PrinceWith999Enemies @ PrinceWith999Enemies @lemmy.world

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606

Joined

2 yr. ago

Stupid is the wrong word. You might be losing money, but is the peace of mind is worth tens of thousands of dollars, or whatever the difference is, that’s a decision you should make.

But for you (or anyone reading this), the decision isn’t between paying off your mortgage and buying a car. It’s between paying off your mortgage and putting the money into something with a higher expected return than you’d be paying on your mortgage.

Let’s say you owe $1M on your mortgage, and you have $1M cash. If your mortgage is at 2.5% interest and your investments are bringing in 10% per year, you’d be better off leaving the money invested. The closer the two rates get, the smarter it is to just pay it off. If you’re facing financial uncertainty you might be more comfortable paying it off, but if you have a solid amount of money put aside, again you might be better off having the savings to spend on multiple expenses rather than just sinking it into the house.

The best thing is to play out a few different scenarios and go with what lets you sleep easiest at night, but realize that, if you were to lose your income (for instance), you’d be depending on cash because you’re unlikely to secure a loan against your realized house value without having income.

Based on the fact that she apparently needed to buy the place with her mom and that the palm in the background is likely worth north of $10k by itself, I’m going to guess that they got a bit overextended by going off of her (commission-based?) income. Anyone can find themselves in trouble if they lose their job and this sounds like a horrible set of circumstances which I hope get addressed, but you have to go off of the scenarios relevant to you.

“Romans go home!”

"Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes they go the house?"

Probably the people suing over the right to drive drunk as long as you don’t crash into someone and using the fact that most people who drive drunk do not get into accidents should get a portion of the blame.

This exercise recurs regularly and there have been a few formulations.

One of the big ones is atomic theory. It took a long time to figure out - and I’m intentionally discounting the Greek version and monads here because I’m talking about actual atomic theory and not a philosophy of essences.

Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics are a second option, especially if you could squeeze in things like the germ theory of disease.

I’m not familiar enough with pure math to say that there’s one concept that would have let the Greeks or Mesopotamians develop the calculus millennia earlier than we did, but that would also massively accelerate scientific progress.

Never, ever take their arguments as if they’re made in good faith. It’s never about history, or religious freedom, or ensuring fair elections, or “reverse racism,” or states’ rights. It’s never about parental rights, or keeping children safe, or freedom of speech.

It is always just about being able to do what they want, much of which is making sure other people can’t do what they want. It’s about enshrining racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia in law.

There are no honest arguments coming from the conservatives at this point. The age of disagreeing over tax policy is over. Bill Buckley and George Will and their actual conservatives are gone. It’s Trumpism now.

It’s always about hate, not history.

If one black person doesn’t get funded, that might just be that person. If only 1% of funding is supporting black entrepreneurs, that’s looking like a systemic problem. Systemic problems require systemic solutions, because the bootstraps aren’t working.

Should VCs who allocate less than 14% of their funding to African American enterprises be subject to an investigation and lawsuits over racist practices, and if so, how much should the penalty be? Should they be forced by the government to find only AA businesses until they constitute 14% of their portfolio?

If less than 14% of applications are coming from African Americans, how can we create the opportunities so that we know systemic racism isn’t playing a role?

NotLD is not a great example.

George Romero literally invented the modern zombie. NotLD was massively successful on its own, and spawned a genre of horror literature that to this day is a dominant trend. It was a brilliant piece in a college-level production. It was a lot like Clerks, but even more so.

NotLD became public domain when they changed the name of the film from Night of the Flesh Eaters to Night of the Living Dead. While the change was obviously brilliant, the distributor didn’t include the copyright notice in the updated prints that were sent to the theater. That one mistake by someone else cost Romero untold tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.

I think we are all in favor of work being published in the public domain. As a scientist, I paid thousands of dollars per paper for everything I published to make sure they weren’t locked behind a $30 paywall. I’ve been a vocal supporter of FOSS since my first slackware install in the mid-1990s, and even before that with the cypherpunk community on usenet.

But NotLD is a counterexample of the goodness of non-copyrighted and non-patented works. It was not only done without the permission of the creator - which is key to the ethos - it is taken advantage of by every third rate company who sells a copy of it for $1.99.

I’m sorry, but I think that this bot really needs some work, or to move to a different engine. Every time I read the summary and then read the article, the bot has missed major points or the entire thrust of the article/opinion, and instead uses minutiae that contribute to the piece only in the presence of the original (but now stripped) context.

The central thesis of the article is that the gop wants to use healthcare policies to restrict healthcare that they feel has a conflict with their religious or conservative worldviews. They don’t want to guarantee the rights of trans persons or people seeking abortions against discrimination but instead want the government to regulate what kinds of healthcare are legal. They want to remove decisions from the hands of medical professionals and patients and instead have it regulated by government bureaucrats who lack any relevant education. On the other hand, they do not want the government - even the parts of the government that are intentionally staffed with medical experts - to make decisions about things like pandemic policies.

This kind of paragraph is far more characteristic of the tone and focus of the article than most of the summary:

But a few select moments revealed that GOP candidates, while perfectly comfortable interfering with certain medical decisions, remain opposed to using that same government authority to provide assistance to people who need access to health care or to protect people whose health may be at risk in a public health emergency.

Other than checking with other countries, I’m not sure what else you could do.

I also used to watch Spanish language programming to help learn Spanish. I do have to warn you that the subtitles will often not match the spoken words. Sometimes they’re completely different, as if they were produced by two different translation services. I found that telenovellas were often very accurate, but other kinds of media were hit or miss, and the translated ones were the worst. If you don’t need to read subs, though, you should be fine.

The other poster summarized exactly what I meant. We are generally not supplying them with weapons systems that can strike deep into Russian territory. I believe Moscow is well with range of a Tomahawk, and missile attacks against a civilian-populated city is a genie that’s already out of the bottle.

I believe the agreement is that the Ukrainians will not use ally-sourced weapon systems inside Russia, and they obviously have to agree. This relegates them to fighting a war of attrition against an enemy that can attack their infrastructure and civilian population at will.

Yeah, this kind of thing is usually done for propaganda value. It’s encouraging for your side to see that you can pull it off, and it is discouraging for their side to see that they have porous defense behind them. It’s rarely fun to have violent enemy action in your rear. The Doolittle Raid was a prime example of this kind of thing.

Although I understand the reasoning, it’s unfortunate that political agreements are forcing the Ukrainians to fight with one hand tied behind their backs.

Well, I always thought he looked like a potato. I think you can’t go wrong with either name.

What’s lower in terms of quality?

The e-ink display is different than something like an iPad. I find it easier to read, to be honest. I can read the kindle for longer in comfort and it’s easier to read while falling asleep.

It’s crap at displaying anything that’s not intended for the platform. PDF files or graphics heavy books are a poor fit for the kindle, but novels or regular books are far better in my opinion.

I have an iPhone, an iPad Mini, an iPad, and multiple laptops. I prefer the kindle for reading in any formats that support it.

I mean, first of all, that’s exactly the kind of thing nobles did. I know the word as an adjective in current usage reflects the image that nobles want people to hold, rather than the reality of assassinations of both reputations and persons for political and personal ends, but I think that the distinction is material to the discussion.

Garak is conflicted about many things. He’s a brilliant and multidimensional character - a torturer with a heart of gold - and it is exactly that Janus-like relation to morality as conceived of by Starfleet that makes him so key in the Dominion War. Like Division 31, his character brought into relief the existential question of the role of intelligence services and dirty deeds in a liberal democracy. The Roddenberryverse Federation was the Galahad (or at least the Lancelot) of the galaxy, and the occasional dark aspects that surfaced invoke the role of organizations like the CIA in a democracy. Garak, as a Cardassian and officer in the Obsidian Order, adheres to a broadly different morality, but ends up aligning with the Federation because of his conscience. His multi-faceted relationship with Bashir is often used to show his “odi et amo” relationship to the Federation.

In any case, I think that I’d have to characterize Garak as “noble.” He was constantly thinking about the big picture and the greater good, even if the deck he was playing had a few more cards than some of the Federation folk were comfortable with. If you define “noble” as being completely exclusive of “evil,” then the character concept of the OP cannot exist. That would be a shame, because it’s an interesting concept to explore.

Honestly, it just looks like Elphaba’s hat.

I mean this as a Cassandra-like prediction of doom:

The Trumps will become the republican version of the Kennedys. The Bushes tried it, but somehow we’re both over-intellectual and insufficiently prejudiced to make it work in today’s gop.

The issue is that his DoJ refused to investigate him because they have a standing policy that a president cannot be charged with breaking the law. So despite multiple public violations of both law breaking and high crimes and misdemeanors, Trump was allowed to get away with it under the Nixonian mandate of anything the president does is by definition legal. It means that Biden could begin actually just arresting all republican politicians on the charge of treason and, as long as the senate doesn’t vote to remove him from office with a 2/3 majority, it’s legal even though it would violate the word and intent of the constitution.

Now they can’t prosecute him because, despite being a private citizen, he might become president? This is the same party - and literally the same person - who joyfully chanted “lock her up” over their political opponent throughout the previous campaign. The same people who boasted about defeating Hillary Clinton via a comic investigation into Benghazi, which was designed to do exactly what it did.

Absolutely nothing republicans complain about is said in good faith. It’s time to move past that idea and not even address the complaint. If Trump wasn’t investigated and prosecuted, he’d still be ahead in the polls. Trump is the republican party, and the republican party is Trump.

As someone who had a Q clearance, it never made sense to me why they’d go with a person claiming to be DoE instead of CIA or DOD.

I guess the letter Q sounds cooler?

The steep decline in money available to publishers means that they’re going to cut reporting in favor of paying an intern to copy and paste off of twitter. You end up with twenty different publications summarizing the same AP article with one paragraph, the. a dozen hot takes on twitter by people you’ve never heard of.

And we’re reaching the point where they don’t even need the intern to do it.

I hold onto the conspiracy theory that the most bizarre Q conspiracy theories are the result of 4chan types seeing what they can get the radical fringe to actually believe, and just trying to outdo each other in monthly competitions.