If this is a transient thing,

I have definitely noticed an uptick in non-white Americans relocating to Ireland. The numbers are too small to be statistically significant but it's noticeable - and also that these are permanent relocations[1] rather than people here on a fixed term contract.

Another reason this might not be transient is that many of these PhDs have very desirable skills in the private sector. They can probably earn 3-10x as much as they were getting. Even if they planned to go back to their government jobs eventually, they might find giving up the money harder than having never earned private sector salaries in the first place.

[1] By that I don't mean that they won't go back, just that their job in Ireland is permanent with no planned end date and at least some are taking salary cuts in order to move.

...MCSE school. Having an illuminating discussion wit the instructor over using the .local TLD for internal DNS. Followed by "well, just use .mslocal, that will be safe forever."

Admittedly this was 1993, when no one could conceive of new TLDs. Except for a few of us CNEs who were trained to think ahead, occasionally.

We were trained to have our clients register their domain, immediately, and run their own internal DNS, back when it was truly wizardry. But worth it.

Why does Outlook etc. even permit this? Well, pink contracts and take the business, even of scanners. Microsoft is not alone in this.

I'd wager 3/4 millennials and 90% genz couldn't tell you whether the Cuban crisis was before or after WW2, so I'd consider your question moot.

Reduce opportunity? Then you're also identifying usery, debt and interest, as rent-seeking?

A landlord does not have any duty to enhance 'opportunity', other than provide usable space. If you think higher rents reduce opportunity and deprive for instance, shop owners opportunity to practice, then you must feel the same way about gasoline prices, taxes, utilities, every expense. Rent or lease for a property is an expense for a business owner if they choose to do it that way.

Oh we played a lot of Prince of Persia. There was a cult of Spaceward Ho! playing as well. Fun anecdote time: Netware required you to 'ack packets, and early shareware versions of Doom had a bug in it that didn't ack. We literally filled the network up playing Doom.

Safe to say that wasn't the official reason we gave to people, and settled for "a restart seemed to fix it all". Oops.

Way back in the mists of time, or about 1992, I worked for the company that scanned the French National Library. You can still see the images we did today - we used pretty much the method they're talking about except we would recombine certain books afterwards. We took off the spines, ran them through an automatic document feeder attached to a high speed scanner (for 1992 anyway), deskewed the images and OCR'd some of them.

One day, a production assistant came to me and said "I don't think we should guillotine this one, what do you think?". I looked at it and...flaming hell, it was the French National Academy of Science's original copy of Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton. Had we gone ahead and sliced/shredded...Douglas Adams' predictions would have come true, and we'd have been lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists.

Tech - we used a combination of Mac Plus, 486SX, 486DX2 with super-incredible-powerful-specialised graphics cards containing a whole 1Mb of VRAM, and a Netware server so vast it could only be named one thing: Behemoth. I mean, what other name could we have possibly contemplate giving to a machine which had a whole 1Gb available to it...

Did they finally actually approve it? AFAIK the sale was approved (which was CRAZY dumb) but since then the UK has come to their senses and basically used local-city-council nonsense to stall any approvals needed. Or?

If you persist in misinterpreting the term 'rent seeking', you risk my believing you do not merely understand, but you assert that property ownership is somehow indefensible on its own merits.

But then I re-read your comment. It must be too early in the day for you to discern the difference between 'make unwarranted profit' and 'actually own and use'.

Did you intend to assert that these landlords, at least, neither actually owned, nor use, the property they did, in fact, own? Are you so lost in the weeds of rent, property rights, and some sense of justice?

"they use software from a company that organizes landlords together to raise rents in unison to increase profits"

Please, investigate the nature of rent-seeking. Google is your source. Please.

You're describing collusion, price-fixing, and anti-trust violations. At least get your offenses straight...

I'm watching a version of this where I live. Lots of single-family homes built-to-rent. But this is not a rental lock-in as it may seem.

In Maricopa County, Arizona, builders need a 100-year guarantee of water supply. This is usually provided by the municipality. Ah, but groundwater is being consumed faster than expected, other pressures, and it really doesn't matter what they are. Builders are being denied these certificates. No build, no sale.

One way around this is for municipalities to arrange for water form other sources, but water management areas such as in Maricopa County cont5rol all that.

So, the build-to-rent boom. For rentals, they need not have a certification of water supply. Now, sadly, this means that some day the municipality can deny them service, as they never had as guarantee. There is notice to be given of course, but in the end these homes sit idle when that happens, and it will happen.

Yet, until then, well, profit. And the municipality enjoys tax revenue, both property and sales etc., investors get their end, and renters live happy as can be until the other shoe drops.

Mind you, where I live, plenty of regular build are happening, so many that we are now 50,000 population over what was planned as 'full build-out'. In other words, oversubscribed. But that's the least of their maladministration.

Around the Phoenix area, rents increases are slowing down, partly due to reduced demand, as you might guess, and partly due to some investors cashing out as mortgage rates dip just enough to make it worth buying. And plenty of legit, for-sale homes are being built, it seems many in the affordable pricing ranges.

But the choice to rent or buy is not as simple as it seems. It's not always investors busting the market, sometimes it's in-migration, with newcomers in the Phoenix area last year hitting the market hard. That's resolving.

The trick here is that if doesn't really matter how the lease payment is calculated, it's still a lease payment. But keep trying to make landlords into rent seekers.

Bear in mind that this arrangement could be characterized differently. Is that business starts out slow, sales are low, the business is getting started. Lease payments are low. As the business grows, revenue increases, lease payments do increase, but with increased revenue the business can support it.

That's exactly the arrangement most of the time.

Another way is to use escalating payments, annual increases. Sometimes this is the reason behind an apparently successful business closing 'lost our lease'. Revenue didn't meet predictions.

If you've never been a property owner, you have, perhaps, very little understanding of the business. For instance, does the municipality stop collecting property tax if your property is empty, and no rent is coming in?

In my part of the country, the non-hoa neighborhoods are often also older and sometimes lower quality. You can fix up your property if you want to, it's an expense and maybe not recovered and improved property value, but these neighborhoods are also often a shorter commute. Just cuz they're close at everything that's not residential and that's not always desirable. Your experience of course and my experience of course are both limited.

M immediate reaction was to wonder if 3d printers will join C & Perl with annual obfuscation contests?

And bear in mind that in the example of say a retailer, the retailer puts their stock including their time at risk. Hoping that they'll they'll sell enough stock at enough profit that they can persist. Their landlord's risk is perhaps as simple as the opportunity to rent someone else at a higher price, though of course that's always a choice they have to make. There is risk in owning property and there is risk in starting a business to do just about anything. The primary risk in business probably is failure. Failure in honing property could be as simple as a total loss due to disaster or even unlawful activity, it can also be as vacancy