The forthcoming general election is once again likely to be dominated by claims about a housing shortage and a dire need to build more homes. Housebuilding is an article of faith across the political spectrum.

The evidence, however, does not support this thinking. Quite the reverse. Over the last 25 years, there has not just been a constant surplus of homes per household, but the ratio has been modestly growing while our living situations have been getting so much worse. [...] What has changed for the worse is not the amount of housing per household, but its cost. And cost, in turn, has a great deal to do with the landlordism that is at the heart of the present crisis.

We now find ourselves in a situation where one in every 21 adults in the UK is a landlord. We have four times as many landlords as teachers. As a consequence, virtually everyone struggles to afford a home that meets their needs despite a net gain in housing stock.

Our recent history shows us that landlord abolition, while maintaining adequate levels of housing stock, is an entirely realistic ambition.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-landlords-surprisingly-simple-solution-to-uk-housing-crisis

The Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) system, set up 20 years ago, provides the most authoritative assessments of humanitarian crises. Its figures for Gaza are the worst ever by any metric. It estimates that 677,000 people, or 32% of all Gazans, are in “catastrophic” conditions today and a further 41% are in “emergency” conditions. It expects fully half of Gazans, more than 1 million people, to be in “catastrophe” or “famine” within weeks.


https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/21/we-are-about-to-witness-the-most-intense-famine-since-world-war-ii-in-gaza

What if we rethought our institutions of public safety from the ground up, and the operative concept was “safety” rather than “enforcement”? What keeps people safe? Getting guns out of their hands keeps them safe. Violence interrupters can keep them safe. Having good free mental healthcare keeps them safe. Having communities with good schools, good childcare, good jobs, good housing, and good universities and hospitals keeps them safe. As Illinois State Senator Robert Peters told me:

We know what safety looks like. If you live in the North Shore of Chicago, where there’s a lot of money, you’ve got a good school. You’ve got a good job. You’ve got good public transportation. You have food on your table. You have good housing. That is public safety.

We want to be secure. We want to know that we’re going to be safe. We want to know that we will be fed. We want to know that we will be housed. We want to know that we won’t be destitute in old age. There’s nothing wrong with that. Why should we let the Right have that concept and that emotional terrain? It’s a powerful emotional terrain

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2024/02/more-firefighters-fewer-cops/

"There’s no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn’t install a counter-app that co-ordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold. No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete or, in other words, “IP law”.

IP isn’t just short for intellectual property. It’s a euphemism for “a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers”. And “app” is just a euphemism for “a web page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to mod it, to protect the labour, consumer and privacy rights of its user”."

https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5

Humans now share the web equally with bots, according to a major new report – as some fear that the internet is dying.

In recent months, the so-called “dead internet theory” has gained new popularity. It suggests that much of the content online is in fact automatically generated, and that the number of humans on the web is dwindling in comparison with bot accounts.

Now a new report from cyber security company Imperva suggests that it is increasingly becoming true. Nearly half, 49.6 per cent, of all internet traffic came from bots last year, its “Bad Bot Report” indicates.

That is up 2 per cent in comparison with last year, and is the highest number ever seen since the report began in 2013.
In some countries, the picture is worse. In Ireland, 71 per cent of internet traffic is automated, it said.

“Automated bots will soon surpass the proportion of internet traffic coming from humans, changing the way that organizations approach building and protecting their websites and applications,” said Nanhi Singh, general manager for application security at Imperva. “As more AI-enabled tools are introduced, bots will become omnipresent.”https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/dead-internet-web-bots-humans-b2530324.html