Or they could just mean they would pay down the house, which can be a big financial boon, even if not completely paid off. If you are in the US and have a normal 30 year fixed rate mortgage, then paying down 50k means you get to save on the remaining interest due on that 50k - so you don’t just save 50k, but the compounding interest due on that 50k across the remaining liftime of the loan.
*index fund
My honest recommendation: realize that you’ve been sucked in to using youtube as an addictive coping mechanism. You say you love youtube, and I get it - there is a lot of fun stuff and a lot of useful information there. But YOU ARE WASTING YOUR LIFE. For many people, watching some youtube videos sometimes is fine - but for you, at this moment, you should strongly consider the tradeoff between continuing to watch videos and doing literally anything else in your life. Finding and spending time with a significant other, cooking healthy food and exercising, making new friends and spending time with old ones, advancing your career and making more money, creating art, exploring nature, learning about the world, becoming a valued member of your community, etc. Looking at those great big distant dreams you had during childhood and adolescence and chasing them!
I highly recommend that you do everything possible - EVERYTHING possible - to remove youtube from your life Right. Now. Seriously - take your tv off the wall, stand it up on the ground, and give it a swift kick in the screen with the toe of your boot. Or if you wanna be an environmentalist about it, list it for sale on fb marketplace and take it off the wall so you can hand it off as soon as someone comes around.
Install every app/site blocker you can on every device that you own. Pay for the premium version so you can get all the features to keep you off the platform.
Make plans for what you are going to do with the time you are no longer spending watching youtube. Hang out with friends. Sign up for a pottery class. Volunteer at the animal shelter. Clean your home up.
Your brain will fight you. It will say “but youtube is so fun, and I’m really invested in these channels right now, so I can just cut down a bit and it will be fine.” It will say “but youtube has lots of good information - what if I need to fix my car?” It will say “but youtube has a lot of cultural relevance - how will I keep up with the memes my friends are sharing without it?” Your brain is trying to protect itself from being deprived of its most consistent, low effort source of feel-good chemicals by coming up with all sorts of convincing-sounding reasons for never having to change. Don’t listen to it. For any benefit youtube might provide you with, you can get that somewhere else in the world. If you want to laugh, you can see a standup show or make jokes with your friends. If you want to learn something, you can read a book or take a class or read wikipedia or ask a friend who knows more. And the biggest one of all - if you want that feeling of feeling comfortable hearing about the small minutiae and updates of someone’s life that you’ve known for a long time, you can do that with your friends! You can do that, and have the other person actually know you exist!
And of course your brain will say “I’m not addicted, I just need to cut down a little, but I could stop anytime I want.” Yeah? Then prove it. Try to go 2 weeks without youtube. If you can’t, then you have a problem
I mean, I’m not saying that all humans are completely self-interested. I think volunteering in your local community is often a great way to meet some excellent people. And local volunteering contains a lot of the feedback loops that will encourage normal, well adjusted people to participate - you are becoming part of a real social group, a group of friends, who are doing something positive that they can see the results of in their own lives.
And I think the pioneers in early free software had a lot of these same things going for them - they were part of a small, dedicated community, leaving their mark on the world.
But a lot of foss software has been written by people either in non-profits, or in for-profit organizations who finagled their way into getting paid for the work. Eg, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Docker were / are mostly written and maintained by people who are being paid for their work.
I think Red Hat probably shows the best way forward. Write the software as opensource, then sell hosting and support as a service.
And as part of the software they provide, they should also provide an ootb way to ask people for money. Essentially, you could have a fediverse instance that has moderation and (likely at least in the beginning) content creation/aggregation/curation as part of the service. The selling point being that the feed and comments are of so much higher quality that it is worth it to chip in $1/month or whatever to participate.
Hot take: all this drama exposes the real problem with the utopian anarchist/communist/socialist philosophies of many Lemmy users - the philosophies assume that, unshackled from the oppression of a ruling class and the need to work for sustenance, people will naturally come together to work for the good of humanity. But outside the human instinct to help people we know in real life directly, the desire to be pro-social falls off rapidly as the necessary tasks increase in abstraction. People need some other form of motivation beyond altruism.
In a market economy, that motivation is profit.
It the fediverse, the motivation is getting to be the king of your own little castle where you can push your personal political philosophy on the world. Well-adjusted, happy, reasonable people don’t spend thousands of hours writing code for obscure social media sites in their free time. Those people go snowboarding. Or they hang out with their friends. Or they volunteer at a food bank. Or they raise a family, or start their own business, or hit the gym and fuck a bunch of hot people. Developing software is almost universally an exercise in frustration - broken dependencies, undocumented side effects, protecting against cybersecurity threats, unreproducible bugs, angry and ungrateful users, passive-aggressive stack overflow comments, etc. Only the truly unhinged would do such work for free - like if you desperately need a platform to shout that Mao did nothing wrong.
The real solution isn’t to build an anarchist utopian social media site. It is to stop expecting people to do work for free. If you want reasonable people to develop a good social media site, you need to pay them. If you want mods who moderate to foster positive, helpful discussions instead of for the sake of their own egos, you need to pay them. They could be snowboarding instead! Snowboarding is so much more fun than deleting bot accounts and getting death threats from racist incels.
Has anyone ever opened one of those books? For all we know, they could just be a bunch of blank pages on the inside
It seems like most of my friends are on addy, so… yes?
Just get a slice next time you go through. Its $2, and you get a snack + qa. Imo, better than a lot of dedicated pizza shops, and cheaper
Right, I understand what you are saying. What I’m saying is - that’s dumb. I’m then explaining why I think it’s dumb, and giving you the opportunity to contradict me.
Don’t answer, it’s a rhetorical question.
This is how someone says they know they’re wrong but don’t want to admit it.
Your premise seems to be that these things can only be accomplished via large corporate firms, and that everything should be accounted for according to their ledgers. But a sufficiently industrious individual could endeavor to build a house all on their own, and then sell it. Should this individual not make a profit on their labor, given that they are the owner of the firm that constructed the house?
Similarly, should doctors not be able to open private practices?
Or are you saying that the laborors should be paid, but that money lending should be banned? That investors should be unable to profit from housing or healthcare? I will say, I suppose that makes you a good christian - but a bad economist. Suppose our theoretical independent home builder wants to build handcrafted whimsical log homes in the woods. He has the skills, the market is there and untapped, it is clear his plan will work - but he needs money now to buy the land, tools, and materials to build the homes that people want to live in. I have a stack of cash sitting around, and could front him that money - but its my money, and I want to be paid for its use. Just like the independent home builder would fairly expect to pay a fee to rent a tractor to level the land, he can equally expect to pay a fee to rent my money. And if he refuses to pay such a fee (or is banned via a law against it), then I won’t lend it and he will not have the funds to build the homes, so he is deprived of a job and potential buyers are deprived of their whimsical log homes.
So who exactly should not be profiting here?
If you’re getting paid, that is a profit. You are, by definition, creating housing for profit.
I mean, I like land value taxes. Don’t let people speculate on the value of land.
But creating housing isnt like creating, say, a certain grade of steel. Housing has innumerable factors which determine if it is preferrable to some other housing for any given person. Location, size, architectural style, etc. It is not a commodity, and is exactly the sort of good that markets are well-equipped to provide to people. One person wants to live in an ornate, whimsical log house in the forest, while another wants to live in a luxury studio apartment downtown. And the architects, engineers, project managers, general contractors, foundation pourers, framers, roofers, electricians, plumbers, hvac technicians, etc, all need to get paid for their work. And presuming the person who will live in the home isnt the one building it (which is almost always, and is almost inevitable when it comes to multifamily housing), then someone needs to front the cash to get it built, and they need to get paid back for the risk they took with that cash. And if it is an apartment, where people rent rather than own (which many people want to do for a variety of very valid reasons), then this requires maintenance and property management, which is also labor deserving of pay. All these people are providing goods and services of value to others and they should be paid for those goods and services, ie, they should make a profit.
Now, if you are saying “the government should provide free housing to anyone who wants it” - well, I have some questions about the implemetation, but it’s a fair enough stance to take.
But if you’re saying “no one should be allowed to make money on creating or maintaining housing”, then I suggest you start hunting for a cave to live in
The impression I’ve gotten, fooling around with it at home and talking to friends in tech and hearing from actual users online is:
A good developer can develop faster with it. Giving it small, discrete tasks for first drafts or throw away code (like bash scripting) can work well.
It’s better google. If you are trying to figure out if a function that will do a thing exists, or are trying to figure out what architecture would work best in a given situation, it can be helpful. But in these cases, it should be used carefully - dont ask it to do your work for you, ask it to give you options, pros and cons, and sources. But in this regard, it can do a lot to help an experienced developer become more productive faster in a stack or tool they are unfamiliar with.
Vibe coding is a real thing, and it can work. For internal tools in a small company, a non-technical person can create a mostly functional piece of software to get a job done. My expectation is that over time, these people will become real developers, as they end up dealing with bugs and edge cases in the vibe code they created.
At the top end of ai-for-software-development, there is some sort of something with automated iterative looping and verification, where a developer can translate a set of requirements into code, and then a collection of ai agents iteratively develop the code until it works as expected. This is what the tech bros seem really hyped on, and it does seem to work… but at the same time, my feeling is that this is how you get multimillion dollar AI bills. And presuming this is how big tech is developing their products - it seems prone to making inefficient, buggy code, so I don’t think it will be worth it long term.
I was gonna say - the bulk of weather forcasting is done by governments. Commercial weather channels/sites/apps draw from these predictions and give them a nice interface, and sometimes apply some proprietary prediction algorithm (eg, a lot of commercial weather services bump up chance of rain, because people are angrier when it rains when you said it wouldnt, versus doesnt rain when you said it would).
But I wouldnt expect government forecasts to have changed due to AI tools. Except maybe in the US due to the DOGE debacle - but even then, why fuck with it?
Of course it didnt cover that. This was an article on the efficacy of AI in writing software, not a treatise on ethical or legal concerns. I would completely lose trust in the author if they started piling on every reason why “AI Bad”, because it would be clear that they have an agenda
After doing some research on the US census website, my best guess is that, yes, tourists are required by law to complete the census. Though they definitely seem like an afterthought, since I couldnt find any direct reference to tourists completing the census. And also, while technically legally required, on the same page that explains that you are legally required to respond to the census, the government also wrote a whole section about why you should respond to the census.
So in practice, almost no tourists are going to complete a census form, and they will face no legal consequences as the census has basically no legal enforcement mechanism.
As for your followup - why would they want tourists on the census? - Well, because they want the best data they can get. They’re a bunch of nerds collecting data to do statistics on. Why would they just leave data on the floor?
using every trick in their book to circumvent regulations and to continue building
when the US was building highways through black communities
The US building highways through black communities is a big part of why we have committees that can hold up rail development. And do you really want a government that uses “every trick in the book” to build railroads? No! You want a government that follows its own rules both in letter and in spirit, and one that reigns in the excesses of the market economy when necessary, and one that simply writes better laws.
I think you just described being “Not religious, but spiritual”.
So, like, you’re the worst
To me, these seem like marginal benefits. If knowing where your food comes from is important to you for some reason, by all means, carry on.
However, every scientific discussion I’ve ever seen on organic food has found the same thing - there is no significant difference in nutritional value between certified organic food and nonorganic food. Of course, “certified” organic food is still industrially produced - just according to arcane regulations that make it more expensive. You could make a case that “organic in spirit” food is more nutrient dense in some way or other - but the lack of a real scientific definition of “organic in spirit” will make it harder to study, and I have not heard any scientific discussion of this. And improved health in people who eat organic foods are corrolational, and can be chalked up to these people caring more about their health in general, and being wealthier. All the most robust science on diet and health points to the same thing - the big factor is simply avoiding junk food. Getting farm fresh eggs is just a way to show off how much money you can throw away if you use them to make french toast covered in locally tapped mapel syrup.
All that to say, I really doubt you would find any noticeable health difference.
The benefit of keeping chickens and eating their eggs is that you get to enjoy the process. You get to watch your chicks grow into chickens, feel pride when you get the first batch of eggs, and enjoy eating those eggs (which I find are tastier than the cheapest ones at the store that I buy - though I think the taste is comparable to the fancy high price eggs my friends sometimes feed me). Do it to enjoy the process. But don’t do it under the illusion that you are saving money, saving the world, or saving your health.