tburkhol @ tburkhol @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Back in the day, corporate taxes were like 25% of federal revenues. After Trump's tax cuts, it's down to 10%. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1edSi

High corporate tax rates encourages companies not to have profits - pay their revenues out as wages, research new technologies, build infrastructure. Do useful shit with their gains rather than just sit on big bags of cash.

Interesting, though: the highest insurance rates are in the midwest - Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas. No one lives there, so the risk pool is smaller than big states like CA and FL, and you can't send firefighters to divert a tornado. We'll see if that holds up to climate change, bigger CA fires, and more frequent FL hurricanes.

I bought my first car on credit. After my last payment, I diverted that money into dedicated savings for the next car. Kept me from lifestyle creep and paid myself interest instead of the bank.

The computers are, by far, the most reliable parts of a car. They're not subject to mechanical stresses or wear, and the real-time/embedded operating systems are far more fault resistant than desktop/phone OSes. The computers also mean that you can buy a $20 OBDII scanner and have the car tell you what's wrong with it. Maybe an extra $10 for an app that will decode most of the manufacturer-specific codes. The difference between those $30 diagnostics and the $10,000 system the dealer uses is mostly that the dealer system includes all the manufacturer codes and step-by-step directions for fixing each fault.

I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season.

https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-from-birmingham-jail.pdf

I would rather spend (modestly) more time checking my own than less time standing idly with nothing to do but watch some kid checking out my goods. It feels better to be an active participant. Where it breaks down for me and my 12 items is when all the self-check lanes are clogged with people trying to ring up a full cart of groceries, who still haven't figured out how to work self-checks, who are encumbered by a baby in one arm and a phone in the other hand, or who just can't move all that well.

Managers using the presence of self-check as an excuse to understaff the actual checkouts makes all of those problems worse, and makes the checkout process suck for everyone.

I've never been in a coffee shop without an automatic/one-touch espresso machine. The last one I tried - a place that roasts their own beans and offers a range of classes and Specialty Coffee of America certifications - I asked if they could make me a "bad" espresso, and they basically said, "Nope, you're gonna get whatever the button gives us."

Some of that turn is physical plant. Kitchens, especially, are built to serve human forms, where tech solutions to food prep would rather be stand-alone boxes. It's a far harder problem to make a robot that uses a restaurant's existing grills, ovens, and deep fryers than it is to make a box that turns out perfect french fries. It's a riskier proposal for a restaurant to replace its fry station, where a human can make fries, onion rings, egg rolls, or whatever new fad hits tiktok, with a fries-and-rings-only box with less than 10 years commercial proof. Generative AI, for all its faults, is just code that runs on a computer you already have, or maybe in a cloud service with zero physical footprint. Relative to replacing your barista with a vending machine, trying ChatGPT for a quarter or two is practically zero risk.

Graphics aren't as good, but my favorite single-player MMO is http://progressquest.com/

You can't vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger or Ariana Grande, either, and that doesn't represent the collapse of democracy.

It's almost like the conservative court strategy is to appeal, delay, and hope you die before you face any consequences.

You can read McConnell's statement as meaning, "Trump doesn't really mean his racist bullshit, he's just playing to the crowd." i.e.: Why would Trump appoint Chao to Sec Transportation if he really believes immigrants are poison? Maybe there's more context than in the article, but it only looks like a "slam" if you project anti-racist sentiment onto Mitch McConnell, a man who, despite his own wife, has long carried an anti-immigrant flag.

Also, is this legal?

Legal? Defintely: it's at most a civil disagreement between corporate-preople. If it were anyone other than Elon, I'd be sure that the contracts included some kind of termination clause that lets Tesla do this, possibly by still paying Disney+, possibly by paying Disney a termination fee. Because it's Elon, I'd say there's probably a lawsuit incoming, just as soon as Disney Legal's printers finish the gold leaf trim on 1000 page filing.

If you have VR headsets, Walkabout Mini-Golf is surprisingly fun. In fact, I'd argue that it only becomes fun with 3 people.

Too entitled to understand dividing markets by cost. Aesthetics trump functionality when your phone becomes a fashion accessory.

Why would you even waste studio headphones on a device with a $0.25 DAC and no space for signal isolation? Or is that just to signal fellow audiophiles.

Budget phones have them because wired earbuds or headphones are cheap: wired buds under $10. Last flight I was on gave them away for free. Harder to lose. If you're paying £1,000+ for a phone, the you're probably not worried about the cost of accessories. Might even put the style of no dangly wires over the functionality.

Traditionally, RAID-0 "stripes" data across exactly 2 disks, writing half the data to each, trying to get twice the I/O speed out of disks that are much slower than the data bus. This also has the effect of looking like one disk twice the size of either physical disk, but if either disk fails, you lose the whole array. RAID-1 "mirrors" data across multiple identical disks, writing exactly the same data to all of them, again higher I/O performance, but providing redundancy instead of size. RAID-5 is like an extension of RAID-0 or a combination of -0 and -1, writing data across multiple disks, with an extra 'parity' disk for error correction. It requires (n) identical-sized disks but gives you storage capacity of (n-1), and allows you to rebuild the array in case any one disk fails. Any of these look to the filesystem like a single disk.

As @ahto@feddit.de says, none of those matter for TrueNAS. Technically, trueNAS creates "JBOD" - just a bunch of disks - and uses the file system to combine all those separate disks into one logical structure. From the user perspective, these all look exactly the same, but ZFS allows for much more complicated distributions of data and more diverse sizes of physical disks.

Valheim, but I can ride a dragon? Keeping my fingers crossed.

I mean, if Mike leads all the MAGAnauts into exile in the desert, would that be such a bad thing? Nearest desert to escape the US is probably south...I'll volunteer to make road signs.

US Garcia frigates (1960s) were 2600 tons; Knox (1970s) 3000; Brooke class FFG/heavy frigates (1960s) were 5400 tons, and Oliver Hazard Perry class FFGs (1980s) 4100 tons.