Google also seems to pad their library with stuff uploaded to YouTube, which I’m pretty sure includes stuff not uploaded by authorized individuals.

Music streaming services are crooked AF

I hate to knock it as a product, but I compared a lot of the books I bought on Kindle and - unless I’m missing something - the selection on Kobo seems quite limited in comparison.

It seems that Amazon is using Kindle Unlimited you lock authors into exclusivity. This reeks of monopoly abuse but of course nobody is going to do anything about that.

Yeah, I’m generally ok if somebody is charging a reasonable rent which covers their reasonable mortgage, so long as they’re still taking care of all the other stuff (repairs, city taxes, etc).

What burns me is people who either a) knowingly buy in a hot, excessively priced market with full intent to charge excessive rents while providing absolutely minimal service or support

b) bought 10+ years ago but have pumped up rents to the same as those who bought at mortgages 2-3x the rate, citing “market rates” and often doing sketchy things to raise rents including renovictions etc, while being shitty - often absentee - slumlords

Maybe I’m showing my age, but there did used to be quite a good number of mom & pop type landlords who weren’t shit, and while the commercial ones cost a bit more there was a decent mix.

Now, the commercial ones are actually mostly a safer bet in small cities. They’ll raise rent every year but consistently, and the decent ones are pretty prompt about repairs and not fucking people over deposits etc. There are bad ones but it’s pretty easy to tell which are which. The problem is of course that availability at the good ones is lower and they do cost more.

Good private landlords are increasingly hard to come by, as the best ones generally end up quitting after either getting too old or after a bad tenant experience, while the slumlords have leveraged their existing properties to finance buying more and more, leading to a market full of increasingly overpriced mould-monsters.

Yeah, I’d tend to agree on that. Even beyond the security issues, nuclear has the potential to be a safe, but it also has the potential to be disastrous if mis-managed.

We see plenty of issues like this already, including what occurred here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-daiichi-accident

Now imagine a plant in Texas, where power companies response to winter outages has basically been “sucks to be you, winterizing is too costly”.

Or maybe we’d like to go with a long-time trusted company, who totally wouldn’t throw away safety and their reputation for a few extra bucks. Boeing comes to mind.

I like nuclear as a power source, but the absolutely needs to be immutable rules in place to ensure it is properly managed and that anyone attempting to cut corners to save costs gets slapped down immediately. Corporate culture in North America seems to indicate otherwise.