AHemlocksLie

@AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It is mathematically impossible for someone in poverty to be unable to afford property taxes, because if their property valuation is so high that taxes are a burden, they’re not poor.

  For someone on Social Security, that home may be the only asset of any real worth they have. Social Security pays out an average of less than $2,000 a month. We can squabble over the technical definition of poverty, but look at the reality of it. A 70+ year old person on Social Security doesn’t have good odds of getting hired anywhere that’s gonna pay him worth a shit. They can’t afford modern rent prices on that sort of check. Their only real shot at staying housed without a bunch of other retired and poverty stricken roommates is to have already paid off a home. Their financial situation is very likely to never significantly improve again for the rest of their lives.

  Now, I’ll admit some states have very low property taxes that won’t impact things too heavily, but that’s not universally true. Look at New Jersey. They have a property tax rate of 1.86%. For that to constitute half of the average Social Security check, as mentioned in OP, that’d only require a home with a value of $640k, which sounds like a whole lot until you realize the median NJ home price is $540k. That could be a fairly run of the mill house that used to be rural and got caught in urban sprawl, spiking the value. That could be a modest home on a very little bit, not a lot, of farmable land. That could be a home in a rundown part of town that got gentrified over the last decades. That could be a few critical companies moving into the area and spiking home demand. That could just be our housing market doing what it’s done for the last half a decade and just belligerently raising prices to ludicrous levels.

  I don’t think that sounds like he’s living it up. I think that on a $2,000/month budget, even if his home value excludes him from the technical definition of poverty, he’s still gonna fucking feel like he’s in poverty, especially if you fuck with his housing.

  And yes, if the housing market happens to be whackadoodle and despite the sale proceeds they still can’t afford rent for some reason, then they’d be eligible for subsidies.

  Why not just leave them there in that case? What’s the sense in forcing them out of their home just to push them into a new home that has almost the exact same problem? Now you’re paying for subsidies and paying to manage the subsidy program instead of just… Not taxing them. It’s counterproductive.

  Including people whose homes, through no hard work of their own, have ballooned to incredible value.

  Sure, but you seem to be drastically overestimating what it takes to get there. ALL home prices in America have ballooned to what should be considered incredible value, especially looking at modern build quality.

  A person who becomes a millionaire through property value increase is even less deserving of tax breaks than a business owner who makes a million dollars.

  And this is why I specifically said to cut the tax for reasonable homes. Dude in a McMansion can downsize. Dude in a slightly over average value home, though, can stay put and forego some taxes as far as I’m concerned. Set a threshold, but tie it to local property values. An average home should be fine. I might be willing to agree to double, but I’d have to think and research more. But beyond the value of a reasonable home, sure, levy taxes on the excess. Something like full property taxes on any value over some threshold.

  At least the business owner probably put some work into earning the money.

  Eh, I think business owners get too much credit. The vast majority of value created by all but the smallest companies is created by the workers. Most business owners depend on exploiting their workers. CEOs sure as HELL aren’t working hundreds to thousands of times harder than their lowest paid employees. Someone that’s self-employed, sure, busting their ass and earning it, but business owners on the whole, no.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay, but how do you intend to accomplish that without costing the government more tax money? The most cost effective first step seems to me to be to just not tax a reasonable primary residence. Providing housing the inhabitants don’t own costs someone money in building and maintaining that property, and since we’re agreeing that housing should be a right, the only way I can see to guarantee that would be through government funding. And we probably should do that for some people, at least those most in need, but what’s the sense in forcing people in poverty out of their home of decades just because they can’t afford the property taxes? Why is it that we can agree that everyone deserves housing, but we can’t agree that they should be able to own that housing? There are other ways to raise that tax money, and the obvious choice is to increase taxes on those with a gross excess, not those who have managed to achieve stability after decades of work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  And I just don’t agree with that. I don’t think we should have to pay property taxes at all on a reasonably priced primary residence, as set by local and national standards. Housing should be considered more of a right. We all need to contribute to taxes, yes, no dispute there, but I don’t see this as a fair way to do so. Now, if it’s an extra property or a particularly lavish home, yeah, tax the piss out of them. But taxing someone into homelessness should never happen because one of the state’s core goals at least should be seeing that everyone’s basic needs are met, and that includes housing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Assuming the house is worth millions is a faulty premise. Housing prices have exploded in the last 5-10 years, and that can mean that a home bought decades ago is worth many times its original value, causing a huge increase in property taxes, but still being in line with other regular homes. People who bought decades ago might have had the home appreciate to 10x the value of initial purchase, just to end up still in line with median home prices. Selling their house won’t fix the tax rate, it’ll just add some leftover mortgage value after they pay taxes on the profit from selling their massively value-inflated home. So now, instead of just paying property taxes, they pay comparable property taxes and the remainder of a new mortgage.

  I can agree on inheritance taxes, but I don’t think it’s super fair to heavily tax a primary home of a reasonable value. Maybe if it’s a mansion, but a simple, normal home, maybe on some farm land? I don’t see a problem with a family having the security of knowing that come hell or high water, they have a home they won’t lose to anything but a natural disaster. We all need to contribute to society as it contributes to us, but I don’t think that should come at the expense of security in basic essentials like housing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  While these are fair questions, I think it’s a reasonable stance to take that you shouldn’t literally get taxed out of your home if you come into poverty, which unfortunately can include Social Security recipients. I know we all need to pay taxes and contribute to society to the extent that we’re reasonably able to, but I’m not so sure this is the best way to make it happen. For property beyond your primary residence, sure, but for your only home, I don’t super like it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Nostr identities are entirely self generated, and there’s no need for a traditional registration with each community. A single invite link could theoretically convey all the information required to join a community. Exact implementation will depend on the relay that hosts the community and the software they use to do so, but there’s no explicit need to make users register in a traditional sense, just join with the npub identity they created themselves. Some may make further requirements to curtail spam and other low quality content, but that becomes a decision for each individual community as best fits their needs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s true that nostr as a protocol doesn’t seem to have any real capacity for voice, but given a Discord-like community would probably “live” on a fixed relay, that server could also very easily provide something like a TURN server like Matrix clients use for voice and I think video support. The client could integrate support for it, and the typical clueless user wouldn’t see the difference. For the more ephemeral nature of most voice communications, there’s no real need to publish voice chat through Nostr events. It could be done, sort of, for any talks that need to be archived, but it’s not a requirement for the vast majority of the voice chat happening on Discord anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a moot point because Discord doesn’t even have that. Community discovery happens almost entirely through users sharing invite links. There are third party websites that aggregate and categorize public communities with long lasting or permanent invite links, and that’s about the only other option. Functionally, a user can ignore where the community is hosted. All that matters is that they get the invite they want, just like today with Discord.

  I think you see it as a federated system like the Fediverse, but that’s not really the case. Nostr relays are under no obligation to propagate content between each other, and for a Discord-like community, there’s no real need to. Clients are free to connect to as few or as many relays as they like. For something like this, the relay used by the community would be baked into the invite so users can connect without worrying about it. From their perspective, the only real difference is that the link doesn’t start with the Discord domain name.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Call it a server, then. Tons of people already call them Discord servers. And it’d be a lot more true of Flotilla than Discord. Functionally, from a UX perspective, there’d be VERY little difference to an end user. You’d get an invite somehow, probably through a link, maybe combined with whitelisting your identity for more private communities, and you’d be in, using a client remarkably similar to Discord once it’s in a good spot. For most users, they can fully ignore the technical complexities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Discord does exactly one thing not entirely shittily. It puts all those features in one place. It gets beat out in any one feature, but you can run an entire community within a Discord for free. You shouldn’t because it’s terrible at most of that and mediocre at the rest, but it’s free and just good enough if you bludgeon it into shape with tools and bots and stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I wonder if Flotilla on Nostr will be ready in time. The nostr community can unfortunately be a bit iffy right now, but I like the tech, and I’m always excited to see someone taking a good stab at Discord.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Github: Nintendo Submit DMCA Notices to Ryujinx Forks⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Fuck Nintendo. I haven’t bought anything from them or for their systems in nearly a decade now, and a large part of it is their greedy assholery. Their bullshit has probably cost them a grand from me alone, and I’m thankful for the savings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla pulls out all the stops as Cybertruck sales grind to a halt⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  More likely to make the government buy them all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk’s X is now worth less than a quarter of its $44 billion purchase price⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  He didn’t even want to buy Twitter, just manipulate the stock price by talking about buying it. Dumbass signed too much paperwork and waived too many rights, though, and found himself obligated to buy it anyway. Pretty sure he tried to fight it and lost.

  So now he’s trying to not burn all his money, but he’s fucking terrible at it, so he’s just becoming a laughing stock.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If tomorrow it was announced that aliens were real, highly intelligent, and in communication with our governments, no one would be talking about it by Halloween⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Didn’t one of the military branches release the Tictac video or something and admit they didn’t know what the fuck it was? It’s not an admission of aliens, but it kinda is an admission that UFOs exist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The struggle⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Got my bachelor’s and wanted to go to PhD, but realizing this has me strongly considering skipping it. I want to do the research, but holy shit, there’s so much other bullshit, and it’s so fucking competitive for funding. Since I’m considering an international move, I also have to consider how stable my position will be so I don’t get deported. I want to push science forward, but I dunno if I can wade through all the bullshit to get my chance to…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US Government Launches New Attempt to Gather Data on Electricity Usage of Bitcoin Mining⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not disputing that they want to use AI. I’m disputing the idea that the military doesn’t care about climate change. Climate change will cause instability and greatly increase the odds of them having to actually fight. As much as the military enjoys a good flex now and then, they generally prefer to win without fighting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US Government Launches New Attempt to Gather Data on Electricity Usage of Bitcoin Mining⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m pretty sure the military cares, at least to the extent that it will cause instability. I’m 99% sure there’s something from the Pentagon to support that. I wanna say Pentagon wants us to address it before it starts making them do their job a whole lot more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games where an emulated console version outclasses the PC port?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally, I’d say anything with RetroAchievements support. Why buy new when the classic is still just as good as it was back then? I don’t care much about graphics, though, so remakes don’t typically offer much I care about. I don’t want changes to game mechanics or content, I just want to be able to play it without needing specialized hardware I have to attach to my TV.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After 20+ year I've finally finished Oracle of Ages⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, but did you get the RetroAchievements for it? I’ve been on a retro game binge lately, and it’s been really cool to get achievements. Definitely helped me stick with a couple games and finish them, and they’ve encouraged me to do things in game that I wouldn’t have otherwise bothered with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.

  That’s not true, they successfully did their job of protecting capital and the owner class. Same reason they don’t go after Trump. He’s in the owner class, so their job is to serve and protect him.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Meta] Did we drop the "what are you playing" monthly thread? Also, mods haven't been active for a while, should someone take over?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been playing QuakeWorld for a few months, and I started playing EverQuest on Project Quarm. Been kinda wild playing EQ to see how the MMO genre has evolved over time. Only level like 8 or 9, but it’s been fun.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You may enjoy Zero-K more than most other RTS, at least. It’s in the Total Annihilation style like Supreme Commander or Beyond All Reason. One of the ways it sets itself apart is with a diverse array of commands you can issue to your units so they can micro themselves. I haven’t played much of it, so I can’t give a ton of examples, but it has commands to do stuff attack while maintaining distance, compared to how StarCraft 2 forced you to learn to stutter step your Marines, manually alternating between moving and shooting.

  It’s also free and open source, based on the Spring engine, and available on Steam. It felt like it played well and was filled out well in terms of mechanics and units when I gave it a try a year or so ago, but I just haven’t been playing any RTS lately.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Monthly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Can confirm, finally got around to starting New Vegas last night. Barely into it, but off to a decent start.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cryptominers target AMD Ryzen 9 7950X CPU, up to $3 per day profit⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hackers don’t have to break even. They use your hardware and your electricity and take all the revenue while you take all the costs.

  GPU mining has been unprofitable for years now. It was only kept afloat by Ethereum, but that went proof-of-stake. Its been unprofitable in Bitcoin for ages now, since like… Early to mid 2010s. Ever since the rise of ASICs, GPU mining has been a great way to light cash on fire. I don’t think GPU mining will ever be substantially profitable again. If it ever does, I think an ASIC can be built for any algorithm if it’s profitable enough to do so.

  It seems counter intuitive, but I think mining is going to remain an important aspect of cryptocurrencies. It burns energy, but I think it will help keep the game theory appropriately balanced for all actors in system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, but I’m not making a statement about the ethics of it. I’m just stating that that’s the current reality. That’s how commercial software is sold. I’ll freely agree it’s a bullshit practice and we should actually be able to own things, but that’s a whole different discussion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have no idea why you’re being downvoted because you’re right. You don’t really own hardly any of the software you buy. You don’t buy the software, you buy a license to use it in almost all commercial cases. It would be financial suicide for companies to revoke those licenses in most cases, but it still is what it is.