Back in my desk tech days, one of the most useful cable testers I ever used had a “hold” mode. The lights would only come on if the circuit was interrupted. And then they would stay on until I hit a reset button. It made testing cables much more reliable, because it allowed me to find all of the cables that would randomly pop and crackle when wiggled juuuuuust right.

I’d plug both ends in, and shake the hell out of the cable. If I saw any lights, I knew the cable would crackle at some point because it had a break somewhere in the middle. And the fact that the light stayed on meant I didn’t need to worry about missing a tiny flicker (which would sound like a big pop when the cable was in use)… If it disconnected, it was stuck on until I reset it.

Yeah, life always seems to throw expensive problems at people all at the same time. I thought I had a pretty good nest egg saved up, and then boom… Car shit the bed, cat needed surgery, wife had a hospital stay, and a few other big life events. All while the economy is in the garbage, inflation is in the high double digits, the wife is out of work (due to the aforementioned hospital stay), and any hope of a social safety net was being dismantled right in front of me.

I didn’t even consciously realize how stressed I was about money, until I realized I had fallen back to pirating my PC games instead of just buying them. I hadn’t been a prolific pirate since my broke college student days… And then suddenly there I was again, browsing FG’s site for the latest repack, so I could install it in between shifts.

Which is really only used in the americas. Europe/Asia doesn’t use it, except in specific circumstances where the child wouldn’t be eligible for citizenship elsewhere. But even that is only due to treaties set up to prevent stateless people. If the child would have citizenship elsewhere (like in America), the European/asian country would tell them to apply there instead.

The listed amount is actually an annuity that pays out over like 25 years. The base lump-sum amount is usually only around half of the listed amount. So a $2b win would only pay out about $1b in cash. And then that cash amount is heavily taxed.

You should almost always choose the cash option even if the annuity is a “larger” total, because the annuity’s rates very rarely beat inflation rates over the 25 year time period… So you’re better off just taking the cash as a lump sum and investing it in index funds and bonds, which will virtually always beat inflation rates over time.

But all of this is to say, it’s not quite an 80% tax rate. It’s more like 55%, once you consider the fact that the cash option is already only about half of the listed winnings.

Alternate take: If we actually implemented my above plan, you wouldn’t need to be stupidly rich to own two homes. Home prices would be reasonable, because there wouldn’t be giant corporations hoarding all of the real estate.

We have over two vacant houses for every single homeless person in the country. We could give every single homeless person a house, and still have plenty to act as summer cabins. And that’s before you even factor in the fact that the market would be flooded with houses (at least in the short term) from corporations trying to avoid the increased taxes.

Tax homes based on how many you own, and how many are vacant. Allow two homes at a regular rate; Enough for a summer and winter home. Then ratchet tax rates up as the person buys more.

And if the third, fourth, fifth, etc home sits vacant for more than a few months out of the year? The tax rate goes up even more, so giant corporations can’t just buy entire neighborhoods and sit on them to remove them from the market and increase property values for the other homes they own across town. Because that’s what’s happening now; Giant corps are buying homes and letting them sit vacant, just to remove them from the market so they can charge higher rates elsewhere. Allow a few months of grace for renovations and finding tenants… But after a ~3 month grace period, that tax rate skyrockets.

And then take the revenue from these increased taxes, and use them to fund First Time Homebuyer programs, so home ownership becomes more available to the people who are renting. Incentivize the corporations to actually flip the houses and resell or rent them, instead of just sitting on them.

Just out of curiosity, why bother running 4 instances of qBit for the various *arrs? Why not just use automatic torrent management, and have the different categories download to different folders? My *arrs are all using a single instance of qBit, and each service simply uses a different category with a different download path.

The benefit is that I can see my total up/down speeds, ratios, etc very easily without needing to change to an entirely different instance. I can filter by category, or see everything at the same time.

Yeah, I just wish there was a way to automatically update the port whenever it changes. It doesn’t change often since my server tends to stay on 24/7. But when it does change, it would be nice to have it automatically update.

Back before my current server, I was just messing around with it in Windows. I discovered that qBit actually stores the forwarded port in the registry, and PIA has a terminal command that can print the currently forwarded port. I tried to write a quick .bat script to automatically run when the PIA network adapter connected. The goal was to grab the port number and update the registry for qBit any time the internet went out or my server was rebooted.

And it seemed to work fine. It launched when PIA connected, and pushed the new value to the registry. But that forwarded port was also apparently being stored somewhere else as well, because just updating the registry wasn’t enough; When qBit launched it still showed the old port number, even though all of the documentation I found said it was simply a registry value. At that point I just gave up and manually updated it every time I turned my computer on.

The average household income where I live is ~$80k. Excluding the top 5%, it drops to ~$50k. That’s (on average) two full-time workers per household, each making ~$12/hour. Their annual (pre-tax) income would be about $480 per week, or ~$2080 per month each. After taxes, that would be closer to $1450. So likely around $3000 for the household’s monthly budget.

The cheapest homes near me start at $300k. A 30 year mortgage with a 6.5% interest rate and 10% down payment would be almost $2100 per month. That’s assuming they’re able to save the 10% in the first place, and get approved for the loan. It also leaves them with only ~$900 for the entire monthly budget. That’s food, utilities, car payment(s), insurance, childcare, etc…

My point was simply that EA will never release a new Sims game as long as they can keep expanding on Sims 4. They even outright said that they have cancelled production of Sims 5, to focus on expanding 4.

(The Sims, I’m looking at you).

It is 2014. I am twenty years old. I am booting up The Sims 4 for the first time. I find myself disappointed by the amount of content that is missing when compared to The Sims 3….

It is 2024. I am thirty years old. I am booting up The Sims 4 again. I have not touched the game for months prior to this, but I just spent $40 on the newest expansion. I find myself disappointed, but I feel like I need to play it a few more times to get my money’s worth.

It is 2074. I am eighty years old. I am booting up The Sims 4 again. I have not touched the game for months prior to this, but I just spent $700 on the newest expansion. The game now requires an entire 512TB drive. It takes 23 minutes and 41 seconds to boot up. My computer chair hurts my back.

Yeah, but people are getting tired of the soupmaxxing meta. I actually think the next meta is going to revolve around toenail clippings.

If it’s not made in the conservative region, it’s just sparkling fascism.

It’s also how flat earthers started. 4chan started satirically memeing about flat earth. Then idiots saw it, missed the satire, and picked it up as a serious thing. At that point, 4chan went “this is funnier than any satire we could make” and stood back to watch the crazies launch rockets into the upper atmosphere.

Doesn’t work on Twitch; They embed the ads directly in the stream. If you block the ads, you also block the stream.

Yeah, the issue is that if you don’t run ads, Twitch will just put their own in before your stream starts. And this absolutely kills any sort of discoverability for your channel; If new viewers have to watch 90 seconds of ads before they can even see your stream, they’ll just bail.

So for the sake of growing your channel, it’s actually better to run ads. Because then your viewers aren’t immediately blasted by a ton of unskippable ads as soon as they start your stream.

Ross lived across the street, and Chandler lived across the hall. For Chandler, the difference between his own kitchen and Monica’s kitchen was 2 doors and about 10 steps. For Ross, it was only three flights of stairs. The only one who consistently lived farther away was Phoebe.

Plus it’s NYC. They’re not driving anywhere; They walk or take the subway. Even if Ross lived farther away, if Monica’s apartment was on his way to work, it would just be a matter of getting off at an earlier stop to pop by.

In doing so, they needed to reduce inventory, so they gave away the old laptops (sans drives) to their employees. I now own the same laptop (or a very similar one)!

Yeah, IT fleet upgrades are a great way to snag some decent hardware for dirt cheap. My Plex server is running on an old HP EliteDesk that came from a cubicle. The hardware itself is often practically new, because corporate drones rarely do anything intensive enough to actually push the hardware. Just give it a quick spray with some canned air, and pop a new drive in.

Here’s a reminder that the Black Panthers got started because cops kept violently busting peaceful unarmed protests. People realized that the cops would send in the jackboots to bust unarmed protests… But they would politely watch heavily armed protests from across the street. So they began arming protestors.

Turns out, firing into an unarmed crowd is super easy, but it’s not so easy when the entire crowd also has weapons. Maybe you take out a few with your initial attack, but you definitely didn’t get all of them and now they can return fire.

It’s also why republicans started modern gun control with the Mulford Act. It was (at least at the time) the most restrictive gun control law the country had ever seen. When politicians saw armed protestors on their front porch, and saw cops entirely unwilling to stop it? They got really fucking sweaty really fucking fast. Ronald Reagan (yes, the same Reagan that conservatives love to put on a pedestal as the paragon of conservative policy) enacted the gun control law to disarm protestors and give cops justification to bust armed protests. Now, instead of busting the protest directly when it’s happening, cops could wait and quietly follow the protestors home, then kick in their front doors while they were eating dinner… Sound familiar?

This pushed the armed protestors underground, and formed the Black Panthers.

For every $10 earned, dues are usually $1.25

I think you forgot a 0 on that $10. If your union is charging 12.5%, I have a bridge to sell you.