> renters are bad

Uh, no, don't equivocate "forced rent" with "renters". That's bad faith.

That has not very much to do with money though. There are many ways to allocate scarce resources, such as rationing. Even if money is used, the mere fact of scarcity doesn't define the price of something. Silver is also finite, but it still costs $2.50 a gram and not $25000 a gram. Land was always finite but was still much cheaper in the past.

The main contributor to the price here is financialization. The more money the average buyer can raise for one of the scarce things, the more they cost. Nobody wins from this except the banks, so perhaps it should be more regulated.

Building regulations are also a problem. Legalize whatever you feel is the minimum safety standard of homeless encampment or slum, and watch house prices crash overnight, since prices are set at the margins and a lot of people (including me) would be happy to find a way to work with simple concrete box if it was cheap and secure, but it's not legal to build those.

Sure there is, if the attacker has to fulfil some basic obfuscation then it cuts down on the amount of crypto work you have to do before ignoring the packet.

It's not extra security but it is a little extra efficiency.

Wireguard has something like this built in though, the PresharedKey (which is in addition to the public key crypto, and doesn't reduce your security to the level of a shared-key system). It's still more work to verify that than a port knock however.

These are what I call, corporate solutions. They're used to make CEOs feel good while deflecting blame, not to actually do the job. See also how nobody gets blamed if AWS goes down, but everyone who used a different host with higher uptime did get blamed when that went down.

Open source tools are good at actually doing the job, as long as it's a programmer type of job. We've known how to do unbreakable encryption for decades now. Even PGP still hasn't been broken. Wireguard is one of those solutions in the "so simple it has obviously no bugs" category - that's actually what differentiates it from protocols like OpenVPN.

Think about the recent satellite listening talk at DEFCON and how that massive data leak could have been prevented by even just running your traffic through AES with a fixed key of the CEO's cat's name on a Raspberry Pi, but that's a non-corporate solution and so not acceptable to a corporation, who will only ever consider enabling encryption if it comes with a six figure per year license fee which is what the satellite box makers charged for it. Corporations, as a rule, are only barely competent enough to make money and no more.