Nibodhika
@Nibodhika@lemmy.world
- Comment on Not disparaging the dead or anything. But why does it seem in the US we are expected to feel sorry for a person who overdoses on illegal drugs? Didn't they make the choice knowing the outcome? 1 day ago:
By that logic you also don’t feel bad for people who die in car accidents because from the first time they got behind a wheel they knew of the possibility. You should also not feel bad about people who are ran over, from the first time you walked outside your parents told you it was a possibility. Every time you go outside you’re risking being hit by a car, so don’t expect me to cry when that happens, right?.. Right?..
No, life is full of dangers, and ODing is just one of them. Most people who OD are in a bad situation and started using drugs to cope, and then it took control of them. Almost none of them made a conscious decision to OD, and one could argue their road to using that amount of drugs was also not entirely their choice, after all lots of those cause chemical dependency. Think about this, someone is stressed at work, they’re offered a cigarette by a friend who smokes daily, they smoke it and feel the stress going away, are able to focus and get through that tough spot, so they do it again next time they’re stressed, and then they start to get more and more stressed, but now they’re hooked, and trying to quit will be extremely difficult… Would you really not feel bad if that person developed cancer because he was stressed once and a friend offered a cigarette? How is ODing any different?
- Comment on Is it really possible to tax the rich? 6 days ago:
-It requires an arbitrary use-agnostic choice of value. Why 10 million? Why not 5? Why not 50?
Why are tax brackets the value they are? Would you say that tax brackets are a bad system? They also rely on an arbitrary use-agnostic choice of value.
-it requires an arbitrary time scale. Why 5 years? Why not 3? why not 10? Why not limit once in a lifetime?
Same reason taxes are calculated over yearly income and not every 2 years or 6 months. It’s also arbitrary, it’s just an arbitrary you’re used to so you don’t question it.
Both cons you found for my solution are also present on tax brackets, i.e. arbitrarily defined values and length, by that logic you also think tax brackets are a bad idea.
The reason why I said 10 Mil over 5 years is to try to exclude as many legitimate use cases as possible. For starters we’re talking about people, not business, there are legitimate reasons for a business, particularly large ones, to take much larger loans. But for people? The largest expense on a regular person’s life will be the house they buy, and 10 Mil is WAY above the average price for that, if someone is buying a >10 Mil house I’m okay with them getting taxed on the loan, if they managed to get a 40 year 0% loan (impossible) they’ll already be paying 20k per month, might as well pay some more on top of it. But wait, you might say, what about smaller loans that compound to >10 Mil, that’s why there’s a 5 year limit, this means the person needs to loan over 2 Mil per year, which is simply not possible for someone unless they’re mega-rich, because again they would need to be paying >20k per month.
And yes, those are arbitrary values and probably they need adjusting via research and experimentation, but again the same is true for tax brackets, and I think everyone agrees those are a good idea.
This answer you acknowledged my proposal, therefore I now believe that you understood it, on your first answer you suggested I had a definition of income/non-income loans, which is not at all what I’m proposing.
- Comment on Is it really possible to tax the rich? 6 days ago:
Read my answer before replying, I provided a solution for that’s and it’s a solution based on the astonishing difference between what high middle class people and super rich make.
I’ll repeat it, every dollar you take from a loan gets tallied, and expires after 5 years. Whenever that value goes beyond 10 million you start paying taxes on the loans. You, or any high middle class person, won’t be able to take that many loans in such a short period of time, simply because it would mean that you need at least an income of 2 million per year just to repay those loans, and I think we can agree that’s not high middle class.
This way there’s no loophole on the type of loan.
- Comment on Has Fast Food Gotten Worse, or Am I Just Getting Old? 1 week ago:
Vomited tomatoes are also rich in MSG, how can you not like them?
There’s a lot more to flavor than taste, and people are free to not like the flavor of anything regardless of the amount of MSG, salt, sugar or vinager.
- Comment on Is it really possible to tax the rich? 1 week ago:
Yeah, and this should showcase just how bullshit the system is. IMO every one of those 100 trades in the middle should be taxed, this removes bullshit from the system, you can’t buy a contract saying you’ll buy the stock, because that would be buying something of that value and would be taxed. We need to start seeing those 100 trades, as what they are, i.e. a way to try to rig the system.
- Comment on Is it really possible to tax the rich? 1 week ago:
But then the value goes WAAY up. Let’s assume you live in a very good house, and mortgage it you’re able to get 5 million out of it. Do you think someone like Jeff Bezos could live for 5 years with that?. You can do it fairly straightforward, everytime you take a loan, the full amount of that loan gets added, after a period of 5 years that value disappears, if at any point that value goes above 10 million, you start paying taxes on it. And the higher it goes the more tax you pay on it, just like how income tax has brackets, and just like how up to certain values are exempt.
For you or me if we were ever loan 10 million over 5 years we wouldn’t have a way to pay it back. For an Uber wealthy they do that fairly quickly, Bezos mention costs 600k a month, so he’ll get into the first bracket from just that in a year and a half.
People need to realize just how big the gap is, there are plenty of ways to tax extremely rich people without affecting the middle class by just putting the bracket so high up that it’s impossible for a middle class to reach it.
- Comment on Freelance Video Game Journalists Are Propping Up The Industry, And Many Are Being Paid Dogshit In Return 1 week ago:
That read exactly as a footnote on a Terry Pratchett book, if you have never read Discworld you should, it has the same sense of humor that you do. For example another popular saying being bastardized:
Give a man a fire and he’ll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life."
- Comment on In the event you believe a contract killer is in breach of contract, who adjudicates? 1 week ago:
Nicolas Cage’s The Wicker Man is the only John Wick spinoff worth your time.
- That movie is older than John Wick
- It’s a remake of an even older movie
- Which is based on an even older book
- The plot has NOTHING to do with hired killers or anything John Wick related
Are you sure you didn’t mixed up the movie?
- Comment on For my fellow Americans, when is enough enough? 2 weeks ago:
Sure, but so far he’s just the democratically elected president, if after his term is up he doesn’t want to leave then absolutely kick him by force. Until then any attack is, by definition, anti-democratic.
- Comment on For my fellow Americans, when is enough enough? 2 weeks ago:
First of all, I’m not from the USA so take this with a grain of salt, but are you suggesting the election was rigged or fraudulent? Because if not you’re the one trying to impose an authoritative regime. Like it or not he was elected democratically, and this time you can’t even use the excuse that your voting system is weird because he also got the majority of votes. So the majority of people in your country think that he’s the correct person for the job, or in any case don’t oppose him.
So what you’re talking about is for a minority to raise arms against the democratically elected government. You are the one who’s being anti-democratic. Even if you were to win the revolution you would need to put a tyrant in power because calling a new election would result in the same outcome.
Like it or not the majority of the people in your country are stupid enough to either want that or not caring. That’s one of the dangers of democracy, but starting a revolution to remove a democratically elected president in the name of democracy is just as dumb.
- Comment on If Trump wins the election thru fraud how can the democrats refute it and prove they won? Or will it just be like another Jan 6 and four years of whining like Trump? 2 weeks ago:
So you’re saying that if they had comed up with more votes that had gotten “lost” and the result of the election was changed post-facto by those newly found votes that would not be fraud?
If creating fake votes to change the result is fraud, surely asking someone to do it is attempted fraud.
- Comment on How did Third World countries handle the Covid Pandemic? 3 weeks ago:
MF got elected after saying his son is too educated to date a black woman, in a country with a very large black population. How does anything else he did surprised you? The day he got elected I quit my job and moved to another country.
- Comment on How did Third World countries handle the Covid Pandemic? 3 weeks ago:
That would mean Brazil is not a developing nation, but USA is.
- Comment on How long do you think we'll keep seeing "formerly Twitter"? 3 weeks ago:
Forever, unless they start calling it Xcom (which would then be confused with the game) X itself could also mean Xorg (x.org) which is a lot older. Not to mention that it looks like someone forgot to remove a placeholder “in the site X, many people talk about…”
- Comment on if you quit a job you didn't like or was toxic, didn't the financial hit scare you? 3 weeks ago:
It scared the shit out of me, but was one of the best decisions I took, on my next job I learned to impose limits from the start.
I managed to find something very soon, but if I were in a similar position nowadays I would first find something new.
- Comment on Why do cell phones have a data limit but home internet doesn't? 3 weeks ago:
Not all of them do, I’ve seen that in America data limits on home internet is common, and here in Europe unlimited phone data is common.
- Comment on Why do cell phones have a data limit but home internet doesn't? 3 weeks ago:
Of course you can complain, I pay less than half what you do for unlimited cellular data.
- Comment on If I wanted to die in a viking funeral, like getting put on a boat and set ablaze while I am in the middle of the see can this be done? Or is it even legal? 5 weeks ago:
I don’t see why it would be hard to accept that someone could make a carbon iron alloy using carbon and iron. But in any case in this link there are multiple sources, an archeology book and a scientific paper, of these claims bigthink.com/hard-science/norse-rituals/
- Comment on If I wanted to die in a viking funeral, like getting put on a boat and set ablaze while I am in the middle of the see can this be done? Or is it even legal? 5 weeks ago:
A curious fact about Vikings is that they had legendary weapons imbued with the spirit of great fallen warriors which were stronger than any other weapon at the time. They had a ritual in which they would burn the body of their fallen warriors in the fires of the smelter while making weapons to “imbue” their spirit into it, what happened was that the carbon from the body they were burning formed an alloy with the iron of the weapon, making a crude form of steel in a time we’re everyone had iron weapons.
- Comment on New Windows gamepad keyboard will soon make typing on Legion Go, Asus ROG Ally more like the Steam Deck 5 weeks ago:
With it, you can use your Xbox controller to move around the screen and type.
Does that mean you couldn’t before? Seriously people were playing around on a handheld that couldn’t even type?
Button accelerators are also available; these include the X button for backspace and the Y button for the spacebar.
WTF!? Isn’t that standard also?
For better movement patterns, the keyboard keys are aligned vertically."
Does this even make a difference?
In any case, the title is bullshit, it should be that will make windows handhelds close to typing on consoles which sucks. Typing on the Deck is a completely different experience, one that can’t be replicated in any of these handhelds because they lack the hardware to do so.
- Comment on Steam Now Warns Consumers That They're Buying a License, Not a Game During a Purchase 5 weeks ago:
Also I forgot to reply to this on the other answer, but:
Err… You often don’t have the files drm free on Steam. Nor in an installable format (without steam).
Often you do, and an installer is nothing more than a fancy zipped folder. Also people usually like to compare Steam with GoG and claim that on GoG you get DRM free games and not on Steam, that is not true, both have either, although GoG has percentually more it’s still not 100% DRM free (nor is Steam 100% DRMd), it’s always up to the game developers.
- Comment on Steam Now Warns Consumers That They're Buying a License, Not a Game During a Purchase 5 weeks ago:
This is what you said:
While that may be partly true, (also likely) depending on the county you’re located, they’re not able to revoke the license though.
The same is true for Steam, laws are laws
So in this specific case you having the files makes a world of difference.
You also have the files if you downloaded them on Steam. What’s important is whether those files can be used on their own or if they’re protected by some form of DRM. If the files can be used on their own it doesn’t matter if you got them from Steam, GoG or a physical disc. If on the other hand the files are DRM protected you having them is useless, whoever controls the DRM controls your files, again regardless of where you got the files from.
- Comment on What We Don't Talk About in "Spec Ops The Line" 5 weeks ago:
No, watching a gameplay won’t give you the same experience. Keep avoiding spoilers, it is really best experienced blind, although knowing there is something to experience might weaken it.
- Comment on Steam Now Warns Consumers That They're Buying a License, Not a Game During a Purchase 5 weeks ago:
But then the same is also true for Steam
- Comment on Does alcohol expire? Specifically whiskey? 1 month ago:
This is not exactly true, alcohol can become vinegar if exposed to oxygen, and I doubt those bottles are properly hermetically sealed.
- Comment on I'm tired of every game being live service 1 month ago:
While I get where you’re coming from, Fallout 76 was a bad example, you don’t need a subscription to play (unless your preferred system of choice asks you for it regardless of the game you play) and it is intended to be a multiplayer first game, you might not like it, but it is not an example of what you’re complaining anymore than Elder Scrolls Online or World of Warcraft (which actually has a subscription model).
And the answer is simple, don’t buy those games, there are thousands of excellent single player games, if always online games start to fail companies will stop doing it, vote with your wallet. I recommend taking a look at indie games, there are several excellent games and almost assuredly they don’t have DRM, or at least not always online ones.
- Comment on Any game with a forced stealth section needs to have it as a warning so you know not to buy crap. 1 month ago:
On the one hand I get where you’re coming from, those sections are very thematically different from the rest of the game, but realistically it’s just a couple of minutes of very easy stealth.
- Comment on Why do all languages share the same intonation for questions? 1 month ago:
Switching the emphasis on one word can completely change the meaning of a phrase, there’s one example I love: "I never said she stole his money"
- I never said she stole his money (someone else did)
- I never said she stole his money (absolutely not true)
- I never said she stole his money (I wrote it down)
- I never said she stole his money (it was someone else)
- I never said she stole his money (she might have just borrowed it)
- I never said she stole his money (it was someone else’s)
- I never said she stole his money (she stole something else)
- Comment on How do our brains process reality? I heard our eyes were just low-res cameras and our brains were doing all the heavy lifting in 'rendering' reality. 1 month ago:
One thing I find very interesting about how brains process reality is that there’s a disease that makes your eyes have blind spots. However people with that disease don’t see those blind spots because the brain fills the gaps with the information it knows to be there. So you could see a door closed just as it was when you last looked at it directly, but in the meantime someone opened the door and you’re still seeing the door closed until you look at it directly.
- Comment on Does leaving a single board computer caseless can be a problem or not? 1 month ago:
It’s probably fine, but you can accidentally short it when moving it around by touching it or resting it up on something conductive, even if you’re careful dust might short it as well, but this is much rarer.
As a general rule I would try to avoid it, but would not be my first concern.