Thank you for making a part of the world at least a little bit better. Your efforts are worth it.

99% sure this person is cosplaying as QWOP

IMO Canadians should examine the war in Ukraine to get an idea about how to prepare, but keep in mind Russia’s relative military ineptitude.

A misinformation/propaganda greentext from 4chan? Say it ain’t so.

I don’t know if Morgan was an alcoholic or not, it’s unfortunate if he was, but if you are eating a combined high fat and high sugar (particularly high fructose, as found in soda) diet like he was, you are going to fuck with your liver for sure, regardless. Especially if there is no exercise as well. Quickest way to fatty-liver disease.

But sure, do a favor for the sugar lobby and blame it all on one guy’s alleged alcoholism. It’s not like he’s around to clarify things anymore, or anything.

As someone from the long long ago, it’s funny seeing this post. For my generation, this has the same vibe as “of course smoking is bad for you”, meanwhile the generation before mine was saturated in tobacco smoke and normalized tobacco culture. Sure, there was always an undercurrent that it was bad, but there wasn’t the vehement rejection of it like today.

You could go back further again and do it with something like not wearing seatbelts. The value of seatbelts is obvious now, but it wasn’t always part of the zeitgeist.

The same goes for fast food. We knew it wasn’t great, but healthy eating awareness was hardly a thing back then, especially compared to what it is today. It is precisely because of things like Supersize Me raising awareness, (even ham-fistedly in retrospect) and changing the culture, that we get to call out that shit as obvious today.

You had to be there. You’re welcome.

The way accounting works, if the money is going on to their books, it had to come off of someone else’s. So the rest of us are not the same, you are correct, we are actually poorer, collectively.

Billionaires’ accumulation of wealth is basically self perpetuating once they get to the point of being a billionaire. They can’t possibly spend it all, so they invest anything left over, which gains more profits, which they invest again and so on.

They eventually run out of regular investments to invest in (see stocks just going up and up), so they move into investing in things like housing, which is why that bubble refuses to burst. Meanwhile, you can’t afford to buy your own house because of the astronomical cost, and you’re left renting your housing from the billionaire class who effectively own it, creating more profit for them. Even if you buy a home, you likely have a mortgage, with that money having been lent by… investors (see above), creating more profit for them.

Unfortunately, every dollar lent for anything requires an interest payment, which, if you know how that works (see “fractional reserve banking” to get an idea), forces money to be printed in order for there to be enough money supply to keep the whole system working. Printing money causes inflation, which lowers the buying power of any money you do have.

For regular people, that means we’re collectively poorer.

For billionaires, they’d never notice the inflation, both because they already have more money than they could ever spend, and the growth is self perpetuating because they have no other way to spend it.

If you follow that out, obviously they’ll end up owning absolutely everything.

But people have to eat, so one day, shit is going to hit the fan. The longer taxing billionaires heavily is delayed, the larger that shit storm is going to be. The people who are right now living in shantytowns, in their cars or RVs, are the tip of the iceberg.

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This doesn’t even touch on things like shrinkflation (which is just another part of general inflation).

Some people might say “oh, fractional reserve banking is dead”, but what they don’t say is that the reserve part is dead, meaning the engine is now fully pinned instead of just red-lining.

Like some people said on HN, the premise of this is based on a misunderstanding of how the poverty line is calculated.

Look, just because some people on HN turned their brain off, it doesn’t mean you have to listen to them. It’s clear if they said this, they read a tenth of the article at most and then jumped to conclusions. The misunderstanding is theirs, and now yours unless you read and grok the whole article.

They don’t take each year’s grocery expenses and multiply by 3.

Indeed they do not.

Instead they take the same 1963 figure and adjust it each year for inflation generally.

Okay. But what underpins the 1963 figure? That’s his whole point. The figure effectively looked at one variable and assumes that several related others remain static for 60 years.

This means if [it] was an accurate estimate then and the inflation calculation is correct, then it should remain roughly accurate

If it were instead adjusted for inflation since 1910, and the poverty line was based on horse maintenance expenses x3, because it made sense at the time, and it was an accurate estimate then, would this have remained roughly accurate to today? Neigh way José.

The benchmark is not keeping up with modern expenses, nor does it factor in changes to known 1963 variables that the benchmark still presumes are static, effectively pegged at 1963 values.

Just read the whole article. Your future depends on it.

Stop bragging 😂

When things get dire, the fast and high bandwidth Internet we know will be gone, but a form of slow, intermittent Internet will probably be around; still technically an Internet.

The E stood for Elimination.

Even more fitting, really.

Part of me wonders if they sell your driving telemetry to your insurance company, and if those companies pay out more for data on worse offenders. If so, they’re just letting you tie your own increased insurance rate noose by providing that option, for their own financial gain.

On brand for an Amazon property.

And the back button will break the entire app.

Oh, so that’s why Google is killing sideloading.

Then again, I could have accomplished the same thing by knocking off work for the day and going to the driving range.

Hey, look at the bright side, as long as you were chained to your desk instead, that’s all that matters.

Ha!

By bolding “every category”, are you implying that sliding into fascism was one of the categories they tracked?

Oh my god, I’ve thinking about why git doesn’t operate this way for ages, but it already has for a decade. This is going to change my life. Thank you for posting this.

Wait, what? How?