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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • While that’s true for taxes alone, there are income gaps where a small increase of income can result in a loss of various benefits that were worth more than the increase. This can be things like food stamps, subsidized rent/childcare, etc… People end up stuck because while they could potentially earn significant advancement and increased wages over a 4-7 year period, they’d have to weather a significant deficit through intervening years.

    Ideally there should be no cliffs, and all these social programs should have a sliding scale of benefits so a person can always benefit from increased income. Part of the problem is they’re managed across multiple levels of government that don’t always play well together, and a sliding scale might mean more benefits paid out to people that don’t currently qualify. That’s probably actually a good thing, but gets spun politically as undesirable.




  • Also location it’s stored. Some people carry it differently, but fat often builds up around a persons mid-section and causes that pear/apple body shape. Muscles gain bulk on the ones being used. A person can loose the inches of fat around their waste, then build up muscle mass in their arms/shoulders. The fat loss is noticeable because a person starts using a different belt notch or their pants fall down, but the added muscle bulk around the arms will be less likely to require replacing/adjusting one’s clothing.


  • The trick in my area is my ISP is a crown corporation that competes with the privately owned ISPs. They don’t give a crap what you do(as long as it’s not too illegal or damaging their service), the standard on their fiber is upload speeds are 1/2 the download speed and you can pay an extra $10/month for symmetrical. I put it to the test once as I was testing online backuo software. GDrive has a limit of 750 GB/day uploaded data, and I did that consistently for a couple months straight(IIRC that was pretty close to maxing my upstream at that time). Never heard a peep.


  • Plus pets, home/vehicle ownership, commute times, etc… Lots of things that some people have/choose to commit a significant amount of time. Sometimes it’s also not about the total time commitment, but the windows of time available. Things like kids/pets can make it difficult for games that assume you’re actually going to be continuously attentive over 20+ minutes at a time when you can be interrupted by breaking up a fight with the pets, having to let the new puppy outside regularly, hearing the cat about to hack up a hairball, cleaning up the ice cream the kid just dropped, etc…



  • Personally, I think there should be a stronger separation between commercial, non-commercial, and personal use. Friends sharing/copying some media isn’t a big deal to me, but someone making copies and undercutting the original artist should be subject to some pretty strict consequences.

    I also think there should be some protections put in place to protect the actual content creators, because most people’s issue with copyright isn’t usually with the people actually creating things. The issue is corporations that insinuate themselves between the creators and consumers, funneling all the profits for themselves. It’s a pretty shitty system where artists make covers of their own albums so they can get a reasonable cut of the proceeds.




  • USB-A, USB-B, USB-B Superspeed, mini-USB, micro-USB, micro-USB-Super Speed. Some of those also presented the issue of not having a simple visual indication of whether it was USB 1, 2, or 3. At least with USB-C, the cables should all work, even if you get slower speeds, whereas a USB-B-3 connector wouldn’t fit a USB-B-2 port at all.

    The solution to the USB-C mystery cable is to just get a pile of Thunderbolt cables and then you can be sure it’ll handle whatever the attached devices do.



  • I used to do that about 10-15 years ago. I think the subsidies got to be not as good around the same time that phone prices rose sharply. Whereas you might have previously paid $200, and gotten a $500 subsidy for a $700 MSRP phone, now that $500 off a $1000+ MSRP doesn’t seem like as good a deal. I think they also widened the pricing gap between the prepaid and post paid plans, and/or started offering “discounts” for BYOD plans. Seems like the last couple upgrades the cheapest option for me now is to just buy the phone outright and then find a cheap plan.

    For anyone in Saskatchewan, check out LUM mobile. It’s a Sasktel run MVNO that actually has a unique pricing structure that’s pretty competitive.


  • Ratio on private trackers isn’t really a big deal as long as you’re the kind of person that can keep a couple hundred GB worth of things seeding close to 24/7. Aside from actual ratio(the thing your torrent client reports), they tend to have a system that rewards having things seeding, whether anyone actually connects to you or not, that you can use to boost “ratio”. There’s also usually some options for acquiring some content without it counting against you, like freeleech(download data isn’t counted in your ratio) for low seeded or new torrents, or discounted/refunded credit for extended seed times, or seeding large amounts of data. Aside from the first few months in a new tracker, ratio isn’t a big issue.