AHemlocksLie

@AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EU fines Apple $568m for deterring third-party payment methods on App Store⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  People are down voting you like your defending them, but you’re not, and you’re right. It sounds like a lot of money, but for Apple, it’s just an adjustment to the profits they made doing this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨4chan hacked and taken offline. Hacker reopens /qa/ and leaks all admins emails.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh god /pol/ is the hot spot now? I can only imagine the cess pit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Logitech is dropping support for its oldest Harmony remotes⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But then how are they supposed to collect data?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Musk 'Pressured' Reddit CEO to Silence DOGE Critics, Leaving Moderators Outraged: Report.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Musk bought Twitter because he fucked around trying to manipulate the stock price and accidentally made an agreement he couldn’t back out of. He tried. He failed. He was forced to buy it according to the terms he previously specified.

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

  I dunno why you think old people who didn’t save enough for retirement should automatically get to live a good life

  Bruh they’re on less than $2k/month. They aren’t living it up. That’s $24k/year. That’s a $10/hour full time job. That’s poverty wages.

  by making the housing market worse for younger people.

  There are 28 vacant homes per homeless person in the US. It’s not old folks wanting to live in the homes they spent decades in. It’s corporate landlords and bad zoning laws.

  When you’re poor, life sucks, that’s how it is.

  Only because we let the rich condemn us to it. Productivity is at an all time high. We’ve basically conquered scarcity. The only real reason to continue allowing poverty is to keep forcing us to serve the owner class.

  To free up housing stock and keep liquidity and supply in the housing market. To undo the crystallization we see in the market with old people clutching to their houses with all their might. To reduce the overwhelming cost of purchasing ones first home.

  See above on how this isn’t their fault.

  Sometimes, when you can’t afford something, you need to sell it and get a cheaper version. When that thing is a house, sometimes you need to move away.

  But they only can’t afford it because of taxes. They literally managed to afford the entire house and all the maintenance on it. They can afford the house until we decided our elderly deserve to live on poverty wages while being taxed on their housing. I’ve already shown that it doesn’t even have to be that nice a house. It could very easily be a mediocre house that used to be rural and just got consumed by urban sprawl. So now, in their old age, you want to force them out of that home, which means they’ll probably be forced out of their community, which means they’ll lose their support network. Which will really fuck them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨month⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨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.