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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I’m from a reasonably upper-middle class background; reasonably successful in a top-10 metro. So’s my brother, but he’s gone the McMansion & country club route where I’ve tended more modest. I don’t like visiting them. Their environment just rings all my class warfare buttons, triggers all my “you don’t belong here” warnings & the obsequiousness at the restaurants & venues they prefer is just gross. I mean, I’m a middle-aged white guy, dressed like all the other mf’s in the neighborhood, so I do “belong;” it just feels wrong.

    Everybody gotta find their own comfort zone, and we have to appreciate that our friends & family can have different tastes. Sometimes, that does mean dressing up in funny costume & hanging out in uncomfortable spaces to share in their joy, but there’s tactful ways to explain/prepare your fam for unfamiliar situations, and there’s “Come here and let me dress you.”




  • In US metros, they’re typically around 2% of the home value, with discount maybe 50% for owner’s primary residence. Depending on the locality, the home value may be reappraised every year only only after a sale. If you bought a $100k house, planning retirement on $1000 annual taxes, and the area gentrifies your house to $500k, the extra $4k/year in taxes can be a budget buster.




  • When I was looking for a non-employer HSA, there’s a lot of providers out there with not-exactly-predatory terms. All kind of fees or restrictions that you wouldn’t find on other types of checking/saving/brokerage accounts. I ended up a Lively, but they added some investment/transfer fees when Schwab bought Lively’s investment partner TDA.

    I suspect it’s partly because most HSA are determined by the employer, so someone in HR can be induced to choose a fee-laden plan if it’s easier for them, and partly because the tax benefits are so great that it still makes sense even after paying a $20 junk fee here and there.


  • tburkhol@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldThe only good billionaire
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    3 months ago

    They probably do not get the same tax cuts: a “normal” person, making a paltry $250,000/year only reduces taxes by 24% of their giving, where the ultra-rich get 37%.

    But the real difference is scale. A million people each giving $100 to their favorite charity is going to distribute that money more-or-less according to the community’s overall priorities. One person giving $100M to their favorite charity has no connection to the broader community and social goals. They supercharge that one thing, which takes attention and resources from everything else.


  • tburkhol@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldThe only good billionaire
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    3 months ago

    4 - High-end philanthropy is subsidized by regular taxpayers.

    I feel like this is really under-appreciated. Like, Rich Dude decides he wants to donate $100M to…whatever - early childhood education. In the US, he avoids up to $37M taxes, which you can either look at as other taxpayers making $37M matching donation or $37M taken from other society objectives.

    To the extent that government is a (marginally) publicly accountable system for funding a society’s competing goals - education, health, defense, research - charity allows the very wealthy not just to bypass the social structure for prioritizing goals, but to force other taxpayers to adopt their personal priorities. Maybe the goal is good, maybe it’s not - the point is that they’re completely unaccountable.




  • The Android app should still be fine. I’d expect Apple’s move to be followed by a lot of creators adding a “Don’t use the iOS Patreon app” to their profiles.

    I mean, apps that are just the website are a bad idea in the first place, but this specific problem is entirely contained to the iOS app. If some people prefer an app to a bookmark, that’s on them.



  • Yeah, I think there are a lot of people in this thread who learned about the secret service from Hollywood. They rely a lot on local law enforcement, especially for former-POTUS and for unelected candidates.

    I assume they thought they had visual coverage of the rooftop from the position they used to kill the shooter, and just didn’t see him in time. Fuckup, but hardly monumental or inexcusable.



  • Even if you ignore all the neuromodulatory chemistry, much of the interesting processing happens at sub-threshold depolarizations, depending on millisecond-scale coincidence detection from synapses distributed through an enormous, and slow-conducting dendritic network. The simple electrical signal transmission model, where an input neuron causes reliable spiking in an output neuron, comes from skeletal muscle, which served as the model for synaptic transmission for decades, just because it was a lot easier to study than actual inter-neural synapses.

    But even that doesn’t matter if we can’t map the inter-neuronal connections, and so far that’s only been done for the 300 neurons of the c elegans ganglia (i.e., not even a ‘real’ brain), after a decade of work. Nowhere close to mapping the neuroscientists’ favorite model, aplysia, which only has 20,000 neurons. Maybe statistics will wash out some of those details by the time you get to humans 10^11 neuron systems, but considering how badly current network models are for predicting even simple behaviors, I’m going to say more details matter than we will discover any time soon.