amy214

Having a government payment processor I'm sure would be quite a nightmare as well. Imagine your credit card is the DMV.

The reason these credit card companies wield so much power is the modern duopolistic system. "Monopolies are ILLEGAL" they said. Thusly, an array of duopolistic megacorps essentially acting as a monopoly. Something something game theory. Visa and mastercard. Coke and Pepsi. iPhone and Android. Windows and MacOS. Google search and google search. NASDAQ and NYSE.

The answer is to have 10+ actually competing, financially healthy payment processors. At some point the cabal-like duopolistic behavior breaks down.

dude is saying it's even worse than laissez faire

it's laissez faire towards monopolies, let them be

but not laissez faire when a company is about to collapse, then the government rescues them. laissez faire would be less sympathetic. i.e. bank bailouts of 2008, automaker bailouts of 2020, current intel bailouts

thus not only is the government allowing monoplies/duopolies, but in fact pumping money into them to continue their survival

the best kill switch is to write a slop codebase only you understand. no intentional evil little mechanisms, no intentional breaking, just the slop, slop written in good faith. now that is legal

dude is saying the bubble will burst when people least expect it. if there's people expecting it then that's not the right bursting condition

have you taken the maryland test? no road test. an obstacle course

to take this one step further - go back one infitesmal back in time and adjust position one infitensmal, thusly, a fixed time machine

He's not a bully, hell is other people and the phantom aerial farter speaks for all of us

> > In sane units: 3.8 kW

> 5.1 Horsepower

0-60 in 1.8 seconds

tylenol is the one that's hepatotoxic (spanish for harmful to the liver) - ibuprofen is nephrotoxic (italian for harmful to the kidney) maybe you are mixing up your very similar painkillers. in kiddos it's common to go back and forth between them for pain control, thusly attenuating specific insult to liver or kidney. then there's aspirin, don't give that to kids, that's a whole thing

this piece de resistance swan song is only 35% fish but then my fish tank is like 90% various formats of blackface fish, nazi fish, and swimming penises

> Cars, dogs, and water.

Just to go off of this, springs as well. Usually it's garage door springs or suspension of a car springs. People will DIY thinking it's a small thing but they can easily decapitate you. Some garage door springs have been known to level the families of entire neighborhoods or small townships. Garage door spring related deaths are far more common that you will ever know. Garage door springs also are known to be the main transmission vector for tetanus so if you survive the unspringing be advised there's a 90% chance it flung a deadly dose of tetatus and botulism (also grows on springs) into your every bodily orifice. You may think "well why is a kid fixing a car's suspension" but of course kids like poke around and explore because they're curious or they could be exploring your shop or your garage door mechanism.

>In practice, no one donates like this with their own money. They just vote for the government to take incremental money from others via ever more taxation.

In practice they throw piles of money at Trump - knowingly that it will lead to them saving an even larger money pile and thusly a net win.

Trump, who then happily drives up debt. Taxing people more is so uncool, so let's go easy on the whole taxes thing, just have the money printer go brrrrr and let inflationary tax serve its purpose

This a wonderful summary of the unfair dystopia that is the Bay Area real estate market.

I would also add, the forklift driver who bought the house for 40k in 1971, by state law (Proposition 13), is still paying 1971 valuation property taxes and contributing essentially nothing to local school funding, funding which is mostly covered by you according to a "new guy has to hold the bag" type scheme. In a state obsessed with fairness, a most unfair policy.

Should you wish to modify the property, conventional area wisdom is to just do so unpermitted. Boomers don't like construction because it increases supply and they want no supply, only demand, home price go brrrr. Environmentalists don't like construction because the more nature the better. Others don't like construction because they make it their business to set the vibe of the area as static and frozen. These political interests culminate in a construction permitting process that basically autorejects everything, paradoxically increasing public danger because everyone now does everything unpermitted.

Even the famously wealthy Steve Jobs ran afoul of it and couldn't buy his way out. He had a property he wanted to modify but they wouldn't let him touch it at all. So he just let it sit and rot to make a point. Ultimately the government agreed his plan was better than a rotting house.

Yea, exactly.

You pay for healthcare in -any- system, even a completely communist/socialist system. Healthcare costs resources which much be allocated to a greater or lesser extent.

Problem with the US system is WHOM do you pay. Ultimately, to a degree perhaps greater than almost any other nation - you're paying quite a lot to stock holders, both public and private, stock holders of insurance, stock holders of pharma companies, stock holders of pharmacy companies, stock holders of EMR software (private company, Epic), and I'm sure, many other for-profit companies. Hospitals tend to be the only technically not for profits in the equation, as well as healthcare groups, but even then these groups tend to operate in a for-profit manner in service of ambitions of regional growth

> I'm not going to waste my Saturday doing a writeup on the dirtiest city in America. It can be said easily, what happened to Baltimore is it got Detroit'ed