I thought 35%ish in the US was bad. 56% in Russia is one of the more shocking stats I’ve seen about their inequality.

That’s very funny.

Assuming legally married or sufficient confidence to not have a break-up be a risk factor here. Gotta say that part.

To me, 4.5% and 5% (taxed) is not sufficiently different to be worth the mind space. If the world was perfect, you should do the CD thing. In real life, there could be a glitch or a mistake of timing that causes an issue with payment of a loan or an auto draft or something, you have to think about it and make sure it’s still paying and your CD is re-upping at a high enough interest rate etc. Not worth it in the slightest to me.

From context clues it seems like they were hosted on Lemmy which is why they are now limiting image hosting.

You have control by default. If you hire a financial advisor to manage your funds, you’re giving them control but you can tell them not to sell ever and they will do what you say.

Their point is that they agree with you 100% on slavery, but this isn’t slavery.

Why are 50 percent of prisoners minorities?

Because the system is racist and bad and minorities are disproportionately imprisoned. Nobody here is arguing against that. They are just pointing out that if 50% of the “enslaved” are white, that is a different sort of thing than the race-specific enslavement of black people. Things can be not-literal-slavery while still being bad.

What happens if you refuse to work?

I assume you can’t refuse without a medical exception of some kind. These are imprisoned people, they also can’t leave. Not trying to excuse everything about prison labor but as a society we have decided the state has the capacity to remove rights from people as a punishment after due process has been afforded to them. We can argue that it’s not right or humane to force labor on an imprisoned population without saying it’s literally slavery. “It’s not literally slavery” is not a defense of the system.

We’re not arguing “well prisoners can’t be sold to other prisons so that proves it’s not slavery” because that one difference doesn’t prove anything, just like one similarity doesn’t prove anything.

It may not be inherited at birth but is the system setup to capture successive generations of prisoners from the same families?

…no? Even if you include Capitalism and wealth inequality and racist policing as part of “the system” maybe members of the same family are disproportionately likely to be imprisoned because they are the same race and likely similar economic status, that isn’t because a parent was imprisoned. There’s nothing targeting children of imprisoned people. And even then, you’re trying to compare disproportionate odds to be imprisoned to literal 100% ownership of slaves’ children by slave masters? What are we talking about here?

It’s also time-bound for the length of the sentence. So like sure it’s slavery…temporarily, non-inherited, non-race-specific, as a punishment for a crime, at least sometimes paid.

Which is just a lot of caveats.

Similarly, having a job is just temporary, non-inherited, non-race-specific paid slavery where you get to pick your slave master. Sure you can make that argument but it’s not a very good one.

A lot of stuff about the US prison system is really bad, including this part, it’s just not literally slavery, and it doesn’t have to be slavery to be really bad and need changing.

I usually wait until Feb to be sure I got all my forms but I wouldn’t think now is that early.

You know I’ve seen every other mainline Star Wars and several of the one-offs and TV shows but I never got around to this one and I haven’t really felt like I missed out.

I watched with my SO and googled it right after we finished it to see when Season 2 was coming, thinking it would be a joke “haha only 2 years to wait for the next season” and it had already been cancelled. Rough.

RIP ‘Night Sky’ with JK Simmons. What could have been.

Pretty sure it should be “valuation”

Scalping isn’t the comparison though because 1, scalpers don’t reduce the total supply. Any scalper who refuses to sell a portion of their tickets, loses all the money they used to buy them, and the opportunity cost of selling them, and there’s no way it’s worth it for any given individual. The supply/demand differential they make money from is that the venues only have a certain number of seats.

Which brings me to 2, theres no equivalent of homebuilders in the scalper world. If some scalpers could generate new seats at the venue for roughly the cost they pay the venue for tickets, supply and demand would figure themselves out pretty quick.

Hard disagree on the last part there. For one, homebuilders again. Their business model is to build the houses and then sell them, if they joined the “sell houses slower” cartel it just means they earn less profit.

But really the whole idea you’re laying out, the math only works if everyone works together, so it becomes a prisoners dilemma. Because say there’s 20 companies slowing down house sales to maximize profit, there can always be a 21st who gets the benefit of the restricted supply from the 20, but they just sell as much as possible and become the most profitable of all. Maybe it’s in everyone’s interest to restrict supply, but it’s in any given company’s interest to sell as much as possible. So it has to be an as of yet unknown cartel of every home seller in the country and there’s just too many of them to have both: Either it includes everyone or it’s secret.

If I’m low on hot air I’ll just invite [local politician] on the balloon! Oh ho ho ho

I don’t really understand the market failure happening with such a long term housing shortage. By definition there is excess demand for housing right? So it should make economic sense to build more.

When I ask people always say conspiratorial stuff like “they” maximize profit by keeping housing low but even if there was a conspiracy there should be individuals who are not part of the conspiracy who would profit from going against it.

So it has to be either regulatory or funding based, I think. But I don’t know of any recent regulations that would cause this nationwide, “zoning” is probably part of it but there was no one timeline for that, it’s super local. And funding has been free for a decade and a half and homebuilding has still been slow.

I don’t get it.

Direct Drive tech reduced the number of moving parts so low that it put Big Washer Repair out of business and they had to develop other ways to monetize your laundry.

Personally I had way too many quality issues at that price range. An earbud would be randomly quieter than the other, the battery of an earbud would die, the Bluetooth would suck, or they would be unusable for phone calls. I bought refurbished $100-something headphones for $70 and haven’t needed to buy any more since.

If you ever tried to burn way too many songs to a CD and got frustrated that it didn’t work… it’s time to stretch your back.

There’s a famous example of the poverty trap that uses boots that fall apart every season vs quality boots that last, and I think there is a quality level that is so bad it’s more expensive in the long run. So I do buy shoes that cost money. But I’m not buying fashion shoes or luxury brand shoes which I think is what you’re saying too.