• 4 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • A. I wouldn’t because that implies by being around longer I know more or am more right about some things than young people. I’ve accumulated knowledge, but that doesn’t mean anybody should listen to what I have to say or that I’m wiser. There are certainly times that is true, but it’s also true that we have a lot to learn from them and we should listen to them.

    B.

    • Health is your greatest wealth.
    • Love is the answer and all that matters. Be good to others
    • Stay humble
    • Stack sats



  • makeasnek@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlHow Much Is Your Time Worth?
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    2 months ago

    I always think in terms of time, and I have a spreadsheet to track my “actual hourly” i get from work and side hustles so I can know which are working best for me. When evaluating items to buy, I think about how much time it would take me to buy the item instead of the amount in dollar or whatever since the dollar’s value changes with time. This also helps me because I generally try to not think in USD to begin with since I mostly use Bitcoin. At first, I tried thinking in BTC but it’s volatile enough that this is not much any better than thinking in USD. Tying things to hours makes more sense. If you know your “average hourly” it’s easy to determine whether or not to fix something yourself or hire somebody else to do it.



  • Bitcoin basically any year prior to now. You probably think it’s a scam or not useful or whatever, but it’s had a continuous average trend of growth for 15 years no matter how you measure it (market cap, number of nodes, transaction volume, etc). So apparently a lot of other people including large investment banks disagree. If you thought it would disappear next year because it’s a bubble, you’ve been wrong 15 years in a row and it’s maybe worth reconsidering. Bitcoin’s market cap places it in the top 25 countries by GDP, higher than Sweden! If you’re curious about pros/cons/FAQ and myth-busting around it check out http://bitcoin.rocks

    Pretty much everything negative you’ve heard about it is wrong, terribly un-nuanced to point of being wrong, or about something that isn’t bitcoin. Scam cryptos rugging people? Not Bitcoin. Stupid monkey JPEGs selling for a million dollars? Not Bitcoin. FTX/exchange collapses? Not Bitcoin. Slow transactions and high fees? Not Bitcoin (thanks to Bitcoin lightning), transactions confirm in under a second for pennies in fees. Anybody can print Bitcoin? Nope, the supply is capped at 21 million coins. People with the most coins control the network? Nope, amount of coins is totally unrelated to network consensus and rules. Boiling the oceans? It moves trillions of dollars in value every year using < 1% of energy, mostly from renewables (as they are cheapest) and helps even out demand curves/incentivizes provisioning renewable electricity. Makes electricity cost more? Nope, it makes electricity cost less because miners only buy the cheapest electricity possible (off-peak hours) so they don’t compete with regular users. That means you aren’t paying for “un-used supply/capacity” with your bill because your grid always has a buyer for any surplus electricity generated.



  • All of them. Make “banning advertising” an election platform, I’ll vote for you. Ban billboards and other forms of commercial advertising everywhere. Advertising works, nobody denies that. If you see enough ads, on average, your mind will be changed. By allowing advertising to exist, we are sanctioning widespread mind control. It sounds crazy when you say it that way, but it’s true. Advertising does not benefit the average person, it makes them buy stuff they have no native desire for. Advertising only benefits advertising agencies and their clients.

    Let word-of-mouth and genuine desire for a good or service drive purchases of that good or service, not advertising, and you’ll end up with a more efficient economy where our consumer choices better invest in our shared prosperity and future.








  • Programming. Challenging and creative in a way that is different than art & music but still somehow similar. I find it almost relaxing sometimes. Python is a great first language and you can go from no knowledge whatsoever to a working program that does something genuinely useful in an hour, like scraping a website and showing you some data from it. Mastery takes years.

    If you genuinely enjoy programming, you can legitimately change the world with your knowledge. There are tons of open source projects out there which benefit humanity yet don’t have enough development talent. It’s one thing to volunteer your time and see a good outcome from it, it’s another to volunteer your time to build a system which guarantees good outcomes for many people over long time periods and get to see that system grow and get used by people.


  • makeasnek@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlIs Craigslist Dying?
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    3 months ago

    It would be nice to have a decentralized or federated buy/sell platform that replaces craigslist. Facebook marketplace has absolutely eaten craigslist for lunch, and I hate that I have to use it to sell stuff, but there are few viable alternatives for local sales.

    eBay is great until you want to sell a $300 iPhone and don’t want to mess with buyer return fraud which is rampant on that platform (and most custodial payment services like PayPal). I don’t sell anything on eBay for over >$100, got burned too many times.


  • arious far-right groups basically created the framework for their anti-science actions with the COVID pandemic and various anti-vaxx groups that existed before it. Therefore they will double down in their efforts to resist any kinds of mitigation efforts because of “freedom” and “do not comply”. Hell, many of them are buying raw milk in hopes of “gaining immunity” and of course “owning the libs”!

    That was a “viable” strategy for a disease with a 1% mortality rate. H5N1 is expected to be much higher AFAICT. And there is some solid analysis showing that this particular form of owning the libs resulted in some swung elections.


  • I’m not super worried, but I did buy a few extra groceries. We do not have the public trust in public health agencies to manage a pandemic. I still wear N95s at the store, I have more boosters than my entire social circle combined, and I don’t trust a damned thing the CDC says at this point. I “followed the science” and trust scientists. But I don’t trust the CDC and If I don’t, why would anybody else?

    I remember them telling us covid was low risk, that it would be contained, and not to panic. That masks didn’t work, that there was no reason to buy them. And that it wasn’t airborne despite evidence piling up for months. I remember the Surgeon General going on tv and telling us to wrap a t-shirt over our face as an effective mask. They took years to update their mask guidance, last I checked they still suggest surgical masks despite N95s being widely available and vastly more effective.

    I remember them turning down millions of tests from the WHO so they could release their own, only to release tests that did not work and had to be recalled. That costs us weeks when days mattered. I remember the FDA going after a scientist in Seattle who offered free covid tests against FDA policy, threatening any scientist who dared to offer free local covid testing when CDC had a backlog measured in weeks. In fact, I remember the CDC fumbling at basically every possible point in the pandemic’s trajectory from day 1 until present day where they release boosters right after the peak of infections, after everybody has already gone back to school and everybody’s gotten sick, and when the boosters do arrive not only are they late and meaningless, they are an entire strain behind.

    I remember them publishing “studies” with such poor scientific rigor that my 5th grade science project would blow them out of the water. One in particular the CDC used to prove masks work, which they absolutely do, and they went on a whole media tour touting this study, was a case study with two hairdressers. One hairdresser wore a mask and one didn’t. The one who wore masks didn’t infect any patients, while the maskless one did. Except this proved nothing at all because on average, most people are not infectious. Even if neither of them wore masks, it was a completely expected result. Absolute hot garbage science from the agency that is supposed to be the best at it in the world.

    Fuck 'em all, that entire agency needs to be replaced.



  • Honestly this applies to a lot of people in civic service. Not rich politicians, but the people trying to run your local or state government. Often the races are uncontested, because they literally can’t find even one other person who wants the job. Some of them are incompetent or pursue these jobs for power-seeking reasons, but many of them have their hearts in the right place and want to give back to their community, often while fighting ridiculous red tape at one end while contending with threats and harassment from citizens at the other. And the pay is often terrible. My local city council positions would qualify you for food stamps/EBT.