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

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  • Creating electricity is surprisingly easy. Copper and Zinc were widely available for centuries before electricity and the only other item you need is an acid. Nitric acid was being made back in the 13th century. Arrange a copper bar and a zinc bar separated from one another with an insulator (glass, ceramic, or even wood) in a glass or ceramic jar. Pour in the acid submerging most of the bars with some expose above the acid. You now have a battery with the anode and cathode (positive and negative terminals) being the top of the bars.

    Barely slightly more sophisticated batteries than this powered telegraph offices for powering Morse code sending keys.


  • You gotta find a better way to present this other than making it sound like Torvalds is a baby taking a shit. “The one who makes” I’m dead.

    Its capitalized “Makes” which I took to mean a proper name instead of the verb. So this is referring to the GNU compiler Make. Since this is posted in /c/linuxmemes, I think its a safe post for the audience to know the difference.



  • Going to a movie theater can be a pretty bad experience these days.

    • High prices for tickets even during matinees
    • Numbered seats requiring buying tickets online hours in advance (which I don’t have a problem with), but then being forced to pay 25%-40% more for “convenience fees” on top of the ticket price
    • Other patrons unable to put their phones down so there’s bright white lights every 10 to 15 minutes during the show.
    • People talking loudly during the movie
    • Way WAY too many Commercials!!! I saw a movie in an AMC theater for the first time in probably a year. I arrived early to meet someone. We took our seats 15 minutes before showtime and they are playing endless commercials at full blast volume so had to yell at each other to be heard (the two of us where the only ones in the theater). The “start time” of the movie arrived. The lights dim and…MORE COMMERCIALS! Another ten minutes straight of JUST commercials back to back. Finally, the add for the theater itself, the cultural indicator that the previews are about to begin. NOPE! MORE COMMERCIALS! 7 more minutes of them. THEN FINALLY a movie preview, okay. Preview fades out, 3 more commercials! Repeat this cycle of one preview with 2 to 3 commercials until finally the AMC Nicole Kidman theater promo comes up, so now the move? Nope! One more commercial for coca cola! Then the movie begins.

    The good movie theater experience is dead for me, but I’ve learned that AMC is the worst.



  • Its even worse than that 10% number suggest. Widen the picture a bit more.

    “And that gap is widening to a historic extent, Moody’s Analytics data shows. As of June 30, the top 20% of earners accounted for more than 63% of all spending, and the top 10% accounted for more than 49% — both the highest on record, according to data that goes back to 1989. In 2019, during the comparable period, those shares were 59.2% and 44.6%, respectively.”

    source

    If the bottom 80% of earners stopped spending entirely, only 47% 37% of spending would disappear.

    I learned this statistic last week and it explained something that had been bother me for a long time. Don’t the mega-wealthy understand that if the bottom earners have no money they won’t be able to buy anything the mega-wealthy are selling? This statistic tells the tale. They don’t really need that bottom 80% of earners to spend. They aren’t really customers anymore. The mega-wealthy will sell to each other as it looks like they are doing so much of already.

    Edit:fixed typo


  • One in three six-figure earners described themselves in the poll as financially distressed.

    I know two different six-figure earning households that are also supporting their unemployed/underemployed adult children. I’m not calling the kids lazy either. Unemployment/underemployment is hitting GenZ really hard and that means many are not able finance their own households so they live with parents.

    One of those two was also supporting an aging parent until she passed recently. So, sure, they earn six-figures, but they support 3 generations on that income.

    Two in three said six-figure pay is not a sign of wealth.

    Not a sign of wealth, but is still a sign of privilege. Lots of folks are suffering worse with far less than $100k annual household income.



  • The launch of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform for AI and HPC next year could mark significant changes in the AI hardware supply chain as Nvidia plans to ship its partners fully assembled Level-10 (L10) VR200 compute trays with all compute hardware, cooling systems, and interfaces pre-installed, according to J.P. Morgan (via @Jukanlosreve). The move would leave major ODMs with very little design or integration work, making their lives easier, but would also trim their margins in favor of Nvidia’s. The information remains unofficial at this stage.

    If the only way Nvidia is planning on offering these high end GPUs in the future is in a fully baked prebuilt server, this is big mistake for Nvidia.

    For smaller partners, this would probably be a benefit, but I would guess the largest percentage of the volume of product is being consumed by extremely large hyperscale companies. These companies have optimized their datacenters, supply chain, electrical design and even thermal management to maximize efficiency in their specific use cases. A one-size-fits-all COTS chassis would likely be unwelcome at scale.

    Further, Nvidia, by providing the chassis, board, power supplies, etc, are likely charging retail grade pricing for these things. For hyperscale consumers, they don’t pay retail for those. They design and manufacture those things in-house pocketing the profits as well as benefiting from the custom designs that work best in their environments.

    Unless Nvidia is planning on selling these significantly less expensively (who are we kidding), then this is a fantastic opportunity for a GPU competitor to step up and fill the gap of sales of discrete GPS that Nvidia is potentially abandoning.



  • My point is that just because you are living paycheck to paycheck doesn’t mean you can’t still save.

    For many, it does.

    It’s a decision that you have to make but it is doable because no matter how bad you’re situation is

    I think that is an extremely myopic view if you’re making that as a blanket statement. There are absolutely people that spend every last penny of their paycheck each week on absolute necessities and still go without other necessities. There are families that have some or all of the members skip meals because they don’t have enough money for food. There are people that can’t afford something as simple as basic underwear that isn’t worn out because they live with so few means. Some people have to skip taking life saving medicines because they simply can’t afford that. Suggesting folks in any of those type of situations aren’t deciding to cut back is a choice they are making is heartless.

    Even people that aren’t in as extreme situations as those, they may be buried under mountains of debt. Sure, saving a small emergency fund is good, but if they are paying down debt with all of their with the remaining amount of their paycheck, then the idea of saving for a house, car, child’s education, or even retirement are likely out of reach for them.

    there are other people getting by on 5%-10% less than you. By insisting that someone living paycheck to paycheck can’t also have savings is what’s doing a disservice to them.

    I truly hope you never have to live in real poverty. I also hope that you have the good sense to never say what you said here to someone in poverty. I’m not saying you would. I’m not suggesting you did. I’m not strawmanning you here.

    Are there people that aren’t in poverty simply living above their means and could cut 5%, 10%, or even more without negatively affecting their lives or health? Absolutely! I’m not going to sit here and claim that everyone exhausting every penny in their paycheck before getting their next one is spending it only on necessities. For those that are simply living above your means, you are giving good advice to them! I agree with you on that.


  • Of course having the savings made a difference when something major happened, that was the whole point.

    And that is the monumental difference between what you are describing I would just call “sticking to a budget” vs living paycheck to paycheck. Those living paycheck to paycheck don’t have that option to pull from savings because they have no savings. You did. What you were doing, by any definition I’ve run across up until yours, wasn’t living paycheck to paycheck.

    If you want to keep saying you’re living paycheck to paycheck, certainly you can. Its a free country, but you’re going to confuse people you talk to or misrepresent to them your situation. It may also be doing a disservice to those that are living paycheck to paycheck.





  • How would that work, even on paper? Not being a dick, just don’t understand. So it’s literally just, “you can never own this property fully?”

    Yes. The tradeoff is you have a property that is in your name (with a bank note attached), and if the property increases in value during the time you own it, when you sell, you pocket the difference. If you have a fixed interest rate, it also caps the growth of your payment for housing for the entire time you live there. There’s quite a bit of value in that.


  • One weird thing we have is that part of the interest you pay is tax deductible.

    This matches the USA system for mortgages.

    for this reason there is a type of mortage where you first only pay the interest, and slowly start paying off more and more of the mortage, which means your net mortage fee slowly increases over time, which is nice if you expect your income to increase over those decades.

    This sounds new to me. In the USA we do have amortized mortgages so a very high percentage of the monthly payment is interest with little going to principal. Over time that relationship flips where you’re paying more principal that interest. However, in our system the mortgage payment stays the same, only how much of that fixed payment goes to interest vs principal changes.