tburkhol
@tburkhol@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Any politician who disagrees needs to go 2 weeks ago:
Agree. I’d love to see someone do a rigorous accounting of any degree program, especially with international comparisions. I once went through a couple of US state universities, and that generally supported the hypothesis of ‘cost of instruction hasn’t changed in 50 years, but burden of payment has shifted from state taxes to tuition,’ but that was based on whatever the schools published as ‘cost of instruction.’ I’d believe that international cost of instruction follows purchasing price pairity, and it seems more expensive in the US because it’s all tuition and no public payment.
- Comment on Why is AOC a big deal? She just speaks common sense and calls out absurdity. Have we really gone that far off the rails where we don't do it ourselves? 2 weeks ago:
When she first showed up, I remember one particular picture of her being all over right wing media. Not the most flattering picture, obviously. She was smiling especially broadly, showing lots of teeth, eyes wide open (“bugged out”). Sometimes associated with speculation that she might have Graves disease or some developmental disorder.
No question her appearance has made the media give her more time than they might, but she has a compelling story and she’s connected with millennial voters much better than her septuagenarian peers.
- Comment on Any politician who disagrees needs to go 2 weeks ago:
Docs in the rest of the world don’t start with $200k student loans, and nurses don’t start $50k in debt. US medicare for all won’t magically give us Swedish hospital rates.
- Comment on Any politician who disagrees needs to go 2 weeks ago:
The US currently spends about $5 trillion on healthcare. About $1T of that goes through Medicare, another $0.9T through Medicaid, which leaves about $3T. Non-government spending is $1.6T through private insurance, $0.6T out of pocket, and $0.5T charities.
The “universal healthcare would be cheaper argument,” which I believe, is based on shifting that $3T of private payments into government spending and bringing the ~85% efficiency of care by private insurers up to the 98% that Medicare claims. i.e.: eliminating roughly $400 B of insurance company profit. That still requires $2.5T revenue increase, which is about 50% of current revenue.
- Comment on It’s Looking Like the Cybertruck Is the Biggest Flop in Automotive History 2 weeks ago:
Interestingly, the specific article cited is more making the case that all passenger cars are bad, and we’d be better off with e-bikes, transit, and walkable cities. i.e.: I don’t think hes saying 'EVs are worse than ICE," which is where the ‘lifetime emissions’ line usually goes. He’s saying “fuck cars, EVs not excepted.”
- Comment on Gary Stevenson: 'Tax wealth or we'll return to the feudal age' 5 weeks ago:
What 1-2% wealth tax are us shlubs already paying?
You’re honestly lecturing me about unrealized gains and you don’t even know about Property Tax?!? Primary residence is the closest most people get to an investment portfolio, and they get taxed on its full value, not just the equity fraction they own.
- Comment on Gary Stevenson: 'Tax wealth or we'll return to the feudal age' 5 weeks ago:
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no one’s talking about a 5% wealth tax, and few people are even talking about applying it to people with fortunes as paltry as $10,000,000.
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Us middle-class shlubs are already paying 1-2% wealth tax on our biggest asset, and that asset doesn’t even generate income. Why should billionaire stock portfolios be exempt?
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Asset taxes, whether real estate or equity, encourage those assets to be put to productive use. If you can’t figure out how to extract 1% economic value out of your $100,000,000 company to pay the wealth tax, then maybe you should sell that company to someone who can run it right.
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- Comment on Gary Stevenson: 'Tax wealth or we'll return to the feudal age' 5 weeks ago:
The idea that billionaires would leave the economy that made them billions, the services and amenities that make being a billionaire worthwhille, and all their rich friends, all for a little tax break is pretty ridiculous. They already choose to live in California, New York, and London - expensive places with high taxes - rather than Cayman Islands or South Dakota.
They’re definitely not uprooting the whole corporate campus, moving it away from the skilled workforce it needs, the housing that they need, and the good schools that they want.
Billionaires’ personal wealth isn’t generating any taxable income, anyway, so there’s no income tax to lose if they do leave.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Can’t imagine they would be personal-use lockers, especially not with doors that display the contents. Have to imagine that they were no-lock ‘lockers’ to hold common-use balls & gear out of the weather when not in use.
I suppose they could be rental/honor-box - insert quarter to get ball, please return when done, but I don’t think I’d call that a ‘locker.’
- Comment on Time to bring back physical media on PC? 1 month ago:
As someone with a collection of a couple hundred CDs and another hundred or so DVDs filling my closet, I’m not really sure everyone appreciates the logistics of holding physical media for a couple-hundred-game library.
- Comment on PlayStation Is Deleting 551 Movies From Customers’ Accounts, Reminding Us Nothing Digital Is Ever Truly Ours 1 month ago:
I’ve been collecting CDs, DVDs, and BRs for 30 years. They fill a closet. Thank fuck for rippers, though, so I can play them all from one HD with a little sort through menu and a click.
It’s hard to keep up with all the new hotness on disks, though. If you want to know what the guys at work are talking about with Ted Lasso, or The Boys, then it’s streaming or high seas.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 month ago:
Well, the steam machine has a custom gpu, but it seems similar to an RX 7650, so
videocardbenchmark.net/…/Radeon-860M-vs-Radeon-RX…
should give you some quick numbers. Or I’m sure GN has a 90 minute video going through the details.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 month ago:
The tux uses the AMD iGPU, where Steam machine has a dedicated GPU, so it’s going to be very different.
- Comment on Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here? 2 months ago:
The US spent a lot of money on soft power, essentially bribing countries to go along with their agenda. Much of that money did actually improve people’s lives, whether it was food aid, vaccinations, or AIDS care. Sure, it was to further their own objectives. Sure, it’s mostly because it’s cheaper to buy compliance than to bomb people into compliance. Humanitarian aid with strings attached is still humanitarian aid, though, or the collapse of USAID wouldn’t be such a problem.
- Comment on Why exactly are nursing aids paid so poorly? 2 months ago:
Workers feel responsibility for the people under their care. Bosses exploit their guilt over untended people to reduce wages.
- Comment on "Nobody's making games for the retired people" – The growing yet underserved market for grey gamers 2 months ago:
No doubt. Retired gamer here: I play so much Valheim, Saints’ Row 3, and Fallouts. No way I’m forking out $70 for some new wannabe, unless you pry the .comfort games from my arthritic fingers.
- Comment on Flipper!! 2 months ago:
I had a…call? survey? at some point from an entity that probably gave rise to this data. It was basically a push-poll that used question order and positive reinforcement to try to get people to agree that abortion is murder.
Mostly, it tried to conflate “human” with “a human,” starting out with things like “are cells isolated from humans still human?” “Can cultured cells be called ‘viable?’” “So would you agree that tissue cultured from a human donor is viable, human tissue?”
- Comment on What is the deal with IPv6? 2 months ago:
Basically the same reason the US hasn’t switched to metric.
- Comment on The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily 2 months ago:
At what point does a tax on equities essentially become a continuous draw-down of wealth on the same money year after year, resulting in absolutely no incentive to invest in business and for that matter a situation where it is impossible to build up any wealth? How will startups be funded? How will large, shoot for the stars projects be funded?
That’s actually the point: use taxes to force rich people to make high risk investments.
If you can’t figure out how to turn enough profit on your farm to pay the property taxes, then you sell your farm to pay the taxes and someone else gets to put the capital to better use.
If you can’t figure out how to turn enough profit on your $10B company to pay the wealth tax, then you have to sell enough of it to pay the tax, and someone else gets more say in how the company runs.
Wealth tax encourages people with ungodly fortunes to make bigger, more risky bets, because they have to overcome the constant drain of wealth tax. Ultra-wealthy shouldn’t just coast along on the low returns of super-safe investments, because those are the people who can afford to lose part of their fortune.
Instead, we have the guy with $1000 YOLOing his life savings on GME options, because the $80 he can get from an index fund isn’t going to get him to retirement, while Berkshire Hathaway is sitting of $300B of US treasuries.
- Comment on The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily 2 months ago:
Income tax may be a solution to government revenue, but it’s not a solution to inequality.
Capital accumulates exponentially, and if you don’t address that exponential growth, then there will be ludicrously wealthy people, social immobility, and all the problems we have now. Tax wealth.
Of course it will be complicated. Of course there will be court cases. All of that is true of the current system. We can’t get to a working system if we don’t even start. Tax wealth.
- Comment on The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily 2 months ago:
For most of our history, real estate was wealth. You needed property to grow crops, mine resources, build a factory, or do any kind of venture that would make money. It’s only in the 20th century that we really start having a significant amount of wealth in stock markets that couldn’t be directly traced to a physical asset. The robber barons figured that was a good excuse to stop taxing their wealth.
- Comment on "Upgrading" my Home Server setup 2 months ago:
I added homeassistant and some power monitors to my stack, and the IT rack comes in around 1.5 kWh/day - one of the biggest power budgets in the house, even with a low-power CPU, after adding in a few HDDs, a couple switches, and the cable modem. I’m also in a cheap power state, so it’s not a financial pressure, just surprising how quickly 10W here, 10W there…add up. At $0.50/kWh, I’d think solar would be a no-brainer.
- Comment on "Upgrading" my Home Server setup 2 months ago:
Keep power in mind. For most home-use services, you don’t really need much computing power, and you might be able to do all you want with a single box. Even 30W, 24/7 is $25 (@10¢/kWh)-125(@50¢)/year of electricity. That said, it’s a small price to learn how to do clustering or swarms.
I’d guess that your biggest load would be transcoding in Jellyfin, for which Intel Gen 6 added h265 to quicksync. The Gen 3/4 CPUs in M73 would be extra slow with most modern codecs.