Raising house prices do benefit you, if you don’t have kids or don’t otherwise have heirs you want to leave money to. Reverse mortgages exist, and their are millions of baby boomers financing their retirements off of the increases in their home equity.
I think the reason tech hadn’t been as enshittified in the 2010s was that the companies making these products and services could still grow profits just by expanding number of units sold. So you could make more money while also being good to your customers. Make great stuff, expand the potential market, make more profits, repeat.
Eventually however your market caps out. Eventually everyone who isn’t living in an uncontacted Amazon tribe or too poor to afford food already has a smart phone. It doesn’t matter how great the features are; the global market for smart phones will never be more than ten billion units a year. And likely never more than half of that. You can only sell so many phones in a year, and people can only afford to pay so much for them.
So what do you do if you can no longer grow profits by growing scale? You have to wring ever more profit out of each customer. And thus, enshittification.
Buy the toilet. Refuse the subscription. Box up your waste and mail it to the company.
I tend to sleep pretty hot, especially with the memory foam mattress we have. I actually looked into bed coolers at one point. A few companies make refrigerated bed chillers. They have a pad with tubes embedded in it that circulate fluid from a unit positioned next to the bed. They’re fairly pricey.
I almost got one, but I ended up trying something different. The devices tend to be pretty complex, often unreliable, and chained to spyware apps. Leaks in the lines can cause mold, and often they require regular cleaning by flushing cleaning solution through the lines.
Ultimately, I found a much simpler, reliable, and low tech solution - classic rubber hot water bottles. I have two rubber hot water bottles. I keep them full of water. Before bed, I’ll take them out of the freezer. In the morning, I put them back in the freezer. They do a great job of keeping the bed cool. Now, you don’t want to have a big block of ice in direct contact with your skin while sleeping. To avoid this, the bottles have an outer cloth case. There’s lots of different varieties of these bottles, but these are the ones I tried and have worked well for me.
Tell that to every farmer in the US. Do you seriously not know about the DMCA?
Read some Cory Doctorow.
And really, the politicians are fine with that. The goal isn’t the complete elimination of 3D printed ghost guns. The goal is to greatly increase the skill level required to print a 3D printed ghost gun. With relatively modest tools and enough skill, you can machine your own gun from scratch in your garage. Yet the barrier to entry is so high that few who seek guns for evil ends use these methods. A random street drug dealer might find the idea of printing a gun at the push of a button very tempting. But they are unlikely to find the idea of building a machine shop and learning machining appealing or practical. Or in your case, learning all about open source 3D printers and their software. Yours is just the 3D printer equivalent of the home gunsmith. Yes, you and people like you exist. But the politicians aren’t aiming for complete elimination, just vast reduction.
Accessibility matters. It’s why the printing press was such a big deal.
There’s a much simpler and more horrifying solution here, that would actually be technically possible. All 3D printers sold must have a sort of cryptographic lock on them. Only safety-verified prints are allowed to be printed on them. The code running on the printers themselves will still be dirt stupid, but there will be a software lock on the thing preventing uncertified prints from being printed. Every 3D printer sold is locked down tighter than a John Deere tractor.
Every 3D print company would offer a large number of pre-verified prints. (AFAIK many already have libraries of print files.) But you as a user wouldn’t be able to just print anything you wanted. At best, maybe 3rd-party verification services would exist. Model what you want, then pay 20 bucks to some company for a print verification. You send them the file, they screen it for any contraband, and they send you a cryptographic key that lets you print that file and only that file. Long term they would hope AI can do the screening. For now it will be someone’s job to just stare at 3D models all day and to figure out if it’s a gun or not. It would start with screening for guns, but it would inevitably expand to things like intellectual property protections.
They won’t have to change the fundamental deep logic and operation of the printer itself. Just like the fundamental mechanisms inside a tractor haven’t changed. They’ll just make it a felony to sell a 3D printer that isn’t locked down to Hell and back.
That’s something highly specific that was carefully designed to only activate on currency. They added highly unique dot patterns to currency that scanners could detect. And the printer doesn’t (at least by law) spy on everything you do. The printer will just refuse to copy a dollar bill. The printer doesn’t refuse to operate unless it has an open communications line to the FBI.
If they wanted to do something similar with 3D printers, I would have no objections. Others have pointed out the technical problems with preventing any form of 3D print, but I’ll speak conceptually here. There are 3D printers that print metal. Countries with high-denomination coins might find it useful to bar 3D metal printers from printing those coins. You could assumedly create some sort of 3D version of the dot patterns used on paper currency. Then you pass a law stating that any 3D scanner must refuse to scan an object if it detects those very unique dot patterns on it. Then countries with high-value coins could mint them with these unique dot patterns or other features. If anyone tries to scan a coin to reproduce it, the scanner just refuses or outputs only noise. No need to phone home. No need for mass surveillance. Just a simply refusal that would only be active in this very specific case.
If someone wanted to implement a feature like that into 3D printers, technical problems aside, I would have no objections. That would be directly analogous to the 2d printer example, and it would represent no escalation in spying or restrictions on freedom of use.
Then they’ll make owning an unregistered 3D printer a felony.
Understood. Try not to get too discouraged. I met my husband when we were both 27, and I was his first partner. You’re not as doomed as you think.
Ok, then why not just hire an escort once in awhile when you’re feeling like getting frisky? That will won’t have the health effects of blocking T. Probably would be cheaper in the long run considering medical costs.
You may be pursuing the wrong goal. Taking strong T blockers to nuke your testosterone will likely slash your libido. However, if this was just about sex, if you were just horny…well escorts are are a thing. But people seek out partners for far more than just intimacy. The sex really is a small part of a relationship. What you’re really seeking in your heart of hearts is companionship, love, and romantic fulfillment. Nuking your libido won’t solve that fundamental human longing.
Also, you really don’t want to be without any active sex hormone. Your system can run on T or E, but it needs one or the other. With all your hormones at low levels, you’re at risk for menopausal symptoms like osteoporosis, cardiovascular effects, hot flashes, brain fog, etc. You could take estrogen along with the blockers to avoid these effects, but that would have severe issues (assuming a gender transition isn’t something you desire.) If you tried to take estrogen along with the T blockers, that would cause a high level of feminization - you would basically be doing trans hormone therapy at that point. And the E might cause your libido to come back as well.
Dropping your T level to near zero will produce serious long-term health effects that you really don’t want to experience. If someone told me they were, like, a non-offending pedophile who desperately wanted to nuke their libido before they hurt someone, well in that case I might say the negative health effects are worth it. But by doing this, you’re signing yourself up for serious long-term health effects, all for something that is unlikely to really solve the true source of your pain.
This is literally why we have juries.
Hopefully the pigs will just kill each other.
Hey, Bev is a beautiful woman with her own complex inner thoughts, desires, hopes, and dreams!
I can’t build a guitar. I can build a guitar-shaped object. But I cannot build a guitar.
Tactical urbanism ftw!
Are you a hallucinating llm?
Plenty of people in your position fund their retirement off their home equity. It’s called a reverse mortgage. If you don’t have heirs you care about leaving the house to, it’s not a bad way to fund retirement.