BillyClark

@BillyClark@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's great to see a politician that's progressive and Not a Millionaire.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I seem to recall this was from a few years ago. At this point, I wouldn’t hold it against her if she’s made more money. Big name politicians can make extra money through things like speaking fees and book deals. Honestly, I’d be surprised if any famous politicians aren’t taking speaking fees. Plus, her salary is $174,000/year according to Wikipedia.

  I like to at least pretend in my head that I’d be an ethical politician were I ever elected (a job I would never actually want), and if somebody offered me a speaking fee that was sort of the average amount a politician might get, I think I’d still be able to convince myself it wasn’t a bribe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨just temporarily embarrassed billionaires, one good idea or lottery ticket from making it rich⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Strangely, I guess, if I try to imagine myself having one billion dollars, it’s just an amount of money that the only way I’d even make a dent in it is if I either was specifically making bad purchases or if I had lost my mind. (For example, just gambling it all away.)

  Even if you simply threw it in a normal index fund that isn’t focused on dividends, but growth, you might still make 1%, or 10 million a year in dividends. So just the dividends you accidentally make would let you live a very luxurious lifestyle.

  I could imagine having one billion dollars if it was just the worth of my private company that I didn’t want to split up or something like that, but otherwise, it’s really just too much money. I’d be donating to charities just to keep my net worth at a level that I could look myself in the mirror and not feel like a villain, and so I’d actually be in favor of things like wealth taxes. It would just make my life easier.

  I think people who imagine themselves as billionaires and are still stingy with money are either not accurately imagining that amount of money, or they’re too stupid to have any amount of money, or they’re villains, just like every billionaire today is a villain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨President Trump reacts to President Biden’s cancer diagnosis: "I don't feel sorry for him"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I suspect that the Democrats intentionally pressured to delay those prosecutions with the following idea, “If we wait until the last minute, then these prosecutions of crimes, which we 100% know Trump is guilty of, will torpedo Trump’s presidential chances, and the Republicans won’t have any time to boost a different candidate.”

  I think they didn’t expect that the most slam-dunk case, the classified files case, would be pulled by one of the most outlandishly corrupt pro-Trump judges we’ve ever seen, Aileen Cannon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨President Trump reacts to President Biden’s cancer diagnosis: "I don't feel sorry for him"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Boneitis.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This is what happens when Billionaires own the news media.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Bezos bought the Washington Post after he had already been the richest person in the world. What do you think you mean when you say “how they get their status in those circles”? He’s got the status. There are only two people who have more wealth than him today. You think he’s just embarrassed hanging out with those two guys? Give me a break.

  His best move to close the gap right now with Musk is to advocate for a wealth tax. If Musk paid 1% of 800 billion and Bezos paid 1% of 280 billion, that’s actually closing the gap.

  And what are you even saying about how taxes are spent? Everybody has to pay whatever they’re told, even if it’s spent poorly. But if the government could demonstrate that they were using the tax money well, do you think Bezos would change his mind? If not, then it’s not even the bare minimum criteria for a point and you shouldn’t have brought it up.

  And whatever else you think of the American government, it at least enabled Bezos to become the richest person in the world. There are a lot of countries where that couldn’t have possibly happened. We’re talking about Bezos’s taxes here, not taxes in general.

  I’m not sure why you are apologizing for the richest people in the world being bad citizens. It seems like an obviously losing argument, as well as counter-productive to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This is what happens when Billionaires own the news media.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t think of a way to understand this type of billionaire as if they are a human. Paying new taxes or not paying new taxes will make very little difference to people like Bezos. He would continue to live the exact same lifestyle… maybe on a smaller yacht, but probably even that wouldn’t change.

  It’s hard to even say that he wants to be richer than other billionaires, because they’d all be paying the same taxes, too. At least the American ones.

  It’s literally just a number in a computer that he wants to be bigger. Yes, for him, that number getting bigger used to improve his life back when it was in the range of something that a person could spend in a lifetime, but now, it makes zero difference in the real world.

  Bezos’s net worth is just a number. It makes no difference to him if he pays more taxes. Why would he go so far out of his way to fight against taxes? He could alternatively just fucking ignore the politics, pay whatever they say, and then at least people would only hate him for being rich, and not for being a piece of shit. It just seems like the choice of somebody who is not human.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨10.99 for a beer with..... ai pictures on it.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the worst thing to come out of this AI thing is how all the conspiracy theorists now have a new target, calling everything AI without even understanding what it means or how to tell what’s AI. Somebody here even posted the contact info, and now the brewer has to deal with that shit.

  They have a saying in politics that if you’re explaining, then you’re losing. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t something similar in marketing.

  If you’re an unethical participant in some industry, and your competitor has some distinctive-looking artwork on their product, all you have to do is make a few anonymous posts that the artwork is AI, and boy, howdy, that BS is bound to spread itself to all the mainstream sites via conspiracy theorists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Dangers of Socialism they warned us about...⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen several times where somebody posts a picture saying “Look what socialism causes,” and the picture is like a tent city in modern America that was created under capitalism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's going on with Tesseract and why are people upset?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For anybody who doesn’t know what a front end is, the job of the front end is generally to take data from the back end and present it to the user. So for the fediverse, a front end might be the web page or app. The back end is the actual instance where you made your user.

  Lots of front ends do filtering, but at the explicit instruction of the user. It’s better to do it on the back end if you can because it’s wasteful to send data to the front end only to throw it away. But there is a place for front end filtering, just not in secret.

  So in this case, a person who used tesseract as well as, say, a lemmy web page interface, would probably expect to see the same data in both places, but the tesseract front end would actually be hiding a lot of stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When Stephen Colbert had The Colbert Report did the right ever realize he was doing a parody of them?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You have to look at how it was presented. Part of a speech that was supposed to be humorous, but we all know he really wants to run again.

  Also, that proposed amendment is a troll in my opinion. The guy who proposed it, some representative named Andrew Ogles, knows it has no chance of being ratified. So, why would he propose it? The likely candidates in my mind are to kiss up to Trump and to “trigger the libs” or whatever, at the same time. Proposing something that will never happen just for giggles is a pretty classic troll.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When Stephen Colbert had The Colbert Report did the right ever realize he was doing a parody of them?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I take all of my points from wisdom, and place them into intelligence!

  Now, to challenge myself to build the world’s most polluting machine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When Stephen Colbert had The Colbert Report did the right ever realize he was doing a parody of them?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are two reasonable ways of interpreting The Colbert Report. One is that he was joking, and this we know is what he intended, because he made himself clear when he was off the show.

  The other is that he was trolling. He was throwing things out there and he was joking, but not really. You now see this style from a lot of right wing people. Trump just did it in his correspondents dinner speech where he said he was going to run again in 2028.

  It’s because other people come in with their own biased perspectives and they can make some sort of reasonable interpretation that they get the wrong idea and never correct it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When Stephen Colbert had The Colbert Report did the right ever realize he was doing a parody of them?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  People who are smart in one way are usually not smart in every way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just got arrested for a supposed DWI even though I blew a 0.0000000. Don't cops need to read your Miranda rights to you? I asked for a blood or hair follicle test and I was denied. WTH is happening?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s shit that you have to know exactly what to say in order to take advantage of your rights.

  But one thing I should mention is not just to be careful not to say what you’ve been eating or drinking. Never tell the cops anything about yourself other than what is legally required. They often ask where you’re coming from and where you’re going, for example.

  They often try to trick people into consenting to a search by phrasing an order as a question, and pretending like they were just asking a question. “Would you mind opening your trunk?” The response is “I do not consent to searches.” I would also lock my door if I stepped out of my car. There are many situations where they can pretend you implied consent to search.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's rigged⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, while paying my property tax bill, I noticed that the government has no problem taxing me for an assessed value of my property without me actually realizing my gains.

  Of course, that is a property tax and not a capital gains tax, but it just shows that they definitely don’t have to wait until you sell to tax on capital gains. Just have an official assessment of value for investments.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does dried pasta have an expiration date⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Despite the memes, apparently, Twinkies go stale pretty soon after they’re made.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think that Trump is the most hated U.S. president?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How long are we to wait? If we wait too much longer, we’ll have waited for longer than the Confederate States of America existed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would it be better to just have a lot of society be underground?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Underground is not necessarily better for the environment. I think if we compared the ideal underground build to the ideal above ground build, underground would actually be worse for the environment.

  Think about it this way: The advantages you might get from underground are related to reclaiming ground and comprehensive city planning. But you can reclaim roof space to make up for the ground, and you can get the same benefits from city planning building above ground.

  The idea that you’d just leave pure wilderness on the ground level when you build underground is not realistic. You could grow the crops you need right there above it, instead, for example. A certain amount of land is needed to support each person. But either way, people would be going to the surface every day. If you build underground, you’ll also be building above ground.

  Meanwhile, underground requires quite a bit more stuff. You have to plan more to manage heat and ventilation. It’s difficult to increase density underground because you can build higher more easily than you can dig deeper.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In fact, there are some “child prodigies” out there who are simply drilled from a young age to pass specific intelligence tests. If you’re a overbearing parent desperate to live vicariously through your children, you can turn a fairly normal child into a “child prodigy.” It only costs you a lot of time and money and it only costs your child their childhood.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  One advantage of red cups is that you can more easily see names written on them with a Sharpie.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America continues to fall behind the rest of the world⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Freedom for children to starve until they develop severe lifelong disorders and mental deficiencies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anatomy of the Milky Way⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If you ignore the “100,000 light years”, this could be the anatomy of somebody’s spine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  All of those cars and probably planes causing god knows how much pollution, just to get one of the world’s most despised men to a meeting where he’ll be too incompetent to have any effect.

  Seriously, why do we even have ambassadors anymore?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If this were a movie, some clueless garbage truck would have pulled out and blocked the road.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨is our battery/junk drawer dangerous?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is less dangerous than me sitting on my ass all day.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Misaligned cabinet in apple wwdc⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mentioned the stack of 3 books at the top exactly to rebut that statement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Misaligned cabinet in apple wwdc⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t care at all about that because something else is far more offensive about this piece of furniture.

  If you look at the top above the plant, there is a stack of three books. THERE IS ENOUGH DEPTH TO PUT BOOKS THERE WITH THEIR SPINES FACING OUT, YET ON THE RIGHT, THEY’VE TAKEN AWAY ALL OF THAT DEPTH SO THAT THE SHELF WILL ONLY HOLD A SINGLE HARDCOVER BOOK, COVER FORWARD.

  This furniture screams, “I want you to think I like books, but truthfully, I don’t even know how to read. Hardcover books are more expensive, so I’m fooling you even harder.”

  It’s furniture for braggart morons. Let people brag all they want. Let them be morons all they want. But don’t make specialty furniture for braggart morons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Differences of Opinion by Wendy Cope⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Some parts of the internet which are moderated may remove content that they believe is bigoted towards certain groups. Moderators may not always have the luxury of taking the time to understand exactly why a word that is normally inappropriate might be appropriate in a specific situation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Differences of Opinion by Wendy Cope⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There was an episode of South Park where the kids claimed that a word that we view as a bigoted slur against gay men actually referred to people who loudly ride motorcycles at night.

  If reason doesn’t work for flat earthers, maybe we should use one of the well-known euphemisms that we no longer use for people whose mental abilities are far below average. You know, like, “special”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DOGE cut 20% of APHIS the agency that protects U.S. agriculture and now the screwworm parasite that wipes out livestock has returned to the U.S⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I just saw this yesterday, and that article had an estimated yearly impact of how much money farmers/ranchers would lose every year if screwworm comes back to the US, and IIRC, it was something like $900 million.