grue
@grue@lemmy.world
- Comment on YSK You don't need Teflon pans for nonstick 2 days ago:
Le Creuset enameled cast iron isn’t the same kind of thing as the ceramic nonstick the person upthread was talking about.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 2 days ago:
Putting a second story on likely includes increasing the number of bedrooms, which theoretically increases the number of people who could be living there and thus increase the burden on city services. Renovating for quality and building additions to the square footage aren’t equivalent.
I think lot sizes are still a much bigger factor, though: a house renovated/rebuilt to max out the allowed FAR (floor-area ratio) on a 1/4 acre lot still ought to get taxed less than a modest-sized house on a 2-acre lot.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 2 days ago:
That’s just scapegoating bullshit temporarily-embarrassed NIMBYs like to tell themselves to avoid the hard truth that we have to fix the zoning code.
The fact is, plenty of houses exist at reasonable prices in rural areas and small towns. But you don’t want to live in those places, do you? You want to live in a big metro area, just like everybody else. Well, when everybody wants to live in the same place you have to build enough housing units for them all to fucking fit in the same place, or you end up playing musical chairs and the ones who aren’t rich lose. That’s just a fact of geometry and basic supply and demand, not the diabolical machinations of some villain.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 2 days ago:
The fuck-up was by the city, which failed to abolish the single-family zoning in order to allow the land to be developed to its highest and best use.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 2 days ago:
Well at least for tax purposes and likely insurance, but not necessarily market rate (tax assessments commonly lag the market, so a market downturn could leave them with a multi-million dollar house that no one will pay the stated value for
More like the house is likely worth even more than the $4.4M it was assessed at. But nice try trying to spin your point to fit your narrative.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 2 days ago:
but if you apply the same rate to the homes that average people have to buy you’re going to end up in a shitty spot
And that’s why you don’t do that and instead make progressive taxation a thing.
If taxing the rich is the goal we shouldn’t be talking about property taxes on single family homes unless it’s specifically related to second and third homes.
Nah. It is good and correct to tax extremely large single-family homes at high rates even if they’re primary residences.
- Comment on ‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’ 2 days ago:
Simply tying property taxes to home value isn’t fair, because the burden a person puts on city services doesn’t increase just because the perceived value of their home rises.
It depends how much home value correlates to house size and lot size. A $1M 1500 sqft bungalow on a 1/4 acre lot in a gentrified neighborhood may not burden city services more than a $100k 1500 sqft bungalow on a 1/4 acre lot in a bad neighborhood, but a $1M McMansion on a 2-acre lot on the edge of the city absolutely will. That’s because the cost of city services scales with things like increasing the length of pavement and sewer pipe across the lot frontage and decreasing the number of homes emergency services can reach within a reasonable distance/time from the station.
- Comment on Google's AI now listens to your English language phone conversations 2 days ago:
What do you mean, “illegal?” If the phone user consents to turning it on, that makes it legal.
I hate to defend Google, but I will absolutely defend single-party consent for recording. Don’t like it? Don’t fucking call me in the first place.
- Comment on Is Heliobiology a pseudoscience? 4 days ago:
Based on the post title I was expecting to say “no,” but that’s because I was also expecting “heliobiology” to be about sentient plasma eddies or something, not woo-woo magnetic bullshit somehow affecting humans.
No, seriously, even life inside stars is less implausible than the nonsense you’re asking about: sciencealert.com/physicists-argue-that-life-based…
- Comment on Fake reviews on Play Store by Plex staff 4 days ago:
but the discussion is usually not made in good faith
“Everybody who disagrees with me is a troll or a shill.”
Sure, buddy, because Free Software projects run by volunteers famously have huge guerilla marketing budgets. Won’t somebody think of the poor for-profit companies who first got their leg up by taking Free Software code they didn’t write and then subsequently gradually closed and enshittified it? They’re the real victims here.
- Comment on Uber to introduce fixed-route shuttles in major US cities designed for commuters | TechCrunch 5 days ago:
- Comment on Palantir CEO Alex Karp praises Saudi engineers and takes a swipe at Europe, saying it has 'given up' on AI 5 days ago:
Why does it feel like all the worst people are working together to fuck over the world?
- Comment on A VPN Company Canceled All Lifetime Subscriptions, Claiming It Didn’t Know About Them 5 days ago:
Lifetime is a hoax.
No, it’s fraud.
The difference is that one is a funny joke and the other is a criminal act that ought to land corporate executives in prison, if the US weren’t an oligarchy to corrupt to prosecute.
- Comment on Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection 6 days ago:
More like F-Droid cares about things like reproducible builds and other best practices, and sloppy upstream projects sometimes have a problem coping. But as I understand it that’s typically the upstream developers’ problem, not F-Droid’s.
- Comment on Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection 6 days ago:
I actually like that the F-Droid maintainers check over the apps and warn about anti-features/stop offering new versions if they enshittify.
- Comment on doctors 6 days ago:
Then why are Americans so much worse at it, on average, than people in e.g. France or Japan. You can’t just say “hurt durr Americans are just irresponsible;” that’s a bullshit cop-out and you know it.
I’m trying to have a conversation about what it would take to actually solving the problem here; if you just want to feel morally superior you can go ahead and fuck off.
- Comment on doctors 6 days ago:
For the moment, anyway, it’s possible to eat good-ish if you educate yourself andfamiliarize yourself with your local area’s businesses.
Of course it’s “possible;” anything is “possible.” What matters is, why is it apparently harder to do in the US than in other places?
Something is different on the societal level that changes the average outcomes. Disregarding that because you’re bent on blaming individuals for perceived moral failings is missing the point.
- Comment on doctors 6 days ago:
So then the question becomes, why is processed food and other shit so pervasive in the average American diet? That’s what an environmental factor is.
- Comment on doctors 1 week ago:
…if there’s [a pool] available near them.
Speaking of institutional racism…
This validated a new normal across America: When legally required to share public pools with Black children, many white families decided they’d rather not go at all. Closing public pools to avoid racial integration became official policy for many cities across the U.S.
- Comment on doctors 1 week ago:
Everyone is fat
Exactly, which points squarely at an environmental cause, not at individual sloth/gluttony or some shit like that.
- Comment on Rate my setup 1 week ago:
No, that should absolutely be discouraged. Nvidia should quit trying to fuck with users’ rights and release proper Free Software drivers.
- Comment on xkcd #3087: Pascal's Law 1 week ago:
They certainly should’ve; it’s just a consequence of how pressure is force divided by area.
Here’s an analogy that might make it feel less weird: you know how you can reduce the force needed to lift a heavy weight by using a lever and making the lever arm longer? This is the same kinda deal, except that instead of varying the length of the lever arm you’re varying the diameter of the hydraulic pistons.
You don’t get it for free, of course: just like how you have to push the long end of the lever a longer distance to lift the weight a shorter distance, in a hydraulic system you have to press the plunger further down the small-diameter piston to move the plunger in the large-diameter piston up a smaller amount.
(I thought of mentioning pulley systems as an analogy too, but of these three varieties of gaining mechanical advantage I find pulley systems to be the most confusing, LOL.)
- Comment on French culture 1 week ago:
As a person learning French, I think it’s more closely related to “training” or “entrain.”
- Comment on Rooftop solar can be torn out of capital’s hands | Decentralised solar has the potential to support co-operative, municipal and other forms of community ownership and control 1 week ago:
Well, yeah. That’s why the entrenched corporate interests hate it so much.
- Comment on Showing your ID to get online might become a reality 1 week ago:
The problem with the cookie law wasn’t the concept of it, it was the EU’s failure to crack down on malicious compliance.
They should’ve revised the law to make it opt-out by default.
- Comment on Second US Navy jet is lost at sea from Truman aircraft carrier 1 week ago:
This wouldn’t be happening if they weren’t running sorties to attack Houthis for the crime of fighting back against Israel’s genocide of Gaza.
- Comment on Trump's New Streaming Service Truth+ Is a Conspiracy Theorist's Dream Come True 1 week ago:
Emoluments Clause, anyone?
- Comment on You could get anything you wanted and it was FREE 1 week ago:
That’s why Napster went away, but it didn’t stop it from being first to exist.
- Comment on Rejoice! Carmakers Are Embracing Physical Buttons Again 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on You could get anything you wanted and it was FREE 2 weeks ago:
Napster was so early that most folks didn’t have the bandwidth and CPU speed to deal with decent-quality video yet, so it initially only did MP3s. I think some folks forget about it because they didn’t get into the piracy scene until they could get TV shows/movies/software etc.
