lucidmote

I actually want to go back to just physically possessing bullion. Nobody has convinced me central bankers won't eventually abuse digital currencies as badly as they do fiat ones.

We need a deflationary currency. We need one that has very little electrical overhead. We need one that isn't succeptible to a 51% attack. It'd be ideal if it was decentralized. If someone can solve all those hurdles, I might consider crypto.

As an American, I've seen it spelled both ways and I don't think it matters. People get too emotionally invested in these things. Languages evolve and for most of history there wasn't universally consistent spellings for many words.

Most of the people I have known that rave about Chomsky actually read very little of his work. I've tried getting through a few of his books, and I actually find his linguistic publications more interesting than his geopolitical ones.

From the perspective of working class unity and logistic/democratic changes to civilization, I've not found any of his advice terribly useful. Becoming an academic and pushing policy is inaccessible to most working people.

In areas like this he comes dangerously close to being a propagandist for Putin. We need a Fifth International where we can all come together and agree once and for all that state capitalism is not socialism, and China and Russia are officially capitalist countries with absurd levels of communist propaganda.

Any hope that the tools of capital will eventually lead to a people's revolution when the primary barrier to that is a totalitarian vanguard party seems silly to me.

I've considered it. I'm Jewish and qualify for Israeli citizenship, and theoretically I could keep SSDI while living abroad. I'd prefer Spain though honestly. There's a Puerto Rico loophole that allows US citizens to move there under their former colonies program. You just have to learn Spanish and live in PR for a year before applying.

It's a lot to consider though.

I've never been able to get a mortgage while on SSDI. It's theoretically possible. I do have credit cards and a car payment though, so access to credit isn't entirely non-existant. I'd love to get qualified for USDA loan. Seems like a pipedream though.

People have no idea. I've done Darpa internships in IT and full stack developer internships in DC, and could have a lucrative career someday, but I'm stuck in this strange pocket of SSDI where I can't afford to return to work for less than $70k and I'm not yet worth that much.

I'm literally better off doing unpaid or minimum wage internships for the indefinite future until I can hit that benchmark.

My programs pay for everything. My food, my power bill, the interest on my student debt. And if I save one cent over $7200, I lose my medical subsidy so I'm constantly having to find inventive ways to spend money. It's a weird problem to have.

So, I'm in networking, but we typically charge the equivalent of $100-120 per hour for labor. We generally don't make any money on materials unless it's something we bought before a price hike.

I don't generally get too much resistance to this even with direct consumers. They do get sticker shock though. Easier to sell a series of small projects than to hit someone with a total network rebuild.

I've been disabled since 17, finally got approved for SSDI in 2017 after almost two decades of struggling to work and make ends meet. I can say definitively that employment in the US does not follow the guidelines as they exist and those guidelines are too weighted in the favor of the employer in the first place.

A simple example of this is that often part-time hours would allow me to continue working and there is nothing in the ADA/EEO or FMLA that guarantees a worker's right to keep their job at part-time indefinitely. The obligation to perform to the level of a typical worker is squarely on the shoulders of the disabled. Good luck finding an employer generous enough to deal with all of your needs.

85% of the people with my diagnosis are unemployed despite the fact most of us want to work. The algorithms will probably help make sure it's more like 90-95% of us. But at least the stakeholder involvement process makes people feel like they have a voice even as they are categorically excluded from ever being fully-functional human beings.