Every vote is a push in one direction or the other in the US. You can vote to push right, you can vote to push left, or you can avoid voting and let the rest of us decide for you. But the last time a bunch of leftists weren’t thrilled with the options, the electorate voted to push right. From your valid gripes against Newsom, I’m gonna guess that was not what you wanted.

Come election day, one of the two candidates is guaranteed to become president. You cannot stop that. I won’t try to say Newsom is ideal or even a good candidate. I’d love to see someone else run instead. But if you want an even more leftist candidate next time, the country has to show they’ll tolerate movement in that direction, and that means not electing another fucking Republican.

Nah, that’s too obvious, could have just been a coincidence. This, though…

Can you not? I haven’t really used OpenMW, but I’ve been thinking about using it to go through Morrowind. I assume it’s not perfect, but I got the impression it was getting to be pretty good.

That’s only after your mouth and esophagus. Those aren’t really geared to tolerate exposure to strong acids or bases. Even foods that aren’t acidic enough to immediately damage these regions can still contribute to tooth enamel being worn away, for example. It’s either strong enough to at least consider the impact on those, or it’s weak enough that adding lemon is a questionable move.

True, but your body will not enjoy water that’s very alkaline, so there’s a chance it’s sufficient since lemon is pretty acidic.

Plus, if the whole point of it is to be alkaline, why directly counter that with what you add?

I never really used Spotify, so I can’t make any direct comparisons, but one thing I can say is that Lidarr and Jellyfin will not help with exploring new music. They’re things you host yourself, so they can only interact with your own collection.

Lidarr manages a music collection and works primarily through a web page. I’ve only personally used it on desktop, so I can’t vouch for the mobile UI. Desktop UI seems good enough, no real complaints. You can use it to do things like index your collection, show what you may be missing, standardize folder structure, file names, and metadata tags, and automate downloads of missing content or upgrades for low quality content through bittorrent or Usenet. There might be third party apps to use it if you prefer, but I’m not aware of any since I never felt the need to look.

Jellyfin streams audio, video, and I think ebooks. It has a web client, too, but it also has official client apps for desktop and mobile. The UI is decent, pretty intuitive, no real complaints, but I feel like it could be improved somehow. Still, it works well, and it doesn’t cause problems. However, Jellyfin has had some security vulnerabilities in the past, so I think it’s recommended you not directly expose it to the internet. So instead of setting up port forwarding on your router, you’d want to use something like a VPN or maybe an SSH tunnel to get into the house from outside. That makes it a bit more technical to set up since you need that extra service to access it safely, but that’s only necessary if you want access from outside the house.

Jellyfin and Lidarr is a potent combo for managing and streaming a collection.

One dude brought his son, and I don’t think the son was super enthusiastic, so not quite

Don’t worry, Trump will just roll over and let it happen.

I think a lot of economies are entangled in the modern day, so it’s not so easy to do without punishing your own citizens.

Of course, when Trump levies huge tariffs that make it too expensive to be so entangled, that helps encourage decoupling.

If I remember correctly, you don’t really need Prowlarr. It’s useful if you’re using multiple *arr services, but Prowlarr manages your indexers, the place *arr services look for content, and syncs them to your other *arr services so THEY can do the search. I don’t think Prowlarr itself ever looks for content automatically, only if you manually search through Prowlarr.

Shit, I’d settle for ACTUALLY upholding the constitution instead of green lighting whatever the fuck Trump wants.

“2.5 billion? Don’t be ridiculous. More like 2.3 billion. 2.4 tops.”

No, it mainly means a colder Europe because the current won’t carry warm water up north. To my knowledge, it won’t have much impact on warming rates, just shift that heat around. That would likely mean warmer climates around the Gulf of Mexico and tropical Atlantic since the heat will just linger down there, but I’m not as sure about its impact outside of Europe.

allow your gods

We don’t worship our politicians as gods like you sycophants do.

If you’ve got a spare PC or one that’s always online, you can host something like Jellyfin for yourself. Make your own streaming service. With blackjack and hookers.

I’m sorry to bring this up again so much later, but I apparently missed the notification at the time, and with the conversation just seeming to start to turn productive, it seemed like a waste to just ignore it.

Because the entire housing market is unreasonable in almost every city in the Western world. It’s not just a few outliers here and there that can be compared to some average. The average itself is completely out of whack. We can’t just rein in the crazy part of the market; the whole market is crazy.

This is a result of our markets emphasizing residential real estate as an investment tool. Homes aren’t just places to live, they’re pathways to profits, even if you live in them, and especially if you don’t. Countries like Japan don’t encourage it the same way, and it helps keep housing prices in check. It’s obviously not perfect, but after some quick checks, it does appear that even the most expensive cities in Japan are still less expensive than ones in the most expensive US cities, even with all their population density and the pressure that puts on housing.

Either we pick a semi-arbitrary value and tax above that (your plan) or we introduce a graduated, progressive tax on all homes (my plan). Introducing exemptions and especially benefit cliffs has historically always had crazy unforeseen negative consequences. A tax on all homes will by itself automatically bring the market closer to equilibrium.

I could support a bracketed plan. I just think the bottom bracket should be 0%, and I probably think the bracket should be bigger than you do.

Moreover, I would argue that anyone who owns a home at all is already of enough means that they don’t need tax breaks.

If they’re well off, I’m not opposed to them paying more taxes. But since I think housing should be a right, I don’t think anyone should be taxed out of their homes except maybe those who are far more than simply comfortable in an average family home. I’m not opposed to ensuring people contribute. I just don’t think this is an appropriate mechanism for it. People care about a society that cares about them. Let society ensure they keep their homes if they’re paid off.

Home ownership is not essential. Having shelter is essential, which is why I support taxpayer funded grants to homeless people etc, but home ownership is not and should not be a fundamental right. If you can afford to buy a house, you can afford to pay taxes.

And this is where we disagree. The only truly secure shelter is one you own. Shelter that no landlord can evict you from. Shelter that no government can seize for taxes. I’ve no problem with renting for people who don’t want to commit to a home for whatever reason, but if someone wants to own their home, they should be fully capable of buying and owning their home. If you want to tax people on their homes, make sure every single person who genuinely wants one and is willing to work for it is able to get one. Then we can consider taxing homes, but not before.

But relevant to this conversation, social security in its current form is not a pension. If all you’re living on is social security, you probably can’t afford to retire. If you’re physically unable to work, then that’s disability. If you don’t have enough money saved up to pay for the life you want, but happen to be age 65, you’re not retired. You have to keep working. … I’m ignoring social security because it’s not a retirement plan

For 1 in 7 recipients, Social Security is at least 90% of their income. That’s over 10 million people. For those people, it very much is their pension. It very much is their retirement plan.

Now you get to experience the pain of renters being priced out of their own neighborhoods, but also with a small golden parachute to take with you.

This just comes across as bitter, as if you’re happy to see someone who managed to succeed in spite of a rigged system suffer. I don’t think that perspective is productive. Like I said earlier in this post, people care about a society that cares about them. Housing is one of our most fundamental needs. We shouldn’t be in the business of strong arming people out of reasonable homes. They still need an income to survive, and that provides a way to tax them.

And it makes things less bad in general for everyone by helping to bring housing costs down across the board.

This is true. I just don’t think it’s the right approach.

Also, just to keep this conversation in perspective, I don’t think this is the MAIN reason why housing is crazy in places that have similar tax carve-outs for homeowners. I actually think that’s zoning and local NIMBYism.

I think this is somewhat true, but I think they’re also symptoms of homes being treated as investments. A lot of NIMBYism arises from people trying to protect their most valuable investment and trying to make sure it continues to appreciate in value. This is also true to an extent about zoning, but part of zoning was at least initially racially motivated, so it’s a bit mixed on that one.

In general, I think your intentions are good, I just think you’re a little too eager to squeeze people who are marginally better off than you compared to the real problem, which is the parasitic owner class. And I don’t mean just home owners, I mean business owners, landlords, the people who make money off the money they already have. They do no actual work, collect all the profits, buy up our necessities, sell them back to us, pay as little tax as possible, and leave us to squabble over how the rest of us are going to finance society.

It saves them money in the same sense it saves every other information source money, it reduces traffic. But just like other sites can’t serve ads without traffic, Wikipedia can’t prove its worth and ask for donations without traffic. Eventually, people will start asking themselves why they need to support Wikipedia when Google’s AI tells them everything they need to know, unaware that Google’s AI can only do so because it scrapes Wikipedia without paying for it.

And in return, they drive traffic away from the sites that collect the information in the first place, causing the sources to lose revenue.

Don’t forget that loans are probably deferred through the PhD, so that’s like 4+ years of accumulated interest on top.