“I’ve come to view home ownership and healthcare as destabilizing forces in my life,” said Bernie, a 45-year-old network engineer from Minneapolis. To finance owning his and his wife’s $300,000 home and saving for the future, the couple was foregoing medical and dental treatment of any kind and cutting back on expenses everywhere, he said, despite a pre-tax household income of more than $250,000.

I have no idea where in Minneapolis this person is but this is nothing like my own experience in the metro area.

My wife and I bought our home in 2021, for about the same price as he’s describing and with an income far less than theirs, and we’re expending less than 30% on our mortgage payment (including our insurance premiums and taxes). Maybe they bought theirs at the interest rate peak in 2020, whereas we bought ours when the interest rates bottomed out, but I can quite confidently say that our home is not the main burden on our finances.

What is killing us is raising food and healthcare costs, as well as our student loans. Our energy utility announced last year that they would be implementing surge pricing that could almost double our energy costs, and since the utility administers the state solar incentive program themselves, they quoted us a PV system cost almost twice what you can find on the open market (they use your average monthly energy bill to determine how much you can afford to pay for the system, which ought to be criminal). We’re getting fucked up down and sideways, but our mortgage payment is probably the most stable expense we have.

There are a lot of reasons things are shit and financially precarious, but owning my home has been a rare bright spot in our otherwise gloomy financial picture. If we were still renting, not only would we be in the same strained situation as we are now, but we’d be constantly anxious about our rent skyrocketing, too.

Home ownership isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but the alternative of renting is often just as expensive - on top of being at the whims of landlords. They’ve been publishing articles for a decade now trying to convince people that home ownership is overrated and renting is the way of the future, and I really wish I could trust them to report on it transparently.

Lmao

I feel like we’re watching some sort of brawl between different factions of liberal and conservative rags trying to decide which foreign adversary is going to be our boogeyman this cycle

Ok but can we at least appreciate that he did this in the funniest possible fashion?

NOW WHAT BITCHES

ah, ok that is interesting, thanks!

Can someone explain the significance of quantum teleportation in qbit architectures?

From what little I understand, it relies on quantum entanglement instead of electrical current to ‘pass’ logic states between qbits in different physical space, but I’m wondering why (in this case) they still need to be connected by fiber optic cables?

I thought the point was that it didn’t need to pass signals over physical media, and that was valuable because it was instantaneous and secure, but now it’s sounding more like conventional computing…?

Which would increase their effort to chase it down and make regular people avoid it.

Not that it would deter you, but the network would essentially stop growing and no longer be a real competitor

It would probably be something like: “any social media site made available to US users must verify user identities and legal name and age and comply with US agencies’ requests for user information. Violators will be subject to penalty, including but not limited to economic sanction and imprisonment”

Yes, there would be ways around it and yes, there would be nations who would not enforce it, but there being legal barriers to operating an instance would basically kill its adoption for normal users. I’m really tired of people saying ‘you can just get a vpn’ as if most people would go to any length at all to share memes with friends. The fediverse is already too complicated for most people to adopt before having to circumvent region blocks.

As soon as the fediverse becomes an actual threat, the ban hammer is going to come down on anonymous social media

I’m honestly surprised it hasn’t happened yet

Characterizing that as ‘unawareness’ is a little too charitable, I think.

For whatever it’s worth, I’m entertained by these bans and have no problem with your moderation style.

Users from the larger instances can be melodramatic - it’s nice to see them get burned for it on occasion.

He loves exploiting China.

Does anyone know of another efficient mode of transportation that has near-zero surface friction?

Because that would be a gamechanger

My favorite postmortem take so far has been “why don’t democrats get in line like republicans do??”

It’s just such perfect mask-off liberalism, I just want to make a supercut of it for next election when libs are whining about why their unpopular candidate/policies aren’t winning.

Yea, given how new it is i probably wouldn’t trust it for something that important. But in-theory it’s meant to handle that type of embedded system

From what I’m hearing: yes

They fell below their 5% target, coming in at 4.6%

For reference, the US is projected to slow to 2% growth in 2024

But only the data that is explicitly intended to be public. There’s no single entity installing invasive apps or logging your traffic through partner network sites.

Facebook had half the internet using your Facebook login as authentication at one point

Praxis.

Because apparently some of us only eat peanut butter and never chew anything solid