chiliedogg
@chiliedogg@lemmy.world
- Comment on Bernard 1 day ago:
The end part about Americans traveling the world being respected again in 2010 is really depressing in 2025.
- Comment on World travelers 1 day ago:
So the coconuts migrated, but the majority population of many of the islands were taken there as cargo?
- Comment on Hey, do americans just want to take a break from normal politics for a bit and focus all our efforts solely on the wild boar problem? 2 days ago:
Yeah. I grew up around guns. I was shooting 22s early like you, had a compact shotgun by the age of 10, etc.
We didn’t live in the country, so while we had guns in the house, we did NOT have ammunition in the house until I was 15 or so, just in case me or my sister ever decided to play with a gun. We bought ammo on the way to the range or the hunt, and anything we didn’t shoot was given to a family member.
- Comment on Top 50 TV Shows Of All Time Ranked by the most known sources of ratings like IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic etc. Agree? 3 days ago:
Most of this is fairly recent, and I think it’s all available to stream pretty easily.
- Comment on Type C 3 days ago:
Techically true. The “Adaptive Fast Charging” was a 2014 15-25W standard from Samsung that could be delivered over Type A.
- Comment on Welp. 1 week ago:
So the cost of like one class in the US.
- Comment on Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you 1 week ago:
I work for a city where the stupid-rich live. Their houses are NUTS. I recently approved construction of a 5,000sft guest house with a rooftop tennis court. We have over a dozen houses in active construction that cost over 15 million dollars, and no new structures being built under 4 million.
We actually have standards in our development code regarding servant’s quarters. And the most important thing to know about those standards is that they’re required to be smaller than the minimum allowable size for guest quarters. Can’t have the Servant’s getting all uppity.
But the thing is, they pay very little in taxes as a portion of their wealth. They have enough political power that they founded a 4mi^2 enclave as its own city entirely surrounded by a major city. They also managed to get their own school district. As a result, they have some of the lowest taxes in the state. Someone with a 7 million dollar house here will pay the same amount of money in property taxes as someone with a half-million dollar condo 2 miles away, because the rates for the school district and city for the wealthy are so low.
For utility districys, they get out of paying property tax by having the city provide it directly without a WCID by contracting to the major city next door that gives them the utilities at a loss to keep the rich assholes happy and supplying campaign donations.
- Comment on Realistically, how feasible is it to 100% boycott a massive corporation (such as Amazon) for an extended period of time? 2 weeks ago:
The most plausible way is a short-term boycott for like 2 weeks at the end of their fiscal reporting period. You want the rebound not to be reflected in the quarterly report so it fucks with the share prices.
- Comment on Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you 2 weeks ago:
The house was about 180 when they bought it, then climbed in value over time to the point they had to move due to taxes. The combination of city, county, 2 separate MUDs, school, ESD, health district, and other taxes didn’t help either.
The school taxes alone were nearly 2% of the value of their home. When your home quaruples in valueshoppingthe area around you gets ritzy, that adds up.
- Comment on Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you 2 weeks ago:
For the city. Then double the city rate for the school district, then add some more for the MUDs and the County and the Health district and the Emergency services district. Shit adds up fast, and when you buy a house new for 180 grand and a few years later it’s valued at 700 grand, you have to move because you can no longer afford to pay the taxes.
- Comment on Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you 2 weeks ago:
It’s really not that crazy in some areas.
They had municipal taxes, county taxes, school district taxes (when massive school bonds pass every single year without fail that one can really add up), emergency service district taxes, Water District taxes, Healthcare District taxes.
That shit adds up when the value of your property doubles every 3 years like it has been doing in Texas.
- Comment on Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you 2 weeks ago:
That’s the thing about increasing home prices nobody talks about. It increases the “value” of your home, so you’re taked more.
When my parents retired, they didn’t move out to the country to get away from the city life. They did it because it saved them 40 grand a year in property taxes.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer 2 weeks ago:
As I’ve grown older and busier, I now prefer shorter games. Even when I intentionally try to play games, I may get 2-3 hours a week most weeks. A 100-hour campaign takes me a year to play through.
- Comment on You guys have to end it 2 weeks ago:
I love my automatic transmission and cruise control, but I do think that I may have been a better driver when I drove stick. By necessity, I had to pay closer attention to the road than I have to today.
- Comment on Anon has a close encounter 2 weeks ago:
Story time:
I teach underwater photography at the local university. It’s a night class, and I was teaching about shooting macro in a pool with my students.
We’re at the surface, and a student points behind me and says, “What the hell is that?”
It was a bright light that looked like someone was going crazy with the focus on a camera, with the lightpoint being small, bright, and sharp and divide and blurry, but it looked like that to the eye. It was mysterious and awesome. Then it bloomed into some kind of flower made of light and gas before going dark.
I had a several thousand dollar camera setup with a big zoom lens in my hands, and you know I went nuts taking shots.
The thing about underwater macros is you generally shoot them with the aperture closed as much as possible, the ISO low, and a fast shutter, then you blast the hell out of the target with your strobes.
So I was taking shots with an ISO of 200, F-stop of 22, and a shutter speed of 1/250th of a second.
Turns out SpaceX rockets de-orbiting are out of range of my mini-strobes, and the pictures were just black rectangles.
- Comment on fuck this asshole 2 weeks ago:
Congress isn’t making a law. Instead, the President is committing treason while his party pretends not to notice and the other party flops around like a dead fish.
- Comment on Meow 3 weeks ago:
For some reason I have the sudden urge to built a carpeted tower…
- Comment on Chad rule 3 weeks ago:
Of they can show that they’re not being treated the same as other employees who are making the same minor mistakes that may be able to claim unemployment.
- Comment on Chad rule 3 weeks ago:
All 50 states. At will employment makes it legal to fire people, but it doesn’t relieve the employer of the requirement to provide unemployment if the employee is terminated without cause.
It just means they can’t be forced to keep an employee on staff.
- Comment on Chad rule 4 weeks ago:
No. But aside from failure to show up on time or theft it can be hard to document cause.
- Comment on Chad rule 4 weeks ago:
“Being toxic” is hard to define in an employee handbook.
“We don’t like you” isn’t not considered good cause for termination. It’s 100% legal to fire someone for that, but they get to claim unemployment.
- Comment on Chad rule 4 weeks ago:
That’s true in the US too. If someone is fired without cause, the company has to pay unemployment.
I’ve been the manager of completely shitty, toxic people who cause harm to the company and lead to massive turnover of other staff, but was unable to fire them because they showed up on time and met dress code, and corporate wasn’t gonna pay for unemployment.
- Comment on Murica 4 weeks ago:
I rode one for a while in college.
Didn’t really help with the sweat problem between April and October in Texas. Or was less work than pedaling, but nothing aside from air conditioning helps with the sweat issue in Texas summer heat.
- Comment on Murica 4 weeks ago:
Arrive to work soaked in sweat because it’s been 100+ degrees every day for the past 8 weeks.
- Comment on The priorities of life 4 weeks ago:
It’s not zoning.
It’s when places developed. The super spread-out metroplexes of the US are in areas that developed after the invention of the automobile.
Europe isn’t more enlightened when it comes to development. They’re just older. Cities tend to develop around most people living within an hour of where they work. When the US urbanized, that was a much larger area due to technological advancements. Rolling that back is almost impossible.
- Comment on The priorities of life 4 weeks ago:
Believe it or not, not everyone lives in dense urban areas or the suburbs.
And the scale of the US isn’t something most Europeans understand. How long does it take you drive across your country? In the US, a drive from Southern California to Maine is over 48 hours and around 5000 kilometers.
The Texas Triangle megalopolis (Houston, Dallas, San Antonio) is bigger than lots of European countries.
- Comment on The priorities of life 5 weeks ago:
I tried saying “bippity bopping boo” just now, but it didn’t move my house 20 miles closer to the grocery store.
- Comment on Try going to public school 5 weeks ago:
Let’s start with this: murdering people is bad.
That being said, if someone is determined to murder people for infamy and attention, let’s give all the attention we can to those who kill parasite CEOs while saying nothing about those who kill random civilians and children.
- Comment on The priorities of life 5 weeks ago:
Peope can’t just say “I don’t like the weather” and leave.
Wednesday things like housing, Healthcare, and food, which depend on jobs. And those can be very difficult to find in a new place.
I work in municipal employee and an expert in Texas development regulations. If I leave Texas, I lose most of my value as an employee.
- Comment on The priorities of life 5 weeks ago:
Most Americans buy a lot of groceries at once because most Americans don’t have quick access to grocery stores, and buying smaller portions of groceries costs a fortune.
I can buy a week’s worth of groceries for a family of 4 for about the price of 10 days of groceries for one person. But it requires being able to haul a lot more than can fit on a bike. And for many of us, the store is also a long way away with no public transit and in a place where the temperature may be lethally hot for months at a time.