tburkhol

@tburkhol@slrpnk.net

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the deal with IPv6?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.