partial_accumen
@partial_accumen@lemmy.world
- Comment on Amazing. 4 days ago:
Some people have a 401k. This guy’s retirement is in metals.
- Comment on do you think freewill truly exists? 5 days ago:
Being in a relationship means you can come home and totally info-dump unguarded about whatever weird thing you’re contemplating and the person opposite you will be happy you’re there and delighted that you’re happy or sad with you if you’re sad. It also means you do this for the other person with genuine interest. I don’t call that “small talk”.
- Comment on "Official" Russian Military game depicting invasion of Ukraine released on Steam as Yunarmy propaganda 6 days ago:
Time to start posting reviews with:
- “This game is impossible to win!”
- “I was told I could take Kyiv in 3 days. I’ve been playing for 1,190 days and I’m still not even close to Kyiv.”
- “Why is my enemy using smart guided anti tank rockets and my soldiers are riding bicycles and wearing Adidas knock off sneakers into battle?”
Who knows? Maybe the Russian military is out of tactical ideas and trying to crowdsource a military strategy from gamers to take Ukraine because they can’t do it themselves.
- Comment on Gumroad Founder Sahil Lavingia Reveals He Was Let Go from DOGE as Software Engineer for the Department of Veterans Affairs After Just 55 Days 6 days ago:
In 2016, I canvassed for Bernie Sanders. I spent my first day in Nevada walking door-to-door in the desert heat with a dying phone battery and a stack of printed papers delineating potential voters,
…and…
and advance the policies of my [trump] Administration.
Translation: “In 2016 I was doing the hard work of trying to advance progressive politics. In 2025 I decided to do the exact opposite and support oligarchy and kleptocracy.”
Unlike private industry layoffs that target middle management bloat and low performers, the government cuts its newest people first, regardless of performance. Anyone promoted within the last two years was also considered probationary—first in line to go.
Translation: “I was surprised to learn that government employee, which earn substantially less as a tradeoff, have more guarantees that their work loyalty will be rewarded with more job security. This prevented us from cutting people who we felt earned too much because of how long they’ve been with the organization even though they carry institutional knowledge or those we feel we could replace with cheaper juniors we could churn through via burnout like we do in private industry. This also prevents us from implementing ‘stack ranking’ which we could use to pit each worker against each other making each fear daily for their jobs as a method of extracting more value from them.”
I couldn’t install Git, Python, or use tools like Cursor, due to government security policies. Fixing the root of the problem–making it easier for employees to execute–would require congressional intervention, and it was more practical to continue spending lots of money outsourcing the software development to contractors.
…and…
I also learned that my frustrations with the government laptopwere solvable; Charles Worthington, VA’s CTO, recommended getting a software engineering-grade MacBook.
Translation: “What I had confidently concluded on DAY 2 of my employment to be concrete evidence of the endemic corruption, waste and inefficiency of government was actually just me not aware of organizational policies I learned on DAY 5 of my employment.”
Meanwhile, the public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible. In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the ‘fall guy’ for unpopular decisions.
Translation: “Trump’s DOGE foot soldiers were being painted as the bad guy when it was really Trump’s agency heads commanders that were ordering the actions. Trump’s poor volunteer DOGE foot soldiers were blameless. The only thing Trump’s DOGE foot soldiers did was go through all the people, determine a methodology to fire people, then put the names on a list. It was those evil commanders that fired as many people as possible from all the names we gave them.”
I attended my first and last DOGE all-hands. It felt like a candid Q&A with Elon rather than a structured meeting. When he asked the room about improving DOGE’s public perception, I asked if I could open-source the code I’d been writing.
Translation: “I finally had an opportunity to raise my concerns to Elon Musk directly about the negative impacts our DOGE work was having on workers, services, most importantly the veterans we were supposedly there to serve. I could, at long last, employ my humanity to call out what I saw was how our work was being used destructively. Instead, I asked if I could open source my code so that I could legally access it later after I was done working at DOGE.”
- Comment on Remember, kids! Unregulated capitalism is not your friend! 6 days ago:
Not that I’m going to follow through with this, but this has got me thinking about all the waste streams from food production with excess carbs that could be used to make alcohol.
- stale bread
- skins/peels of various fruits and vegetables from processing to other products like apple juice, baby carrots, potato chips/crisps.
- excess dairy milk production/near expiry dairy milk
- stale popcorn that gets thrown away from movie theaters/sporting events
- everyone uses nearly black bananas for banana bread. Why not use those carbs for fermenting into alcohol?
- Comment on Lara Croft games are the nightmare of any real archaeologist, biologist and paleontologist. 1 week ago:
I’m not sure there’s a market for a “Pipette Cry Repeat” based video game.
- Comment on IT’S THE FEDS! 1 week ago:
If you’re doing it right you’ve got plenty of pods.
- Comment on IT’S THE FEDS! 1 week ago:
There might also be a followup examination with a thermal camera of the property, which with a server farm, would also show significantly elevated temperatures.
This is why most of us in the USA live in constant fear that our hobbies of basement aluminum smelting operations will land us on the wrong side of the law enforcement.
- Comment on Why do people care so much that their friend or family member’s partner is attractive and not just loving? 1 week ago:
These people you are talk to are shallow and immature. As far as those people you have to choose from to talk to, you can do better.
- Comment on Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews. 1 week ago:
Unless they’re doing app signing, some of the methods to “log every app” literally look for an executable name. Renaming “firefox.exe” to “explorer.exe” (an obviously allowed executable name) and then executing it will still run Firefox.
- Comment on You have been in a prison of bone for your entire life 1 week ago:
This. Evolutionarily speaking, a pile of cells wanted to live as long as possible. They collectively chose to support the creation and ongoing maintenance of the “brain” organ. They all delegated their survival decisions for the whole collection of cells to just those in the brain. Your consciousness, possible by your brain, is the president. The whole of your body is your constituents. The body is depending on you to make good decisions so the body lives as long and as healthy as possible.
- Comment on Remember, kids! Unregulated capitalism is not your friend! 1 week ago:
Great info on the process of manufacturing. I know that some spirits have to come from some specific carb sources, but it makes sense that if its just goal of mass production of ethanol, then I suppose they weren’t picky about their carb source.
Canals makes a lot of sense for higher volume cargo, thank you.
The gin was not served in bottles. It was served like beer or ale into cups/mugs/communal tankards etc … mostly earthenware, leather or wood.
Would the gin be consumed exclusively in bars/taverns where it could be dispensed into mugs? Even then, the gin had to be in a larger container to be delivered to the tavern, a barrel I presume? Were coopers in crazy high demand always making new barrels or were the empty barrels turned around and refilled?
- Comment on If it ain’t broke… 1 week ago:
He hasn’t worn it yet, but its there waiting in the wings just in case.
- Comment on Remember, kids! Unregulated capitalism is not your friend! 1 week ago:
I am, you’re right. Where did England’s gin come from?
- Comment on Remember, kids! Unregulated capitalism is not your friend! 1 week ago:
That 14 gallons number raised all kinds of questions for me:
- What potency was this gin that could be consumed in this quantity but without killing so many more of its consumers?
- How can they possibly produce gin this cheap? Slave labor from the Caribbean?
- What would the logistics look like to move this much gin to a population consuming this much? This is the days before motor vehicles so everything would have had to be moved by human or horse/donkey/mule/cow pulled cart. Steam engines wouldn’t arrive for another 100 years. So it was likely animal cart the number of barrels of gin must have been a river of full carts moving into the city and a river of empty ones headed out all the time.
- Public sanitation didn’t really exist. Public sewer systems wouldn’t arrive for another 100 years or so so the entire city must have smelled like urine all the time.
- With the sheer number of gin containers needed for this volume, did they have a “deposit” on bottles like we have sometimes today? Did they have an underground economy of people collecting empties to trade back in?
- Comment on I knew it 1 week ago:
That was my thought too. Or rather, you sacrifice the outside aesthetics (which you yourself wouldn’t be able to enjoy because you can’t be outside) to gain interior aesthetics which you could.
- Comment on I knew it 1 week ago:
I’m wondering if this is a result of having to spend most of the time indoors or be in the camera lens of paparazzi. We’re looking at a photo from one right now probably.
- Comment on Remember, kids! Unregulated capitalism is not your friend! 1 week ago:
- Comment on Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews. 1 week ago:
I’d be very tempted to install Firefox in my local appdata folders (which doesn’t require admin rights to install), then install a theme to make FF look like Edge with something like this..
Still use real Edge browser for work stuff, but FF for less-than-work stuff.
- Comment on Why is it so hard to buy the same toothbrush twice? 1 week ago:
The Oral B knockoffs can be had for about $1 each or less. They have models that use the same heads for almost 20 years.
- Comment on Why is it so hard to buy the same toothbrush twice? 1 week ago:
I can’t remember the last time I’ve bought a toothbrush. Every time I go to the dentist for a cleaning I’m given a toothbrush for free. I’ve since switched to electric, but still have a whole bunch of toothbrushes from dentists past. I’m slowly going through them using them when I travel.
- Comment on The small scale of Lemmy's active user base is never more evident than in the absence of active members in all the sports related communities. 2 weeks ago:
Does your sport have a separate meme/shitposting community? If not that may be the missing component. Being able to both talk about the sport and make fun of parts of it are highly engaging.
Formula 1 seems to do decently here on Lemmy with its news and commentary community:
!formula1@lemmy.world with nearly 10k subscribers.
But importantly there’s also a place for shitposting and meming for the sport in a separate community:
!formuladank@lemmy.world with 4.1k subscribers.
So for every one subscriber to the main community there is about 1 subscription to the meme community.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 2 weeks ago:
How do you actually do the income taxes though?
Many companies can do payroll withholding for local/school taxes just like they do with State or Federal. There are boxes on your W-2 you get when you file your taxes that show this:
Is it completely separate from your federal/state that get filed each year?
Yep, 3 forms to fill each year: Federal, State, Local/School
It seems like it would be a huge burden to be a separate thing, and it would be easier if it was somehow incorporated into a federal/state tax system where if your municipality has taxes you fill out a few spots and the money gets sent to them?
Its a pain, but so are Federal and State taxes. Municipal/school taxes can also get complicated if you work in one city with tax and live in another. Many will give you partial or full credit so you don’t end up paying full municipal income tax to two cities, but this isn’t always the case.
E.g an added section on your state/federal to add the municipalities tax id and tax rate (as it’d be variable by area)
Just like each State has their own rules, each city can have theirs so your suggestion can’t be just numbers to fill in because which numbers may change between cities. Dividend income is one example I know different cities treat/tax differently. Yes its a pain, but, its adulting.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 2 weeks ago:
He’s saying property taxes are a necessary source of government revenue (that we all benefit from) but you shouldn’t have to pay it if it’s a primary residence and there should be a different structure or revenue stream. I agree with that
Where do you want the revenue needed to fund the city to come from if not from property owners?
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 2 weeks ago:
Where I am we have fairly low property tax and a small municipal income tax. So it splits the burden equally. If you live outside of a municipality, there will be a small income tax to support your public school district. This is also on top of State taxes income taxes and Federal income taxes. Sales taxes are also a thing at the state and city level. Honestly, I don’t feel overly taxed with the total amount of money I pay in taxes. I receive the benefits of society. This is even for services I don’t consume, but I want the services available to my neighbors that may need them, such as housing assistance, elder care, supplemental nutrition, etc.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 2 weeks ago:
Lots of back and forth on inspection items. We wanted a lot fixed that should be fixed and they did do it as well as a lot of consolations,
That’s fair. That’s pretty common, and it usually sounds worse than it is. I think its also about setting expectations. If you have the expectation that you’ll be looking at a perfect house and simply agree to the sale price, then you’ll be surprised/frustrated. If you’re prepared for that back and forth with the horse trading on what you’ll fix vs what you won’t (similar to buying a used car), then its not too bad.
but if we had to sell this house right now, as I lost my job yesterday, I wouldn’t have the cash to be able to fix stuff that needs it for another inspection
You aren’t required to fix anything as the seller, however your buyer can walk away if it doesn’t pass inspection. If you have lots of buyers, this can be the right choice sometimes. However, if you only have one buyer you’re going to have to compromise. The middle ground here is that you can lower the cost of the house to cover the costs of the items needed to pass inspection. Buyers will usually go for that. So even if you don’t have cash in hand to fix things, you can still sell.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 2 weeks ago:
Some municipalities may also have an income tax (completely separate from state or federal income taxes). Other states have much larger sales taxes.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 2 weeks ago:
If you’re old and no longer have much of an income, you still have your home. If you become disabled,
We already have this is many states in the USA. Its called the “Homestead Exemption”. Here’s an example from Ohio:
“This is a statewide program, administered by County Auditors under rules established by the Ohio Legislature and the Ohio Department of Taxation. This allows senior citizens (65 or older) as well as permanently and totally disabled homeowners to reduce their real estate taxes by the amount equal to the taxes that would otherwise be charged on $25,000 of the market value of an eligible taxpayer’s homestead or residence. The homestead may include up to one acre of land. Under the changes made by the Ohio Legislature and beginning with applications for tax year 2014, new participants in the program will be subject to an income test to be eligible.”
So matter how big your house is (as long as its on one acre of land or less and you have an income $$75k/year or below) you only get charged as though the house is worth $25k, which I think would obviously be a very low tax bill.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 2 weeks ago:
I’ve only bought one home and it was recently. It was every bit as aweful as I expected
I’ve now bought two in my lifetime. I wouldn’t call either awful for my experience.
What was bad about yours?
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 2 weeks ago:
Tax the sales of property.
I’m thinking of the untended consequences of that policy. The first I can think of is people simply would never sell their houses because they’d get hit with enormous taxes (large enough to equal decades of property taxes). Home owners would simply rent out the houses when they need/want to move away. So home ownership for those living in the homes would collapse. Further, city services would likely starve from lack of funding because there would be no little revenue and what revenue they got would be very sporadic.
but you should be able to have a house to live in without paying the state for the privilege of them not taking it.
There are absolutely houses like that (in the USA at least). Those houses not in cities with police and fire protection, roads, sidewalks, snow plowing, public libraries, or any other kind of city services. If you want the benefits of a society someone has to pay the bill.
Who are you suggesting paying the bill for your consumption of city services besides you?
