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Agree.

So often I see people complaining "people treat their home as an investment…". Because in fact it turns out it is?

Are we supposed to pass laws that fix the price of a home based on the square footage?

(I wonder if jewelers complain that the reason silver is so expensive is that people treat it as an investment.)


Nobody advocates for fixing the price. People want more supply which will bring the cost of housing as a whole down or at least provide more price diversity.

Is it even beneficial to have a house worth a lot of money? Think about places where property is expensive, it is also expensive to live there in general because housing costs so much. The cost of housing means employers have to pay their employees a lot to keep them there. This in turn means you are paying more for goods and services. If you're a homeowner, but NOT a high income person, this is very bad. It means you can't make payments towards maintenance of your house, going out becomes harder, etc. Your quality of life decreases.

People who inherit homes that are worth a lot, but aren't flush with cash end up having to sell frequently because there is no way for them to maintain it. It's also the plot of white lotus season 2 with the villas lol.


Expensive housing means expensive commercial rent too, which means high prices and less quirky niche shops. In Berlin I've watched them disappear and get replaced by a McDonalds or a cryptocurrency startup firm.

> I wonder if jewelers complain that the reason silver is so expensive is that people treat it as an investment.

Probably not since silver is not a basic need nor even a luxury that affords you independence.


"…get annoyed whenever there's new construction…"

People "getting annoyed" doesn't prevent construction of affordable housing. I often see NIMBY comments but never see anything to back up the notion.

Greedy developers that want the largest profit on a given plot of land is probably where you should be looking instead. Why build two inexpensive starter homes when you can build one luxury home and make a larger profit? (Never mind that the county gets larger property tax returns on the more expensive homes.)

And yet. They build high end homes and they sell them anyway. So there seem in fact to be buyers out there?


Go back to AOL.

that's my kids. i'm from usenet.

"DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government…"

Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.


>Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.

Nope, it was about looting the government's data and delivering retribution to perceived enemies (ie: USAID).


Also about destroying the government's investigative/enforcement capacity. USAID's destruction was ideological, but protecting Tesla and SpaceX was existential.

> protecting Tesla and SpaceX was existential

Don't you miss the simpler times when people could just frantically applaud Musk's genius and not be inconvenienced by the truth of how big of a role deception, grifting, and outright fraud played in his success?


Anyone who thought this guy was a genius is probably still frantically applauding.

They saw Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, but didn't really get it.

And racism.

It's always cool to see people discover KiCad and the amazing world we live in now where a hobbyist can come up with something that can masquerade as a commercial offering.

The transition to SMD and having the "fab" do the assembly was another hurdle for me.

Now I tend to consult LCSC Electronics at the same time I am designing my circuit: checking availability and price of the various components I am proposing to use in my design.


But, holyshit, the tariffs when ordering from JLCPCB from the U.S. this year have been astronomical.

It's interesting to me because it tries to protect American options, but for Americans only. It creates an opportunity for the rest of the world to be able to get boards printed far cheaper than the Americans can.

Maybe I'm just catching up to what people already know, but it feels like the tariffs are especially bad for parts and not just products where the U.S. market is the final stop.


I'll have to try OSH Park.

They don't do assembly, just the bare PCBs—and my last projects required assembly.


Pretty clear marketing killed PS when they went to a subscription model.

A subscription model isn't needed to kill software. I think Adobe just stopped caring about product quality. They stopped asking "why do people love Photoshop" and instead just chased quarterly numbers.

Adobe and everyone else. Many of those complaints resonated with me outside of Photoshop

But as I've said in the past, I think there is a relationship between subscriptions and quality: with a subscription model, feedback signals become decoupled. In the past, if the new version isn't good enough, people won't buy it. Now the calculus is changed to whether the product has become bad enough to unsubscribe

Potentially related: trust thermocline (https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01ggz99w9kvpp6yq52abes00eq...)


You also can't stick to the older version, so the choice is can you afford to do your job without any Photoshop or are you stuck.

If you were an honest company, you'd have the current version available for $subscription, and past versions available for some amount more - and use that to see how many people still subscribe but refuse to upgrade.

That’s why I love the Nova.app model. You pay for a year of releases, but if you unsubscribe you keep the latest version when your subscription was active.

It’s the best/worst of both worlds!


Same with most (all?) JetBrains products, and for the first 3 years every year gets cheaper!

The rot started with Flash in 2009. Then it hit Illustrator and Dreamweaver. By 2014 everything was an unstable mess. It coincided with their buyouts of a bunch of competitors including Day, Demdex, and Nitobi. They hit "big enough" size and stopped caring.

With subscriptions, you want to have ways to increase the subscription amount and retain people, which usually leads to adding features no one asks for and bloating the product, trying to upsell users.

Heh, yeah. They have always been chasing quarterly numbers, they just stopped asking, "what do we have to do to sell the next version" and took their customer base for granted.

It looks like they can take their customer base for granted:

https://news.adobe.com/news/2026/06/adobe-q2fy26-financial-r...


> A subscription model isn't needed to kill software.

It's not needed, but it sure helps!


They stopped caring much about Creative Cloud. They were focusing on Experience Cloud which is their euphemism for their advertisement network (products like Adobe Tags).

True, but the subscription model is what allowed them to stop caring. Subscriptions will likely kill more software companies than AI in the long run.

Now, I thought that going to a subscription model would give them the resources/motivation they needed to improve things regularly, and let us customers pay for just what we need. You're telling me the benefits only went one way?

I started with PS2.5. I held onto CS5 until I found Affinity.


I despise their subscription model, but I bet it’s minting them tons of money.

Individuals leaving them (including myself to Affinity) is a drop in the ocean to them


His debut in the 1001 Movies to See Before You Die is in the 1979 film, My Brilliant Career [1].

("Hey, that's a young Sam Neill!")

[1] https://youtu.be/aU3kXBb6Yc4


Finished my hobbyist analog computer [1]. (Just need to make a YouTube video, blog about it…)

[1] https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Anna-Analog-Computer


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