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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Someone did a study on various means of welfare support, and figured out that doing away with all other forms of poverty easement and replacing it with an equivalent amount of UBI would actually save taxpayers a significant amount of money. And further, it actually costs way more to try to identify and prosecute fraud than the system actually loses to said fraud.

    I think the easiest way to accomplish UBI, without dealing with a lot of rigamarole and nonsense, would be to figure out what amount “basic” should mean—you suggested $2000/mo, but for some cities that would barely cover rent, so maybe let’s say $3000/mo—and then have anyone who wants any form of government financial assistance register with the UBI office, indicating the compensation they receive at their highest-earning job. The UBI office would then simply pay them the difference between $3000 and their monthly paycheck. UBI office automatically cross-references with the IRS every year, so you can’t hide income without getting audited.








  • This is just me, and I’m no expert. But I kind of think that, if you’re legitimately worried about your country’s currency collapsing, you might want to consider leaving your country. Any sort of collapse that leads to hyperinflation or the large-scale elimination of financial infrastructure is probably going to be difficult if not impossible for the average person to survive, gold or no.

    That said, precious metals are a niche enough market that I can’t imagine it not being rife with predatory sellers; companies that aren’t offering scams per se—you’ll probably pay them and receive what you pay for—but companies which are counting on people not knowing anything about the market and accepting a terrible price or poor quality goods.

    Again, not an expert. But my end-of-the-world investment would be in shelf-stable food, easily-stored seeds (for planting), medicine, hand tools, high-quality camping gear, books, that sort of thing. If there is a collapse, those sorts of things will be immediately useful and also tradeable.





  • Alec has been on a multi-year quest to get an incandescent color profile from LED Christmas lights. I haven’t watched this episode, but he usually does a pretty good job of recapping at the start of every episode.

    It’s always super entertaining, in my opinion.

    EDIT: I watched it. It is indeed super entertaining! This time, the recap comes after his special Christmas light repacking tip, so it’s a couple of minutes in.






  • ilinamorato@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldThreads alternative
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    13 days ago

    Mastodon has definitely improved, but more to the point, there’s really nothing else. Particularly not anything that anyone is using. Unless you widen your definition to include Bluesky.

    Honestly, I’d say that Mastodon’s perceived complexity in the past was kind of an illusion anyway. The problem of choosing a server was really made out to be this huge hurdle, when in fact it was no big deal at all; I was a member of several different servers over time, and I didn’t feel like my experience was substantially different on any of them. Just join one that seems interesting or is near you or whatever, and you’ll be fine. After that, it operates pretty much the same as Twitter did. Following people on other servers can be a little bit trickier on web, but in the app it’s pretty seamless.