Skip Navigation

Phantom_Engineer
Posts
5
Comments
90
Joined
4 yr. ago

  • This war brought to you by Rage: Shadow Legends.

  • OpenTTD. Sure, I had used android, but it was the first thing I consciously knew was open source and enjoyed.

  • As an investment, a home is risky. For one, you're only going to have one most likely, so you're not diversified. While property values do trend up, there's a myriad of things that could potentially happen to reduce your property value as well. Not to mention, while the land underneath the home increases in value, the value of the home itself (on top of the land) decreases as the house ages.

    On top of that, you're paying maintenance, insurance, and property tax. While yes, it's better than renting, it's not necessarily a good investment compared to other investments you can make. On average, you're going to have a better return on the stock market than a home. True, that's also risky, but it's easier to diversify and there's more money to be made.

    Finally, you're usually leveraged pretty deep on a home. If you default for whatever reason, you'll be left with nothing. If the bank somehow fails to recover its investment after selling the home (say, because you owed more than it was worth), they can sue you for the difference.

    That said, it's not a bad idea to buy a home. You can always live in it, if nothing else. You might want to buy one just because you want it, which is valid. Lots of people do well on homes. You just need to realize that it's not as safe or good of an investment as it might seem.

  • I've got a 1000w motor on mine. Is it a motor bike in disguise? Yeah, maybe, since it has a throttle control. Where I live, though, there's no regulations specific to ebikes. I obey traffic laws and stay off of sidewalks and have a drivers license, so as far as I'm concerned it's fine. It does go about 25-30 mph, but in my mind it's a commuter vehicle. I'm not riding on bike trails that share pedestrians and have low speed limits.

    If necessary, I could modify it to make it a class three e-bike. The governor, currently off, cuts it to 750w and I could change it from a throttle control to a pedal assist with parts that were part of the kit but are still sitting in the box.

    It's in a legal gray area, as my state's definition of what constitutes a "motorized bicycle" was written with gasoline engines in mind. There's lots of unlicensed, uninsured 49cc scooters running around that fall into the same gray area, so it fits right in.

  • E-bikes are great. I've got one I built from a kit. That said, you don't want kids riding more powerful e-bikes than they can handle. If you wouldn't let your kid loose with a gas-powered dirt bike that can go 30+ mph, you shouldn't let them loose with an equivalent e-bike.

    I'm against licensing e-bikes or requiring insurance. While they can potentially be dangerous to the rider if misused, danger to other people or property is pretty minimal. The risk isn't enough to justify requiring liability insurance, like with cars. Licensing will only discourage ridership.

    That said, there should be an age requirement for certain classes. In lieu of that, parents are just going to have to exercise common sense. The kids will do what they want, rules be damned.

  • Yeah, hard to say the exact nature of the scam. It could be some kind of ponzi, paying out the teeny "wage" from the fees coming in from new recruits.

  • Ideally lower than median: closer to Q1. Still, you have to start somewhere.

  • But at the same time, this meant companies didn’t have to be profitable, because they could pay out investors from money that other investors gave them???

    Few, if any, of the big tech companies were playing out any kind of dividend to investors. It was more that they were content for companies to maybe someday make money as opposed to actually making money,

  • Yeah, I had missed the $5 per month per community part, which does basically boil down to that.

  • Glanced over it. Complete word salad. Corporate nonsense: baffle them with bullshit.

    You get points from communities. These points are stored on the block chain, because why not? The points themselves come from reddit, but the communities distribute them. Since they're on the block chain, reddit can't take back your magic bean points or whatever once you get them. Nevermind that they're worthless and that reddit controls the only platform that they're even remotely useful on.

    For now, Reddit will cover gas costs for distributing Points to users and allowing them to spend Points on features such as Special Memberships.

    Emphasis mine. Someone has to pay for it, because that's how the block chain works. For now it's Reddit. In the future? Who knows!

    How does this benefit the consumer? It doesn't, really. Potentially it gives posters more control over a subreddit, but looks like mods will still hold essentially all the power when it comes to a subreddit, which is how it works now.

    How does this benefit reddit as a business? It doesn't, really. They're handing out magic beans with the selling point being that they can't take them away from you once you get them. It costs them money to do this, because it's on the block chain as opposed to some in-house database. This replaced coins, right? They killed an income stream and replaced it with an expense.

    They get to tell investors that they're into the block chain when they launch their IPO, I guess. All I can say is buyer beware. Chances are high the powers that be unload their stock options in the IPO hype and then get the hell out of dodge. They might have waited too long, though. The tech bubble deflated, and I don't know if the books are impressive enough to draw in the big bucks from investors.

    If you want genuine control over your community, start one on the Fediverse and self-host an instance. No admins will kick you off since you're your own admin and head mod rolled into one.

  • One of the all time greats, which is only funny the first time. Too many cooks, doo doo do doo...

  • A you mean a fasces?

  • I dunno, the Biblical story around Nimrod doesn't paint him in a good light either.

  • It depends on what you're trying to buy. For CDs and Vinyl I go with Discogs, usually. There's also Mllusicstack, though I haven't gotten around to trying it yet.

  • I'd say just do in store pickup whenever you can. That way, you can refuse to pick up the merchandise if it's too bad.

  • A global crisis, if severe enough, would make a global government impossible to maintain. If anything, existing governments would struggle to survive.