Permanently Deleted
tburkhol @ tburkhol @lemmy.world Posts 1Comments 606Joined 2 yr. ago
tburkhol @ tburkhol @lemmy.world
Posts
1
Comments
606
Joined
2 yr. ago
Honestly, it would be most efficient just to grind everyone over 70 into mulch. The years spent slowly siphoning their life savings while they just sit around not being hardcore workers are complete waste. Accelerate the process, transfer the wealth, so the next generation can spend it on new cars and electronic baubles: old people don't spend enough money, and what they do spend is all government-subsidized healthcare.
/s
They probably do not get the same tax cuts: a "normal" person, making a paltry $250,000/year only reduces taxes by 24% of their giving, where the ultra-rich get 37%.
But the real difference is scale. A million people each giving $100 to their favorite charity is going to distribute that money more-or-less according to the community's overall priorities. One person giving $100M to their favorite charity has no connection to the broader community and social goals. They supercharge that one thing, which takes attention and resources from everything else.
4 - High-end philanthropy is subsidized by regular taxpayers.
I feel like this is really under-appreciated. Like, Rich Dude decides he wants to donate $100M to...whatever - early childhood education. In the US, he avoids up to $37M taxes, which you can either look at as other taxpayers making $37M matching donation or $37M taken from other society objectives.
To the extent that government is a (marginally) publicly accountable system for funding a society's competing goals - education, health, defense, research - charity allows the very wealthy not just to bypass the social structure for prioritizing goals, but to force other taxpayers to adopt their personal priorities. Maybe the goal is good, maybe it's not - the point is that they're completely unaccountable.
It sounds like he's not being given a house, but cash that the donor intends OP should use to buy a house.
To me, this sounds like a combination of "you're going to inherit significant money" and "here's a strategy to survive on it long-term." If OP's family member has made their life as a landlord, then that's just them passing on their own experience. OP is unhoused, and it's reasonable to imagine their family member distrusts OP's financial awareness.
The inheritance may or may not specify how the money is to be used. If OP just gets some lump sum of money, then there's the financial question of how to extract the greatest quality of life from that money and each strategy has its own ethical question. Would it ethical to buy two homes - even if they're the same physical building - and rent one out to pay for both? Plus OP's living expenses? Would it be ethical to invest it all in United Healthcare and live off the dividends? To open a restaurant?
If OP gets a lump sum, there is also the ethical question of whether they are bound to use it in the fashion recommended by their family member.
How do you see this situation as different from splitting rent with a housemate?
To me, the ethical questions lie not in the situation, but in how you handle it. Charge your tenant high enough rent to cover the full mortgage, maintenance, and renovations of the whole building? Sounds sketchy. Charge "market rate" just because that's what the hedge-fund landlords demand? Sketchy. Find a rent level that accounts for your costs & maintenance of the rented space, an allowance for vacant time, and risk of bad tenants? That's a great way to help people find housing, without being an actual charity, and make more sustainable use of a big space than living in it all by yourself.
Just being Devil's Advocate here: Medicare fraud is a thing - docs who prescribe, or claim to have performed, unnecessary treatments, which may be as much as $60B (out of $900B spending, so...7-ish%). Maybe not enough to justify UHC's 32% denial rate. And nobody seems to source their $60B or $100B fraud estimates - I can only find case evidence for a few hundred million, and those are cases spanning years.
1200 sf townhouse. I can clean it top to bottom under an hour. It takes 5 minutes to mow the lawn. Only time my electric bill tops $100 is August, and gas only in January. No one even thinks about you hosting family gatherings or parties. Don't have to buy a monster TV so you can see it across the 20' room.
I suppose, if you really like gardening, or hosting parties, then those could be negatives, but it seems like the main reason to have a big, fancy house is so other people know you can afford a big, fancy house. Personally, they make me uncomfortable, and I would hate to live in one, nevermind the maintenance.
I've got z-wave monitoring plugs from both minoston and zooz, and they give the same readings as Kil-A-Watt.
It looks like your source is focused on loads that switch on and off frequently, which is probably important for laboratory, but not really for home. The reporting interval for my plugs ranges from maybe 3s to 30s, and I can imagine that there's internal lag between measuring and reporting, but it's not relevant to anything I can imagine using the data for.
If this happens to multiple CEOs, companies will just implement secret-service style security for the C-suite. Wouldn't even be a rounding error in CEO compensation.
There's no wrong or right way to enjoy games, and so many ways to find enjoyment in those games. Some people love the novelty, or the stories, graphics, music...
Based on the favorites you've mentioned, I feel like you really enjoy specific mechanics or the physical experience/practice of the game. Back in the day, I could spend hours running through Diablo 2, and that was entirely based on button mashing and running. Something about its pacing, interface, and the match of its challenge with my coordination just hit exactly right - difficult enough to be rewarding, easy enough that repeatedly dying didn't frustrate me, and always another fight just seconds away. I played that for years.
Now that game launchers track my time, it's really obvious that I like certain games for their mechanics - mostly Skyrim & Fallout - other games for sandbox/crafting - Valheim, Rimworld, X4 - hundreds of hours in each, even though I'll try other games, at least long enough to finish their stories, once. Sometimes just because I paid for it & feel obligated to get to the end. It's OK to have favorites.
Super easy, as it turns out. I run my own DNS and web servers, so I pointed quicken.com at my web server to capture the request, then used curl to capture the response. Both turned out to be plain ASCII, request like
stk.1=SMCI;.2=NVDA;.3=INTC;
as POST data, and responses like
qwin.quotes.ASTM.symbol 4 ASTM
.last 7 18.7400
.time 10 1573074000
.time.str 5 16:00
.change 6 0.4000
plus a whole slew of other optional fields for fundamentals, dividends, etc. It was a simpler time on the internet, when no one cared about leaking data and companies didn't care if a handful of geeks reversed engineered their data structures.
This won't help you, but I want to brag. I started using Quicken to track my finances at the turn of the century, back when it was all local storage. Quicken 2012 was the last iteration that used http (not https) to update stock prices. When they discontinued support, I captured the interaction and deciphered the formats. Wrote a proxy to intercept the request, look up the security info, and send back the data.
So, I self-host quicken.com. It's saved me having to update Quicken or submit to their subscription model.
I don't watch streamers, but I'll watch videos like 'which is the best weapon for [X]' or 'how to optimize production in [X].' I've watched stream highlights like SovietWomble's bullshittery, or IAmCrusty's psychopathic VR vids. Once you get stuff like that into your YouTube algorithm, there's a lot of it. It's gaming content you can consume when location or time constraints won't let you actually game, and that's a larger chunk of my day than when I can sit down and play.
You can't have stream highlights without a stream. Even if no one watches the stream, the infrastructure and technologies have to be there. And I can see where some audience members of those highlights would be attracted to the raw stream, trying to catch the 'good stuff' live, the same way some people watch NASCAR hoping to see crashes as they happen.
Find out how much you're spending on what. That will let you determine whether the amount you spend on which things is actually worth it to you in the cold light of day, and show you where you can make the most effective cuts. Diagnosis is the first step: treatment without diagnosis is not helpful.
Tons of expense tracking apps out there that will download straight from your bank & credit card. You Need A Budget/YNAB seems t be pretty popular.
There are several reason why a President can impose tariffs without congressional approval. If he wants to do them, all he needs is a pretense, regardless how non-credible, and his own pen. Like the 'immigration emergency' that let him loot the military construction budget to build bits of border wall.
Yeah, don't let the bashers get you down: wasting stuff just because it's cheap is how we got here. Measuring your power use is the only way to make informed choices, and sometimes the results are surprising.
Like, I was surprised to find that my audio gear uses exactly the same power whether it's playing or not. The subwoofer alone uses twice as much power as the RPi that feeds it signal. It's maybe 0.02 USD/day (for the sub), but I've got extra smart plugs from a multi-pack, and it's easy enough to put together an automation to power them all down if they've been idle a while.
But who will pay for our campaigns if we don't lick the boot of oligarchs?
Ditto. Was surprised to hear it that far along, with absolutely no prior leaks/hype, except maybe they learned from CP2077.
Eventually sorted out they mean 'production' in the movie sense, not the product sense. And I suppose that's fair, given how much modern ARPGs incorporate voice & physical acting, foley work, motion capture, etc
Read further. There are two judgements against Jones: one for ~$50M and one for ~$1B. In a normal bankruptcy resolution, the 8 families of the $1B judgement will get 95% of the proceeds, while the 2 families of $50M get 5%. "Sandy Hook families forgoing $750,000" means that those 8 families are effectively giving $750k of their millions to the 2 families, resulting in a more even distribution of compensation across the whole group.