If he’s anything like American conservatives he probably appreciates the comparison more than anything

Makes me wonder what would happen if a government funded and operated pension fund were setup. Basically like social security but ramped up to fully cover the cost of retirement for all Americans.

I also wonder how that would realistically impact macroeconomics if the money were simply printed instead of budgeted to avoid the problems of expecting infinite growth and a growing retirement population as people live longer and populations shrink. There seems to be some growing economic questions as to if measured money printing can be beneficial to an economy, and doing so for social good, even social security if you will, might theoretically stave off deflation. It would probably become a useful dial for the Federal Reserve to adjust in persuit of its dual mandate as well, increasing or decreasing how much of the fund is printed vs budgeted as needed. Maybe that could even become a third mandate of managing the social pension fund to ensure comfortable retirements

Somewhere in the In-between by Streetlight Manifesto

I’ve been slowly digging into their discography recently and holy crap Ska is so funny because it’ll be a bopping tune but then you catch the lyrics and find it’s a song about war, death, collapse, etc.

This music video definitely embodies that same disconnect. Cute animal animation with bopping music except wait what are those people doing? What are those animals doing? Oh my is that how this ends?!

You see, it’s not communism, but communism with Chinese ideals (therefore whatever the heck the CCP wants it to be)

To build off of this, if you collect $1000 in taxes from a million people and you’ve just pulled in a billion dollars. With 300 million people in the country that’s a lot of tax dollars.

Obviously if you can tax 1000 out of every million dollars in wealth and individual earns in a year you can easily collect far more in taxes given how many multimillionaires will see their wealth increase by tens or hundreds of millions in a year.

This is all super reductive for simplicity. It’s worth looking at how the super rich are able to avoid paying taxes. Are they not paying taxes because they’re doing things with their money that is directly incentivized and generally better for the country than if they simply hoarded the same money, such as running the money through charities, clean energy installtions, etc? I’m honestly asking because i really don’t know and I dont have the time right now to pull at that thread and research the question

That’s a lot of time to figure out an escape plan and execute it!

This was the premise of the Greek myth of Tithonus

In short, Eos fell in love with Tithonus, a mortal prince, and begged Zeus to grant immortality to him (but forget to specify eternal youth and eternal health) so she was forced to watch him age until he shrunk into a raisin and was eaten

The earth is traveling around the sun at about 67000mph (29,722 meters per second, the unit of measurement I’ll use from here on our for consistently) that means to fall into the sun (and this is once you’ve already expended a ton of Delta-V (delta-V being a count of meters per second in change to orbit your craft needs to make/can make) escaping the Earth’s gravitational influence) you’d have to slow down a significant portion (about 24,000 meters per second specifically) of that 29,722 meters per second that you’re hurtling through space at.

It takes so much energy to try to crash a craft into the sun it’s literally cheaper (only costing about 8,800 m/s of Delta-V, compared to about 24,000 m/s of Delta-V) to fly the craft very very far away, such as to the edge of the solar system, then zero out the angular velocity so it effectively falls into the sun, than it is to fly directly to the sun. This tactic also enables one to use another planets gravitational influence to “gravity turn” and save on fuel, but it’s still horrendously expensive to get even a small craft weighing a fraction of a ton from the surface of earth out to the edge of the solar system to begin with.

Rockets face a significant challenge in that in order to reach orbit they need a large amount of energy, sources from a large amount of fuel. To get 1 ton of payload to orbit it needs an amount of fuel which adds additional weight which then requires additional fuel to lift the mass of the fuel. Because of this it takes about 100kg of fuel to get 1kg to orbit

In short, I highly recommend spending a few days playing Kerbal Space Program to learn far more than will fit in a single comment about orbital dynamics. That game is amazing at teaching basic concepts of orbital dynamics and the incredible challenges space programs face in just getting payloads to orbit let alone incredible feats like interplanetary travel or interstellar travel

I have a better idea! Launch it into a stable orbit in the oort cloud and maybe we can create a new planet there to colonize in a few centuries! It’s perfect because then we have the perfect place to send the radioactive soil from WWIII and a perfect base to hide from WWV from!

I feel that. I like Linux, but I also like using the right tool for the job, and sometimes that’s actually Windows. The rates of Linux talk here reminds me of Reddit like 15 years ago. It’s nice, but also I forgot how weird it is to be in such a Linuxy echochamber

In China, they have a citizen score system based on data collection like this. And if you drop too low, you won’t get loans, or jobs.

More recent reporting indicates this is not true. It appears the earlier reporting indicating this was based on a mix of bad translation and poorly identified conjecture. But mass data collection certainly enables no shortage or scary totalitarian surveillance.

Really I just wanted to share a perspective that can help handle the mental load of knowing how bad things are with mass data collection

I found it healthy to find humour in companies collecting boatloads of telemetry data to sell to brokers who then manage to make the data worse while they curate it, then sell it to advertisers who manage to fail to properly utilize the data they pay boatloads to access, and you end up with “targeted” ads that are no better targeted than advertisements placed on broadcast television. It’s a cycle of money that somehow creates wealth and cash flow out of nothing and provides no value in the end. Its the bullshittiest of bullshit jobs. And by simply blocking and avoiding ads you make that money cycle even more pointless!

Holy crap that works too well. Have my plastic fork!

Personally, I’m terrible about actually spending money on myself. Mostly because right now money is pretty tight as a single income household. A giftcard forces me to spend money in a more careless manner than I otherwise would. A giftcard encourages me to splurge and order a thing on Amazon or buy a super sugary treat or something else that can bring me joy. If I’m given cash I just use that to smooth over the daily grind, so giftcards absolutely hit different

To be fair, English has a bit of that too if you look at the first 20 digits

One, two, three… Eleven, twelve, thirteen… Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three… Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three…

If English was fully decimal the teens would simply be “Onety-one, onety-two, onety-three” but it’s not because fuck following conventions!

In a forum system that sorts by last comment that can be annoying.

I’ll be real, I entirely forgot that was a thing. Why are you reviving terrible memories like that?!

I see necroposting as when it’s someone coming by months or years after the discussion is over and not bringing much of value to the table. So it’s more to do with the value of the contribution than the timeframe

Only time I’ve had fraudulent charges was when I was 18 or so and hadn’t yet got my first line of credit. They disputed the charges normally and froze the account. It did suck not having much money but I also was living at home still so I just avoided spending money for a few days until it all finished processing

Honestly I’ve only gone made it to 7 days when sick and feeling like a shower would be waterboarding myself and waited until I felt just well enough to actually shower

Remote work really lends itself to some bad habits. My body’s sweet spot seems to be showering every other day, and with remote work I can end up not leaving the house at all for long enough that I’ll get to as much as 4 days without showering (usually the point where I shower at lunch because holy crap I just want to not feel my skin being greasy

Doesn’t help that I do evening showers which relies on my getting ready for bed on time, and staying up too late can be made up for by simply getting up 5 minutes before work and eating breakfast over the work computer an hour later