Greed is the reason, because they can. People need housing. Same way grocery stores are getting away with charging so much, people need food. The working market theoretically should fix this in time, but so far it isn’t. New houses and competing grocery stores don’t appear overnight. I fully agree with you, rentals have their place and there can be many benefits, but without proper oversight and rent control this was always going to be the outcome - squeeze as much cash out of people until you literally can’t anymore. I don’t think there is some secret collusion going on between landlords (at least in most cases), there’s really no need. Just watch rental prices, then when the area average becomes higher than you charge for your unit, you raise yours slightly above that. By doing that you’ve now ever so slightly increased that area’s average, now other landlords will raise their prices slighy higher, causing other landlords to raise their prices slightly higher, rinse and repeat. Note that I might be completely off the mark here but this lines up with my experiences at least.

I just went through this process when I got a Dreame D10 Plus which has an identical root process as the L10s a few weeks ago with the intent of putting Valetudo on it. I ended up trying but failing after one of the header pins I was trying to flash it with broke off in the machine. If you are brand new to this stuff, personally I wouldn’t recommend trying it. If you still want to try, do not update the robot once you get it and either buy one of the programming boards or at the very least have some 2mm pitch header pins around (standard in NA is 2.54mm). I really wanted to run mine locally as well (don’t like the idea of someone gaining access to a full lidar map and remote controlled camera in my house) and hope in the future an easier method is discovered. I don’t know about the base station for each floor thing, I do know that Valetudo only supports a single map. From what I understand that means you’ll have to re-map each floor before cleaning. If you only want Home Assistant intergration there is a HACS intergration for Dreame that allows for multiple maps. You used to have to jump thorough some hoops and use it with Xaomi cloud or something but the newest beta allows sign-in using the Dreame app credentials.

I had 2 great finds so far:

1: A David Clark noise cancelling aviation headset. It was used and a bit old but still worked perfectly. I was a student pilot at the time and was using the cheap headsets the school had so this was an awesome find. I think whoever put the pricing on it saw the weird plugs without knowing what it was and priced it at $5. I remember seeing them on ebay used for around $600.

2: A old network drive full of pirated content and porn from the early 2000’s. I don’t know what the fuck teenage me was thinking hooking this up to my PC without any idea what was on it but it ended up being a hilarious find. I think it was shared between a bunch of roommates as each folder was named after someone. It was an IDE drive so I made a backup (for reasons), wiped it, and now use it in a PS2. Think that was around $5 also.

Stay away from weed and you’ll get to live your dream.

Worse than that, we had a guy essentially miss the toilet while taking a shit in our work washroom. It was this larger construction worker and he must have sat down wrong somehow and shit went everywhere on and under the toilet seat. Guess who didn’t try cleaning up and left without saying a word? Fuck that was nasty…

Yeah, I like having cameras but don’t want that video being sent elsewhere. I ended up getting Tapo cams which are cheap cloud cameras but they also have RTSP streams and local username / password settings. That means I can send the footage to a locally hosted NVR and lock the cameras behind a parental option in my router that blocks all external in and out communication to them.

I had a Mastodon account but didn’t really understand how it all worked, I thought it was only for Twitter like applications. I really like the concepts of self hosting stuff so when the Reddit strike happened and I found out what Lemmy was, I decided to try it out and have been learning along the way.