People still complain about PHP saying how it is not secure at all, how shitty of a language it is, and so on, because they are stuck at PHP 5. Everyone should just start from PHP 8.
I have no clue what the future brings for PHP, but PHP 8 is definitely a good start, and we should put PHP 5 to rest.
PHP 10 might not be that different from PHP 8 for all I know.
We do not know if there will be "constant change". Out of curiosity, what programming language do you use that you also love?
FWIW, if by "constant change" you mean improvements or bug fixes, then I do not see why we should not have those. I do not even mind breaking backwards compatibility if the reasons for breaking justifies it, but it has to be a really good reason.
It gets updated but breaking changes are not that many and always well justified. Most breaking changes I've seen the past decade only broke if your code was already bad relying on non standard ways of using language features. There are tools that help with migration.
People also hate how _slowly_ Python moves and complained forever about that. They also complained forever during the many years of 5.x PHP releases that PHP was moving too slow. It was only after Facebook forked first the runtime (HHVM) and the language (Hacklang) and showed how fast and advanced PHP could be made that the PHP team started accelerating. Which I think has been a boon to the community. This is all given away for free as open-source after all.
From a purely mathematical, scientific, and logical standpoint, I must regard this article as entirely speculative. The scientific claims it presents are extraordinarily improbable, and sound reasoning compels their complete dismissal.
History repeatedly shows that the popular: "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence" is often dependent on the frame of reference.
What is thought to be likely is used to frame conventional wisdom as truth, making the new viewpoint "extraordinary, until, over and over again, the new viewpoint becomes conventional wisdom. So "extraordinarily improbable" is really just an overton window framing (what we accept/don't accept), rather than a statement based in logic. Though your overall framing reminds me so much of historical phrases that I wonder if you are being intentionally ironic.
There's a resurgence of patriotism in the political right in Britain from what I hear. They have a few years yet before the next election so we'll see where this goes, but I wouldn't count out the English people yet.
Humans are certainly not winning the war on cancer. Not even close. Now, even children perish from cancer in America. Things are getting worse, not better. When you get cancer, you'll better understand the hopelessness.
Landlords have 100% risk. Look what happened to California, when the state said tenants did not have to pay rent. Same for Washington, NY, IL, etc... The vast majority of people with rental properties are just regular people trying to make a living.
My landlords have basically frozen rent since 2010. I pay half of what the people in the houses around me do. I'm very thankful to have landlords that aren't greedy.
You because you didn’t have to come out of pocket the high cost of a down payment, handle maintenance costs, deal with the risk of mortgage default if you lost your income, deal with the possibility (and thus hold insurance for) of liability if someone is injured and sues, or lose out on the opportunity cost of money spent on the house versus what else that money could have purchased. To say nothing of you don’t know what their interest rates are, how property taxes or cost of home owners insurance may have changed (in the U.S. your escrow payments change often if taxes and insurance change) or how liquid the house is (ie could they sell if they needed to and at what discount to the market value).
Oh, and don’t forget that they’re paying interest on the mortgage and that - when adjusted for inflation - the actual increase in value versus what they’ve paid in in mortgage interest over the years is probably far less than the non adjusted gains it looks like.
It’s pretty easy to demonize owner landlords when you’ve always been a renter because you think only about a monthly payment. I’m not going to tell you that’s it’s a relative luxury to be fixated on one simple payment each month, but it’s also not the case that owning a home as an individual is some kind of pot of gold.
An owner that values their tenant and keeps their rent flat isn’t a saint. But they’re also doing a good thing in a time when they could be - by account of this thread - exploiting people for as much as possible. We don’t need to order them a parade, but it might be worth broadening your understanding of what the cost of a home is before you blanket assume they’re worthy of scorn.
Seems like I struck a nerve in some way? It's 2024 and you can call a man a dog to his face or even stomp on his blue suede shoes, but as soon as an argument has a walletary impact, the response is swift and lethal.
Maintenance is just not an argument. Unless you choose – yes choose – to rent to destructive tenants, or in other ways are irresponsible with your property, maintenance cost is a tiny fraction of what you get from rent. The same for insurance, taxes, etc that you list. Nobody is unaware of these costs.
With that said, I'm not demonizing over these landlords. I'm sure they're fine people and could be worse like you say.
A renter should not be any more grateful to the landlord than a worker should be grateful to the shareholder for paying their salary. It is an exchange. I do think it is better when homeowners at least rent out their property instead of just letting it rot abandoned like many choose. The most decent thing of course would be for them to sell property they don't need and we wouldn't be living in this dystopia from the beginning.
The youth of the industrialized nations are vanishing on a grander scale than ever seen - for petty gains to a few. And those gains will be short lived when the economy folds in on itself due to the impossibility for productive people to have a home. In the end you cannot have an extremely highly skilled workforce that is needed to sustain a modern economy, while at the same time keeping them dumbed down enough to accept total life long exploitation and their own genetical extermination.
> A renter should not be any more grateful to the landlord than a worker should be grateful to the shareholder for paying their salary. It is an exchange.
All true, but there can be a lot of "quality of life" variance in how that exchange is implemented in practice. I've been a tenant a couple of times and now had a couple of tenants myself. Landlords can make things more or less difficult while offering the same agreement, and tenants can make things more or less difficult while complying fully with the same agreement.
I'm grateful whenever someone chooses to do better than the bare minimum required by the agreement. If anyone reading this takes good faith for granted, I urge you to at least read horror stories on reddit.
If their fixed costs are low, the tenant could be making more through investments after staying in the same house for 15 years.
Buying makes a ton of sense if you're going to live somewhere for a long time of course, but if you start out not sure and you have a nice landlord that doesn't take advantage of you with perpetual rent increases every year, then it can make sense to ride it out and invest your "inflated" income every year instead. By the time the tenant moves out, they have a nice portfolio to leverage for a new property and the landlord has gotten a decent return on their investment with a stable tenant.
In this scenario, it seems to me that main driver of disparity in our society is landlords' push to always increase rent even when the mortgage is being paid 2x or 3x over each month, just because it's allowed.
I'm not saying we need rent controls necessarily as a way to fix the problem, but that is one problem that rent control solves. Perhaps paired with some other scheme (3% max increase per year for first 5 years of renting, then capped at 1%?) we could find a more equitable way to account for inflation of repair costs while not screwing tenants with "forced" moves every few years when the rent becomes unaffordable.
Where can we find stats on this? Lots of claims in this thread feel good but don't point to number-sources.
I do know a few retirees who rent-out the home they raised their family in and live in a new primary. But my town also has some developers who build and rent.
Since when has war ever been tit-for-tat. Since the beginning of time, if a nation where to attack and make war with another nation, they had to measure carefully the consequences if they were to lose... because losing meant losing everything. This is no different. Russia attacking Ukraine is no different. No one is tracing and counting every bullet Russia fires and certainly no world court is saying anything at all to Russia… or to Turkey, or Iran, or Syria, or anyone else… except for Israel. Gaza attacked Israel and like any nation that goes to war, they will either win or lose. Consider carefully before declaring war against your enemy…. Everything is at stake.
You're right that the violence and devastation Israel has laid upon Gaza has historic precedence. Genghis Khan completely destroyed cities that he considered cultural enemies, to give one example. You'll find many instances of genocide in the history books, even post WW2. Israel is not unique in that regard either.
But why does it matter? Does historical barbarity justify present day barbarity? It doesn't, and we all know it doesn't.
It's not the case that Israel is held to a higher standard. Russia has been widely condemned, blocked from international finance, and faces severe sanctions. On top of that, western countries have given substantial military and intelligence aid to Ukraine. Russia had reasons for their invasion of Ukraine (just like Israel has its reasons), but so what? Russia being angry at Ukraine is not a justification for destroying the country.
I also take issue with your characterization that Gaza "started it". This is a 70+ year conflict with many chapters of violence in it, and innocent Palestinians make up the bulk of the casualties. Israel is not the victim here.
Finally, it's not accurate to talk about Israel/Gaza as two nations at war. Israel controls everything coming in and going out of Gaza, electricity, water, etc. Palestine is not an independent country or a state, it's part of Israel except its citizens have no rights.
