TehPers

Washington’s approach to taxes are interesting.

There’s the wildly controversial long-term care tax, which might be the only income tax in the state. It’s a relatively small tax (less than 1%), but the benefit is if you continuously live in-state for 10 years and pay the tax, you can get a year of long-term care. Except there are a few issues: the payout and requirements are worse than LTC insurance, the tax was optional for those who were here during the opt-out period and had LTC insurance, and everyone who made any significant amount of income (enough that the tax was more expensive than private insurance) opted out during that period. It’s essentially taxing only the people who couldn’t afford LTC insurance, though it at least might give them LTC coverage I guess.

Then, there’s a capital gains tax. If you have more than ~$250k in capital gains in a year, you pay 7% tax on the excess. The amount goes up to nearly 10% on capital gains exceeding $1m I believe.

Finally, you have a new “luxury motor tax” that began this year. For vehicles that exceed a sale price of $100k, you pay an 8% tax on the amount that exceeds it in addition to regular sales tax.

The state has been making attempts to implement new taxes over time seemingly with the goal of taxing those with the means to pay them rather than those without it, at least when it comes to the capital gains and luxury motor tax. As controversial as the LTC tax is, it’s a relatively tiny tax, and does directly benefit long term residents of the state at least.

I am always in favor of these kinds of taxes. The tax in question, as currently written, only affects people with an annual adjusted gross income exceeding $1m, which is a number I can’t even imagine making in a year. These kinds of taxes do not tax the average person, and this tax doesn’t even tax people with the top 5% of income.

I would find it incredibly hard to believe any significant part of the state would oppose such a tax. Those who claim to are, as far as I can tell, either bots, live in an echo chamber, or are against their own self interest. Or they’re incredibly wealthy, in which case I don’t care what they think.

why is she taking care of me like this?

Because you haven’t eaten in four days. Most people are not so apathetic towards others they know to let them starve to death.

As for your relationship with your ex, it’s best if you try to figure that out sooner rather than later. Relationships between people, platonic or romantic, work best with good communication. If you don’t know what she’s thinking or how she feels, and you’re in regular contact with her, then maybe just ask. Just be sure that it comes across as genuine and not creepy.

In fact, why not start by asking her why she would order food for you?

Is there a point to this? Back to the Future isn’t 2001: A Space Odyssey. It doesn’t have to predict everything.

Cars crash enough already for reasons spanning from shit driving to shit manufacturing. I don’t see the value in making them even more guaranteed to be lethal on failure, especially when innocent pedestrians and people’s roofs are downrange from these things.

“Social” isn’t part of the title. Meta is the company that acquired the site.

I also fail to see the ROI for buying a social media site for AI. There’s no advertising revenue to be made. At best you’re just charging a subscription fee.

why would something have to be closed source in order to optionally provide secure boot? Couldn’t you provide the secure-boot-enabled binaries in addition to the source for everything except the boot keys?

This is also something I don’t fully understand. Unfortunately it’s not easy to find what the requirements are to get a bootloader signed by MS. It’s possible I’m mixing up these requirements with requirements for something else that requires a NDA, but it’s really not that simple to find the requirements online.

It’s possible that the latter is actually the case and it’s not secure boot that requires it to be closed source. It’s also possible I’m entirely mistaken and they don’t need to make it closed source at all. I wish TrueNAS would give more details why it needs to be closed source - whether it’s due to a NDA or whatnot.

You can use self-signed keys.

It’s basically like saying you can trust your own certificates used by TLS on your own machine rather than going through a CA, but realistically businesses would rather use a CA.

Self sign doesn’t defeat the purpose

The whole point of signing is that the BIOS can verify that the bootloader is legitimate. For a local Arch install, it doesn’t matter because Arch doesn’t distribute signed bootloaders and the environment is wholly personal. TrueNAS sells products and services though, such as enterprise-level support. It isn’t just something used in home labs. Their customers may require things we do not, and secure boot support appears to be one of them.

Self-signing to work around the idiotic restrictions Microsoft imposes to get it signed would be one way to do that, but then the software is essentially acting as its own authority that it is legitimate. Customers would realistically rather the bootloader’s signature is valid with the built-in key provided by MS since it means that MS is confirming its validity instead - not exactly a name I would trust, but I’m personally not a TrueNAS enterprise customer either.

This transition was necessary to meet new security requirements, including support for Secure Boot

Secure boot is dumb, but explains why they’d need a repo to be closed source. To summarize it briefly, you need your bootloader to be signed to work at all with secure boot, which means you have two options: self-sign (which defeats the purpose, though some Linux distros let you do this if you want), or follow all the requirements imposed by Microsoft. As far as I’m aware, one of those requirements is that it must be closed source.

This doesn’t account for leap years, leap seconds, drift, timezones, which planet you’re on, or velocity of both the clock and its observer. That couldn’t possibly work.

Being more serious, time is far more complicated than that. It’s better to just keep clocks simple.

So to be clear, if a state decided to have a new official flag, then it would be allowed to be flown? Same with if a tribe decided on a new flag?

But it makes me think of it is as at type of recreational drug use. And that moral quandary of quantifying when drug use is transgressive and when it is not when the goal is chemically altered happiness.

I think this is a good point. For many people who take it, the goal is not to address a physical health concern (those people can address it through exercise which they still need while taking these medications), but to make themselves happy by making it easier to lose weight that they believe is excess.

Now I’m of the opinion that their self-image being so negative is more of a mental health problem (and I’m specifically not referring to people who are extremely obese, diabetic, etc here), but regardless, it’s not my place to prescribe them a treatment for their own issues. If these medications make them happy, then whatever.

The issue we have today is an issue of scarcity. Ozempic is expensive as fuck and isn’t accessible to the people who need it. For example, my sister in law is morbidly obese and has physical and genetic disorders that lead to a drug like this being lifesaving to her. She can’t really afford it even with insurance, but it’s not really a choice.

One thing to keep in mind though is side effects. These drugs aren’t all sunshine and rainbows. There are risks associated with them. For people who need them, the benefits usually outweigh the risks, but for “recreational” use, those risks should naturally be taken into consideration by whoever’s taking the drug.

why haven’t you bragged about using Arch yet?

Well Manjaro is Arch-based, but it feels like cheating to say that. Anyway, I used Manjaro, btw.

You don’t need to keep going back to reference the Fuhrer’s state of mind at different times throughout your life.

Considering he lives in the US, the Führer’s state of mind has a pretty significant impact on his life right now. I’d reference it myself now and then if I owned a copy just to prepare for what’s coming next.

Hey even I use Linux daily.

Actually, I’m not really sure why “even I” should be shocking. I write code for a living. Surely I should be using Linux once in a while.

Anyway RHEL is probably the only Linux distro I can think of that costs money and comes with support. The major cloud providers sometimes have their own Linux distros they use as well (looking at you, Amazon) and you can argue they are selling Linux, but not as directly as RHEL does.

Red Hat.

The other distros? No idea.

Not sure what you mean. Everything “holy” has ended in war, whether we’re talking about anything from Crusades to Mexico’s colonization and conversion to the current war between Iran and Israel. It’s in the name, anyway: it can’t be “holy” unless you’re leaving holes in the ground where people used to be.

There’s of course a subset of people who use religion to better themselves. I feel bad for those people. They really don’t deserve their religions being used time and time again to justify war and mass murder.

leading Florida International University Turning Point USA chapter president Ian Valdes to reply that he “would def not marry a Jew.”

“TPUSA Chapter President is an antisemitic shithead” isn’t even remotely close to newsworthy, but if some left-leaning org president stepped on a fly? Shit would be international news.

I guess it’s a matter of shock factor? Nobody’s really shocked that TPUSA is full of terrible people.

It also affects subjects like atheism, as the various religious cultures generally do not want people contemplating the idea that there isn’t a god, especially not while they’re young, they want you long indoctrinated into belief before you can explore different ideas.

This reminds me of a Pakistani person I don’t personally know, but someone I know talks to them.

In their hometown, people recite verses from the Quran as part of their religious activities. There’s only one problem: the Quran they use is written in Arabic, but everyone there speaks Urdu. People don’t actually know what the passages say, just how to say them.

So this person asked them once what the passages say. Why do we read the passages in Arabic instead of Urdu? People here don’t know Arabic.

Anyway, he got belted shortly after that.

It looks like this was briefly touched in the article, but LLMs don’t learn shit.

If I tell you your use of a list is dumb and using a set changes the code from O(n) to O(1) and cuts out 15 lines of code, you probably won’t use a list next time. You might even look into using a deque or heap.

If your code was written by a LLM? You’ll “fix” it this time (by telling your LLM to do it) and then you’ll do it again next time.

I’m sorry, but in the latter case, not only are you mentally handicapping yourself, but you’re actively making the project worse in the long term, and you’ve got me sending out resumes because, and I mean this in the politest way possible, but go fuck yourself for wasting my time with that review.

So surely this means prison time and fines, right?