tburkhol

@tburkhol@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why people consistently vote against their own interests to benefit the rich?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  For small businesses, a president taking power can immediately affect business. Small business owners make decisions based on their expectations of future, colored by their emotional state, so if they believe that a Republican President will be good for business, then they’re more likely to order new machinery, hire an extra person, etc. In an ecosystem of small businesses, that optimism feeds on itself.

  Happens in big business, too. S&P500 gained 3+% the day after election, which (if you don’t believe the daily stock market is just gambling) presumably means that ‘the market’ expects 3% more growth out of all those companies, just by Trump’s win being formalized. Stock price up makes it easier for companies to raise capital to expand, buy out competitors, etc

  Neither of those things is “the economy,” but they can feel like it, if you’re close enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is a Quest 3 really worth it?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I can see that. If you just want to hang out in a space, then VR Skyrim definitely has some cool places to hang, but how long are you really going to spend in that Skyrim tavern?

  When OP asks whether VR is a long-term option, that’s what I think. My favorite 2D games I have 500+ hours, probably a half dozen of them; I can still go back to those, some 10+ year old, and sink another 50+ hours. The only VR game I have more than 50 hours is the mini-golf game that’s glorified chat.

  For me, VR as an experience has been really amazing. It’s a level of immersion that’s just indescribably better than anything 2D, but each of those experiences has had limited staying power, which I think is because the physical demands of VR constrain my playtime and focus. I can left-mouse-button all day, but my back gets sore if I stand for three hours. So I can handle beat saber because I treat it like a gym session, but the idea of VR walking 7000 steps to Skyrim’s Throat of the World…just no.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is a Quest 3 really worth it?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not going to replace flat screen gaming. It’s hard to be in VR for hours, especially when you have to manage battery life, but I’ve had a headset for a year or two now, and it’s still amazing where it’s good. I’m better with smooth moving, but I still prefer teleporting, for headache/dizziness.

  Tried Skyrim, couldn’t make it stick - VR just isn’t right for massive open worlds. Halflife Alyx is amazing - it’s the right scale for VR, the attention to manipulatable objects is amazing, and some of the puzzles just couldn’t be done in 2D. Blade & Sorcery is good, too.

  Games I keep going back to are Beat Saber, because I’m old and need something to make me stand up and move, and Mini-golf, which is mostly a focus for hanging out with remote friends.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Treasuries are nice because they’re convenient and low buy-in, but their yields are crap, sometimes a little above inflation, sometimes below. TIPS are a decent way to hedge the inflation risk, but (IMO) it’s still really for people who are more worried about losing their savings than living off it. (i.e.: if you have, say, $1e8, you can live pretty comfortably off $1e6, even $1e5 in a lean year, so your rate of return doesn’t really matter)

  For me, personally, the limited bond exposure I have is all corporate and mostly junk, bought through my broker in the secondary market, with maturity 10-20 years out. Until fairly recently, junk bonds were the only way to get yields above 4%, and that’s kind of my mental benchmark for gaining relative to inflation. One downside of corporate bonds is they generally have a $10k minimum.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That drop was when the Fed was raising interest rates to stall inflation. Interest rates up, bond values down. But the drop in VTINX was only 20% over all of 2022, where OP is showing 50% in maybe the first quarter.

  Incidentally, the sensitivity to interest rates is why I don’t like bond funds. If you buy actual bonds, you get the face value back at maturity, where bond fund are forced to mark them all to current market prices to calculate NAV. IMO, this negates the main “safe” factor in holding bonds.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, OP isn’t telling us everything. He’s got a 50% decline in what looks like January 2022, where FSKAX and VTI were off by ~10%. Half that drop looks like it happened on one day. In fact, now that I look at it, it’s kind of reminiscent of a BTC chart.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No. If you’ve been saving for 30 years, then you’ll have 30 years of accumulated 10±20% annual gains, which should be something like 16x your start, but could be 100x if you’re lucky or 1x if you’re not. Regardless, an historic crash on retirement day may take that down to 12x your start, which is still pretty good, and will be fixed by the following couple years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Being an already decided voter in a swing state is swell⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I get political spam addressed to three different people who used to have my number. Real estate spam for one of them. Temp job offers for another. It’s annoying af going on four years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Eat lead⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  wwwrcamnl.wr.usgs.gov/isoig/period/pb_iig.html

  Lead-204 is the only isotope that doesn’t derive from radioactive decay, and it represents only 1.4% of the lead on earth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My mental health has improved after deleting games that have microtransactions in them⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  My 80-year-old mother is stil hooked on Hay Day (2012 Farmville clone). She doesn’t alarm-clock overnight events any more, but that could be because she can’t sleep through the night now. Got a team of other old ladies around the world for contests, and it’s right on the edge of where I think it’s great that she’s got something to keep her engaged versus might need an addiction intervention.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I make games and this literally happened to me this morning⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I used to pay a particular company by purchase order for this exact reason. CC takes 2-3% of the payment, but purchase order - they’ve got to get themselves into the company system, track the PO, invoice, track the payment…at the time, a common estimate was $50 to process a PO, and if you’re only buying $100 batches, that’s a big hit. Did not like that company, but they were the only place to get whatever it was I had to buy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I make games and this literally happened to me this morning⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Revenue divided by time is a depressing metric for anyone who starts trying to monetize their hobby, but that’s not the point. Do your fun project because it’s fun. If you make enough to cash out on Steam, get yourselves some actual trophies. Or pizza. Trying to make money will force you to do all the depressing capitalist things the big studios do, and then it’s not fun anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come LED Light Bulbs only last for about 2-3 Years?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re technically inclined, Big Clive has a tutorial for ‘fixing’ most bulbs not to overdrive the LEDs by removing or changing a single resistor. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HTa2jVi_rc

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seriously, what the f*** is keeping Donald Trump in this presidential race?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Have an updoot, Offspring-fan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨i will never understand scientific fraud⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know about this specific case, but it’s common for the big name researchers not to do any actual research or play any direct part in generating their images. That’s often done by kids - 25 year old grad students, even 20 year old undergrads - or other trainees. Those people may not appreciate how easy it is to detect image manipulation and are still learning what kinds of ‘refining’ of imagery and datasets is acceptable, while the PI that pays their stipend or sponsors their visa rages at their inability to get an expected outcome or replicate a previous result.

  Not saying there aren’t people out there just flat-out frauding, but these are group projects with a structure of trust and pressure that can muddy assignment of culpability. Like any committee or corporate action, it can be tough to say that any one individual is the guilty party or which people where just going along with the group.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is this just how it’s gonna be till Election Day?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The politicians made sure to exempt themselves from all the consumer protection, anti-fraud laws. They live in bubbles where their own political agendas are too important for limitations.

  But I suspect, because my brand new phone number gets a lot of political spam, that 1) a lot of people can’t live with it and change their numbers to escape or 2) a lot of it is recycled burner-phones, previously used to launder donations to fit legal donation limits. But it’s given me a personal rule to never make a donation from my real phone or allow my real phone to become associated with any political process.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zoom exec calls in-office work mandate a ‘success’ — despite working remotely himself⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I can see this possible argument: that having their employees do both in-person and remote work allows them to identify and understand aspects of in-person work that are beneficial and missing from the remote experience, and thereby discover how to improve their product.

  I won’t believe that’s why they have an RTO mandate, but I can see it as a post hoc rationalization.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why not serve fried chicken on Juneteenth? How is it different from serving corned beef on St. Patrick’s day?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coon_Chicken_Inn Black people and chicken was like leprechauns and breakfast cereal for a while.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many people actually want fully on-site IT jobs?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My brain definitely focuses better with environmental cues. I mean, I can work just about anywhere, but if I’m not in the mood, then having the environmental cues displaces alternatives. Subjectively, I feel more productive at work. Never had a really bad commute, so I was never motivated to try to set up a ‘work-only’ space at home, but I’d only do a 70 mile one-way drive for very special occasions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I put a gallon of 10% cider vinegar in a shallow pan and let 1/2 gallon evaporate, will that make it double its strength?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  acetic acid is almost as volatile as water, and the atmosphere contains a lot less of it. If you evaporate vinegar, you’re likely to lose about as much - maybe more - of the acid than the water. So, evaporation is probably not a good way to concentrate vinegar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'We have no rights.' Frustrated with California wage laws, Moonstone Bistro in Redding cuts lunch service⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If he’s not getting paid enough working for himself, he should go work for someone else and get all those breaks and overtime.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we have an internal monologue?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I do wonder if not having to ‘hear’ words changes the rhythm of reading.

  Hadn’t thought of this…what’s your take on poetry, especially meter-forward? Like, Robert W Service or Robert Frost, I feel would be less interesting if they didn’t have their beat.

  I don’t do voices or accents when I read. Everything is in the same ‘voice,’ which isn’t quite the same as my spoken voice. My internal voice enunciates much better and slightly lower pitch. It’s more like the voice I wish I had than the voice I do have. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If your instance is defederated from another instance, would it be sockpuppeting to create another account to view posts from that instance?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, that’s the way the fediverse is supposed to work. It would be sockpuppeting for both of your accounts, say A@A.social and B@b.social, to have a conversation with each other on a third instance, say !politics@c.social, with which both a & b are federated.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Light No Fire Announcement Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Valheim, but I can ride a dragon? Keeping my fingers crossed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US Question. Will the people that have to wait until 70 to get Social Security ever get what they paid in to it back out before they die since men's life expectancy is only 77 now?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If you make it to 62, your life expectancy is 21 more years. that mean 21*0.7 = 14.7 years worth of social security payments. Full benefit at age 67 gets you 16 years worth of payments. If they’d raise full retirement age to 70, you’d only collect 13 years of payments.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US Question. Will the people that have to wait until 70 to get Social Security ever get what they paid in to it back out before they die since men's life expectancy is only 77 now?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  In the US, social security is a tax on poor people earning less than~$160k. That’s the bottom 90% of earners.

  The top 10% of earners collect about half of the country’s personal income. Each of them does have to pay SS tax on the first $160k of earned income, but clearly there’s a huge pool of income that doesn’t pay into social security.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The death of ownership: Companies are taking away your ability to actually own the stuff you buy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Back in the day, you weren’t allowed to plug a private phone into AT&T’s network. You had to rent phones from Ma Bell, for something like $10/month, back when $10 would fill a gas tank.

  Between that and Columbia Music Club, so when Netflix was still sending DVDs in the mail, I decided I’d rather buy one movie a month than rent 4. Ripping them wasn’t so easy in those days, but there was already library organizers. Now, it’s like 20 years later and I’ve got something like 250 movies I can watch any time. Mostly good ones, now spread over four different streamers, if they’re even out there. Plenty to keep me entertained.

  It’s a corollary of Pratchett/Vimes “boots theory.” More expensive to buy stuff, and the first few years you go without a lot, but in the long run, you get enough for less.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm not asking to be rich.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Excess money may not buy happiness, but lack of money causes a lot of unhappiness.

  The study you’re referring to was basically that. There has been some follow-up, including www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118 that suggests any plateau, if one exists, is more like $400-500k. The latter study used continuous sampling via go.trackyourhappiness.org, where the former did retrospective, daily, binary sampling, so they’re not exactly comparable. i.e.: if you ask someone 6 times a day to rate their happiness 1-10 right then, you’re going to get different results than if you ask them whether yesterday was a good day.

  There’s a whole weird thing people do where they can be quite satisfied with their life at any particular moment, but dissatisfied when asked about their life overall. I suspect that the $75k plateau is more of the latter, where the lack of plateau is more of the former.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Opinion arguments, like “gaming feels like a chore” require different support from fact arguments like, “the world is flat.” You absolutely can not prove the world is flat, gravity works, or birds are real with an opinion poll, but a poll will support whether newer games are less fun or Coke is better than Pepsi.

  IMO, the best argument against the video is that he’s focused on old games that he still plays - he’s comparing the best of old games with whatever has just come out. I’d argue that there’s something special and unique about a game you can still play a decade later - it’s not the story, which is definitely going to get tiring after 10-20 playthroughs; it’s not the quests for the same reason. Game mechanics, decent pacing for that one-more-turn feel, and maybe just aesthetic appeal. Where would he put games like Minecraft or Valheim, both of which rely heavily on resource farming and repetitive building?

  I think that many of the new, big titles have tried to capture all possible niches - part FPS, part RPG, part basebuilder - and it’s hard to make all of those seem important to the game without forcing FPS players to do basebuilding and basebuilders to do RPG. That takes away from each person’s enjoyment of their preferred mechanic and imposes tedium.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why the original, 1999 version of EverQuest is still one of the best MMOs to play today⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I have a nostalgic affection for making my own maps. I remember discovering hidden rooms based on unfilled squares of graph paper, and mapping mazes of twisty corridors, both all alike and all different. I think that translating the digital representation to physical added vividness to the imaginary worlds when they were presented as simple wireframes, 8-bit graphics, or even just text.

  Today, I don’t have time for it. I would almost certainly end up visiting the same - I’m guessing - half dozen places I could keep in a mental map, decide the game is boring, and play something else. Lazy. Jaded. Spoiled. Whatever - that phase of my development from reading static books, to reading interactive text, simple avatars, now near-photorealistic animations…the phase where I enjoyed the physical crutch for imagination is just gone.