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033803throwaway

Re:Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah on Friday September 20, 2019 @12:19PM (#21028344)
I don't downvote. It is a cowardly habit.

There is nothing wrong with investing in a productive enterprise and expecting to share in the profits of that enterprise.

If a man is starving (or, worse, has convinced himself he needs a new iThing when he does not) and you loan him money you are either violating charity or enabling debt-peonage, respectively.

This is setting aside the exponential nature of compound interest, which is why debt-based economies always go bust, and focusing on the individual morality of the transaction.

Re:Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah on Friday September 20, 2019 @12:08PM (#21028236)
The Kenyans are right.

What they need is money, not loans, and, in particular, not loans against consumption rather than production, which is what broadly available credit inevitably devolves into. (Look at college loans, which started off ostensibly as an investment in productive assets and has devolved into financing four years of heavily curated consumption followed by crushing student debt.)

Even loans against production are dangerous and eventually lead to debt peonage and wealth concentration, as we have seen time and time again, from roman times onward.

The problem is usury, and there is a long, historical argument about it that is completely ignored in the west. This is because history is written by the victors, and the usurers won. We are all usurers (or aspiring usurers) now.

Re:Fractionalizing Home Equity on Thursday September 12, 2019 @04:37PM (#20956168)
> What Patch offers instead is to take a piece of your home equity (currently limited to $250k maximum) and sell the upside on it to a investment fund.

Sometimes I can't help but feel that we deserve what's coming.

Re:Bring Back the SE on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @02:36PM (#20931630)
Or someone, anyone, make a functional clone of it.

I don't care much which OS I have to run, they are all the same now. I just want a smart phone that fits in a single hand.

I tried the palm and it is a bit too small, and the battery life was insanely bad.

Re:Americans' fear of losing their jobs grows on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @02:13PM (#20931341)
Social trust has been declining for half a century:

https://archive.is/u9Jex

It's one of the most pressing issues in sociology and is rarely discussed at all, and typically discussed dishonestly when it is.

Re:Americans' fear of losing their jobs grows on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @02:08PM (#20931277)
This is great advice in general, but FU money gets tricky when you have negative interest rates on deck.

We are one stock market pull back away from catastrophe even for wealthy boomers.

Interesting times.

Progress & Poverty (1879) by Henry George

Orthodoxy (1908) by G.K. Chesterton

The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Re:How a deadly fall revealed CIA secrets on Friday September 06, 2019 @11:29PM (#20901613)
Interesting that psychedelics are being pushed by elites via popular media like Joe Rogan, etc.
Amen.

And congratulations.

But you are not a useless worm and this is not a piece of dust.

Marriage is a wonderful institution and the children that come from it are the greatest gift you can be given.

Our culture tells us the opposite. But our culture is insane and wants you to be an isolated, rootless, consumer wage slave.

Re:No-deal Brexit opponents defeat government on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @06:26PM (#20871889)
If that is the case, would it not be simpler, If the government simply dissolved the people And elected another?
Re:Big Tech’s ‘Innovations’ That Aren’t on Friday August 30, 2019 @01:20PM (#20840552)
"Eventually we will run out of things to rip off from Douglas Engelbart"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

Re:15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete on Wednesday August 21, 2019 @04:56PM (#20761744)
If trump is re-elected it may be the last time a republican wins a presidential election in the current system, due to demographic changes in key states (FL, TX, NC, etc.)

If the electoral college is abolished, it could actually end up getting another few republicans elected, since it would incentivize republican turnout in solidly democratic states like California.

Re:It's Gotten Too Hard to Strike It Rich in America on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @07:08PM (#20700938)
I wouldn't.

Which is why I view the situation as hopeless, but not serious.

Re:It's Gotten Too Hard to Strike It Rich in America on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @06:03PM (#20700475)
Always keep in mind: the US spends more per capita on public healthcare than any other country in the world, except Norway[1]

We pay for a single payer system, we just don't get it.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

Re:Apple Card on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @04:23PM (#20629180)
the florentine pattern repeats again: start a manufacturer, end a usurer

nihil sub sole novum

Re:Did John Steinbeck Spy for the CIA? on Friday August 02, 2019 @12:25PM (#20594245)
Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA as well.

It becomes very difficult to understand what happened during the 50s and 60s, the more you look into it.

Re:Middle class, the housing crisis is coming for you next on Thursday July 11, 2019 @10:19AM (#20411668)
There are many ways to do it, but one method would be to limit loans to some multiple (say 3x) of someones trailing income (say 3 years). This could be scaled into over time to smooth out price adjustments.
Re:Home is a small, engineless sailboat (2018) on Saturday July 06, 2019 @04:23PM (#20371709)
I admire the man and his concerns about debt. But he is playing a young, healthy single man's game.

Family formation without debt slavery doesn't have the same appeal to our media class, but it's far more important in the long run.

This is why housing affordability should be tied to income, rather than willingness to go into debt. As with education, once the banks can get a guarantee that they will be bailed out in case of trouble (explicit with education, implicit with housing) the race to the bottom commences. Prices go to the moon, everyone ends up in debt slavery

There is a reason the church was so hard on usury. I hope it rediscovers the issue: it is the most pressing social justice issue of our time, cutting across all non-elite identity classes.

Re:How do most SPAs handle breaking API schema changes? on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @12:17PM (#20224628)
I don't know if most SPA frameworks offer this sort of functionality, but with intercooler.js you can send response headers to trigger client-side events (or, if you are feeling hacky, to evaluate raw javascript.)

This can be used to trigger a full browser refresh when the application topology had changed dramatically.