It is hard making friends, and there is no straight answer since all of our lives are very different. That’s honestly the main reason why its hard to make friends.

I would join a sports league, book clubs, etc. Something where everyone who goes, has the intention to return.

Also, in your post example it sounds like you went out once with these people. As soon as your done hanging out with people, I would shoot a message saying that you should do it again. Be the reason people come together, because no one wants that job because its tough.

Thanks for reading through my post and with thoughtful followups.

1. I would say this would actually be up to the ‘owners’. I don’t want to restrict too much freedom of ownership, there is indeed a lot of risk when you are starting a business. So the owners would be able to select through a variety of business models. One model could be very similar with the stock market. So people’s ownership would go up and down with it, the dividends they receive would fluctuate depending on how well the biz is doing, etc. I have no specific plans on this, those details would need to be fleshed out at a later time. Right now I just want to make excuses and reasons to adopt this economic mindset. Because at the end of the day, as current events has shown, it really doesn’t matter how stupid/impractical ideas are, we can get them done if we really want to.

2. Yeah, I can’t imagine anyone disagreeing in good faith.

3. Yes, bank loans. You bring up a good point, another solution might be necessary. But I do want to solve the problem of already established business owners can EASILY receive a loan for a new business. I see this as a huge issue because this just means overtime, like what is happening right now, it will always be hard for entrepreneurs with no experience honestly just need to be lucky. There is only so much money that can go around, so of course banks will give it to those already established. This is not a bad thing in the short term, but I do see it as a problem in the long term. Just makes wealth inequality inevitable.

4. While distributions are not subject to payroll taxes, they are still subject to income tax at the individual level. The key difference is that distributions can be more tax-efficient than taking a salary, as they avoid payroll taxes. However, if an owner takes too little in salary and too much in distributions, they may attract IRS audit. We are starting to get into territory where only CPAs are really qualified/knowledgeable to talk about. I have been out of the industry for 2 years now so I am not confident my information is up to date anymore to provide additional detail.

Home assistant is currently in development for their own prebuilt ‘Alexas’. But they are only in their ‘preview’ stage for selected devs and influencers. No announced target date when it is commercially available.

I started self hosting AI to learn more about it, and I have come to the conclusion that it really depends on the AI if its bad or not.

For instance, Google’s AI results and just literal dog shit. It is just so factually bad its incredible even. Microsoft also sucks. And this is why everyone doesn’t like AI. The two most common ways people see AI (Google search and Windows 11) is just complete horse shit. They should not roll them out, absolutely disastrous decision on their part all because they were feeling FOMO. For example, I asked microsoft’s AI if the ‘New’ outlook had this feature from ‘classic’ outlook. It said it did. An hour later, I found it didn’t actually have that feature. Fucking ridiculous that Microsoft’s own AI doesn’t know their own software. Embarrassing. Did they not give it their own documentation?

But ‘dedicated’ AI like ChatGPT and Deepseek I can trust to be factual with a 95% success rate. Current events is it’s worse subject.

If we had actual regulation here this would be illegal for distracting driving.

Illegal to look at phone (I know everyone does it and isn’t enforced, but still illegal on paper) but not illegal to watch this short message from our sponsors?

I hate living through a bad joke. Much rather read about this shit and laugh then wondering what the next stupid thing is.

As a past tax accountant.

I don’t believe a straight tax will get the job done. Taxation is too unpopular to be realistically effective, and will just have corners cut in very easy and direct ways. Mainly because the masses are too stupid to understand how taxes work. I have had countless times people ask me a tax question after knowing I work in tax, I’ll answer their question, and the answer is the same thing every fucking time no matter if its a friend, coworker, family, etc. “No that is wrong, what I think is correct actually”. It is infuriating.

I think there are three effective ways to tackle wealth inequality.

1. Give workers ownership along with their wage. The ‘owners’ will of course have a bigger cut than the workers, but the current hoarding of ownership is what I think the key issue is. Our idea of ownership is the root cause.

2. Lobbying/bribes. We all know why this is bad, but it happens. Until this is fixed wealth inequality will never be fixed.

3. Loans. It is so easy for the wealthy to receive a good deal on a loan. Only because they already have money and the loan is not necessary. We need to limit loans on people who already have one successful business. Why are we allowing people who have prospered receive more money without more scrutiny? That is the definition of greed. As long as their BS and IS look okay to a bank, they will get approved with little to no follow up.

4. Distributions. In the US, when filing as a S-corp, they will receive no income tax. This is because they are then required to have the owners be paid a ‘fair’ wage to themselves. Why? Because payroll taxes are more compared to income taxes in this scenario. Problems arise when owners will obviously abuse what is a ‘fair’ wage. Lets say an owner gives himself a 30k wage because that is what is ‘fair’. There is nothing stopping him from withdrawing 100,000 in contributions a year, and distributions are tax free with literally no oversight. The only checks and balances for this is they might have a basis issue later in life, but honestly that is a pretty small fine for essentially having all the tax free income they want as long as their biz is doing good.

*This is based off my experience as tax accountant/consultant for small businesses with less than 20 employees 2 years ago. Tax laws have changed since then.

I just don’t get why they haven’t put AI in the already established ‘assistants’ yet.

Why isn’t siri or google home not integrated? Why make new things instead of improving the tech you already have?

If I had to guess, its either because of branding, or because they know it doesn’t work that well yet. Probably both.

Wow, what a great point.

Too bad we are talking about pain and not an extreme form of pain.

Obviously there are exceptions.

In war, yes. Warzones are the ultimate immoral area where you can do whatever you want, and is encouraged to do evil acts. That is why I am in general anti-war.

Love? Absolutely not. Pretty sure everyone agrees that cheating on people is not fair in love.

Seems pretty stupid when most faiths core ‘truth’ is that they are the only true faith.

So you are someone who wants a reason to explain your behavior to others, with no real conviction or faith. If you have dual faith, it actually means no faith, just an excuse for your shitty behavior.

Pain is temporary, therefore pain is fine if it leads to long term gain. It is not fine when it leads to long term loss.

You question seems jumbled and I have interpreted as, “why do people care so much about relationships when I don’t”

Its because you have different priorities in life. They enjoy their relationships, to you its indifferent. That’s about it really.

Good article, does bring up concerns. But I don’t like this argument.

Though this content could flourish in pockets of the fediverse, the scary scenario of prevalent child sexual abuse material is not the case.

It assumes that non-fediverse sites don’t have this problem. But the few articles I read about this news, Facebook is usually the way they share this disgusting content. So while yes we need to do something to stop it, it is not like traditional social media has solved it either.

Why… the two chess websites? That seems really random. I know chess has boomed within the past 5 years, but really? Both of them?

Religion, in my honest opinion, did help humanity progress way back in the day. But has been outdated and overstayed it’s welcome.

Take the story of Moses (assuming the general story is true of him freeing slaves). He freed slaves, how? Through religion. Was there another way to do this? Not really. Slaves didn’t know how to read or write, so communicating privately was difficult. Besides, they were stupid by design, they couldn’t even think of a way to escape together. They couldn’t organize together to free themselves. But religion bypassed all of that. And that, is powerful.

And then once they were free, it evolved into a moral/judicial system to once again help them organize and able to live with each other. We simply don’t need it anymore. And since it is essentially a “vibes based” law system, it gets in the way of actual progress now. Also kind of the point of the New Testament, “forgot the old testament, that’s bad now”. We need a ‘modern testament’ that basically says, “good job, you all made it out of the shithole together, you don’t need me (God) anymore.”

AI is useless for most people because it does not solve any problems for day to day people. The most common use is to make their emails sound less angry and frustrated.

AI is useful for tech people, makes reading documentation or learning anything new a million times better. And when the AI does get something wrong, you’ll know eventually because what you learned from the AI won’t work in real life, which is part of the normal learning process anyways.

It is great as a custom tutor, but other than that it really doesn’t make anything of substance by itself.

Fun little project. Sure it is probably impractical, but you decided to try out an idea you had.

Honestly that’s exactly what I come to the internet for, to see little personal projects. Who cares if they work or not.

I am sure you were at least entertained through the cold, and that is something a heater would not of done.

I’ll have to give it a try.

Off topic, but WHY THE FUCK in the 10 years of VR gaming there is ZERO Tron games? Like???

Interesting, never thought about using python as an excel replacement. Definitely wouldn’t work in my current work setting. But I just started taking a python class and I’ll have to keep this in mind.

Also as a casual pc gamer, here is my take.

I just started getting into github projects, and have learned a few things. Like windows and linux can be ran on the same operating system (called wsl) for free and already built in windows. It is pretty useful for developer projects. The point being, there is a good chunk of gamers that are tech savy. Learning linux is not that hard especially with no barriers to entry.

But MAINLY, because people are tired of changing operating systems. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Windows 10 has INCREASED in popularity more than windows 11 compared to last year for steam users. Since Windows 10 will be officially discontinued in a year, that is actually bonkers. This shows that people (gamers) are getting tired of making unnecessary changes/updates to things that aren’t broken and work fine.

Linux is a free option for that. BUT… until you can play all steam game son linux, the switch won’t happen. The linux popularity will only increase once games can be run on it. Then, the gamers will teach their families how to use linux, which won’t be hard, because distros like Ubuntu are already user friendly (Macs are also based off linux as well). It has desktop, file exploration, browsers, etc.

Since most people just use their computers for work, email, social media, streaming, etc., there is actually no reason for people not to use linux really. The only reason they haven’t is because they are not per-installed on computers and windows is already ‘free’.