scarabic
@scarabic@lemmy.world
- Comment on Has Fast Food Gotten Worse, or Am I Just Getting Old? 1 day ago:
We sense less and less as we get older. I’ve learned this from observing my kids and seeing them react to things like needles and spicy food with such greater sensitivity than me. I can remember being like them, too. But I just plow through experiences now with less sensation of them. Part of it is that my senses are slightly more dull, but also important: my cognitive filters are much more established and sensations that are outside of them get little notice. Meanwhile my kids are like raw nerves at the mercy of every experience that comes their way. Bubble gum probably doesn’t blow your hair back anymore either but I bet it was awesome when you were a kid.
- Comment on What do you like/dislike about lemmy? 2 weeks ago:
I like that Lemmy doesn’t have stupid levels of auto-moderation happening. And I like that threads don’t constantly get locked merely because people are engaging with them.
- Comment on What do you like/dislike about lemmy? 2 weeks ago:
I’m also a lefty and often find myself going against the extreme grain here. The narratives about everything being a scam designed to steal your balls, the generational hatred, the cynicism and fatalism…
- Comment on Dropbox lays off 20% of staff, says it overinvested and underperformed 2 weeks ago:
It’s a neat utility and all, or at least it was neat back when the cloud was novel. But I don’t understand how what’s basically a minor iCloud feature became a publicly traded company of gigantic size.
- Comment on We should have elections with no candidates. 2 weeks ago:
This is the idea behind direct ballot measures. Instead of working through representatives, just let people make actual decisions. Of course, there are problems with it. You wind up looking at a ballot with 10 different bond measures on it as if you’re in any position to decide on the budgets for 6 different agencies. And all the voter guides scream contradictory things at you from the pro/con positions, leaving you thinking “gee, maybe politician is actually a profession after all?”
- Comment on Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds 2 weeks ago:
How are they defining the end of the universe?
- Comment on Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds 2 weeks ago:
Infinite time is undefined though. We are not sure there was time before the Big Bang. Before anyone says “but there must have been,” consider that it’s just as paradoxical and mind blowing to imagine that time never had a beginning and just stretches infinitely into the past. How can that be so? It means it would have taken an infinite amount of time for us to reach this moment in time, and never would have.
- Comment on Is it okay to take drugs to make yourself a better person? Does it make a difference if "better" is mental or if it's physical? 2 weeks ago:
I can’t define better. But I can tell you who can. The people around you that you trust can tell you when you’re better and when you’re not. They will not tell you you are better drunk or on meth. (unless they are also drunk and on meth - that’s codependency, not trust).
If you’re really, really lucky you will find a life partner who knows you top to bottom and will tell you when you’re better, and be patient enough with you when you’re worse to really know the difference.
- Comment on Is it okay to take drugs to make yourself a better person? Does it make a difference if "better" is mental or if it's physical? 2 weeks ago:
It’s entirely okay to use medication to improve your mental health. There are serious things like depression, anxiety, and mania out there that are chemical in origin and there is nothing wrong with using chemistry to get rid of them.
You should do this with the help of a good doctor and trusted people who can help give you perspective on how you’re doing. When you say “take drugs to make yourself a better person” I can’t tell if you are looking for permission to get high or addressing the topic of mental health meds in earnest.
- Comment on Having $270 billion dollars and spending the bulk of your time trying to make more money is like weighing 900 pounds and thinking "ooh, I bet I can get to 1000". 2 weeks ago:
I think these guys get addicted to the power. Sure Mark Zuckerberg could spend all his time learning to cook Thai food or surfing or traveling, and we all live to do those things. But very few of us know what it feels like for him to walk into a campus of thousands that he commands and make choices all day long about what to do with them all.
I’m not saying that anyone would do the same in their shoes. But certainly the kind of person who likes to build a giant company will like being at the helm of it too. It’s not about more billions.
- Comment on YouTube tests removing viewer counts — here’s what we know 2 weeks ago:
I guess I’d rather have it than not have it, but I don’t really understand how it would make YT unusable to me if I didn’t know how many other people viewed a video. How often are you using those numbers to make important decisions between videos about what to watch? I tend to go by the topic and subscribe to creators whose videos I like. Very occasionally I might be looking for a guide to an obscure level in an obscure game and there may be 3 similar looking videos about it, but one has 200 views and the others have single digits, and I agree in that situation it means something. But otherwise I just never pay attention to it. What do I care if 2000 or 200,000 people watched a video that looks interesting to me? Some creators I subscribe to have just a couple hundred followers. I don’t care.
- Comment on YouTube tests removing viewer counts — here’s what we know 2 weeks ago:
This is inane but damn if it didn’t give me a good laugh :D
- Comment on YouTube tests removing viewer counts — here’s what we know 2 weeks ago:
Personally I find the highest viewed videos on YT to be the absolute shittiest ones.
- Comment on Data Show That X Continues to Lose Users in EU. 2 weeks ago:
It’s going to converge with Truth Social eventually and at some point they will just merge.
- Comment on What is the argument for making poor/working class folks shoulder the burden of taxes? 2 weeks ago:
No man read the top dozen voted root comments and you will see the narrative: rich people are using their political access to fuck you and get richer. The OP doesn’t even acknowledge progressive tax brackets. The entire system apparently is specifically designed to direct money out of starving people into the super wealthy. That’s the narrative. It’s right up there with “CEO don’t do anything” and “you shouldn’t recycle because it’s just a scam cooked up by Big Plastic.” It’s actually hard to be a good liberal when those around me are dripping with this kind of horseshit nonstop.
- Comment on Metal is plastic. 2 weeks ago:
Yeah words have special meanings in special regimes. There are a lot of regimes these days, with so much known about so many specialities. We could spend all day noting use of words that make sense within a particular science or engineering field but would be funny in casual conversation .
- Comment on Robinhood admits it’s just a gambling app. 2 weeks ago:
Yes, and good news about the company can drive the stock price down, if enough people decide that that’s probably a high point for the near future and a good time to sell and take profits.
- Comment on Robinhood admits it’s just a gambling app. 2 weeks ago:
I work for a publicly traded company and I have some visibility into what’s happening with our products and business. Then I read the Y! Finance page about our stock and it’s all weird math trends analyses and absolutely zero about our company, its fundamentals, and the future of our business. Stock trading is just a bunch of assholes trying to sift the sea to divine a magic formula. The irony is that their own behavior drives the price changes, so they are feeding straight into the data they are trying to read and act on. What a circle jerk.
- Comment on Robinhood admits it’s just a gambling app. 2 weeks ago:
a failed venture
Bruh wut.
living off government subsidies
Are you referring to the consumer incentives to buy electric? Not only are these ending, but they’re some of the least hinky government subsidies of business in the economy, because they go direct to the consumer. Have you seen what our government does for corn farmers and big oil? Oh right, corn and oil: those other “failed ventures” LOL
- Comment on What is the argument for making poor/working class folks shoulder the burden of taxes? 2 weeks ago:
Yeah I think we may only differ on degree, and yes some of my confusion about your post came from phrasing. There are still some phrasing points I’m struggling on.
I think the logical thing is to have those who most benefit from the infrastructure our taxes pay for
The poor benefit from roads, schools, firefighters, Medical/Medicaid, and utilities as much as anyone. But I think you had the super wealthy in mind. “Those who benefit from infrastructure” is an odd way to pinpoint the super wealthy.
be the ones who contribute the most.
This part is already true. Progressive tax brackets have them contributing the most as a proportion of pay, and far and away the most in absolute numbers.
And those that are seeing the least benefit be exempt.
The entire lower 50-60% of the economy is an extremely inclusive notion of “those who benefit the least.”
Again, phrasing.
- Comment on What is the argument for making poor/working class folks shoulder the burden of taxes? 2 weeks ago:
The standard deduction should be at least the median income…? Wouldn’t that mean that half of people would pay no income tax?
You might say this is what we should do, but I think it’s unreasonable to say that it’s a total head scratcher that we don’t already do this.
If you earn $40k and the first $13k is untaxed, then you’re paying no taxes on about the first third of your income. And from there you begin paying in the lowest bracket.
If you make $100k, and the first $13k is untaxed, that’s the first 13% of your income, not 33%. And some of your income will be taxed at levels higher than anything the $40k earner pays. I just fail to see how this is placing the burden on the poor. Is structurally doing the exact opposite and giving them the most breaks.
I’d probably agree that the floor on the deduction should come up, and we should raise taxes on extreme wealth to make it up. But at least in its most essential form, income tax is already progressive.
So I don’t really get your question.
- Comment on Why is the price of real estate rising so dramatically? 2 weeks ago:
Also private investors from around the world are buying US property. Americans think of their homes as wealth building investments and it turns out that they are not the only ones thinking that. Housing markets elsewhere are too regulated or volatile or stagnant but snapping up US housing has in a way created its own motivation. The more people do it, the better the returns are on doing it. It’s a bubble, in other words. However that bubble resist popping because historically, housing has never been priced according to its true value. These days we’re seeing prices rise on things like food and housing because shit, what are you going to do, not live and eat?
- Comment on if you quit a job you didn't like or was toxic, didn't the financial hit scare you? 2 weeks ago:
Ooh starting your own business must be so exciting. I wish you all the luck with that.
- Comment on if you quit a job you didn't like or was toxic, didn't the financial hit scare you? 2 weeks ago:
I’ve never had trouble finding new work, so it hasn’t been too scary for me. Once I got laid off and found another job before the severance ran out but that job turned out to be a disaster and I got laid off there as well, only months later. That was definitely discouraging but a relief as well. I got right back on the horse.
However now things have changed a lot. I am much more senior and earning a lot more. Senior roles are fewer and more competitive. And the job market has been a disaster this year. It used to be that I’d get a couple of recruiter emails per week and now I can hardly get a response to any job applications I send. So yeah. At this point the financial hit terrifies me because I have a lot more at stake and I don’t know when I could get back to where I am if I left. I’m not miserable but I am unhappy as well as bored.
- Comment on What I learned from 3 years of running Windows 11 on “unsupported” PCs 2 weeks ago:
Oh we’re talking about all options including outside of Windows? Well gee life has a lot to offer, even things more glorious than using Linux.
- Comment on What I learned from 3 years of running Windows 11 on “unsupported” PCs 2 weeks ago:
It does make me wonder if perhaps malicious actors have novel intrusion methods waiting for the deadline because they know those people won’t just get a patch the night the intrusion gets detected.
- Comment on Microsoft fires employees who organized vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza 2 weeks ago:
Heh it literally stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.”
It is recursive and the G has no ultimate referent except that it completes the acronym in a way that invokes an animal.
- Comment on What I learned from 3 years of running Windows 11 on “unsupported” PCs 2 weeks ago:
Well there are 3 options and they are all bad.
- pay to upgrade your PC (or for extended 10 support)
- stay on 10 and go without security updates
- jump through hoops to update to 11 unsupported
It’s almost like being on Windows is all bad.
- Comment on Microsoft fires employees who organized vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza 2 weeks ago:
I was going to. But then I found out that GNU’s not Unix.
- Comment on I'll share a troubling fact with you if you share one with me 3 weeks ago:
It’s the “people are still voting for him” part that terrifies me. Because we can defeat Trump, but you can’t do a whole lot with a rotten electorate.