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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Here in Boston we’ve got migrants sleeping in the airport, the state transportation building, and now the state owned gym and pool complex across the street from my house. The governor is draining a $600 million rainy day fund plus asking for another $250 million to help manage the inflow of migrants. Meanwhile our housing crisis is only getting worse, and we’ve literally got no place to send these desperate people. I’m pretty far left, but this doesn’t feel manageable to me.



  • First, that assumes the company makes no profit at all. Not a sustainable way to keep a company in business. If they go out of business, 400,000 people lose their jobs and a whole lot of them lose their health insurance. Starbucks is pretty well known for being generous with their benefits.

    Second, wages are typically only about 2/3 or even less of the total compensation, and don’t account for the employer’s share of payroll taxes.

    So figure that you think Starbucks should make half their current profits and give the other half to their employees. That puts it at $6250 per employee, which would likely translate to about $4000/ year before the employees’ portion of taxes, or about a $2/hour raise. Which would be great for employees making maybe $30k/year, but is not exactly going to vault them into the middle class.


  • Serious answer, as someone who’s been through years of therapy.

    Pretty much everyone rich and powerful experienced intense trauma early in life. And one of the horrible ways our early childhood trauma plays itself out is by causi us to recreate it on younger generations. You don’t just wake up one day as a child molester. That shit was visited upon you in some fashion when you were a child.

    Our entire culture is based on generational trauma (strongly suggest you read the Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate).

    People who seek power and fame are almost all incredibly damaged from a very young age. Not necessarily an excuse, but if you want to stop the cycle you have to be able to step back far enough to see it.



  • First, IBC has had this as code for at least 15 years.

    The International Building Code (IBC) establishes minimum requirements for airborne and impact performance of multifamily buildings. The minimum code requirement is STC 50 and IIC 50. Since many factors can affect the transmission of sound in the field, including non-standardized source and receiver rooms as well as construction tolerances, a field measurement (ASTC or AIIC) of three to five points below the lab measurement is acceptable to meet code requirements.

    As the understanding increased of how STC and IIC ratings correlate with occupant comfort, the International Code Council (ICC) issued ICC G2-2010, “Guideline for Acoustics,” which established two additional levels of acoustical performance:

    acceptable, defined as STC 55 and IIC 55; and preferred amount of isolation as STC 60 and IIC 60

    Second, all the money is most definitely not in the land. As a general ballpark, developers want the land to be under 1/4 of the total cost of the project.





  • I’m with you on that. I’m also pretty sure my wife would leave me if I tried to force her to use some weird non-standard search engine and browser instead of the thing that literally everyone else uses. She has no interest in any of this.

    But the fact that people like you and me, the kind of people who comment on threads like this on lemmy, are balking at the price of kagi really lays it all bare. $20/month is probably a tiny fraction of what google makes off selling our data. Their ad revenue is on the order of $25/person for every man, woman, and child in the world. But given that huge swaths of the world aren’t online, or are in a place where Google isn’t the default, or don’t make enough money to be worth marketing expensive products to, people like you and me and our families are probably worth many multiples of that annual revenue.

    Yet we balk at paying to opt out, even though we know we should. If we’re not willing to do it, who is? And what possible solution is there?






  • I used to feel the same way, but then I was standing in a (short) global entry line and I watched people breeze right by that. Found out they were just using the free CBP app. Felt a little cheated, honestly.

    Haven’t been doing as much international travel since second kid was born, so we didn’t get him global entry. Last trip we did I used the app instead. It was just as fast as global entry, possibly faster.

    The only real reason to get global entry again now is for tsa ore check, and there are easier and cheaper ways to get that.



  • Hard to say. My experience with people in general is that they’ll keep going even if things aren’t great, but they’ll get upset. And eventually things will come to a head and there’s a major change in a short period of time. This being a somewhat democratic platform, I would bet that we’ll have that sort of trajectory.

    As for donations, it’s just very hard to get people to donate enough and often enough to support this kind of thing. Think of the regular donation appeals on public radio, or Wikipedia, or even The Guardian. They have a whole organization and system built around soliciting donations, and even then they are always operating on a shoestring. How often do you donate? How often do your friends and family?


  • There’s no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there’s not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there’s a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.