Yeah back when margin rates were close to 1% it made a ton of sense to use margin. I was pretty cautious with it but bought a bunch of blue chip dividend stocks- altria, vz, etc at 1% rates and collected 5% dividends. For awhile I could even deduct the margin interest from my income.
At a 6% rate though, this is very risky. Your hurdle rate is just below the average market return rate. There are better ways to gamble on the market if that's what you want to do-UPRO and TQQQ come to mind, as well as options.
I still check it out a few times a week, and the discussions have just fallen off a cliff, and that was the biggest draw to me as well. The articles are far less technical these days as well and tend to lean more political - and I see the draw there, those posts are the only ones that can attract over 100 comments these days, when back in its heyday pretty much everything had around 200 comments on the front page.
And it's a weird snakepit of conservative anger. On more than one occasion I have suspected bots have stolen accounts. Looking at post history on some particularly unhinged posts after the previous election, there was a pattern of people posting regularly in the 00s about only technical things and then going quiet for 5+ years and then only making comments about politics. It was fishy enough I sent some examples to the mods but never heard anything back.
It's a real shame, slashdot used to be a juggernaut, and it's just a shadow of its former self.
> The articles are far less technical these days as well and tend to lean more political
I dunno, it must've been 15 years since I set my signature there to "remember, Slashdot is a tabloid", after I realized how the posts skewed towards... "engagement".
(signatures seem to have been lost in some redesign since)
> And it's a weird snakepit of conservative anger.
I disagree. It's still 90% center left. But if you have a low tolerance for seeing conservative responses then sure maybe it feels more conservative. Those views rarely get modded up though.
I've noticed that on teamblind as well (started to use it only recently). I didn't realize there was such hate towards foreigners in the US, especially, in the tech world which I assumed was more educated/progressive. Don't know if it's fueled by Trump or the other way around, but it's pretty scary.
Something like 80% of blind posters are Indians on h1b. Absolutely no judgements here, just saying (source: polls asking some variation of Are you Indian? appear all the time there)
I agree that it would be misleading to judge D.C. based on being at a 30 year low. Of the cities with the highest homicide rates, only Philadelphia has a higher population and rate. It's fair to say that there are other cities close in population. But it's clear that D.C. has a abnormally high homicide rate when compared to all of the other U.S. cities of its size or larger. Even if you only compared it to all other U.S. cities within, say, 100k of population, it's still at a very high percentile.
You are right it's misleading to say DC is at a 30 year low- the data I posted shows that it is actually at a 60 year low.
It's not clear at all that it has an abnormally high homicide rate at all. DC is not even listed on the link you provided- the one I provided has cities of equivalent size.
Just to be consistent with my sibling comment: it is improper to conclude that St. Louis is the most murdery place in America. The city of St. Louis metro population is 3 million people, who travel to the city proper to murder each other even though only 280k people live in those political boundaries.
I bought a UDM about two years ago, and it was a real mess for about 6 months. It was hanging every few weeks which required a hard reboot- which was shocking, because this was my first attempt at upgrading my network to more expensive and capable stuff, and for the previous 20 years, had never had an issue with my network equipment hanging or rebooting. They were going to RMA my UDM, but then they had me install a special release as a last try, and it worked, and everything has worked well since then.
That said though, do I really need these features? The biggest draw was having a proper AP to put on my ceiling instead of my old google wifi pucks. The upgrade from wifi 5 to 6e was not noticeable in any way. I spent 3x the money and really have nothing tangible to show for it aside from a cool UI to log into, which was never necessary prior because everything Just Worked.
Also- this may be my fault for not reading the fine print, but the IDS stuff on the UDM only works at 600mbps, and I have a gigabit connection. People in Unifi forums will tell me I am the idiot for assuming that, but it has gigabit ports, its 2023... I just ass/u/me/d that everything would work without issue at line speed and wouldn't have to read the spec sheet like a lawyer.
Anyway, its fine in the end. I would never buy anything cutting edge from them again, I want anything to bake for at least 6 months after release, which is usually how long it takes for their "shipping" stuff to become actually available anyway. I will stop whining now :)
Doesn't anti-theft precautions kick in when you do this? On my Honda, if the battery goes completely dead or when I replace it, I have to enter a code in after, and IIRC all my radio stations reset, so it would be really inconvenient to do this often.
My way around this, which is also somewhat inconvenient- is that I pop the hood and connect a trickle charger if I have a feeling I won't be driving for a few weeks. I have a garage so this is the lesser evil.
Hmm I do have to put the key in the door when I’m reconnecting the battery, or else the car alarm will go off. That’s the only thing I’ve noticed though — maybe it’s just too old to have more complex features? I never listen to radio, so the stations may be reset and I just don’t notice.
My accord is a 2007 so not much newer than yours. We can Uber around for most trips but find it very convenient to have a car at times. If it works for you great, I thought that was a fairly common thing- particularly in cars of that era, because radio theft used to be so common.
The silent and really unheralded disappearance of Wintel from my home surprised me a few weeks ago as well. It wasn't a conscious decision, they just got slowly replaced by macbooks, and an ARM based NAS... etc. Kind of like how I also realized I no longer have an optical disc reader... despite still having spindles of very old stuff.
And this is kind of sad in the context of this post. Because I have always wanted to dive deeper into assembly, and there are loads of material to study X86 assembly out there.
But being able to run it only in a virtual machine, it is a little bit demotivating.
Well, there are some chinese folks selling newly built PC-XT compatible machines on the internet. Maybe I could go this way. And probably, pure, original 8086 assembly is a lot more fun than overly complicated X86_64 with lots of extensions.
There's always arm assembly. It's a differen ISA of course, but a lot of the concepts transfer pretty nicely. You could also look at something like the Zimaboard or similar machines.
I found using qemu to be quite simple and pretty decent. I guess it depends on what you are looking to do- really low level bootloader/OS type stuff or actually explore the instruction set and maybe build something useful. Learning about the BIOS interface was actually quite enlightening, but in general ARM and RISC-V is much less complex.
IMHO its more about the varieties that are grown for industrial scale and efficiency, rather than flavor. I was part of a community garden and started a lot of stuff from seed- celery, tomatoes, onions, garlic, lettuces etc... and I was overwhelmed by the different numbers of varieties of each and that "celery" isn't just celery. To be fair, not all of it was better- the celery variety was very bitter and chewy, but most other stuff was much more flavorful, though yields were smaller in most cases. The lettuce we grew in particular was so much better than anything sold in a store- at a cost of the fact that it would be wilted and almost unusable by the next day. We did throw in some garlic bulbs straight from the super market to grow next to our "heirloom" variety and the supermarket garlic was exactly what we were used to, while the heirloom was much stronger, and arguably more pleasant (I love garlic). Cooks often joke that "one clove" of garlic really means 5 to them, and I wonder if this is more of a result of breeding garlic over the years for different qualities other than its garlicky-ness instead of just recipe writers with a light hand... I don't think its the methods being used in large scale farming, but really more the varieties attempting to be grown.
There is also a factor that some types of foods will degrade within hours to some extent of being picked- Herbs I pick out of my garden like thyme and rosemary are extremely fragrant when picked, even a few hours later they are noticeably less so. I think many consumers have picked up on this, over the last decade or so I have noticed the fresh plants section of the grocery store expanding, while the "cut and plastic boxed" section of the store shrinking. I am in an urban area, most people don't have outdoor space (I didn't for many years), and I had difficulty keeping those plants alive when attempting to keep them going on my windowsill with a western exposure.
I would be shocked if anyone is really looking for anything practical out of this, its more of a lab exercise that lets you learn by actually doing things. I learn best this way. It's one thing to draw a circuit, or even put it in a simulator, but the act of hooking up the chips, and watching the blinking lights really sticks with me, and far more deeply ingrains the concepts in my head. And while the 8-bit kit is expensive, and time consuming, I found it worthwhile. There is probably a lot more value to be had in the 6502 series though, if for no other reason that the 6502 is iconic, and it was something of a thrill to me to really understand at a basic level the chip that powered the NES I spent so many hours with.
This picture without context gave me QA or build lab type vibes, and the caption in the story confirmed that. They had to test on all kinds of configurations and hardware, so this makes sense- tbh I am surprised its this small. Remote tools didn't really exist in those days, and even if they did, they are unlikely to work if the OS is having issues. So you run a test, find an issue, and if its hard to reproduce you might just have to bring the dev into the lab to get on the box to understand what happened.
It looks very similar to a QA Lab at a place I worked at in the early 2000s. They essentially commandeered a larger conference room and there were just (cpu) boxes everywhere.
This is my big struggle with all of this. His first term I felt America was duped by a con man so protested and made a fuss on social media. Americans saw the first four years and astonishingly decided they wanted more of it, by a decent margin.
So while I absolutely hate what is going on right now this seems to be what the people wanted. I question each day whether that needs to be respected or we should resist.
I also wonder if his supporters have any idea of what is going on. I am sure fox news isn't covering any of this and if they are it's probably being spun in some horrific way.
Or election were hacked, but not the way you think.
Social media was weaponized and turned into a tool that manipulates people's view of the reality. Each person gets a personalized feed that presses their buttons to think certain way.
For example with war in gaza.
If for example you were pro Israeli, you will see content that Harris was siding with Hamas, and trump actually was the most Israel friendly candidate.
If you were supporting Palestine you would get that there's no difference between Harris and trump, and it is best to do protest vote.
Same with leaning too much to the left, or not enough to the left etc.
Pretty much every issue was handled this way. People who got their news from social media had no idea what her stance were on any topic, because that was filtered.
Few years ago we had huge scandal about Cambridge Analytica, there was a bit loud about it and then died out, meanwhile it all continued and was perfected.
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook manipulated older generation. While TikTok managed to capture younger, left leaning generation and make it more apathetic.
I don't think it is a coincidence that pretty much all social media (except the Chinese TikTok) was present on his inauguration.
I also don't think it is a coincidence that all social media companies have involvement with AI. With it, they no longer need humans to generate content, so the whole manipulation is much easier to do.
This isn't just isolated to US and it is being used in Europe too. Look at elections in Moldova, Romania, what's happening in Germany etc.
Timothy Snyder's "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century" book is a must read so we can prevent this.
> Social media was weaponized and turned into a tool that manipulates people's view of the reality
I really dislike this argument. It shifts responsibility from the voters to evil nebulous puppet-masters. I reject that. At some point, you have to accept that people can think and make decisions for themselves.
Is it reasonable that social media influencers may be assigned some degree of credit? After all they are generally effective at selling products.
I also agree that people have responsibility for their actions. For example, it has been personally sobering to observe some friends and colleagues agree that defunding PEPFAR and putting 20 million lives at risk was morally the right thing to do.
Yeah. Everyone is convinced ads don't work on them, yet somehow it is a trillion dollar industry.
Perhaps you are lucky and don't have anyone in your family affected by disinformation.
I have family members that no longer watch TV, listen radio, read news papers. All "news" they are getting is from sources that also tell them that all other sources lie.
They live in complete different reality that it is a distorted mirror of actual reality.
He’s an elected president, not an elected dictator. It’s totally reasonable in our democracy to say that you don’t get to do anything everything you want just because you got 51% of the vote.
We have a constitution and separation of powers which many seem to have forgotten about this week
> I also wonder if his supporters have any idea of what is going on.
They do not. Most of his supporters are either rich or uneducated normal people who lack the mental capacity to realize what's going on. They just repeat the talking points. Respond to anyone of them with a non-talking point, compassion, and honesty and they just shut down. They haven't a clue about what's really going on. I bet none of his supporters even know who Robert Mercer is, the person that got him elected in the first place.
I feel like you're interacting with the same people I'm interacting with because your assessment of them is spot on. They love the talking points. Whenever you shut down one talking point with facts they pole vault over that into the next talking point. They want to be 20 ft up in the air away from the truth and never question why they've been lied to. They believe and even make up wild conspiracy theories on the spot when confronted with information that conflicts with what Trump and his supporters have said and done. Their brains leap over every possible barrier I put up, never letting it stop them. Maybe I'm not a good debater but facts are facts and they don't seem to appreciate or respect or even value them. I need to find a new, less depressing group of people to be around which will unfortunately mean quitting my job but I just can't do it anymore.
+1 I spend a lot of time engaging with these folks in good faith as well, and exact same pattern.
Repeat statement from Trump -> demonstrate that it's untrue -> repeat statement from Trump on new topic -> demonstrate that it's untrue -> repeat statement from Trump on new topic -> demonstrate that it's untrue
What is "the people" at this point, even? Is there really such a thing as "American people" that can be meaningfully defined? What would be its ideals?
> In 2008, Obama got elected on a promise of change, but by-and-large just did more of the same
After 2010 midterms he couldn't really do anything, because the GOP did everything they could to obstruct everything, seemingly mostly just as a nihilistic power game. If you will recall, even very simple and uncontroversial appointments were being blocked. It was absolutely ridiculous. I don't especially like the democratic party, but there is no real comparison. Both a forceful push and several punched to the face are assault, but clearly they are not the same or "every bit as guilty".
In the first two years, when he was actually empowered, he mainly focused on the financial crisis and the ACA. Those two were already massive undertakings.
Also Afghanistan was not "Vietnam 2.0". About 280,000 US troops died in Vietnam. About 3,500 coalition troops died in Afghanistan, most of them in the early years. 2020 saw 11 casualties. Comparisons to Vietnam are profoundly unserious. There's a reason Obama stayed in Afghanistan: it was relatively cheap and kept an enemy (Taliban) in check. Now, you can agree or disagree with that, but it's really not as straight-forward as you're presenting it.
The ACA is just more of the same? Are you kidding me? Do you know how many lives that changed? No more pre-existing conditions? Literally before that if you lost your insurance you just died.
For the majority of people, the ACA just meant "insurance has an excuse to raise premiums without end (far more than the number of new people covered)". There was some corporate trickery involved, but that doesn't matter to the individual who's paying more.
The majority of people are very grateful of the coverage. The ACA is very popular if you call it something different (to move away from the propaganda) and explain the details.
I don’t know any serious person who could make these arguments without also acknowledging that premiums were increasing before the ACA. They typically won’t acknowledge that the rate of increase slowed down post ACA because then their entire argument falls apart.
Okay, but even with that (though I really don't think there were >20% increases in any year prior to the ACA ...), all we get is my original point of "Obama promised change, but just provided more of the same."
maintaining the status-quo was at least predictable. change was needed, and was inevitable, but will the result be akin to the replacement of the articles of confederation with the constitution, or the replacement of the french republic with the first french empire?
> With regards specifically to Phyllis Fong, I have no confidence that an Inspector-General that occupied the office for twenty two years straight[1] can ethically perform their prescribed role. I am in complete agreement with her termination, we need someone (anyone) new and different in there.
Are you "in complete agreement" because of actual things Fong did, or because you think that 22 years experience in a position is disqualifying?
>because you think that 22 years experience in a position is disqualifying?
Yes.
An Inspector-General is in charge of inspecting and auditing, as the name would suggest. That requires being impartial in absolute terms, because you must be able to call out problems no matter how inconvenient they are.
Being in a position of power means an inevitable accrual of reputation and influence, and 22 straight years of accrual is ridiculous. Her excessively long tenure is also unusual; the longest-serving Inspector-General besides her served for 8 years, shortest being 2 years not counting acting IGs, average is about 4 years each IG not counting her 22 year tenure.
So yes, I support her termination because her long tenure lends me no confidence she can perform her duties ethically anymore. There must be a regular changing of the incumbent to head off the office being bought or otherwise corrupted. There are millions of other D.C. bureaucrats to replace her with, and even more Americans overall. There is no reason to keep her specifically for this long and I daresay that the lack of a term limit for this office has to be an oversight.
You got it. I would also support this termination if Biden or Harris had done the same. 22 years is way too long of a tenure by any reasonable measure for an office like this.
What is wrong with being reappointed to the same job for 22 years? What if she's just...competent? Your argument seems to be that anyone having the same job for that long must be corrupt in some way, but you don't provide anything to support that premise. Ironically, you're implicitly endorsing the resort to illegal means for her removal, rather than following the process defined in law.
Are you arguing Phyllis deserved to be fired because she had a lot of experience and was a dedicated employee? That's a pretty hot take. I hope for your sake you are independently wealthy, lest someone who can impact your life comes along and determines you shouldn't be employed anymore because you've been doing it too long. You think twenty two years is too long to be in a profession, perhaps the next person will think 10 years or 5 years are too long, gotta get someone (anyone) new and different in there, and you out.
Don't live in the US, but I got the impression that a lot of people actually saw positive change in their lives in the first round, which is a pretty good reason to want more.
Do you honestly believe your news is being spun any less?
Yes I read high quality news sources- the WSJ, NYTimes, foreign affairs and a few others like the national review and mother Jones from time to time. I hear this argument a lot and my issues with Trump were from the primary source- his own words and tweets.
The economy was already humming when Trump first entered office and despite his best efforts it continued to do so through his term.
I feel like his first term benefitted from his administration being wholly unprepared to govern, as witnessed by the numerous stories of there effectively being no transition plan for a vast majority of departments.
The only real policy victory his first term was the TCJA. Otherwise, it was a lot of bark, no bite.
But now with four years to prepare, they came in barking and biting like hell.
Ironically, losing in 2020 gave MAGA time to create a game plan which we’re seeing in action now. A second Trump term right after the first would have been more effectual than the first, but not to the degree we’re seeing now.
You are free to believe what you want to believe and to seek out media that will tell you what you want hear.
Those of use living in the real world don't have the luxury of believing what ever makes us feel good; we seek out and even pay for journalism that describes the world as it is and not just how we want it to be.
At a 6% rate though, this is very risky. Your hurdle rate is just below the average market return rate. There are better ways to gamble on the market if that's what you want to do-UPRO and TQQQ come to mind, as well as options.
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