Thunderbird is acquiring Exchange features.

They haven’t turned them on just yet owing to a little last-minute work, but your ability to sync calendars and address books with an ActiveSync/Exchange-compatible eMail server is coming soon.

Our civilization demands that I be profitable to a parasite who leeches a majority of my labour’s value in order to accumulate obscene levels of wealth.

Without exorbitant amounts of time spent maintaining that profitability, I will end up poor, homeless, and eventually dead from exposure. This leaves vanishingly little time to spend on open source work, regardless of how intellectually and ethically attractive it may be.

Try and find a 38" waist with a 36" inseam.

Then that is an availability of options issue, and not any kind of issue where manufactures label a pair of pants to be a 38 when it is really a completely different size.

Not the person you replied to, but…

What would it take Mozilla to do, to break your trust?

To move out of the least-worst option position.

Right now it’s in that position. It’s always been in that position, and IMO it has never not been in that position.

And for the record, I am not talking about Mozilla specifically, but the browser ecosystem for that rendering engine that includes any forks and derivatives… because things like Chrome’s maliciously flawed and user-hostile Manifest v3 also cascade down into forks and alternatives that are based off of it, and so contaminate many other normally-good alternatives.

I was there, during the first advertising push of the mid/late 90s, where visiting the wrong website - or even the right one on the wrong day - spawned “uncloseable” pop-ups and pop-unders… uncloseable because as soon as you tried to dismiss the window, that action triggered a half-dozen more to spawn.

Eventually, the weight of all the browser windows would cause not only the browser to grind to a halt, but even the computer as a whole (single-thread CPUs & minimal RAM, nat), such that your only possible recovery path was to conduct a hard restart of the entire system, your unsaved work be damned.

I feel for those businesses whose only possible funding strategy is via ads, but that well was lethally poisoned for me decades ago. I jumped onto the world’s first adblocker the moment it became available for Phoenix (now Firefox), and I have never looked back. The only way I will ever stop using adblocking is to stop using the Internet entirely.

Then you must have the weirdest waist ever, for a man.

I am able to go out into any store with my current waist size, and get a good-fitting pair virtually every time without even trying it on. Now, I may not like certain styles - I prefer my belt to be at my bellybutton, not halfway down my hips such that any erection can only ever point down - but men’s sizes are remarkably consistent.

In this economic climate, people cannot work for less than it costs to live. Nurses are voting with their feet and taking work that makes economic sense. Ergo, if they cannot keep rural ER’s staffed, then the pay is just too low.

The employment landscape is a free market as well. If you cannot pay the wages it demands, you cannot complain about the lack of applicants.

The homeless “problem” is a direct outgrowth of the housing crisis.

The housing crisis is a direct outgrowth of housing “investors” jacking up prices and rents for 25+ consecutive years without a clear market crash.

The housing crisis can only be resolved with a return to affordability.

A return to affordability would see a housing crash of about 68% Canada-wide, with some markets (Vancouver, Kelowna, etc.) seeing valuation drops of 85% or more.

Remember: the one-third rule states that median housing payments (rent or mortgage) should not be more than one-third of median monthly income, but it also states that median home values should not be more than 3× median annual income.

The second half of that rule indicates that current home values in Kelowna alone - where median home values are just shy of $1M but median incomes as of the 2021 Statistics Canada poll are $35K - means that housing here is 28× that of annual income, or 9× more expensive than it should be.

So for a city like Kelowna to return to a sane and healthy housing market, values would have to crash by a MINIMUM of 89%.

This is what parasitical “investors” - mostly Greatest Generation and Boomers, but as of late no small number of GenX’ers - have done to the housing market.

This is why we are seeing a homeless crisis.

A switchback is to a hiking trail what a hairpin curve is to a mountain road.

The litmus test of determining if there is bigotry involved is to change the terms in contention. If it is bigoted in one direction, it is fundamentally bigoted in both.

You hit the nail on the head when you posited “if this was a guy doing it to his girlfriend” it would be toxic, manipulative, and abusive.

Let’s make misandry as unacceptable as misogyny. Because true equality will be impossible until we do.

Posted in a Canadian channel before, because I am Canadian:

The housing crisis arises out of one problem, and one problem only:

Housing as an investment.

That’s not to say foreigners are to blame - at less than 2% of the market, they don’t have any real impact. British Columbia’s laws against foreign home ownership is nothing more than a red herring, a bullshit move designed to flame racism and bigotry. Yes, some of them are just looking to build anchors in a prosperous first-world country, but most are honest buyers.

A better move has been the “speculation tax”. By taxing more heavily any home that remains empty, it encourages property holders to actually rent these units out, instead of holding out for people desperate enough to pay their nosebleed-high rents.

But all of this misses the real mark: housing used purely as investment.

Now, to be absolutely clear, I am not talking about landlords who have a “mortgage helper” suite, or who have held on to a home or two that they previously lived in. These are typically the good landlords that we need - those with just two or three rental units, and that aren’t landlording as a business, just as a small top-up to their day job or as an extra plump-up to the retirement funds they are living off of. By having many thousands of separate landlords instead of one monolith, healthy competition is preserved.

No, there are two types of “investors” that I would directly target:

1. Flippers
2. Landlords-as-a-business.

1) Flippers

The first group, flippers, also come in two distinct types:

1. Those that buy up homes “on spec” before ground has even been turned, and then re-sell those same homes for much more than they bought shortly before these homes are completed. Sometimes for twice as much as they paid.
2. Those that buy up an older, tired home, slap on a coat of paint, spackle over holes in the walls, paper over the major flaws in hopes that inspectors don’t catch them, and shove in an ultra-cheap but shiny Ikea kitchen that will barely last a decade, then re-sell it for much more than they paid for it.

Both of these groups have contributed to the massive rise in housing purchase prices over the last thirty years. For a family that could afford a 3Bdrm home in 2000, their wages have only increased by half again, while home values have gone up by five times by 2023.

And this all comes down to speculation driving up the cost of homes.

So how do we combat this? Simple: to make it more attractive for owner-occupiers to buy a home than investors.

A family lives in a home that they own for an average of 8 years. Some less, most a lot more. We start by taxing any home sale at 100% for any owner who hasn’t lived in said home as their primary residence for at least two years (730 contiguous days). We then do a straight line depreciation from the end of the second year down to 0% taxation at the end of the eighth year. Or maybe we be kind and use a sigmoid curve to tax the last two years very minimally.

Exceptions can exist, of course, for those who have been widowed, or deployed overseas, or in the RCMP and deployed elsewhere in Canada, or where the house has been ordered to be sold by the court for divorce proceedings, and so forth. But simple bankruptcy would not be eligible, because it would be abused as a loophole.

But the point here is that homes will then become available to those working-class people who have been desperate to get off of the rental merry-go-round, but who have been unable to because home prices have been rising much faster than their down payment ever could.

This tax would absolutely cut investors off at the knees. Flippers would have to live in a home much, much longer, and spec flippers would be put entirely out of business, because they can’t even live in that house until it is fully completed in the first place.

2) Landlords-as-a-business

The second group is much simpler. It involves anyone who has ever bought a home purely to rent it back out, seeking to become a parasite on the backs of working-class Canadians in order to generate a labour-free revenue stream that would replace their day job. Some of these are individuals, but some of these are also businesses. To which there would be two simple laws created:

1. It would become illegal for any business to hold any residential property whatsoever that was in a legally habitable state. This wouldn’t prevent businesses from building homes, but it would prevent a business from buying up entire neighbourhoods just to monopolize that area and jack up the rent to the maximum that the market could bear.
2. Any individual owning more than 5 (or so) rental units (not just homes!) would be re-classified as operating as a business, and therefore become ineligible to own any of them - they would have to immediately sell all of them.

As for № 2, a lot of loopholes can exist that a sharp reader would immediately identify. So we close them, too.

• Children under 24 “operate as a business” automatically with any rental unit. They are allowed ZERO. Because who TF under the age of 25 is wealthy enough to own rental units? No-one, unless these units were “gifted” to them from their parents, in an attempt to skirt the law. So that is one loophole closed.
• Additional immediate family members are reduced by half in the number of rental units they can own. So if a husband has the (arbitrary, for the sake of argument) maximum limit of five, the wife can only have two herself. Any other family member who wants to own a rental unit, and who does not live in the same household, must provide full disclosure to where their money is coming from, and demonstrate that it is not coming from other family members who already own rental units.

By severely constraining the number of investors in the market, more housing becomes available to those who actually want to stop being renters. Actual working-class people can exit the rental market, reducing demand for rental units, and therefore reducing rental prices. These lower rental prices then make landlording less attractive, reducing the investor demand for homes and reducing bidding wars by deep-pocketed investors, eventually reducing overall home values for those who actually want to buy a home to live in it.

Plus, landlords will also become aware of the tax laid out in the first section that targets flippers. If they own rental units that they have never lived in as their primary residence, they will also be unable to sell these units for anything other than a steep loss. They will then try to exit the market before such a tax comes into effect, flooding the market with homes and causing prices to crash. They know that they are staring down two massive problems:

Being stuck with a high-cost asset (purchase price) that only produces a low-revenue stream because renters have exited the market by buying affordable homes, allowing plenty of stock that is pincered by the spec tax that heavily taxes empty rental units, thereby lowering rental prices well beneath the cost of the mortgage on the unit.

By putting these two tools into effect at the same time, we force a massive exodus of landlords out of the marketplace, crashing home values to where they become affordable to working-class people, thereby massively draining the numbers of renters looking for places to rent. Those places still being rented out - by owners who have previously lived in them, or by investors who couldn’t sell in time - would significantly outnumber renters looking for a place to rent, thereby crashing rental prices as renters could then dictate rents by being able to walk away from unattractive units or abusive landlords.

Full disclosure: I own, I don’t rent. But I have vanishingly little sympathy for greed-obsessed parasites that suck the future out of hard-working Canadians who must pay 60% or more of their wages for shitbox rentals to abusive landlords in today’s marketplace. Most people (and pretty much anyone under the age of 30) who don’t already own no longer have any hope of ever owning a house, as their ability to build a down payment shrinks every year, while home values accelerate into the stratosphere.