Going to be a beautiful, sunny day here. Nothing better to do than go hang out with some like minded humans.

I don’t spend any time, awake, in my bedroom. TV is in the living room, where I spend my idle time. I can hear through the walls, though, that my neighbors spend a lot of time just hanging out in their bedroom, and that there’s a TV there. So, I suspect, if you’re in a home with multiple people, that having a TV or entertainment in each bedroom is more common. Essentially treating the bedroom as a private apartment within the larger space.

Gitmo is expensive, like $10M/prisoner/year expensive, and still at least nominally subject to US laws, though watered down by being a military facility. Outsourcing to El Salvador gets them massive cost savings and complete liberation from judicial oversight. They may still work on Gitmo, but I expect El Salvador to be the go-to camp now. Discount Gitmo. All they have to do is get you there - get you in the air to there - and you become a stateless, rights-less slave.

The whole reason you put concentration camps in a foreign nation is to remove them from SCOTUS jurisdiction. Then you get to sit back and say, “We can’t compel a sovereign state,” while the sovereign state gets to sit back and say, “We’d gladly return these people, if only POTUS would ask.” Just one capo doing a favor for a fellow capo, somehow neither one of them able to do the right thing.

I think OP is talking about a single building with single-family occupancy and commercial storefront. At least in the US, a lot of single-family residential zones exclude commercial use.

Also check that the switch is rated for motors. A lot of the switches I’ve seen have separate power ratings for resistive (lights) and inductive (motors) load, because of the power-factor or inrush spikes. https://www.getzooz.com/zooz-zen15-power-switch/ is Z-wave, but specifically for high-current motors.

Average spending is not a good metric for addictive behaviors - spending/consumption tends to be extremely concentrated in a small fraction. My go-to example for this is alcohol where, in the US, 10 drinks/week is the population average, but also enough to get you into the “top 10%” or “heavy drinker” bin, where the average consumption of that bin is 74 drinks/week. In both alcohol and gacha, a huge fraction of the population don’t pay anything.

I mean, even if the article’s $30/month average spend is entirely within their 20% “problem” spenders, it would only be $150, but it’s a little easier (for me) to see where $150/month gacha habit could be a problem for young people already on the financial edge. Not the fundamental problem that skyrocketing rent and stagnant wages are, but more in the last-straw sense.

There are still “favors” to be done.

That’s income, though, not net worth. Imagine you’ve got $250k in your 401k and you spent $250.

That penetration is super exaggerated. Ever cut through a stained (i.e. pigment-stained) board? Board painted with a water-based paint? Those paint pigment particles are same scale as microbes, so you should expect them to penetrate to similar depth. Surface cleaning and routine abrasion get rid of most of it. Go over the surface with a scraper - take off 20-50 microns - and you’re pretty much down to virgin wood.

I mean, if you’re starting from the view that we have too many poor people for the number of billionaires, then killing off a bunch of plebs in a massive economic depression is definitely one way to balance the field. Just seems a little psychopathic to me, is all.

It’s definitely a MAGA theme, though: let bird flu run wild and all the survivors will be immune; crash the economy and all the survivors will be better off; throw out all the immigrants and every that remains will be comfortably English-speaking; jail all the protesters and everyone that remains will agree.

These were the “good old days” when fighting had rules. National armies would literally line up facing each other in uniforms with literal X-marks-the-spot targets.

I think, for ‘lefties,’ the trouble is that Trump is replacing progressive income tax with regressive consumption tax. Not that US tax structure was particularly progressive, but it at least pretended. Now, the low end of the income scale, living paycheck-to-paycheck, spending everything on goods & services it going to have to spend an extra 15%, straight to federal coffers, ,while corps get a 25% tax cut and billionaires get elimination of the estate tax.

It’s schadenfreude to see billionaires lose 10 or 20% of their wealth, but they still own all the factories. They’re still going to make money, and they will make up for production reductions by reducing workforce and eliminating 100% of many worker incomes. That is why all the economists are crying recession: consumption taxes reduce consumption, reduced consumption reduces employment, unemployment reduces consumption.

I’m surprised the rest of the world hasn’t tried Russia-like sanctions on Trump. When Russia invaded Ukraine, all the countries got together to target sanctions on specific Russian oligarchs, on the theory they’d undermine political will without hurting uninvolved Russian civilians. So now, I’m imagining embargoes on Ivanka Trump’s fashion bullshit, a massive property tax rider on Trump’s Scottish golf resort; freezing the assets of Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners.

My thought exactly. OTOH, I feel like the anti-Musk ball only really got rolling in March, and this report can’t possibly cover March - it’s got to be Dec24-Feb25, so probably just a hint of things to come.

Even if there’s a coherent policy goal behind the tariffs, which I doubt, achieving that goal with punitive taxes on undesirable goods means that the greatest burden falls on people with the lowest income. Reaching the same goal with promotional tax incentives means the burden is paid through our normal, slightly progressive tax system and falls more on the wealthy. Tariffs and sales taxes are the worst kind of taxes.

I’m OK with a live filibuster. Being able to “filibuster” a bill by passing a note to the teacher threatening to talk all night does not promote compromise or good lawmaking.

It kind of amazes me that, in this day and age, email has turned out to be the lynchpin of security. Email as a 2FA endpoint. Email password reset systems. If email is compromised, everything else falls. They used to tell us not to put anything in email that you wouldn’t put on a postcard…how did this happen?

He’s not the majority leader any more, and without all the sycophants flattering and distracting him, it turns out that someone has been systematically sabotaging US democracy going back years.

Wonder if there’s an opportunity there. Some way to archive one’s self-hosted, public-facing content, either as a static VM or, like archive.org, just the static content of URLs. I’m imagining a service one’s heirs could contract to crawl the site, save it all somewhere, and take care of permanent maintenance, renewing domains, etc. Ought to be cheap enough to maintain the content; presumably low traffic in most cases. Set up an endowment-type fee structure to pay for perpetual domain reg.