If you know you want to stay in an area for the rest of your life, or even just the next 10 years, absolutely, you should be able to buy, and not being able to is a societal failure. But if you don’t know where you want to spend the rest of your life, you still need shelter now, and renting provides that, and when you decide to go somewhere else, it’s relatively easy. One of my bigger regrets in life was feeling pressured to buy a house in 2005… Just in time for the subprime mortgage crisis. I had a traditional mortgage, but nonetheless, my house went from $150k to <50k in months. I was stuck. Couldn’t sell without coming up with extra money to pay off the mortgage, but I wasn’t in as bad shape as some people, I could afford the payments, so I couldn’t justify walking away, just had to wait for it to rebound, which took another 5 years roughly. Had I been renting, I would have been able to leave much more easily.

If I wave a gun around, I’ll catch a brandishing charge, whether or not I actually plan to shoot anyone, it doesn’t even have to be loaded.

Do you have knowledge of these truly abandoned properties? I could use some adverse possession…

Yeah, in Arizona it’s 2. Much better.

(If an owner is so disconnected from their property that they don’t notice someone living there that they didn’t allow, have they really lost anything?)

Most, sure. But all it takes is one that’s not.

Weird that was my first thought as well… Then who will be held responsible?

Tell that to the high voltage power lines I go for bike rides under… There’s no visible ionization, but I can feel tingling in my hands and sometimes nuts…

Neutron star?

The problem is “path of least resistance” implies that there is only one path, which laymen tend to take literally. I go for bike rides along a canal which also has high voltage power lines running above it. If I hold my handlebars just right, with my hands just barely touching the metal of my brake levers, the (I assume) corona discharge gets rather painful. “Path of least resistance” seems like it should be confined to the wire, but in fact includes ~100 feet of air between wire and ground… And me.

Yes windows can be installed easily, but it’ll require a Microsoft login to do it- this meme is made for people who don’t want that.

I do… Kids in school occasionally need stuff printed. I have a network attached laser printer, it was super easy, barely an inconvenience to set up in Linux. It was fairly easy to setup in windows too, but every so often it stops working randomly for a few minutes, then as soon as I start trying to figure out why, it randomly starts working again… No such trouble from Linux.

That’s fascinating… I knew birds had been linked to dinosaurs for a while but hadn’t given much thought to the implications… I just thought it meant dinosaurs were being reclassified as not reptiles…

Reptiles … penguins

Hold on…

They are, actually. The point of patents and copyright is not to protect the creator- that’s a temporary effect. The point is to release the thing to the public afterwards. The problem is that capitalism corrupts the process and finds ways to make the temporary effects permanent. Disney has succeeded in making copyright last effectively forever.