Ooooh, there’s a short story you should check out, by Vonnegut- “Any reasonable offer”

Let’s get you into a beautiful house. Options:

As a student, overseas relative is helping you buy, has set the budget and you’re going around and looking at places to get a feel for what’s available in the price range

Or maybe you’ve just taken a new job position nearby and want to stay in the area and the exterior has the charm you’re after,and curious to see what you get inside for the price

Pull up a few other places being sold for same price range and note a couple of small things that one of them has, that this might not. Act like those are a bigish deal because “the one over in sint-gilles has xyz, and that was one of the things on my partner’s list of deal breakers”

Look wealthy, mention offhand that financing is handled by the trust, and the board is open to investing, and you just wanted to put eyes on the place before you advise them to commit,then ask a few questions about the neighborhood after dark, so they focus on convincing you without paying too much attention to the rest

They’ll likely poke a bit about your story, and wonder about your financing, but its also super normal for people to be at the end of a long day and focused on paying attention to remembering details of the house or taking pictures and not really bothering to talk, so deflect or ignore.

Check a few faucets, ask when the electricity was brought up to code, and ask if they’ve already gotten estimates for any repairs that would need to be made before you were to move in

Do report back!

There are innumerable horror stories from cottage vendors bumping up against the money and strict gatekeeping of the nationally established conglomerates. This was in the US, but I know Canada also has, new, laws on the books to specifically prevent plant based cheeses from referring to their product as “cheese,” despite being the exact same process and a final product that you wouldn’t know side by side to the dairy version.

I’m not a vegan, but this is the just same ole regulatory capture bullshit that we’re seeing w ev cars, good imported rum, net neutrality and everything else

Sure, but that’s not the only article you read on the internet that morning. Every other site you hit took a similar fingerprint of you and soon those tiny “this profile/user likes rugby” data points start to add up. Swapped across 1700 (that we know about from this article) on a constant basis makes it easy to target you, specifically, when “this profile likes rugby” and “visits these sites from this network while that phone is at a certain geolocation during these hours” and “this device pinged this website every weeknight approx 20 min after that other device on the same network closed the Instagram app and started snoring.”

All pulled together into their model of you, as a digital pawn to be pushed whichever way they think will make them the most money that day.

Where’s the consent?

I give my name, age and weight to whatever health app, and yeah, I think it’s normal to expect a few marketing outreach attempts from them and their advertising partners down the line. But even that’s pushing it for me, and once it feels like spam, we all deserve an easy way to turn it the fuck off.

There’s no consent with this shit they’re pulling. It’s unacceptable. Fuck their feelings or considering their business model. It’s certainly not being reciprocated.

Use calibre book converter. You might need a plugin if it’s a super specific drm that needs to be removed (like, say, a library book from the libby app), but calibre will let you pick any output you want and save it as a clean file.