MystikIncarnate
@MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
Some IT guy, IDK.
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 2 weeks ago:
I need savings because all my bills land in the same week-and-a-half timespan.
So there needs to be all of the money in the account before that happens.
I know, it’ll balance itself out in the long term, but the weeks I don’t have bills to pay are usually the weeks that I need to refill the pantry, and end up spending more than I have allocated for that week so that I can eat.
I need to accumulate the base amount to pay all my bills when they come due, before I can really get started.
I know it seems really simple, once all my bills are done for the month, start then! Except there’s probably incidentals, like the food that I mentioned, that need to be purchased, that I just can’t afford on the $100 available for me that week. So I take what’s needed, and then I’m behind again. The cycle continues.
I had a very good system for this when I was getting paid twice a month. I took the ~400 or 450 or whatever (again CAD) from each paycheck, and I split my bills so that, by cost, they were roughly split between before-the-15th and after-the-15th pay periods. I’d get paid, take my share, let the bank do the rest, and when I get a notification for a bill I need to pay by hand, from my calendar app, I go and pay it in full.
Then I ended up with weekly pay and suddenly, I’m paying 130%+ of a weeks income to pay my bills on the same week.
It fucked me up man. I’m still pretty wrecked by it and it’s been like this for more than a year.
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 2 weeks ago:
This all sounds great until you realize that you need time to run up to this, or a modicum of savings in order to make it happen.
Your numbers are optimistic at best. My bills vary and they’re more than 70% of my income (roughly).
It’s more efficient to deposit my money into a bill payment account, then take out what I can spend from that.
Guess what I already do?
Guess how much “spend” I have, per week, that needs to cover all of my gas, food, and everything else? I’m not even saving a dollar, and my available money per week is around $200.
That seems great until you realize that I’m Canadian and it’s Canadian dollars, and $200 CAD is around $150 USD.
I’m employed, full time, in a specialized field, and I can spend $100 USD a week on food because I need the extra $50 for incidentals and gas.
I don’t need a budget. I have a budget. I need a raise.
- Comment on THIS is a real test of how old you are. If you score 20 your future is short 2 weeks ago:
Child.
- Comment on THIS is a real test of how old you are. If you score 20 your future is short 2 weeks ago:
According to that, I should be 53.
That’s over a decade older than I am right now.
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 2 weeks ago:
That would be a great idea if I had any discernable savings. I expect I need at least half a month of money in my bills account to balance everything out, for those weeks that I am paid less than what I need to pay for bills.
- Comment on Anon lives on a budget 2 weeks ago:
This is killing me in a different way.
Weekly pay for monthly bills.
Most of my bills land between the 10th and 20th of the month, which means I have to set aside and reserve money from my other paycheques to cover that range.
I am bad at doing so.
- Comment on Capitalism isn't the problem, THIS is the problem, and I've watched it roll over us for 40 years. [3 min. video] 3 weeks ago:
I would argue that capitalist monopolies are the problem.
There are examples where a “monopoly” has 100% of the market and they do a good job, usually in non-profit driven contexts. To provide an example: there’s only one organization in pretty much any given area, that handles extinguishing fires. Usually called the fire department, and it’s run by the local body of government in a monopoly context.
They still do a great job, but there’s no competition in fire fighting.
They’re not inherently profit driven.
Also, hats off to the firefighters out there, you guys are awesome. Anyways, back to my point.
There are good organizations that operate a monopoly in their service segment. They’re just typically owned and operated by a democratically elected government. Of the people, for the people, by the people.
Any monopoly that is profit driven, especially any that are capitalistic, will succumb to enshittification, 100% of the time, it’s just a matter of when it happens. The only time that it is possible to not have that happen, is in privately owned corporations, which are rare… But the leadership believes in improving the product more than profiteering. But on a long enough time line, that will also fail because inevitably someone will buy the company or inherit it, and they will want to maximize their profits over everything.
It will always happen when things are privately held, and especially if they’re publicly traded.
- Comment on Capitalism isn't the problem, THIS is the problem, and I've watched it roll over us for 40 years. [3 min. video] 3 weeks ago:
There’s a paradox I heard of that’s pretty relevant in this line of thought that is pretty transportable to most things. I heard it in the context of IT security.
It goes something like this: you buy security and after 2 or 3 years when you need to renew, nothing bad has happened, so it seems like you don’t need security. When in actual fact the extra security has been the reason there haven’t been any incidents.
So it’s almost impossible to prove that buying the security is helping without extensive analytics.
In many cases those analytics are either very difficult or impossible to get.
To demonstrate the transportable nature of this concept, let’s transpose it to vaccines.
If everyone is vaccinated, then nobody gets sick from those diseases, making it seem like the diseases are not a threat anymore, which means that vaccines are no longer useful.
Meanwhile, in all actual fact, the only reason why polio is so rare is because there is a safe and effective vaccine for it that everyone has taken (replace polio with whatever disease you want that has an effective vaccine).
It’s a paradox of: how do we prove this is working, without discontinuing it and possibly being eaten by rats/leopards/whatever.
If there’s only monopolies in the market then is their product the best on the market, or is everyone using it because there’s no alternatives?
Leaning that monopoly argument against capitalism, it’s almost certainly not the best product. When you have a captive audience, those that need your service and don’t have an alternative, there’s no incentive to innovate, or invest in improving the product at all. Do innovation stagnates so that corporations can maximize shareholder value; because the focus of a corporation isn’t to innovate, or improve what they do, their focus is always on extracting the most value for the least cost.
Therefore, monopolies will almost certainly lead to a sub-optimal product. The people that suffer for this are the users of that product. In the case of something like Google search, that’s basically everyone.
There’s a more modern term for this phenomenon: enshittification. Actively making a product worse specifically for the purposes of creating profits for shareholders.
Late stage capitalism is fun, isn’t it?
- Comment on Anon is a fan of GabeN 3 weeks ago:
This is such a controversial person to discuss. On one hand, loot boxes, the steam market for trading, and a lot of gambling and profiteering going on. At the same time, all of the OP comments are also true.
Out of all the billionaires, I dislike gaben the least. The net good he’s done for gaming may not balance the scales entirely, but at least there’s a discussion to be had whether what gaben has done is for the better, or for the worse. Which is more than I can say about most billionaires I know of.
- Comment on Fresh dystopian hell from Samsung fridges with ads. 4 weeks ago:
I don’t really understand the appeal of a smart fridge. Unless it’s going to tell me what groceries to buy, I don’t really need an iPad on my fridge.
In any case, this was all inevitable. Technology has produced a socially acceptable way for corporations to spy on their customers. They’ve been doing that for years. Now they’re putting what they’ve learned to use, so they can sell you more shit and maximize the profit potential per customer.
Maximizing profit isn’t new or is it news of any kind, that’s literally the entire reason corporations exist. There have been entire lawsuits about it. CEOs, sometimes want to reinvest in their workers and use profits to upgrade facilities and give out raises, only to be sued by their shareholders… The shareholders won by the way.
This is necessary for them. Anyone who acts contrary to maximizing shareholder value is either sued, removed, or otherwise taken out of a position where they can have any effect.
Any publicly traded company, especially multi-National and international companies, are basically slaves to this kind of enshittification.
The system is working as designed.
- Comment on The President of the United States of America 4 weeks ago:
So this is what a puppet looks like when you pull your hand out… Very interesting.
- Comment on Lemmy users who say that Lemmy users are smarter than Reddit users 4 weeks ago:
Man, y’all are wrong. People on both platforms be stupid as hell. Myself included.
What was I talkin’ about?
- Comment on Feeding my family alone is expensive. I can't afford to feed all of y'all. 5 weeks ago:
This is exactly what I was trying to say. Someone single making $200k might think, well, I’m not struggling at all, maybe I’m on the rich side?.. No, they wouldn’t be rich there either.
$200k/yr is nothing compared to the fat cats on top.
Even double that, you’re still much much closer to begging for quarters in the go station than deciding what yacht to buy next…
The amount of money the rich have extorted from the rest of us is unfathomable.
- Comment on Feeding my family alone is expensive. I can't afford to feed all of y'all. 5 weeks ago:
🛩️🛩️
- Comment on Feeding my family alone is expensive. I can't afford to feed all of y'all. 5 weeks ago:
Middle class is gone. You’re either extremely rich, or you’re down in the dirt with us poors.
If you’re not sure which camp you’re in, welcome to the fold.
- Comment on Feeding my family alone is expensive. I can't afford to feed all of y'all. 5 weeks ago:
Oddly specific.
I hope you’re living your best life just to spite her.
- Comment on Feeding my family alone is expensive. I can't afford to feed all of y'all. 5 weeks ago:
🛩️
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Why do you think that?
Because corporate greed > all?
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
The reason is simple. Inflation.
The NES originally sold for $180 USD in 1985, which is worth $530 today. The SNES, circa 1991, was $199 USD or $459 today.
Fast forward a bunch…
The switch 2 is currently priced at $449 USD.
The literal price has gone up, but the cost is going down. Slightly, but still.
I’m sure I could repeat the same experiment for PlayStation, Xbox, or Sega’s consoles and see similar results.
- Comment on PetSmart won't let you leave a review if you have adblockers on 5 weeks ago:
Literally baked into http is a “referrer URL” option.
None of this is new. It’s literally built into the protocols we use daily.
- Comment on PetSmart won't let you leave a review if you have adblockers on 5 weeks ago:
Yeah… As a technology person (working IT for many years now), it’s more likely that there’s some bad interaction between the browser, Adblock and the service that does the reviews. They’ve found a way to get an image to load regardless if the review applet works.
My bet would be that the Adblock is preventing the site from loading the necessary code to show the review submission “page”. This image is up behind the review regardless of if it works, is just that if the review thing works, it covers this up.
Sounds to me that this is a courtesy message basically saying that Adblock thinks the review thing is an ad.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Idk, $699 USD for the PS5 pro seems a bit closer to “PC pricing” than I would expect from Sony if they’re subsidizing the cost with future game sales.
I’d kind of expect them to be making consoles at break-even/no-profit, more than at a loss right now.
- Comment on Labcoat! 5 weeks ago:
Yeah… That’s just unnecessary to put a dog at risk like that, whether service or otherwise.
Also, don’t work in a lab by yourself. Have a buddy, even if all they do is sit in a corner and scroll on their phone. Have someone there in case something happens.
In the best case, you’ve maybe wasted some of their time. In the worst case, at least you’ll have company in quarantine.
- Comment on Racism restaurant 5 weeks ago:
We need the rest!
For science!
- Comment on Racism restaurant 5 weeks ago:
How dare!
(/s in case anyone wasn’t sure)
- Comment on Every accusation is a confession? More like everything is a confession 1 month ago:
What’s next? Operation bareback?
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 1 month ago:
Good luck.
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 1 month ago:
You’re probably right.
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 1 month ago:
Well, that was the point.
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 1 month ago:
As long as we don’t end up going over the waterfall, that should be fine.