kaitco @ kaitco @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

But, if he spits out the fish like Mr. Burns, we’ll have a laugh that will last for decades.

MASS EFFECT!!!

I’d played games pretty casually since I was a kid, but Mass Effect is what turned me into a gamer. Before Mass Effecf, I hardly finished games and could never really master controls, let alone the concept of movement with one stick and viewing with the other.

The Mass Effect story pulled me in so deep that I put in the effort and learned to actually play the game. After, ME I started playing just about everything.

Now, I’m in the process of recording my ME playthroughs and editing them into a show just for fun. I used to be normal at some point…

Honestly, you need to make 6 figures to just not be “poor” these days. Very annoying, considering how quickly things changed over the last decade.

I honestly thought he’d go via the classic window fall, but this was far more original.

All right let’s talk through this a bit. Let’s say you earn like 90K a year.

Uncle Sam takes about ~25%ish to make things simple, so we’re looking at 67,5K take home, so $5625 monthly. But you’re doing as the logical advice says and you’re paying 5% into your 401K since your job matches it, and it comes out pre-tax, so recalculating, you’re at $5250 a month take home. But wait! There’s also healthcare to pay, which has medical, dental, and vision paid separately, post-tax, which we’ll say is around $250 a month, so now we’re actually down to $5K take home.

A mortgage that comes to $28K yearly would be something like $2300/month, so we’re down to $2750 for everything else.

Now, assuming you’re between 25-45, you’re a millennial who likely hasn’t been able to save up 80K for a 20% down payment, so you’ll be paying mortgage insurance, but you’ve got a great credit score, so you’ll be adding about $400 a month for the PMI. Then there’s property taxes going straight into your escrow account, which we’ll say is around $400 to make things simple.

Then, you’re going to have your homeowner’s insurance, which might be around $150 a month, plus you’ve bought in an actual neighborhood, so you’ve got a little HOA fee of $30 a month.

Now, we’re down to $1720 a month after we’ve covered taxes and just having a place to live. This is where we get into the fun budgeting items.

Basic utilities (electric $80, gas $50, internet $90, water $30, trash $20, car fuel $40) come to around $310/month. You’ve then got your mobile devices ($100), maybe two streaming accounts ($25), and then accounting for things you pay yearly (Xbox $5, Office $8). You likely had to pay for the move into your new home as well as a couple of newer furnishings on a credit card, so we’ll assume just some base card debt of $300/month. Plus since you’re a millennial, you’ve likely got a student loan you’re still paying ($200/month). Overall, we’re around $950 just living in this house, which brings us down to about $770/month at this point.

We haven’t yet accounted for food and amenities which can vary widely. A nice food budget that allows for a couple meals that can be made at home these days will run a single person about $100 a week. Amenities can range anywhere from haircuts to tampons to sandwich baggies so you can bring your lunch and snacks to work, and then if you’ve got one small cat, you’re adding in litter, food, and pet insurance. If you’re allergic to grass, like I am, you’ll need to pay for lawn care, too which can add an additional $100-200. If you’ve got a car payment, you’re adding an additional ~$400.

Let’s assume that your meals, amenities, and car payments eat up that remaining $770 a month. If you are ever too tired to make dinner one a week, you’re already going over budget. If the 15-year-old water heater goes, you’re looking to go into debt to cover that, and if you do something like get married and have a kid, the hope is that the spouse is bringing in another $90K because childcare is so outrageous, one of you would just be better off staying at home with the kid. If property taxes go up, the funds going into your home escrow are going to make things even tighter.

Could you make your $2300/month base mortgage work if you’re making 90K/annually? Yeah, with a very tight budget and having none of the more asinine homeownership issues, it’s more or less doable. That said, there’s just not a lot of people in the 25-45 age bracket that are earning that 90K and the average is coming around to $2300/month, and this is all assuming you can get a bid accepted when there’s some corporation planning to rent the property who’ll offer 20% over the asking price.

TL;DR: $28,000/year is ridiculous.

where I'm usually not using my phone

This is why my house is a tangled mess of cables. The only time I’m not actively on my phone is when I’m asleep. I’ve got a 10’ cable beside my bed for the time just prior to sleeping and just after waking up. 😬

Even when I’m working, I’m constantly picking up and checking news, or games, or messages, or whatever. I don’t have enough “inactive” time throughout the day to get anything from wireless charging.

After rising for 10 consecutive quarters starting in fall 2020, the median U.S. home sale price has now declined for two straight quarters, to $416,100, according to federal economic data. That is still $87,100 above the quarter just before the pandemic, or an increase of 26.4%.

A person who buys that median-priced home with a 20% down payment and an average interest rate would have a monthly mortgage payment of about $2,300.

Any 1-3 folks wanna go in on a house together since it’s going to take a min of 2 full salaries to buy a home these days?

In many US states have what’s referred to as “at-will” employment. When you accept the terms of your employment, there’s a small disclaimer that states that you can be fired for anything at anytime for any reason and without notice.

This is also why we have so many lawsuits here.

So, while there’s no full protection, there are laws available that say you can’t be fired for certain things, and if you can prove that you were fired due to simply being of a “protected class” or in retaliation for reporting a workplace violation, you can sue and can likely win through settlement or decision.

The thing is, few employers will maintain records that indicate that they fired Anita because she was black or Howard because he was gay. It’s usually “Anita had 4 errors in the last year” if pressed for detail. That’s why if you feel any sense of discrimination or other unfairness on the job here, it’s a good idea to keep records of the incidents and dates in a CYA file (Cover Your Ass), just in case.

Twitter’s success wasn’t monetary. The success came in allowing ordinary people their soapbox at a global town square.

Look at what happened to the price of insulin with a single tweet made back when all the blue checks were in complete free-for-all. A single tweet, made by a random person, thoroughly changed the shape of that one industry. Twitter gave “power” to the people, and those like Musk weren’t comfortable with that.

I said this in another post, but I think it bears repeating:

Musk, whether he was paid to do this or not, is acting purposefully. This is all a grand scheme to fully dismantle what was once our global town square. Twitter was once a place where “the people” could hold politicians, corporations, and the generally wealthy accountable for their actions publicly. In the past year, the platform has become unsteady, blue checks are untrustworthy, and even the name has changed to something that causes one to pause.

I dislike the man as much as the next normal person, but all of this nonsense has been planned from the start. He’s not a complete idiot. These actions have been calculated steps to take away the voice of the people and eliminate a single source of truth as things get worse and worse.

Ah, yes. A “glitch”. And, how fascinating that it affects links from the early days when Twitter was really gaining traction and being used to rouse populaces.

The thing is, Musk, whether he was paid to do this or not, is acting purposefully. This is all a grand scheme to fully dismantle what was once our global town square. Twitter was once a place where “the people” could hold politicians, corporations, and the generally wealthy accountable for their actions publicly. In the past year, the platform has become unsteady, blue checks are untrustworthy, and even the name has changed to something that causes one to pause.

I dislike the man as much as the next normal person, but all of this nonsense has been planned from the start. He’s not a complete idiot. These actions have been calculated steps to take away the voice of the people and eliminate a single source of truth as things get worse and worse.

Any news on how the Indian one did?

I expected Russia’s to blow up on launch, so bully for them for getting it to the moon, but India was scheduled to launch one yesterday too, and I’m far more intrigued about how they faired.

This will like end up having a Streisand Effect for them.

A couple years ago, they were trying to shoot at the hurricanes, so…

Shepard Commander!

Your username is a bold-faced lie.

Wait…? You don’t make your coffee in the bathtub??

You realize my new life’s work is going to be in figuring out what you’ve scratched out, right??

I mean, we joke, but this is pretty what he’s proposing.

This dude is pushing Putin-level shades of crazy.

No.

The books are valuable as a picture of the time. How many times are they going to be edited to be “acceptable”? There’s value in teaching about what things were like at that time and why the author was okay writing what they did.

And why attempt to draw a line with children’s books? If there is something worth preserving in classic literature that was intended for adults, the same can be said for classics intended for children as well.

Re-writing books is an erasure and a white-washing of the past. People want to keep what they’d had but recognize that it’s not culturally sensitive any longer, and instead of accepting that, they’d rather pretend that things were fine 50, 80, 100 years ago by slapping a new coat of paint on the text and moving forward.

In the Secret Garden, when Martha tells Mary that she thought Mary was going to be a little native girl, Mary loses her ish and starts calling her “daughter of a pig” and other names. There’s significance in Mary’s reaction and the words she uses that paints a picture of the time. Removing that to make the story more culturally sensitive, removes the historical elements and also changes Mary’s character.

It would be better to make an entirely new “adaptation” of books in the public domain without the sensitive elements than to change what these books originally said.