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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 19th, 2023

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  • NateNate60@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldLike its a drag race
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    5 days ago

    While it is rude to honk immediately when the light turns green, it is also true that taking too long to accelerate when the light changes severely reduces traffic flow and causes congestion. And this is commonly caused by distracted drivers. You are supposed to release your brake and begin moving at roughly the same time as the car in front of you, i.e. when the car in front of you turns off their brake lights or when the traffic signal turns green if you’re in the front.

    Edit: “Too long” realistically means anything more than half a second. If everyone’s reaction time was one second it would reduce the number of cars per green light probably by half. That doesn’t mean it’s polite to honk after half a second but if your reaction time is that bad you should not be driving.








  • I am not the parent commenter, but the argument for and against wealth taxes is a lot more nuanced than many people would originally think.

    For one, a great deal of wealth in this country (the overwhelming majority, actually) is not money but takes the form of illiquid capital goods like real property and shares in companies. There is a real concern that people subject to tax just won’t have enough dollars in a bank account to pay for it, and forcing the sale of that many goods could render the markets illiquid as it wipes out the red side of the order book every April.

    A potential way around this is if the tax can be paid in kind, similar to how wealth taxes were collected historically, such as in the Roman Empire. This could be stupid easy to administrate—a 1% wealth tax against companies can be enforced by just minting 1% of every registered company’s outstanding shares in new stock and then transferring it to the control of the Government. Though the downside is that this sort of tax is very indiscriminate and difficult to target towards certain demographic groups. While shareholders are largely wealthy individuals who would be the target demographic for a wealth tax, they aren’t exclusively so. Effectively that becomes a tax on holding shares in companies, which is a good, but not perfect, proxy for wealth. The drawback to collecting shares in kind is that the stuff that is raised is not really “revenue” for the state, in that it is not money that can be spent, and to liquidate it would incur significant loss for the state as well. Which is basically throwing wealth away. This wasn’t a problem when “in-kind” meant grain and barley that could be used to feed the army, but soldiers can’t survive on a diet of stock certificates.

    I am in favour of large-scale wealth redistribution from the billionaire class to the working class, but doing so isn’t as easy as saying “You, billionaire, give me 1% of everything you got, cash.” I think a policy of combined high income tax, high capital gains tax, and taxing loans for personal expenses secured against shares as income is more likely to be effective.


  • The actual reason: Gasoline prices in the United States were customarily displayed in cents per US gallon (about 3.8 litres). This means the sign originally read something like “15”, which meant $0.15 per gallon. Since the US has also a long history of pricing things in 9 or 99 (due to the psychological effect of such pricing), many service stations appended the extra 9/10 at the end to indicate 9/10 of 1 cent, which was a more meaningful price difference when the price of fuel was 15 or 25 cents and not two or three dollars. Legally, although the smallest cash denomination in the US is one cent, the US dollar can still be nominally divided into 1,000 “mills” for accounting purposes.

    Inflation has caused the price of gasoline to rise, and when it passed $1 per gallon, service stations continued the same pricing traditions by just adding a third digit to the number. When digital price displays came on the scene, many of them continued to just display a three-digit number with the traditional 9/10 at the end, i.e. 123 9/10

    New displays seem to have gotten rid of this tradition and just display a three-digit decimal number, i.e. 3.45 or 4.56.


  • Firstly this is surprisingly high-quality coverage. I’ve never heard of this website but I’m pretty impressed.

    Secondly, regarding the lawsuit in general, I think that patent and intellectual property law regarding game mechanics and software processes in general are badly in need of reform. There doesn’t seem to have been significant legislative action to address this in any major economy that I know of. The number of bullshit parents being filed, unclear and vague rules as to how copyright/patent law works with respect to software, AI, and game mechanics, is really leading to a lawsuit culture where the only way to find out what the bounds of the law are is to spend millions of dollars on lawyers to litigate it in court, when really, legislatures should be actively writing new and clearer rules to deal with these issues before people need to sue each other to find out.

    The Internet of 2025 is just way too different and complex to operate using the copyright rules of the 1990s.

    If I were in writing the rules, there’d be separate categories of intellectual property for software libraries, game mechanics, fictional characters, and so on, with clear definitions on what is and is not considered fair use of these sorts of intellectual property. It should not be possible to copyright the design of a widely-used software API or game mechanic. And any such protection on those things should be comparatively short in duration (not more than a decade) so that others can eventually re-implement the design, and probably do so better than the original inventor.




  • NateNate60@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldthe perfect browser
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    4 months ago

    I’m never going to be one to dog on something before I try it. If it’s good and can offer the same or better experience as Firefox then sign me up. The biggest sticking point for me, though, is potentially losing Firefox’s massive add-in library. I really like my uBlock Origin and Restore YouTube Dislike and my VPN extension and Metamask and all the other crap I’ve got there.