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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • The essential problem is that the people working now are paying for the people that are retired. It would make more sense for the gov’t to have taxed the people prior to their retirement, and have invested those taxes, so that in their retirement they would be getting out what they had previously paid in. And switching over to a system like that would require double taxation on the population now, which will make such a proposal very unopopular.

    But if your retired population is growing, and you have fewer people working, then you either need to increase the retirement age–so that more people are paying into the system–or increase the taxation overall. If I recall correctly, Denmark has been seeing a negative population growth; that’s a real problem for retirement schemes that rely on current taxes paying for retirees.

    Is this fair to people that have been working in trades and have beaten up their body for 40 years? No. Likewise, it’s not really fair to people that have working in white-collar jobs that may still be more than capable of excelling at their job, and still want to work. (My dad had mandatory retirement at 72 due to company policy; he immediately got re-hired as an on-site consultant, and has been doing that for over a decade.)

    EDIT - this is a huge problem in the US. The social security taxes now on working people are immediately paid out to retirees. SS benefits go up to account for inflation, but the amount coming in is decreasing because population growth has slowed. Without major reforms, social security in the US won’t be solvent by the time I retire, IF I ever retire.






  • SCO crashed and burned in part because they tried to sue multiple Linux providers claiming that they owned all the rights to certain pieces of code that they’d contractually leased from IBM, and that IBM giving code to Linux distributors violated the terms of their agreement with IBM. It was a lawsuit that dragged on for over a decade and a half–I think that it’s still going–and it’s bled SCO of tens of millions of dollars ,esp. since they’ve lost nearly every single claim they’ve made.




  • Unfortunately most commercial farms aren’t putting in what they’re taking out, even with the industrial fertilizers. Most of the industrial fertilizers are just nitrogen, potassium, and phosphates, often as a liquid. You are absolutely right that you can’t take and never return; that’s why in pre-industrial revolution times, people would rotate fields between crops, and lying fallow/being used for grazing (where sheep, cattle, etc. were leaving free fertilizer) You also ended up with fewer years where all your crops got wiped out by a single pest, because you weren’t farming just one thing. Efficiency in farming–esp. monoculture–is great for profits, not so great for the land itself.

    Good news is that good water treatment plants will pull phosphate out of the waste water.

    Eh. High levels of phosphates end up running off fields into waterways, and then you get things like algae blooms. Waste water treatment plants will clean up runoff that goes into the sewers and storm drains, but it’s not really cleaning up entire rivers. IIRC, that used to be a much more significant problem; I remember water in rivers near where I grew up–which was all surrounded by farms–often had white, sludgy scum anywhere that the current was forming eddies. If I remember correctly the high levels of that white shit was due to worse regulations governing agricultural run-off.




  • Well, yeah, it would be.

    We would need to drastically increase taxes in order to have UBI for the poorest people in the US. Right now, across the board, all of us are paying some of the lowest income taxes since income taxation was introduced. After you consider things like the EIC, a lot of poor people have a negative tax rate. As it is, we’re running a budget deficit every single year, and most of that deficit is entitlement programs (I’m not using that in a pejorative sense) like social security and Medicare.

    (No, social security is not fully funded; people pay in far less than they end up getting paid back, and the system relies on a constantly expanding pool of people paying into it to fund the people that are currently drawing from it. To fix that, we would need to increase social security taxes, end the cap on those taxes, and probably set the retirement age higher.)

    Even if we took every single penny that every billionaire in the US had, that would fund the federal gov’t for something like eight months. Total. And then it would all be gone. (Plus the stock and bond markets would crater, but eh.)

    Yeah, we need to bring back the highest marginal tax rates for sure. And we need to increase corporate taxes and eliminate a lot of the corporate cash giveaways. But we also need to increase taxes on the middle class. I’m saying this as someone that’s at the lower end of middle class; I’m not paying enough in taxes for what i think this country should be doing for the citizens of the country. But man, if you told me my tax bill was going to go up by $8k, but I’d also get national single payer health care? And national public transit, and free public universities? I would cream my panties.


  • I have an earlier version of this (got it on sale from Costco, and it was the highest-rated model by Consumer Reports at the time); I love it. It’s not great for carpets, but it’s fast and easy for hardwood floors.

    Would I have bought it if it needed to connect to my cell phone? Absofuckinglutely not. Not in a million fucking years. It could have been the best goddamn vacuum in the world at sucking, powered by a miniature black hole, sucking dirt to the event horizon, and I still would have passed.

    I need LESS connectivity in my life, not more.


  • HelixDab2@lemm.eetoLinux@lemmy.mlWindows doesn't "just work"
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    4 months ago

    Windows 11 LTSC

    I’m using Window 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC; the biggest issue I’ve had was that I couldn’t get my video card installed. I had to wait until there was an updated driver, a few weeks after I assembled my computer. Every time I tried to install the driver that was supposed to be the correct one, I got a BSOD.

    Honestly, I like 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC better than I liked the 10 Pro version that I had. And–compared to the only Linux distro I’ve used, Tails–it’s fairly straightforward. And yes, I know the Tails is kind of a pain in the ass, and it’s not fair to judge all of Linux against that. But i’m old, and cranky, and just want Win 3.11 back.