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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • The cost of the outlets isn’t bad, but the whole system has to be wired and able to support those outlets all being in use. The average apartment is probably only wired for about 50-100 amps per unit, so this would mean a 50-100% increase in the capacity for the building or a load sharing system that can split the load in a way that’s compatible with everyone’s EVSE. I don’t know what that kind of system would cost. But it’s going to be more than just $200-500 per space. This is not to disparage the requirement. I think this is absolutely the right move if you are going to ban new gas cars in your state in a few years. I hope we see these kind of requirements everywhere in the next 5 years. Lack of charging prevents most non home owners from being able to consider EVs.





  • My parents did this with several of my cousins over the years. You need to file the paperwork for legal guardianship. It’s not adoption, nor foster care, but it allows you a lot of the same benefits. You can add them to your medical insurance, enroll them in school, and in general have legal backing for signing any permission slips or waivers for them. It will make things easier in so many ways to do this, especially if this is projected to go on for more than a year or two. You should also try to get his birth certificate and social security card if possible.


  • I’m going to stray from the herd here and just say ‘stop’. It’s not a good book. It is foundational to cyber punk and we wouldn’t have movies like the matrix without it, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. I’ll also give it a lot of credit for being a very well imagined future with some great settings. But the main character is unrelatable, and the supporting characters are shallow. I’ll give it a pass for being a product of its time and not call out the racism and misogyny. But it commits the worst sin of a story in that you just don’t give a shit what happens to the characters. If halfway through the story a bomb went off and the story went on with a whole new cast, you’ll be ok with that. With no connection to the characters you have no investment in the victory or concern about their defeat, so the plot just kind of happens and you feel pretty ‘meh’ about it.






  • Your questions are stating false comparisons. The only alternative to buying a house you listed is renting an equivalent house. But there are several other alternatives. To buy a house you must qualify on you and your spouse’s/ Co buyers proven income. So even if you intend to have a roommate, you cannot included the rent they’ll pay in your income. But it’s almost trivial for two couples (4 incomes) to rent a house together. There are also apartments, or trailer parks, or living with parents.

    But let’s get back to equivalent homes.

    A young couple makes 80k/yr and wants to buy a 250k house. They can’t afford much of a down payment and finance 225k. They’re paying roughly 2500/mo in a mortgage tax and insurance. That’s roughly half their take home income.

    Older couple makes 160k/yr and just sold their previous home walking away with about 100k in equity. They also add 25k more for the down payment and finance 125k. Now their mortgage is 1200/ mo and they make more money so that represents a far lower percentage of their take home income as well. Even if they still only made 80k the fact they were already in a home with equity still leaves them with far more spending money each month.

    The young couple is going to be in an apartment, or a trailer, they’re never getting into that home, even as a rental, unless the owners bought it during a low market and have a low mortgage and are not trying to get “today’s market rates” for it.


  • Cox just shut down their email services. They did so by transitioning everyone to yahoo and gave yahoo the cox.net email domain. As long as the provider plans accordingly, they can shut down and not screw over their customers. It was hell getting grandparents to understand their email changed but not really, and just to reconfigure outlook for them so they can keep getting those prayer requests. “No grandma, that’s your windows password, what’s your email password? because that doesn’t work. You know what, I’ll just look it up in the registry.” It was a pretty seamless transition all things considered.


  • First a large enough group has to agree that something is a problem. Then they have to agree there is a solution. Let’s look at the problem of labor abuse in China. First, does everyone agree that it’s a problem? There are a significant number of people that think it’s fine or even a good thing. Some people think that everyone should be willing to sacrifice or be sacrificed for the greater good of the economy.

    Okay so we manage to convince the shitheads that humans, even humans in China stuck assembling iPhones, have rights. What’s the solution? Not buy iPhones? Pay more? All out war against an oppressive regime? Countless other solutions exist, and until there’s agreement there, unlikely any of them will take hold.

    The apathy is engineered, and can be easily furthered by injecting more disagreement on possible solutions by the people that were never really convinced slavery is bad.





  • It’s pretty simple to start at the fact you have a species that can read the thoughts of other people, even outside their species, and even inject thoughts into those other beings minds. So there must be something detectable that sentient species emit that can be detected and understood, and can also be pushed at them. Once that mechanism’s understood, a machine can be developed to apply that to language. Sato is really good at using that machine.

    Of course “magic box” works too.




  • I mean yeah, if people want to live in that condition to be in cities and save money, it’s fine. But not at $850/mo. That’s insane to expect that much to live in a closet with no personal bathroom. For $200-300 a month, maybe.

    The solution is to end corporate ownership of single family homes and flood the market with the vacant homes they’re sitting on. Which will drive down home values, which will drive down rent values.

    This “solution” is just trying to get the working class to be happy peasants because “hey, at least you have a room to yourself”. Get the fuck out of here with that.