tburkhol

@tburkhol@slrpnk.net

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gary Stevenson: 'Tax wealth or we'll return to the feudal age'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  1. 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.

  2. 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?

  3. 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gary Stevenson: 'Tax wealth or we'll return to the feudal age'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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!!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.