I play this game at least a couple times a week. It’s an all-time favorite!

What did the government do to cause that?

This is an excellent video by a physicist about crackpots: https://youtu.be/11lPhMSulSU?si=ZGslcTKyp5Wxt1KE

More than that. You can depreciate the building (but not the land) to offset tax on the income but the bill eventually comes due because by depreciating it you’re lowering your cost basis. For example you buy a property for $150k. If you depreciate it long enough it’s worth $0. If you then sell it for $350k you have to pay tax on all $350k, not just the $200k gain in value.

However If you intend to use the proceeds from that sale to buy another investment property or properties you can do a 1031 exchange to roll your adjusted basis into the new property. Thus even when you sell it you don’t have to pay the tax.

As you might, expect tax laws are written to benefit constituencies that politicians value highly. Wealthy donors are among those constituencies.

Please explain. My intuition suggests the opposite. The company’s office is in San Jose. Presumably they have to pay high local market wages to retain workers. If they could hire remote workers willing to accept Peoria lL market wages they could conceivably get the same value of labor at lower cost.

20 years ago companies didn’t demand local workers to staff their call centers to avoid competing with the entire world. They did the opposite, contracting out to the lowest bidders overseas and firing staff in the global north.

Is that the origin of this meme? I knew I recognized it from somewhere.

This is it. For nearly 15 years money was basically free for tech companies. Banks don’t pay anything, bonds don’t pay anything, the stock market is overheated and investors are still looking for return. So if your tech company was already public you could borrow in the form of bank loans or bonds for dirt cheap and if it was still privately held you can get money from individual and corporate investors.

Now that the free money era is over a lot of companies have had to finally think about making a profit so that they can keep the lights on. This is why there have been tens of thousands laid off in the tech sector in the last year or so.

As far as Reddit goes I have no idea what they’ve been thinking. It seems like they’ve been spending money developing features nobody wants or needs: locally hosted images and video which have to cost a fortune, live chat, and NFTs, to name a few. They’ve got the ~20th most popular website in the world with millions of daily active users and they can’t figure out how to make it profitable?

The API the third party applications used doesn’t serve ads. All they had to do for a bump in revenue is to insert ads and require third party applications to display them or risk losing their API access. Users would grumble but it’s a pretty reasonable ask. The fact that they didn’t do this demonstrates to me that they don’t think the money is in serving ads, they think it’s in data mining and they can only get the data they want from the official app.

I get called BUM, for bargaining unit member. It is better than most alternatives.

I’m sure it was nothing. It seems fine? What was that noise?

I got a similar reaction to idiotsincars. Some oblivious asshole driver would recklessly endanger everyone around them in a video.

Okay, sure, that’s bad. Drivers should be held to a much higher standard of training, driving privileges should be easier to withdraw from repeat offenders, we should encourage dramatically less car-dependent infrastructure that requires everyone to have to drive to go anywhere or do anything, etc, etc, etc.

However the comments you see every day are out for fucking blood. Life in prison, death sentence, beatings, million dollar fines! Like, yo, chill out. Overreacting and demanding extremely harsh punishment is how America ended up with the largest prison population in the world. As a society there has to be a middle ground between doing nothing and the most extreme punishments imaginable. This is especially true if the ultimate goal is to discourage antisocial behavior, rather than just seek vengeance.

By my reckoning it was a reasonably fun spot to shitpost about politics and poke fun at each other, but when The_Donald got banned it seemed to pick up a lot of refugees (oh the irony) and the mods did nothing to stem the tide of sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. garbage. I used to pop in once in a while for a sensible chuckle, but after the change I blocked it.

It’s okay. Nobody’s perfect.

I’m not sure it’s even possible to contain some of the tropes. I still occasionally see people posting “first” on YouTube and similar, and that’s a Slashdot troll meme from more than 20 years ago.

Slightly off topic, but perhaps you can point me in the right direction. I recently upgraded my home router/NAT firewall to one that runs pfSense and it now supports IPv6. I was slightly horrified to find that DHCP had assigned all my devices IPv6 addresses and that they were all publicly routable. Comments online seemed to indicate that in order to protect devices on my local network from being probed by external entities I’d have to create custom firewall rules. I know just enough to know I didn’t want to do that as the likelihood of doing it wrong and compromising security far outweighed any benefit I’d see from IPv6. The only other option was to disable all IPv6 traffic at the firewall.

What am I missing here? Is it intended that regular home users have their printer, which the manufacturer hasn’t seen fit to update since Bush Jr. was president, exposed to the entire Internet? Is it that the IPv6 space is so large that port scanning for vulnerable machines is like finding a needle in a haystack?