I'm optimistic about another use some time next year. I'd thought about planning it, but it all began to feel a bit too contrived and was really draining the joy out of it. So I'm just going to see what happens. If it rolls around to next autumn without another appearance I might get a bit restless, but I've learned you can't rush these things.

While that's obviously gross, I'm not sure some budget public service pleb who wouldn't last 5 mins in a real business wouldn't simply make things worse

Thanks

Great work. Can you give some examples of how this works in practice?

Tagify leverages AI to automatically generate and manage tags for files

Do one thing every day that scares you

Amazing, lol

Lots of effort to make it immaculate but the 3 different types of wood in the downstairs clash horribly, eurgh..

It was meant to be

Yes

Travesty!

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - page 19

It’s probably just your house being knocked down,” said Ford, drowning his last pint.

”What?” shouted Arthur. Suddenly Ford’s spell was broken. Arthur looked wildly around him and ran to the window.

”My God they are! They’re knocking my house down. What the hell am I doing in the pub, Ford?”

”It hardly makes any difference at this stage,” said Ford, ”let them have their fun.”

”Fun?” yelped Arthur. ”Fun!” He quickly checked out of the window again that they were talking about the same thing.

”Damn their fun!” he hooted and ran out of the pub furiously waving a nearly empty beer glass. He made no friends at all in the pub that lunchtime.

”Stop, you vandals! You home wreckers!” bawled Arthur. ”You half crazed Visigoths, stop will you!”

Ford would have to go after him. Turning quickly to the barman he asked for four packets of peanuts.

”There you are sir,” said the barman, slapping the packets on the bar, ”twenty-eight pence if you’d be so kind.”

Ford was very kind – he gave the barman another five-pound note and told him to get a nice new set of aglets while he was at it.

The barman looked at it and then looked at Ford. He suddenly shivered: he experienced a momentary sensation that he didn’t understand because no one on Earth had ever experienced it before. In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny sublimal signal. This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is never possible to be further than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn’t very far, so such signals are too minute to be noticed. Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born 600 light years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse.

My dramatic account detailed here: https://lemmy.world/comment/13482252

(Incidentally, if you can believe it, I used to use floccinaucinihilipilification unironically when I was a teenager)

So, this is what winning at life feels like eh?

I was getting in an MRI machine and had a sudden panic that the aglets on my shoes were metal. I garbled out my concern quickly to the nurse and was surprised to hear myself say "aglet" in a sophisticated manner rather than "the little end things on my laces" like a pleb. Of course, she didn't actually know what I meant and we all died. Joking. Some people died. This story is half true.

And what exactly is the difference between a loan and a loan acting as income?

I'm finding it's much smaller volume but the conversations are more genuine with less low effort filler and puns in between. But YMMV...

Why? Are any loans ever taxed?

There were tax evasion schemes in the UK where wealthy people could take loans from an offshore entity they contributed to and never pay the loans back. But this was shutdown fairly quickly by HMRC (British IRS) and a bunch of people were fined / went to jail. Don't know if the same is true in America?

eye of sauron frantically watches base of tower give way

Problem with one line of data? Better shutdown the airspace.

Amazing this hadn't happened before with a strategy like that.

Also, duplicate waypoints are allowed, just not in the same region. But also exit points don't have to be explicitly indicated and the system will just look for the nearest waypoint in another region.

Sounds like the whole thing was a needlessly hacky messy standard. I've dealt with quite a few of them, but to tolerate it in air traffic control? Good grief....

Companies do pay other taxes roughly comparable to their size, I was just simplifying for the sake of explanation. Employee tax is one example. Don't know how it works in the US but in the UK all businesses will pay a "national insurance" tax contribution for every employee they have. This is a level that can be turned by the treasury. But increasing any tax burden discourages the activity that leads to it. Taxes on employees, although paid by companies, are seen as "anti job" taxes. Taxes on profits are seen as "punishment" for honestly raising a profit in the home country (rather than various offshore licensing schemes). The raw market value of a company could be taxed, but that sort of perversely encourages a company to downplay its value.

Ultimately we want companies to be successful, the only issue with it is when the ownership is concentrated in the hands of the very few. Unfortunately that appears to be what drives success in many cases. Small ownership = focussed quick decision making. Sometimes that really is what's led to an American company seeing the success it does rather than some Chinese competitor gaining the edge.

That's why I throw a lot of this back on consumers. We're the democratic force in all this, and we have a lot of power when we act en masse. Why is there one Amazon instead of two? Because people also choose cheapest and they fail to properly value the fact they can have all sorts next day (even same day) when that service never existed ten plus years ago. If they valued that properly then they'd be more able to see competitor B at $10 is still providing them good value service even if Amazon is selling the same at $7.

I'm not sure that's it's healthy to stop people having free choice of where to shop. People being able to vote with their money is what makes capitalist countries the innovation experts of the world.

The issue is what happens when that capital concentrated into a small number of hands starts to wield anti-choice power and / or political power. So I think people building successful companies and being wildly rich (on paper) is fine, but legislation should stop them hoovering up smaller competitors (anti trust laws). And money should certainly be capped and prevented from undue influence in political processes.

The US and UK are quite different in that regard. Our anti trust laws could be better, but at least our political processes are relatively short and the use of money in them held to a reasonably high level of disclosure. Both could be improved.

And I think they will when the population elects a social-good minded government that's pro business. Typically in the past I'd personally say this mostly lines up with what used to be called New Labour. They certainly did some social good but they made some appalling mistakes trying to partner with business.

I don't know that the equivalent hope in the US is. I see the democrats gets criticised a lot of not being well connected to working class people and too cosy with big business. But campaign finance laws would need to change before the way in which money and politics interacts could ever reasonably change.

Which all feels a bit far off, which is why I come back to what small actions individuals can do... Buy local, from small businesses, be prepared to spend more to spread wealth a little more evenly, buy domestic, not foreign, avoid the services of megacorps wherever you can, enable others to do the same. Who knows? Can you imagine a community run Amazon that cost a bit more but funneled profits back into the local community? Things like this can be tackled by a relatively small band of motivated individuals regardless of what's going on in the halls of power.