The US spent a lot of money on soft power, essentially bribing countries to go along with their agenda. Much of that money did actually improve people’s lives, whether it was food aid, vaccinations, or AIDS care. Sure, it was to further their own objectives. Sure, it’s mostly because it’s cheaper to buy compliance than to bomb people into compliance. Humanitarian aid with strings attached is still humanitarian aid, though, or the collapse of USAID wouldn’t be such a problem.
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tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Work Reform@lemmy.world•Why exactly are nursing aids paid so poorly?
34·5 days agoWorkers feel responsibility for the people under their care. Bosses exploit their guilt over untended people to reduce wages.
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Technology@lemmy.world•S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and AnthropicEnglish
56·5 days agoThe very broad funds definitely will - VTI/VTSAX - but at lower weights and under less time pressure than the rigid index funds (VOO/VFIAX). That takes off a lot of the liquidity squeeze and (presumably) reduces their loss.
But you have to remember that people who use these funds intentionally invest in obvious losers and willingly overpay for hyped stocks because they believe, in the long run, that buying obvious losers is more than balanced by also buying the unexpected winners.
SpaceX is just the first time an oligarch tried so obviously to rig the passive investor structure to his favor, and I’m glad the S&P people didn’t cave.
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
pics@lemmy.world•My neighbours probably hate my overgrown yard. I love it - and so does the wildlife
6·6 days agoMy mom is one of those grannies. They moved out of my childhood home a couple years back, and she still calls up the old neighbors for pictures of ‘her’ house, so she can be upset about how poorly it’s been cared for.
I’d much rather have a wild, life haven.
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Selfhosted@lemmy.world•This community isn't your personal adviserEnglish
8·6 days agoDoesn’t work that way on lemmy: if they delete the post, then the alt’s shilling disappears, too.
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Selfhosted@lemmy.world•This community isn't your personal adviserEnglish
7·6 days agoor at least change the title to [solved] with a link to the comment that worked.
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Selfhosted@lemmy.world•This community isn't your personal adviserEnglish
55·7 days agoUncheck “Send notifications to Email” in your settings. Or get a 3rd party app with a notifications setting.
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Selfhosted@lemmy.world•This community isn't your personal adviserEnglish
55·7 days agoCould they be astroturfing, looking for a specific solution to fill search engines with their own product placement, then deleting because most of the comments are other FOSS solutions?
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Technology@lemmy.world•SpaceX is worth less than half of its $1.75 trillion IPO target, Morningstar saysEnglish
12·7 days agoWhat I’ve seen indicates SpaceX will become something like 0.1% of S&P and 0.5% of Nasdaq. If a retirement fund is one of those indexes, and they get ‘forced’ to buy at 2x SpaceX’s eventual value, then that’s a loss of 0.05-0.2%. $50-200 on $100,000 principal.
Most normal people won’t notice that among the usual stock market noise. Over a hundred million account, though, it’s a huge amount of money getting funneled into the thousands accounts able to front-run the index inclusion, which means, in turn, a huge amount of money getting funneled into the dozens of VCs who got into SpaceX pre-IPO.
It’s like the scam from Office Space where they collect the rounding errors on interest.
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Technology@lemmy.world•SpaceX is worth less than half of its $1.75 trillion IPO target, Morningstar saysEnglish
25·7 days agoAccording to the IPO docs, something like 90% of SpaceX’s future earnings are from its AI business, which it projects to have trillions of annual revenue. It’s a mystery to me why so many apparently serious investors are treating it like anything other than a scam.
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•"You can't out train a bad diet" and "you can't out earn bad spending habits" what are some other true clichés along the same lines as these?
11·13 days agoHad a friend training for Iron Man. He’d do like 15 mile bike in to work (and back), 5 mile run at lunch, and swim in the evening. Dude would eat sticks of butter straight out of the refrigerator for lunch. I couldn’t watch.
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Selfhosted@lemmy.world•How many and how much are your subscriptions?English
2·14 days agoNot who you replied ti, but I’ve been on purelymail for about a year and a half. No complaints. $10.yr is great, and their billing statements claim I could be around $3/year if I switched to their advanced billing. I have nagging concern that they’re hosted on AWS, and if your goal is to completely free yourself of US tech giants, then purelymail won’t.
Basically the same reason the US hasn’t switched to metric.
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Work Reform@lemmy.world•The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily
2·17 days agoAt what point does a tax on equities essentially become a continuous draw-down of wealth on the same money year after year, resulting in absolutely no incentive to invest in business and for that matter a situation where it is impossible to build up any wealth? How will startups be funded? How will large, shoot for the stars projects be funded?
That’s actually the point: use taxes to force rich people to make high risk investments.
If you can’t figure out how to turn enough profit on your farm to pay the property taxes, then you sell your farm to pay the taxes and someone else gets to put the capital to better use.
If you can’t figure out how to turn enough profit on your $10B company to pay the wealth tax, then you have to sell enough of it to pay the tax, and someone else gets more say in how the company runs.
Wealth tax encourages people with ungodly fortunes to make bigger, more risky bets, because they have to overcome the constant drain of wealth tax. Ultra-wealthy shouldn’t just coast along on the low returns of super-safe investments, because those are the people who can afford to lose part of their fortune.
Instead, we have the guy with $1000 YOLOing his life savings on GME options, because the $80 he can get from an index fund isn’t going to get him to retirement, while Berkshire Hathaway is sitting of $300B of US treasuries.
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Work Reform@lemmy.world•The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily
28·18 days agoIncome tax may be a solution to government revenue, but it’s not a solution to inequality.
Capital accumulates exponentially, and if you don’t address that exponential growth, then there will be ludicrously wealthy people, social immobility, and all the problems we have now. Tax wealth.
Of course it will be complicated. Of course there will be court cases. All of that is true of the current system. We can’t get to a working system if we don’t even start. Tax wealth.
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Work Reform@lemmy.world•The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily
5·18 days agoFor most of our history, real estate was wealth. You needed property to grow crops, mine resources, build a factory, or do any kind of venture that would make money. It’s only in the 20th century that we really start having a significant amount of wealth in stock markets that couldn’t be directly traced to a physical asset. The robber barons figured that was a good excuse to stop taxing their wealth.
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•What are your thoughts on people who are against pacifism?
3·19 days agoIf you want the real answer…
spoiler
I don’t have the reference handy, but the gist is: They use pithed frogs, and they do not jump out of slowly heated water. Intact frogs do jump out, but you can’t know if that’s because of the heat or some other random frog thought. Frogs have really elaborate reflex systems (eg: wiping reflex ), and a pithed frog given a sudden, large noxious stimulation will do something a lot like a jump, but the neural pathways accommodate to a slowly changing stimulus and fail to elicit movement.
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•What are your thoughts on people who are against pacifism?
14·20 days agoYeah, Orwell had the clarity of fighting against a literal right wing coup. A clear, decisive event to separate the non-violent time from the violent time, and violence instigated by people without even nominal consent of The People.
The slow rise of militancy, matched with spreading desperation, at least so far lacks a trigger. And in the particular case of the US, we have, like, 30 shootings a day just being us. That makes it a lot less shocking when a couple of those are government shootings. We let the right wingers take over the government (arguably, 250 years ago), and they’re just slowly boiling the frog.
tburkhol@slrpnk.netto
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•What are your thoughts on people who are against pacifism?
57·20 days agoI believe Orwell was speaking of the Spanish Revolution (1936), in which he fought on the side of the socialists.
Pacifism is a great ideal, and (I believe) a lot of conflicts can be solved by honest negotiation. Once the shooting starts, though, the time for pacifism has ended. In the US, right now, it’s not clear whether the shooting has started. I mean: ICE is definitely shooting people; people are definitely being injured and dying as result of the administration’s actions, but it’s not Shooting-shooting, and it still seems like avoidable, poor-policy harms. The question is: will it escalate to civil war level violence? And if it does, will strict pacifists already have blocked any hope of resistance?

A records return the numerical address of a name.
CNAME returns a different name for a name. Basically ‘synonym’ so the maintainer only has to change the one master, A record when the IP address changes. Convenient to use CNAME to point www.example.com to example.com, but you can use it just as well to point example.com at my.private.host.xyz You can even chain multiple CNAMEs to make it easier to manage a complex backend structure while presenting a simple address to users.