jmp242 @ jmp242 @sopuli.xyz

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537

Joined

2 yr. ago

This sounds like a good idea, but is basically getting rid of LLCs entirely and going back to partnerships or some other structure. That said, having LLCs kind of lets people just do bad stuff and no-one is responsible. I think the idea of LLCs was potentially OK (hard to get stockholders if every investor is personally liable for what the company does), the people making decisions on a daily basis need to not be shielded IMHO. And / Or we need to get more comfortable with a corporate death sentence where courts just regularly revoke the license / charter if the company is bad enough.

Trademarks aren't copyright or patents. The entire point of trademarks is to identify a brand. That said, I don't really understand trademarking LOTR at all, it seems like it's copyright, but IP laws are used so broadly now to just stifle things that who TF knows, and I have no idea about NZ law.

Lord of the Rings has nothing to do with food or chicken wings trucks, so seems like it shouldn't apply. Usually trademarks are in the same industry, so you wouldn't want someone else writing a knock off series of books called Lord of the Rings and trademark would help there.

That said, the other thing that seems suspicious to me is trademarks in the US are pretty specific - it has to be the exact wording which is why so many companies "mispell" the names, well that and in the US you often can't trademark a generic word (though Apple threw a wrench in that one). Or the graphic design has to be extremely close.

This is so hard to specify because it really depends on a lot of factors. It's usually more like there are specific models that are really worth getting, or pricepoints or brands depending.

Like, I don't think cordless drill/drivers that are sub $100 are really worth it if you're ever going to do more than screw into pre drilled or pre made screw holes. But a Bosch (blue), Dewalt, Milwaukee, Makita, etc are all pretty good. They're just usually over $100.

You're right about blenders - I never had a use for Oster blenders, but a BlendTec in 2008 changed my life (well, not really, but did do things that I have uses for at least).

Ohh, pressure cookers - I don't want to risk it exploding, so I avoid the $70 and under crowd. Actually, I went Kunh Rikon which is pretty expensive, but also really hard to screw up (like 6 layers of safeties), and easy to get refurb parts for seals and such.

Lots of safety equipment - there's all sorts of ... "fake" in that it won't actually work stuff at super cheap prices. I'm thinking like laser safety glasses or chain saw safety pants. Mid range is def worth it there.

Dishwashers IMHO. I've used cheap ones before and they clean poorly and are extremely loud. Depending on your house, you won't want to be in the next room to them. OTOH, Bosch higher end ones, like the 800 series, cost a pretty penny, but are darn near silent and actually live up to the washing claims - shit just comes clean in them. I'm usually surprised in a good way. Oh, and that third tray for silverware - I'm never going back to the basket (though lots of brands have that now).

Stand Mixers - especially if you want to get into bread or attachments for grinding things. I strongly recommend the Bosch Universal Plus. That thing is like a power tool for the kitchen. We've abused it for over 10 years and it's not slowing down. I know many people online who have had them for 30 years.

Vacuums - look into Sebo.

That's usually actually down to technique - you need to fill "normal" blenders in a specific way to have enough liquid on the bottom to make the vortex.

You have to be very careful with KitchenAid mixers - I think the 700Pro is the only currently made one that's worth very much - the gears strip out in most of the cheaper ones, and all of them made from like 2000-2014 or so. At least if you mix anything in there you couldn't do about as easily with a hand mixer that's $20 on Amazon.

Some of it is also going to be experience using it.

Like I have Rada and Cuisinart and Wustoff knives. The Rada is super cheap, and very sharp and holds an edge well. But its handle is pretty uncomfortable, and god forbid you're trying to chop a large cabbage in half, you'll hurt your hand on the top it's sooo narrow. But I can hit it with something and it's going to cut that cabbage the easiest because it's a narrow blade. The Cuisinart were a gift long ago, and really were just overpriced worse Rada. They have thin blades and don't hold an edge as well as the Rada. The Wustoff have the most comfortable handles to hold IMO, and nice thicker backs that make them hold up to lots of abuse - you can chop bones and such without worry. They also hold an edge pretty well, but also sharpen nicely. People also seem appreciative of Wustoff so you get some status when using them FWIW.

I actually think there are things that the cheap versions can work as well as the expensive ones, but in such a PITA way that you'll infrequently use them. Cameras are one of these things - pretty much any camera can take a picture, but try a low end Motorolla phone camera vs a mid range OnePlus or high end Samsung / iPhone and you'll have so much more frustration with the Motorolla you'll get a different phone to get a "camera that works". Same with ILC - you can get a Canon 4000D and it'll be capable of taking better technical shots than the high end smartphone. It'll just require quite a lot of skill. Put it next to a high end Canon R5 and you'll see how the quality of life improvements and everything else will make it a lot more fun to use.

Some are expensive for filtering reasons. It can take some engineering to build HEPA or similar filtration along with seals that actually have the filters work, plus managing motors or filter designs that aid in the high speed airflow needed for a vacuum.

Sure, but I'd also avoid Shark at all costs because they're not really made to be serviced. Also bagless, which generally suck in a bad way. I'd suggest something like a Sebo model with the electric brush head. Easy to service, last a very long time, use bags which are just cleaner and avoid needing to think about cleaning out dust storage areas to keep airflow up, and have great canister options.

I mean, it's not how I travel, we usually take about 10 minutes every 2.5 hours if I'm with others, by myself I usually do 4 hours without stopping. The main thing is not that EVs will never be there, it's that right now the infrastructure still isn't there. I'm literally just starting to see chargers at WaWas and that's not guaranteed, and I have no idea what they work with TBH. The great thing about gas is I know every gas station works with every gas car. We finally just agreed on a charger, but I still will wait a few years to see if it actually pans out to be the USB-C of cars.

And we just haven't yet gotten the chargers where anyone wants to stop. They're in strip malls as far away from the stores as possible. They're in downtown parking garages. This in some ways is great, but also TBH backwards - they're where locals, you know, the people who really ought to be charging at home - would make the most use of them. (at least around me in rural southern NY and northern PA) It's the places you avoid like the plague on a road trip because you want on and off the highway fast, not to investigate the local downtown. They're also not by the convenience stores or food places where you might realistically spend 15-40 minutes.

The other thing that I hadn't thought of till seeing some other road trips (though they were in the UK) was - plan your trip is great, but what if something goes wrong? An unexpected detour? A traffic jam? Until the chargers are in way more places, you could really feel unsafe if you go below 50% charge. I don't like going below 1/2 a tank of gas to have a buffer. And that's going to change things also. Because worst case with a gas car on a trip, I can call AAA and get 2 gallons delivered to me on any county road forget about state roads etc. I have no idea - am I getting a tow or something with an EV?

I'll also say, if I'm driving 18 hours, the last thing I want to hear is I'm going to intentionally make it 19.5 hours.

Yes, that's a slight rewording of what I said in the beginning. Though what I would suggest is likely to happen is just less and less physical stores and more Amazon deliveries, because many small physical stores closed because they cost too much and could not price match the bigger stores or online sellers.

Yes, capitalism is shitty. I will not say it's a good system, just that it seems to be the least bad a large scale society has managed to implement. Large attempts to explicitly be anti-capitalist didn't work out better than current day late stage capitalism by any metric I'm aware of.

But all of that is irrelevant to the main point that saying there cannot be scammers because capitalism inherently makes all participants scammers is just incorrect.

From what I've read, she copied multiple things verbatim, or with tiny changes that would never have flown when I was in school to avoid plagiarism, nor that would seem to satisfy the standards in place at the time, much less now. I'd say that's proven to the standard that would get students a 0 or other punishment, as reported by students from Havard in a recent school paper article. Hence my point that the issue to me isn't what she did so much as the "rules for the but not for me" response from Harvard.

Of course, what I'd argue would be a better discussion is whether plagiarism (as defined in most schools now) is the huge issue academia makes it out to be. It seems like many (maybe most?) professors don't think strict plagiarism is an issue, yet schools and colleges continue to use it as something they can "easily" check for via text scanning tools. I think the problem is how anal places have gotten over what they think constitutes plagiarism to be far less than is actually a problem.

And of course, I think this is actually all to get her on something for the horrible performance in front of Congress a la tax evasion for Al Capone rather than an actual moral panic about plagiarism.

That might be your framing of capitalism, but I'd argue it's one that takes into account the reality of greed and tries to harness it to run the system.

Government actors - kind of what I think of as a common alternative to capitalism - also act shady and like to hide who they are for many reasons not related to money but instead to power. They have just as much incentive, driven by a potentially similar base human desire, that are orthogonal at best to capitalism if not it's opposite. I suppose you can argue that non capitalist governments, or governments in non capitalist or capitalist societies do not have shady politicians, but that seems like a very difficult argument to make.

I think you misspelled “capitalist.”

I don't think being a capitalist requires being shady, nor that being some other economic system would stop some people being shady.

Some potential solutions: Governments could decide corporations must have actual named people in charge, ID by say passports or drivers licenses validated in person at an office to be issued an LLC or whatever.

People also do sometimes use brands or other company identifiers when deciding who to purchase from.

This is because it doesn't really matter. We could just mint a few trillion dollar coins if we had to to make a payment on it. We probably would only get 1/2 the inflation we did coming out of the pandemic as a lot of that was geopolitics that's already priced in now, though corporate greed is another matter. We also could just revert a bunch of the tax cuts from the last 20 years or so, and probably make a dent in the deficit if not get to a surplus again.

My limited understanding is that economists are divided around if too high a debt percentage is what led to Japan's stagflation, but from what I've read the US had that since the 70s already in real wage terms, so would it actually be a change to most people? And it's not like Japan is some failed hellscape - it's a huge economy with a pretty decent standard of living from what I can tell.

I still maintain so much of this is driven by thinking there isn't some limit here - like we talk about "tiny" GDP growth compared to developing economies without realizing that if you start at $1, it's easy to have 500% growth in a year, but each year the absolute amount of growth needed to hit that percentage goes up. The US only managing to grow 1% on a what, 30 trillion GDP is actually 300 billion, which is a huge absolute amount. That's like an entire Merck, Costco, or Adobe each year added enmasse.

If you look at the context of my point - this is basically saying to my reading "Hell yea, we should have no contact between us righteous city dwellers and those outsiders".

Dismissing the allegations because of who made them was always ad hominem. It's also a pretty bad look to hold faculty and the president of the university to noticeably lower standards than the students.

Ivy League schooling is a four year adult daycare and networking camp to secure old money connections. There’s nothing educational about it.

What are you basing this on? I have somewhat deep insight into one Ivy League school and can tell you much of it is quite rigorous, well beyond the local community colleges. This is based on family and friends that have gone to one or the other as well as some employees.

It seems like they already cooperate about as much as is likely, so this is mostly symbolic. I also question whether Russia, China or India - the political players here in my limited opinion, will let UAE throw around more political weight just because they joined BRICS. Heck, China and India are more political competitors than partners.

don’t think that our cities should be catering to them as much as they do right now with parking minimums.

I actually agree with this in general. I'd just like to see some more park and ride or nicer big parking garages in the small cities to acknowledge that anyone from the surrounding communities has to drive to get to the city and then needs to put that car somewhere while shopping, eating, whatever. Though for the park and ride we'd need a lot more bus service from there to the city, which I guess is hard to fund.