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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • 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.




  • They only need to throw one or two counties - Fulton or Dekalb - into chaos, and they’ve got the groundwork laid. After 2020, the legislature voted themselves the power to take over county boards of elections and immediately started investigations to show that Fulton’s board were incompetent. The state board now lets and random county official contest certification, more or less guaranteeing chaos and calls for the legislature to take over. Throw out Fulton County, and Georgia goes back to solid red.


  • University is ok if you’re starting at zero and don’t even know what’s out there. It’s for exposing students to a a breadth of topics and some rationale of why things are as they are, but not necessarily for plugging them into a production environment.

    Nothing beats having your own real world project, either for motivation or exposure to cutting edge methods. Universities have tried to replicate that with things like ‘problem based learning,’ and they probably hope that students will be inspired by one or two of the classes to start their own out-of-class project, but school and work are fundamentally different ways of learning with fundamentally different goals.





  • Tax on hoarded wealth is pressure to make that wealth do something productive. If you can’t get enough return on your invested millions to pay the tax, then you will slowly lose that wealth. Property tax works similarly for farmers and landlords.

    The ultra wealthy are exactly the people who should be making big, bold, high-risk bets with their money, because they’ll be just fine if they lose a few million. Yet these are the same people who can live a comfortable, even lavish life off the lowest risk, lowest return investments, like government bonds. The rich say social safety nets discourage poor people from working, and I say that tax-free capital discourage it from working.

    Also, very important to remember that wealth tax proposals generally target only wealth over a very high threshold. US proposals have been $10-50M, which seems pretty equivalent to the Spanish implementation.




  • The Android app should still be fine. I’d expect Apple’s move to be followed by a lot of creators adding a “Don’t use the iOS Patreon app” to their profiles.

    I mean, apps that are just the website are a bad idea in the first place, but this specific problem is entirely contained to the iOS app. If some people prefer an app to a bookmark, that’s on them.



  • The one time Jesus went HAM, chasing religious leaders around their temple with a whip, and whose temple was it? Zeus? Bacchus? Any of those graven-image, many-gods cults? No - he went after his own Father’s priests for being money-grubbing hypocrites.

    I’m guessing that story doesn’t come up often at CPAC or prayer breakfasts.






  • I think we’re working with different definitions for ‘starter home.’ To me, ‘starter home’ is a real estate agent’s euphemism for ‘undesireable shithole.’ It is a home you expressly do not want to live in long-term. It’s temporary housing to build equity while you’re young, able to sacrifice living standard and comfort, and waiting to earn enough to upgrade to an actually desirable house.

    From the goalposts you’re moving, it sounds like you think a starter house is somewhere affordable that you’d be willing to move into today and live indefinitely. And yeah, that’s probably going to be unavailable to most people. Most people don’t get to live in their dream house in an ideal neighborhood. Never have.