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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • No most Americans do end up supporting their parents. On the other hand, I think most Americans would agree that their parents don’t deserve financial support merely for being their parents. You support your family because you like them and not because it’s a requirement.

    Also, I think a lot of younger people begrudge their parents for not handling their own financials better, especially as the younger generations see how much harder some things are than they used to be.

    For example, my in-laws collectively make over 6 figures and inherited a house decades ago that’s worth almost a million dollars due to housing inflation. They absolutely could have a reasonable retirement plan, but they don’t. They spend money as fast as they get it and won’t be passing their house down like their parents did because they have multiple large loans against the house. They use this money to go on vacations every other month and own more vehicles than they really need. They also mentioned to me recently that they would like it if we could try to buy a house with extra rooms for when they get old and need to be taken care of.

    I’m not going to let my wife’s parents be homeless when they inevitably can’t work, but I do find it somewhat infuriating that their lack of planning is going to cost me potentially a huge amount of money.

    Last, just to add more confusion to this, there are a number of US states which have familial responsibility laws. These laws mean that you can be found legally liable for certain debts accumulated by your parents. This is the exception rather than the norm but it does demonstrate that Americans aren’t actually as independent as they would have you believe.


  • I think we also need levels of PII or something, maybe a completely different framework.

    There’s this pattern I see at work where you want to have a user identifiable by some key, so you generate that key when an account is created and then you can pass that around instead of someone’s actual name or anything. The problem though, is that as soon as you link that value to user details anywhere in your system that value itself becomes PII because it could be used to correlate more relevant PII in other parts of your system. This viral property it has creates a situation where a stupid percentage of your data must be considered PII because the only way it isn’t is if it can be shown that there is no way to link the data to anybody’s personal information across every data store in the company.

    So why is this a problem? Because if all data is sensitive none of it is. It creates situations where the production systems are so locked down that the only way for engineers to do basic operations is to bend the rules, and inevitably they will.

    Anyway, I don’t know what the solution is but I expect data leaks will continue to be common passed the point when the situation is obviously unsustainable






  • I mean nobody really wants Kamala but it sounds like that may be the best path. It’s one thing to have the president step down for health reasons, but it’s another to unilaterally replace the candidate after the primary as a response to bad polling.

    If the second case happens you’ll see a bunch of pushback from democrats who don’t like the pick, donors who backed Biden, and virtually every Republican trying to portray the democrats in a negative light. That’s just the PR angle ignoring that there will also be legal questions around using Bidens donation money and getting a different candidate on the ballot in all 50 states.




  • I feel like banning corporations from owning housing isn’t the panacea people expect it to be. It’s pretty impractical when you start talking about larger buildings and mixed use housing, and I’m not convinced it’s really a big driver of the problem.

    I think a steep land value tax is a more workable solution. It incentivizes anyone who holds non-productive property (vacant homes in this case) to either make better use of the land or sell it. This also has the benefit of impacting individuals who own second homes or have mostly empty airbnbs.

    Property taxes are insufficient for this purpose because they are generally based on the value of the home rather than just the land, so not only are they easier to game, but it disincentivizes improving the property.




  • It’s not just the debate performance, it’s the months of Biden being sheltered from any unscripted speaking, his relatively sparse interview schedule, the Hurr report, his refusal to do interviews following the debate, his refusal to take any kind of cognitive test, and reports that when he does do supposedly unscripted interviews his team has been feeding the interviewer questions.

    I don’t have any way to know what goes on in biden’s head, but if the debate was a fluke then both Biden and his team have been acting very irrationally before and since.

    On the other hand, if we assume his handlers are acting rationally then we can only assume that they believe his speaking ability has gotten so bad that even at this point putting him in front of reporters will only make his image worse.

    Also the debate was pretty fucking bad. Don’t forget his team basically got everything they wanted in terms of no audience, cut microphones etc. and they had weeks to prepare. Biden should have been at his best for the debate and his best didn’t seem very good.