Kamala still sends me emails asking for money, I think for the DNC. That is the problem with corporate Democrats, they think resistance looks like fundraising

There was a lawsuit from the AFGE (federal employees union) I think that they had to drop because it relied on the assumption that DOGE was a federal agency. When it was revealed that DOGE was just a renaming of the US Digital Service, that invalidated the premise of the lawsuit. Idk how the USDS had money lying around in its budget for a bunch of new and unqualified GS-15s to just be added to the payroll like government billets aren’t painstakingly difficult to establish, but that is another question, I suppose

Starting at 0 would actually be silly for a normalized market index value graph like this one because the market going to true 0 is not a realistic situation. Or thought of another way, this graph is essentially zero-indexed, but 0 is marked as 100 on the Y axis. 90 in this case could be thought of as -10% value and that would be perfectly accurate. These kinds of graphs are usually misleading in other ways, usually by picking specific time ranges to represent or cut off on the X axis. For instance, you could argue that the value that Trump is erasing here is largely offset by the market gains from November to January that could be arguably attributed to speculative optimism about Trump winning the election and so the crash that is shown is actually just a market correction. One might point out that triggering a market bubble and subsequent correction is no matter of pride in response to that argument, but it is there

Low income taxes. And our sales tax is typically lower than European VAT when the comparison is valid. But those generally go to the feds and the state, that do not fund municipal services, so municipalities have to collect the remainder they need through property taxes, typically on real estate and cars. And none of them fund healthcare, so we have to pay a company premiums for that. Basically the same for higher education. When you look at our total financial burden to receive the kind of services that are funded by taxes in other developed countries, we can be deceptively expensive, especially if you start thinking about the comparative quality of those services. But our income and capital gains tax rates are low, especially if you are very rich! I made myself sad

My city has a senior discount on property taxes, where seniors that have a net worth and income both below certain numbers pay reduced or as low as 0% of their regularly assessed property tax. I’m not sure how they verify net worth, but it seems like a good system to me as long as they have figured out a way to do that efficiently and effectively

Is sh.itjust.works not federated with lemmynsfw.com? Or maybe you use a Front page or Local feed. Here on world (no comment on the instance wars), lemmynsfw communities pretty regularly show up on my All feed. Seems like whatever they do with posts over there really makes the “Active” sorter happy, if you know what I mean

Degoogled and upamazon’d. Don’t expect a Foss-friendly environment, just a different flavor of enshittification. Also no source

Unethical life pro tip, depending on whether respecting others’ religious traditions is part of your ethics: no mass I’ve ever been to has checked identity before giving out communion. If you’ve got an hour to burn for a free tasteless chip and a sip of wine and backwash, just walk in with mild confidence, mimic others, and mumble along with the prayers, and people will probably just assume you usually go to mass at another time or are traveling. There’s no Eucharist police that’s going to tackle you halfway down the aisle and throw you in an inquisition dungeon because your papers don’t check out

Instructions unclear, hid roadkill bear in Central Park

There are people who retire on 1/1000th of that. This man made almost a lifetime’s worth of money in the same amount of time it takes most people to get a single good night’s sleep. Truly unfathomable wealth hoarding behavior

Accelerationism is ultimately burning the vulnerable at the stake to try and send a smoke signal, so I think it’s hard to say that this is a positive development. We can hope that there is a silver lining here where corporate social media self selects itself out of the general populations’ lives, but I think we probably have to be realistic about the low probability of success here and the human cost that is incurred in the meantime

I think that’s absolutely it. I’d bet reddit has a metric that shows that their “front page” algorithm is much more “effective” at retaining eyeballs and clicks than users who view subreddits directly, so disposing a feature that reduces friction on the less “effective” method of engagement will drive more users to the front page and the algorithmic capture that drives up Reddit’s metrics. Probably harder to serve ads on individual subreddit too because sponsored posts look more out of place when the content is less heterogeneous

I don’t know your circumstances, and it’s your money to do with what you like, so I’m sorry if this is unwelcome or inappropriate advice, but if you are living paycheck to paycheck, there are probably better priorities for your money than the newest generation of OLED monitors. Which is basically what you are saying, but I know how easy it is to fall into the trap of “keeping up with the joneses” on internet comments, and someone reading the comment and then buying a new generation OLED monitor at the expense of building their emergency savings because they can “afford” it without some serious thought and reflection on what that decision means would be tragic