No one will believe you, so they'll call it "sock therapy."
The Waffle House Index needs to be updated to add a new code: Swastica Red. Locked Doors Due to Presence of Conservative Politician.
It's cold outside all year round and there's abundant geothermal energy. Basically, it's the perfect place to build data centers.
They'll pay the fee and underpay the H1-B visa holders even more to make up the difference.
They're indentured servants. They can't quit or they risk being deported by an increasingly violent ICE.
This guy does berry good work.
What would happen if bedbugs went extinct? Other than mass celebrations, I mean.
I dunno. What kind of service can you get with LowG™?
I think you mean it's about to go gyatt, skibidy sigma before the kids get older and it gets an ohio negative aura.
I work for a huge bank that's investing a non-trivial amount of money (billions) in single family homes. They don't plan to rent them out. They just want to own them.
Now why would a huge, rich bank invest in something like that? Because they're pretty sure they're going beat inflation when they resell those properties later. It's a very safe (if spread across the entire US and Canada) place to park money.
It's not a big deal if one or two banks do this or even a handful of private equity firms. However, when all of them do it at once (like they are now) it can have a major impact on the prices of single family homes. It also creates something called a, "systemic risk" but that's a very large topic that I'm not going to cover here.
The point is that yes: The big banks and big private equity firms (and 401ks!) all own way too much non-commercial real estate in general right now and their expansion into single family homes is a great big societal problem.
...but why now‽ Why haven't they been investing in huge swaths of single family homes since forever? I mean, they've been appreciating faster than inflation since forever with only a few minor hiccups (e.g. 2008). The answer is: It used to be much more expensive to maintain homes that don't have anyone living in them.
Back in the day most homes were unique. In any given neighborhood some homes might have gas heat while others had electric and some others used oil or coal! There were also more fire and flood hazards with more flammable furnishings/building materials and things like washing machine hoses would often just break after a certain amount of time (the seals were only good for like ten years).
These days you have endless amounts of cookie cutter homes in enormous neighborhoods all over the damned place. They're also built to vastly superior building standards and come with appliances and AC that are orders of magnitude more efficient than in decades past.
This means a big bank or private equity firm can buy hundreds of houses in a region and (cheaply) hire a 3rd party to look after them. They just don't need as much maintenance as they used to. They're so much cheaper to maintain en mass.
So how do we fix this problem? There's all sorts of things you can do but some quick and perhaps unexpected things are:
- Raise minimum wage and crack down on businesses hiring illegal workers doing house maintenance work (let them do construction 👍).
- Raise property taxes in general. You could try to raise them for homes without people living in them but then you just end up creating other unintended consequences/problems (which I won't get into to stay brief)
- Force upgrades on unoccupied homes. Air conditioning system is 10 years old? You have to get a new one with improved efficiency. House has gas stoves? You have to replace those.
- Force inspections of unoccupied homes and come down hard in regards to code enforcement (every unoccupied home poses a nonzero fire risk to every neighborhood).
Basically, you have to turn unoccupied homes into expenses again. When that happens the banks and private equity will get the hell out.
There's lots of private equity that will just convert to being slumlords but the big banks do not want to be renting out anything. It's a huge risk for them and looks real bad on their balance sheets from a banking perspective. Also, if a bank is big enough they're straight up forbidden (by law) from renting out properties (though there's various loopholes which I won't get into).
They're investing heavily in podcasts because podcasts are far, far more profitable than music. If they can get people used to (and hooked) on listening to podcasts (any podcasts) through Spotify then all that money spent on popular podcasters will be worth it (in the end).
I'm sure Spotify would love it if they could stop streaming music entirely and just focus on podcasts. Streaming music costs them a ton of money and overhead (bureaucracy associated with keeping track of and paying artists globally with bazillions of laws and regulations and fees to navigate) whereas podcasts just cost bandwidth.
There are risks with server security and threat of being hacked
[Citation Needed]. I'm a security professional (my day job involves auditing code). I had a look through the Lemmy source (I'm also a Rust developer) and didn't see anything there that would indicate any security issues. They made good architecture decisions (from a security perspective).
NOTES ABOUT LEMMY SECURITY:
User passwords are hashed with bcrypt which isn't quite as good a choice as argon2 but it's plenty good enough (waaaaay better than most server side stuff where developers who don't know any better end up using completely inappropriate algorithms like SHA-256 or worse stuff like MD5). They hard-coded the use of DEFAULT_COST which I think is a mistake but it's not a big deal (maybe I'll open a ticket to get that changed to a configurable parameter after typing this).
I have some minor nitpicks with the variable naming which can lead to confusion when auditing the code (from a security perspective). For example: form_with_encrypted_password.password_encrypted = password_hash; A hashed password is not the same thing as an "encrypted password". An "encrypted password" can be reversed if you have the key used to encrypt it. A hashed password cannot be reversed without spending enormous amounts of computing resources (and possibly thousands of years in the case of bcrypt at DEFAULT_COST). A trivial variable name refactoring could do wonders here (maybe I should submit a PR).
From an OWASP common vulnerabilities standpoint Lemmy is protected via the frameworks it was built upon. For example, Lemmy uses Diesel for Object Relational Mapping (ORM, aka "the database framework") which necessitates the use of its own syntax instead of making raw SQL calls. This makes it so that Lemmy can (in theory) work with many different database back-ends (whatever Diesel supports) but it also completely negates SQL injection attacks.
Lemmy doesn't allow (executable) JavaScript in posts/comments (via various means not the least of which is passing everything through a Markdown compiler) so cross-site scripting vulnerabilities are taken care of as well as Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF).
Cookie security is handled via the jsonwebtoken crate which uses a randomly-generated secret to sign all the fields in the cookie. So if you tried to change something in the cookie Lemmy would detect that and throw it out the whole cookie (you'd have to re-login after messing with it). This takes care of the most common session/authentication management vulnerabilities and plays a role in protecting against CSRF as well.
Lemmy's code also validates every single API request very robustly. It not only verifies that any given incoming request is in the absolute correct format it also validates the timestamp in the user's cookie (it's a JWT thing).
Finally, Lemmy is built using a programming language that was engineered from the ground up to be secure (well, free from bugs related to memory management, race conditions, and unchecked bounds): Rust. The likelihood that there's a memory-related vulnerability in the code is exceptionally low and Lemmy has tests built into its own code that validate most functions (clone the repo and run cargo test to verify). It even has a built-in test to validate that tampered cookies/credentials will fail to authenticate (which is fantastic--good job devs!).
REFERENCES:
- Use of
DEFAULT_COST: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/050216eed97380c8c1682ba065cf5e62f0961934/crates/db_schema/src/impls/local_user.rs#L18C20-L18C32 - How actix-web stores cookies: https://docs.rs/actix-web/latest/actix_web/cookie/struct.Cookie.html
jsonwebtokenEncodingKey: https://docs.rs/jsonwebtoken/8.3.0/jsonwebtoken/struct.EncodingKey.html
riskable
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joined 3 years ago
That's literally their job.