tburkhol @ tburkhol @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

You might be surprised how much attention family will put into your media, especially any pictures, movies, or audio that you created, when you're gone. It's a way to commune with their memory of you. My family still regularly trots out boxes of physical photographs of grandparents' grandparents & homes no one has visited in 70 years.

The first kind of bankruptcy, Elon & his Saudi bros keep the company, and the banks lose like 50-90% of their loans.

The second kind of bankruptcy, the banks get all the servers and office chairs and sell them to either a new data-mining company or a recycler. This isn't very likely, because most of the value of Xitter is all the people who keep visiting, regardless of whether Elon knows how to monetize them.

We really need a code of etiquette for them, though. Trip to the store this morning, and they were down to 3 self-check stations from usual 10 with literally a dozen people in line. Including one couple with a cart full of a week's groceries and one lady trying to win coupon roulette. Four other people cycled through the third scanner while those two piddled away the day.

This wasn't the Nordstream pipeline. This was a Finland-Estonia pipeline and telecoms in Oct 2023.

I don't even think that deceiving donors was the line. I think it was exactly what he bought. OnlyFans? Scandalous. Botox for a man? Shameful. If he'd bought guns and an F350, or just Venmo'd a high school student, he'd still a congressman.

Spiteful comedy feels good as long as it punches up. Not necessarily funny, but schadenfreude, cathartic, or just relief seeing them 'get taken down a peg.' It invites controversy when the artist and the audience disagree on the power structure. Chappellle falls apart around transgender, because he thinks he's punching up to that group, where I imagine most people believe that trans are close to the bottom of the oppression spectrum. Chappelle's argument basically being something like, "Well, they can 'pass' if they just match gender presentation to biological sex, and a lot of them are white.," but having to hide your membership in a group is the opposite of power.

Also, Federal agents wear black, or plainclothes: they're not part of "the blue."

You're right. I got my current (smallish) car with the explanation that I could just rent a truck when I want to haul hobby materials, but the practical inconvenience of that rental has meant that I just don't, and consequently haven't done any big hobby projects in years. When I imagine renting an EV booster battery, I imagine it being easy, convenient, and reasonably priced, unlike literally everything else in the automotive market.

And there is different emotional content in using your own vehicle vs any alternative.

I don't want to buy the oversized battery, and I don't really want to buy the on-board generator/charger of PHEV. I only want to own as much vehicle, and incur the manufacturing carbon debt, to meet 95-98% of my needs. Make it easy to rent, borrow, or share the extra capacity for the last 2%, and the world will be a lot less wasteful. I can see renting a trailer with enough generator to replace a series hybrid. I can see renting surplus battery. And those rental services can be a revenue stream to replace dealerships lost service centers.

Clearly, though, I'm a minority of consumers, and no manufacturer actually wants to cater to me and my twelve friends.

And let me rent an extra battery pack for long trips. I only need 40 miles day-to-day, but I gotta go 300 for Christmas.

Preachers are allowed to talk about politics: MLK Jr did it all the time. They just can't have the IRS subsidize that conversation.

Just because she's the author, doesn't mean she wrote it.

Like "Trump's" Art of the Deal: when you're a celebrity, you can slap your name on any ghostwritten/AI-generated bullshit and get some sales. Guess MTG is not the celebrity she thinks she is.

Nuts are super nutrient-dense. Just a handful gets you a decent amount of calories & protein. You can crush some up and mix with your oatmeal if they're too much to chew.

If we're dreaming, it'd be great to do away with OASDI as a separate, non-progressive, capped income tax and just roll it into the regular Federal rate. Bump the 10% bracket to 12%, the 22% to 26% and 37% to 45%. Hell, add a couple points to the CG rate.

But they sold OASDI to Americans like some kind of insurance policy - it's right in the name - and they've been trying to turn that fiction into a personal savings account for decades. Social safety nets just don't fit the mythos of strong, independent American who don't need no gubmint.

Where I am, cheap rice and cheap pasta are about the same - something around $1/pound, $2/kg. Ramen is decidedly not cheap at $3-4/pound. Even the 'fancy' pasta brands are only $2-2.50/pound.

At my store, a 12-pack of Maruchan is $6 - $3.57/pound. Store brand spaghetti is $0.90/pound and chicken bouillon is $2.50 for a half pound. Ramen is convenient and fast, not cheap.

I don't know about 'lie,' but it's certainly a misrepresentation. For decades, there were so few retirees that SS taxes were billions more than SS payments, and all of that surplus bought Treasury bonds. i.e.: loans to run the rest of the government. Payments now are running around $100B/year more than taxes ($10B if you include interest on those bonds), which is around 8% of tax revenues. At that rate, the last of the bonds gets sold in 2034, and something will need to get done about the 8% imbalance.

The misleading part is letting people infer that "running out of money" means no money to pay beneficiaries, like SS is some kind of bank account. Fixing the deficit isn't that hard, though. Cut benefits by 8%. Raise SS tax rate to 8.25%. Raise the income cap to $300k. None of those would be especially popular, and there's no reason to do any of them now, because there's still nearly $3T of Treasuries sitting in the SSA account. In the meantime, fearmongering about the issue is a great way to turn out the 65+ crowd and near-retirees, and a great way to demoralize the under-40 crowd.

My usual drinking vessel is a souvenir cup from the 1992 Miramar Air Show. I still use a "boom box" style radio and clock timer from 1985 as an alarm clock. The tape player on the radio is long expired, but it still plays radio.

Infrastructure for distributing the air once it gets to the settlement is one thing. At least for now, though, Earth is the only place to get oxygen in life-sustaining quantities, which is the single source they're talking about.

Maybe you can posit harvesting oxygen from mineral oxides, hydrolyzing water if you can find it, or capturing an ice asteroid. Whether you split every atom of oxygen you breathe out of rust or lift them out of earth's gravity, let alone doing both for redundancy, it's orders of magnitude more energy and complexity than growing potatoes in Antarctica.

My recollection is that Kelly had a pretty contentious relationship with his President and, even at the time, portrayed himself as 'the adult in the room' trying to restrain Trump's worst impulses. There was a whole stream of people who served with barely concealed disdain, then promptly unloaded in scandalous books and interviews upon leaving the administration.

Plenty of people did just join the grifter admin to get their grift on, but a few of them had the misguided idea that they could be the one to make Trump understand politics and professionalism.