• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • It’s difficult for at least half of us to understand as well, but the only answer is repressed anger, desperation, fear of change. People are unhappy and Trump gives them an outlet with his rants, identifies scapegoats to hate, attacks changes they are afraid of. Even his open flouting of the law attracts those who feel stifled by overbearing laws.

    Let’s take the Department of Education as an example. Here, education is mostly at the state and local level. The federal department of education doesn’t have much say, but they can give money with strings attached. In the last few decades, those strings included requirements for the disabled, racial and gender equity in school sports, separation of church and state (like our Constitution requires), programs to uplift the impoverished or poorly served, as well as programs to identify and remediate failing schools. For example my town just built a new high school: some of the reasons for the insane cost are federal requirements because they paid for most of it. People may not be comfortable with all these changes imposed by the federal government, despite the funding that comes with it and regardless of the overall good. Demagogues like Trump can stoke outrage based on outsiders telling people what to do.

    Now it’s a core Republican plank to shut down the Department of Education, so state and local governments can run Education their way. I don’t believe they even think about what they’d lose, who they’d lose it for, or how much worse off they’d be., just “stop telling us what to do”


  • Contrary to their claims, it doesn’t just affect the rich. It many of us in high tax states, and was politically motivated.

    Here in Massachusetts, paying the average property tax plus state income tax on the average income already hits the cap, then you have various excise and sales taxes. Sure, we choose higher taxes to pay for a higher quality of life, but Trump’s SALT cap means we pay taxes on taxes, which is just wrong. For the people who oppose changing or removing this, are you really saying an income of $46,000 is rich?

    It does need to go but I would never trust the person who created it in the first place, nor give him credit for backing out his own spiteful action





  • That’s one of the many things I don’t get. How did he get elected the first time, how could anyone have voted for someone with a long history of stuffing contractors? Bankruptcies? Questionable tax practices? This guy came in as a well known real estate developer fraud who ripped people off: individuals, small businesses, irs, etc, for decades. How did this ever fly in the first place?



  • I’d never justify that urge to spend ridiculous money updating every year to the latest and greatest, but people tend to under appreciate the massive improvements from accumulated incremental improvements.

    OLED screen on my iPhone X was revolutionary (and I’m sure Android had it first), as just one example, and now most phones are. Personally I find ultrawideband and “find my” very innovative and well implemented. Or if that’s too small a change, how about the entire revolution of Apple designing their own SoC for every new model. There’s emergency satellite texting, fall/crash detection, even Apple mostly solving phone theft is innovative (even if you don’t like their approach)

    When we see steady improvements, humans tend to under-appreciate how it adds up


  • Just like always, it depends on how you define or redefine ai. For example, what used to be called ai has been very successful in photo processing. The same thing is going to happen: some portion or incarnation of the current generative ai will be successful, but it will be dismissed similar to “it’s just machine learning, not ai”

    I have a lot of hope for Apple’s approach, where they are incorporating it as tools into specific capabilities, and prioritizing privacy. While there’s no direct profit, it should help sell a lot more devices with ever higher tech specs. I also like their “private cloud” model that has a lot of potential beyond private ai



  • Why not both? More automation is definitely cool, but also make the door work better for you. I hate that style of lock

    First thing I did when I moved into my current home is to replace deadbolt with a key inside with a standard deadbolt with an inside knob

    • better for emergencies - can always get out easily
    • less likely to get locked out - does not lock automatically; from outside, I must have keys to lock door as I’m leaving

  • Especially with an EV. They’ll say the noise == power, and I’ll be amused as my EV silently and effortlessly leaves them behind.

    To me the silence is a big part of it, not just all the low end torque. The silence makes it seem effortless

    While I do appreciate the engineering required, the hundreds of moving parts, the exotic alloys and precision machining to have all the parts clattering and clanking to move a car forward …… in the same way I appreciate the engineering of steam engines. Lesly’s get this legacy engineering in the museums and steampunk festivals where it belongs





  • Pension funds are multi-billion dollar funds, so they can afford their own brokers to directly buy a whole company in one-shot, with no repeat business.

    They’re not usually run this way. Generally pension funds are the same as your 401k, but on a bigger scale. They also usually focus more attention n managing risk and expenses…… I used to work for a company that did exactly this for some insane number of hundreds of billions of dollars

    You might invest part of your 401k in a public shared sp500 index fund, a pension plan might invest part of its money in a private sp500 index plan managed solely for them, usually with lower fees