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Many sources are reporting that Trump finally signed the pandemic relief bill:
- Trump signs stimulus and government spending bill into law, averting shutdown
- Trump Signs Pandemic Relief Bill After Unemployment Aid Lapses
- Trump signs stimulus bill ahead of government shutdown, releasing checks and aid
- Trump signs COVID relief bill amid pressure, but adds conditions
Not gonna summarize all the bits in it - it's some 5k pages of legalese gobbledygook, but I understand it continues augmented unemployment benefits, eviction suspension, funding to prevent government shutdown, and another direct cash payment.
I'm sure it also has a bunch of "porky pork", but the people are suffering, time is of essence, and it should have been done months ago.
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Trump Signs $900 Billion Pandemic Relief Bill
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TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday December 29 2020, @12:31PM (41 children)
I've seen this cognitive dissonance before. We can't trust businesses to do anything except pay for our shit, followed by fantasies about how voluminous the shit they'll pay for. The obvious rebuttals to the above two points is first, if you consider history for real, like the last 50 years for a glaring example, you'll see that businesses don't do their best to "make up the difference". Instead, they move or close up. Off-shoring and automation are things and they've been done for far less than what you've proposed here.
Right now in the US, we're running a test of your model and it's failing. California believes, much as you do, that businesses are merely a tax revenue source which can be tapped heavily. They similarly have a remarkable disregard for the effectiveness of what that tax revenue is spent on, that "social spending". Meanwhile Texas among other states, doesn't have that venal attitude.
What do we see? Considerable movement of businesses out of California into more business-friendly places like Texas. I think it'll be far more educational than your version of history what happens to California and Texas next.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Tuesday December 29 2020, @04:16PM (35 children)
Look at tech - where's the innovation since the turn of the century? Windows is still Windows, OSX is based on FreeBSD. Linux is a Unix (1980s) wannabe. Smartphones were around in the 90s. So we're the tablets - we just called them PDAs.
Chromebooks? We had dumb terminals like forever. Graphic browsers to access the Internet? Some guy created one in the 80s that worked over dial-up and allowed interactive graphics, and user-defined graphics and interactions.
Innovation is dead, it's just everyone competing to create the latest iteration of old ideas to try to become a unicorn.
Is open source any different? No - just look at the 2,000 different distros. All with the same software.
The innovators at the beginning of the small computing era were done by one or two people in a garage, or on their kitchen tables. They didn't try to get a billion dollars before they had a product. It was interesting times with interesting people doing interesting things. You're not going to find the interesting innovative new stuff from the big guys, but by a new generation of individuals and small groups who aren't chasing the big deal and have to limit what they do to avoid scaring off investors.
So neither Texas nor California are going to do anything but give us more of the same shit, different day.
And both California and Texas are untenable long term because of global warming. Already Texas ranchers have to be careful not to let cattle overheat when grazing. What's it going to be like 25 years from now?
10 million domestic climate migrants.
50 years from now? >p> 100 million domestic climate migrants. Because when things tip, they snowball.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 29 2020, @09:53PM (5 children)
Normal business has never directly invested in much of anything avoidable. That's a job for banks and the stock market. They still invest.
Innovation in tech has been huge. CRISPR gene editing is new. Quantum supremacy (for computation) has been claimed. We invented the AGM-114R9X bladed missile to limit undesired casualties. You sound like the patent inventor who quit around 1900, saying there was nothing left to invent.
Open source also innovates. The rr debugger is a fine example, bringing reverse debugging without relying only on snapshots or emulation. Another example is rust, able to create safe unchecked native code without garbage collection.
Dismissing upgrades as "more of the same shit" is terrible. I like the Ford Mustang much better than the Ford Pinto, and I like that much more than the Ford Model T.
Your fears of global warming are way overblown. Fear is how news reporters get eyeballs, and fear is how politicians make you hate the other candidates, so of course you get a 24x7 feed of fearmongering. If people have to move, so what? Alaska is huge. We can sacrifice Hawaii to make Alaska comfortable. Note that I'm definitely not in agreement that this will happen. I bought a Florida house near the beach.
If we end up needing walls to hold back the ocean, costs will rise. We'd best have our economy in good shape. That means not going down your desired path, which leads to being like Venezuela. People in Venezuela might need to live in the mountains because they can't afford seawalls. That's what happens when you fuck your economy with leftist shit.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday December 30 2020, @12:41AM (3 children)
You can't grow much in the boulder fields and moraines of the North.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @05:07AM (1 child)
Soil in the Amazon rainforest is terrible. It's lacking lots of nutrients. Somehow, plants grow. That is because the Amazon isn't really fucking cold like Alaska.
So of course you can't grow much in the boulder fields and moraines of the North. Plants need heat. They also like carbon dioxide, with nearly all plants growing much better if you increase the levels. In other words, we need to burn more coal.
Florida is also lacking nutrients. Much of the state is pure white sand. Oh well, fertilizer exists. It's like hydroponics. Tomatoes grow really well in pure white sand if you fertilize them.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 31 2020, @04:20AM
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 30 2020, @09:55PM
They also left a bunch of glacial till which is excellent for making new topsoil. That incidentally means that a lot of those glacial lands are excellent places now for growing crops, due to the topsoil that has been created since the glaciers retreated.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 31 2020, @03:41AM
The re debugger isn't new and innovative. There have been commercial c/c++ packages that allow you to unwind the stack, change variables, and proceed, set break points and step through execution, reverse and change thevprogram flow, etc. since the 90s. So once again, open source is decades late. >p> I was quite happy to pay for commercial development tools because I got support. Because the people working on ithwm weren't scratching an itch. And money was available to pay people to fix bugs , which most people would rather work on new stuff.
This year the app stores made over $100 billion, passing $70 billion on to developers. Apple generated 68% of that, despite having a smaller market share than android. So while android tries to pass itself as open, if you want to be able to support your product long term, that takes money. Apple is the place to be for developers, especially since they're lowering the cut on projects that make less than a million (and if you're making over a million a year, cry me a river).
The Linux distros are a mess. Too many, distro hopping is still a thing after decades. There needs to be consolidation but it won't happen. You know it, I know it, so does every user.
Progress in Linux is yet another distro, with the same packages everyone else has, yet another package manager, yet another non-intuitive UI change. The distros from the turn of the century were more intuitive.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 29 2020, @10:15PM (27 children)
So what? Business can't avoid that and they invest in plants, factories, etc. As to tax policy, that's a ridiculous claim. I'll note that higher nominal tax rates increases the incentives to evade or avoid the taxes. It will backfire just like it did back then.
Why is reinventing the wheel considered innovation?
They would have had to be just as careful 200 years ago. Not every climate problem has magically shown up in the past 40 years.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday December 30 2020, @12:35AM (26 children)
And the temps in Texas are now too hot in some areas to graze traditional cattle, so they're looking for genetic bloodlines that can tolerate the higher heat and lack of good grazing grounds. This was not a problem 200 years ago.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 30 2020, @02:18AM (25 children)
Except of course, when they have so invested.
Actually, those retained a great deal of worth. The problem wasn't the alleged worthlessness of the securities. It was way overestimating the security of the securities and then massively overleveraging. There is nothing in the world that is sure enough to support the 50 to 1 (and greater) leverage (that is, borrowing $50+ for every $1 of assets you have) that was being bet on mortgage securities at that time (with behavior corresponding to that amazing lack of risk awareness such as ignoring large scale fraud).
As I already noted, that's not new. I suspect rather that those ranchers are expanding into areas that are traditionally hostile to cattle because of the temperature, using climate change money. It'd be far from the first a perceived crisis is used as a pretext to fund an existing scheme that has little to nothing to do with the crisis.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday December 30 2020, @03:34AM (24 children)
And the government bailed out the banks because so many of the properties had a negative worth. One bank tried to just give 8,000 properties to the city. The city said okay, if you pay the costs of bulldozing the homes and disconnecting the utilities. So the bank still holds the properties, they're totally worthless (gutted for wiring, plumbing, fixtures, windows and doors, full of mould, squatters, roof fallen in, fire damage. Some of these places had been flipped sight unseen by one speculator after another, $500 ballooning to $155,000 and then defaulting.
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(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday December 30 2020, @03:37AM (15 children)
Cities offer them for auction, nobody bids because the cost of bulldozing them and turning them into worthless vacant lots is a losers game.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 30 2020, @03:51AM (14 children)
I think that illustrates the problem handily. This alleged problem has nothing to do with securities. And all this real estate is less than twenty years old in good locations. It doesn't cost that much to bulldoze a house and turning it into valuable vacant lots, even if you couldn't flip the house for a profit. I suspect the "cities" of the quote are cities with substantial problems that go way beyond some overbuild of shoddy houses from the last boom. Like Detroit, for a glaring example of a city that has trouble selling homes for auction.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 31 2020, @06:29AM (13 children)
Chicago, Baltimore, much of California's Inland Empire, which was a high growth area (drive until you can buy) with million dollar homes on brand new streets that became worthless during the recession.
So it was both urban slums and suburban rich folk housing that was affected. That's what happens at the end of a speculative property boom when one in every 83 workers is a real estate agent flogging properties that end up being sold multiple times before the first shovel of dirt is dug.
And banks approving no-doc mortgages where you don't even need to show a pay slip or tax return. Search for "stated income mortgage."
Lots of fraud. People would get a mortgage based on their "stated income", then get a bogus HELOC based on an evaluation from a "cooperative" to take out cash to live on and make the payments, flip the house, and do it again. -p> This isn't that far in the past. It's all documented.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 31 2020, @12:39PM (12 children)
I see I nailed that problem. Deal with the urban management problem and you'll deal with the low value of property that became "worthless".
Except that it wasn't so.
Irrelevant. In a market bubble where risk blind traders can do almost anything and still make money, this is the sort of thing they do. It's not news. We'll see that again and again, each time there is such a bubble. It didn't make property worthless then or now.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 31 2020, @08:53PM (11 children)
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 31 2020, @10:03PM (10 children)
Yet. A bunch of property that nobody will touch is a symptom of growing blight.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 31 2020, @11:34PM (9 children)
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 01 2021, @02:16AM (8 children)
You just said they were negative dollar homes. Not buying the semantic shift here.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday January 01 2021, @04:13AM (7 children)
You couldn't give them away because just the taxes exceeded the income of the suddenly jobless, and they were too far away for someone who was having a problem keeping gas in the car (or was living in their car).
It's all out there. But you're too needing to keep up your fake reality that you won't even search.'
Same as you don't know what it's like to have a real job.
Why don't you have some sort of career? Given up? No real qualifications? No real experience? No real interest? No talent? Too lazy? Too afraid of failure? Personality issues that make you unemployable? Periods of delusion? Constantly delusional? Too busy shit-posting? The aliens gonna get you if you go outside? If you work most of your pay will be garnisheed for debts or fines? Outstanding warrants? Electronic ankle tracking bracelet? Too gross? Tourette's?
Come on, there's got to be some reason your only job experience was part time at a concession stand years ago. Got caught stealing? Criminal record?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 01 2021, @04:55AM (6 children)
As I've already noted, that sort of shitshow is how you kick off urban blight. There's a reason some places have this problem and others don't. And it doesn't have anything to do with too little taxes.
What's your career again? As I see it, I don't need nor want whatever you think a career is.
I guess 11 years in hospitality accounting isn't really a job, right? At least, it pays the bills, and leaves a bit over 50% after taxes and bills for me to save.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday January 01 2021, @05:33AM (5 children)
No wonder you don't have a clue.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 01 2021, @12:20PM (4 children)
I notice you don't apologize for getting it wrong. Yes, you hit the Azuma sore spot where the person just says shit about other people, and doesn't care in the slightest if what they say is right or wrong. Basically, constructs their own fantasy world and then tries to make everyone play in it.
Sorry, I'm not interested.
As to your questions, in the (non-covid) summer (this being seasonal work), the "small place" is a resort with 300 hotel rooms, 280 cabins, and 440 campsites, plus several restaurants, retail shops, and a Marina - in the middle of a park that sees more than four million visitors a year. and "hospitality accounting" just means that I do a different sort of accounting than the people who figure out what account to charge the office party cake to or strategies for minimizing tax exposure. In particular, it's a combination of auditing all sales transactions in that location plus monitoring that employees are handling money correctly.
Because? This is a pathetic argument from authority without an authority. Last I heard, you worked in the past as a coder and now, are retired and volunteer work at a local food bank. Doesn't sound like you have the life experiences necessary to judge people based on flimsy evidence, right? Maybe you could come back to continue this argument when you do get such experience? It should only take a few decades.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday January 01 2021, @01:55PM (3 children)
You keep projecting.
Get a real job for once on your life. Seriously, a camp ground? That's like somebody saying they work on a cruise ship. In other words, unemployed.
It's funny. Once my vision is fixed, I'll be using my retirement pension to subsidize my software development. And I'll make money at it, because it's what I do. I should be able to do it through my 90s, in part because I'm not going to open source anything, so no nagging from freetards about features they want that I think go in the wrong direction, or competing with forks of my own crap.
The extra money would be nice, as would being back in the swing of things.
Or to quote Foghorn Leghorn - "where's your ambition, boy?"
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 01 2021, @06:21PM (2 children)
Who would have thought that they would have campgrounds in the woods?
Given that this is coming from the person whose present career is cat-sitter, the accusation doesn't have the sting it might otherwise have.
I also find it interesting how we segued from talking about the futility of high taxation (using your own examples!) to my supposed lack of a career and insufficient ambition unbecoming of a SN hack. I guess I better drop a gill net and catch some massive red herring because the school is here.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday January 01 2021, @06:42PM (1 child)
I'm retired. That's what people in their mid-60s do. I spend my weeks volunteering. You tried to give the impression you were an accountant or whatever, but your posts where you have no clue whatsoever about money say you're full of shit, like usual.
Nobody believes you. Absolutely nobody.
Then again, what can you expect from a hick living in Hicksville.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 01 2021, @10:00PM
Welcome fellow deadbeat. Bring the XBox and I'll bring the Cheetos and skunk beer.
Yes, I'm an accountant and yes, I have on occasion tried to give that impression as well. So what? Have I ever argued that you should agree with me because of my authority as an accountant?
I notice those alleged posts didn't happen in this thread.
So anyway, I've been thinking about why you're bringing this apparently completely unrelated thing up in a thread about increasing taxes and I got it figured out. Your problem is that Canada isn't taxing you enough - that is, you need your taxes increased just like Apple does. That's why you're a deadbeat retiree rather than a real job careerist. Here's hoping that Canada fixes that and makes bank at the same time!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 30 2020, @04:03AM (7 children)
Sure, they do. Needless to say, I think Occams razor cuts differently here.
First thing here is that this unnamed city (not cities) here probably has serious problems in the first place. After all, they too are letting that property rot.
Keep in mind that the bank can hold those properties at an inflated value, thereby reducing their costs of maintaining reserve (among other things, meaning they can lend out more money). A gutted building still has value to them.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 31 2020, @06:17AM (6 children)
There's plenty of videos out there of new buildings being demolished by the property owners. They get an immediate 100% tax write off on the building, reclaiming some of the taxes they paid on sales at the height of the boom. Gives them cash flow. And a vacant serviced lot.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 31 2020, @12:45PM (5 children)
Why would there be "too high" taxes on a building with negative value? Last I heard, taxes were more or less proportional to the value of the property.
In other words, they destroyed good property because of bad tax law. Among other things, it's the broken window fallacy. And I find it remarkable that you think holding raw land for two decades is better.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 31 2020, @08:50PM (4 children)
If you're a developer and you can't rent out or sell a warehouse, it's value decreases with time while it's carrying costs increase. After a while just the passing of time means it's no longer grade a, so it's less desirable than vacant land that can be custom built to a tenants needs.
It's why many commercial buildings are either bulldozed, imploded, or gutted after 50 years - they're worth less in their current state than the land on which they sit is worth empty.
It's like swimming pools. They used to add value to a home. Then they came to be seen as a negative feature with high maintenance and the need to add restrictive ugly fences that took away the aesthetic. People were deducting the cost of filling in the pool from their offers.
same with fireplaces. Can't use them even with catalytic chimneys, so deduct the cost of removing and repairs to the walls.
The benefits in terms of fewer winter smog days made the banning of fire places worth it. In most cases, even with heating inserts, they were still net losers of heat, and raised insurance rates. People don't miss them after a while.
Same as they don't miss the old diesel buses when the hybrids are quieter and cheaper to run, and the electrics even quieter and cheaper. Less pollution and air conditioned are just plain nice bonuses. Tax payers like that. Same with school buses.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 31 2020, @10:12PM (3 children)
Because you wrote "new homes" and "brand new warehouses". That's not a sign of a healthy economy when valuable real estate gets destroyed merely to lower property taxes.
Sorry, that's not it. You started this thread talking about real estate from the last real estate bubble. Most that is less than 20 years old. I have no problems with old structures being razed to make way for a more valuable use of the property. That's human history ever since we started building stuff thousands of years ago. What's different here is destroying new property merely because of taxes. It's particularly ridiculous since you started this thread advocating for high taxes. So we see here that one of the problems of your higher taxation is that it encourages more destruction of good real estate. That's dumb.
I also am less than inspired by your examples. I assure you that in warm climates those pools are still seen as advantages. And making fireplaces and diesel buses costly via regulation is just more of the same bad ideas you've been having.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 31 2020, @11:40PM (2 children)
After all, dead people don't contribute to the economy, or the tax base.
'kind of like the story of your life. And you're never going to have any sort of professional career. Simply not qualified by either temperament or ability.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 01 2021, @02:17AM (1 child)
Communities are notorious for being unable to make such calculations.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday January 01 2021, @03:57AM
We banned fireplaces years ago. Winter air is noticeably cleaner.
The hybrid buses are quieter, and use less fuel despite being air conditioned.
Which is why there's almost a billion being spent on an underground garage for the new electric fleet, and more $$$ for another 800 all-electric buses. And 5 billion or more for an electric regional transit system to connect to the existing electric subway system.
So maybe communities in the USA are still shitty at defying lobbyists, but that's your problem. Not mine. We've got tons of clean green electricity, might as well use it.
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(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday December 31 2020, @01:09AM
Unix was already around in the 70's.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @12:06PM (3 children)
You've been busy spewing your Randian crap here the last day or so.
Are you this active because you're concerned you won't be around much longer, once arrested for felony assault [koat.com]?
Enquiring minds want to forget you.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 31 2020, @12:48PM (2 children)
Thinking is better than whining that I went off message.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2020, @02:32PM (1 child)
Who said you were "off message?" It's pretty much the same sociopathic randian bullshit we've come to expect from you Khallow.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 31 2020, @10:00PM
What I find particularly telling is that there is no interest in how well the money is spent. That indicates to me a huge lack of awareness of both how much is currently spent to little effect and the high likelihood that higher spending will feed the parasites rather than create societal benefits.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 31 2020, @09:18PM
Other countries with less US-type economic and social policies are doing better, while countries that went all in copying the USA model (UK for the last decade) are fucked. Both economically and covid-wise.'
You need to stop confusing the stock market and the real market
And reality with your fantasies.
No wonder China will beat you in terms of the largest economy in 5 years.
And you have a president pulling shit that, if it were anywhere else, you'd be screaming "coup."
You can't even run an election properly because you've got 70 million whackos, many too stupid to wear a mask during a pandemic. That's a special kind of dumb. The US and the UK - two countries that show themselves in the foot repeatedly the last 4 years. And will continue to do so.
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