I agree. I don’t think people should be expected to do all this to be treated like they matter in a society. I do it because I don’t want to go back to living in my car, but the process offers me daily reminders of how our system is thoroughly rigged in favor of commercial interests and against the human who wishes to live as a human.

No joke, once you start structuring your life as a business, especially as formal corporations, the amount of financial, legal, and professional advantages, opportunities, and protection that appear are incredible. For example, did you know that …

1. … as an S corp, you can “pass through” the profit and loss of your business, such that your personal gross income excludes business expenses?
2. … the employer match on a 401k account is considered a business expense?
3. … the actual annual cap on employer contributions to various retirement vehicles are in fact much, much higher than employers are typically willing to offer you as a benefit?
4. … the terms of commercial factoring, mortgages and loans are often far more agreeable than consumer equivalents?
5. … many of the places where you shop offer discounts to business accounts (and not just for volume, simply because you’re a business)?
6. … it’s considered normal/SOP to request edits to many types of agreements individuals are expected to simply accept without question, including leases offered by landlords?

This is just a sample. Most endeavors and many functional aspects of personal life are by design simpler, safer, more scalable, and more profitable if planned and executed as a business rather than an individual in the late great United States of America.

I’m curious about this. If demonstrable, it seems many Canadians could sue.

What is the typical user workflow? For example:

1. An embedded Adobe applet (e.g. fill, sign, and submit on the government website)
2. Token-based API (e.g. redirect or spawn child window/tab, user fills and signs on adobe site, user returned to government site)
3. Something else (e.g. upload button with server-side validation for digital signing)

Edit: looked into this a bit. Did you receive an error message like the following?

This document does not allow you to save any changes you have made to it unless you are using Adobe Acrobat Standard DC or Adobe Acrobat Pro DC

(Regardless it’s totally shitty that government websites recommend a specific company’s software, especially Adobe. I’m just trying to figure out if they actually force citizens to pay a private company.)

I agree re: DS9 and SW with the recent but noteworthy exception of “Andor.”

Estate tax reform and/or UBI

What is the breaker box in your analogy? Breaking legs?

lol I meant a [circuit] breaker box (aka power/ac panel, breaker panel, distribution board, etc)

So how do you suspend a license that the guy didn’t have?

It’s just a minor legal misnomer. If a defendant happens to not have a driver’s license in the first place, suspension could be more accurately termed “prevention.” Logistically speaking, the state probably just generates a stub file/account with a valid license number then just adds the suspension to that empty driving record.

“Necessary but not sufficient condition,” e.g. the light in your room might be off, but “suspending your light privileges” is easy at the breaker box.

The trick is to save many jars of the stuff, so you can really go out in style.

Don’t set yourself on fire just to keep others warm.

I’ve heard this truism my whole life, and glibly repeated it myself at least a few times. But we must acknowledge that it expresses a morally defeatist attitude that poisons the person who actually lives by it.

Instead you can reconcile kindness by being more observant. Some “good deeds” aren’t actually that good, since their extended effects amount to an unkindness to yourself or those you love.

For example, let’s say someone asks you to donate to a just cause, or loan them some money in a difficult time. If doing so means your family goes hungry or can’t afford clothes, it might not be such a good deed after all.

More subtle examples involve your time, such as helping someone by staying late at work, or spending hours listening to someone who really should get professional help instead.

Ultimately, it’s not true that “no good deed goes unpunished,” but even if it were, it doesn’t matter, because helping people is its own reward.

Don’t avoid being good to others, as this truism suggests, just ensure you’re being good to yourself as well.

Right-Wing Authoritarianism is a well-studied, if controversial, and ostensibly hereditary psychosocial predisposition that strongly predicts a number of psychiatric comorbidities often associated with acute cerebral trauma.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism

Yeah he did the job! Now If his MAGA friends doxx him, we gotta make a strong showing of solidarity for our neighbor who wasn’t a total asshole. Fair’s fair.

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Oh shit, that is worse.

This got me good. I’m imagining a bro from Staten Island stuck in a dusty quiet room with bad coffee and New Yorkers from every borough 100% ready to cook.

He can’t log off. He can’t flee to his safe spaces. He can’t feed himself reassuring 4chan memes. He’s exposed. These are his neighbors. There’s nowhere to run. Will his fear and adoration of a wannabe dictator sustain him? Tune in next week to find out.

If you are a disregarded entity, are not currently and do not in the next 6 or 12 months expect to make enough profit for an AGI above a certain percentage of the FPL, and your state has Medicaid, you can apply for Medicaid with dependents using recent profit and loss reports to substantiate your effective self-employment income.

Well it’s not standardized yet to my knowledge, but for example if we used something like the USB-PD protocol it could be a baseline 5 volts, with device negotiated step up to 9, 12, 15, 24, 28, 36, and 48. Higher voltage isn’t out of the question; EV systems safely run closer to 400 and a number of home batteries range up to 600, but I’d be iffy on the idea of the average contractor putting that voltage in the walls of the average home.

It’s true the copper for longer, higher current, or lower voltage DC runs could get very expensive, but even without HV for distance, thoughtful distribution of storage to expected points of delivery would limit the number of heavy lines needed for current spikes.

Long short, I’m not talking about switching entirely from AC, or pumping DC power through existing residential circuits. I’m talking about adding a secondary system that’s a more integrated version of the ubiquitous portable power station / “solar generator” batteries. It would be a home modernization upgrade, similar to running Ethernet to PoE enabled jacks in each room, installing a fancy intercom system, or what have you.

These micro inverters are a cool near-term portable solution for those looking to dip their toes into home energy storage. Ultimately, I hope we see residential DC electrical become more commonplace soon. That will make the grid integration that this tackles a non-issue for most (i.e. those who aren’t selling their excess solar capacity) but will ultimately be simpler and more efficient for the grid as a whole.

The average home has only a few devices left that still use AC internally (mostly large or old appliances) and home storage systems lose energy to power conversion overhead in both directions at multiple stages. Since each conversion represents a loss of up to 20%, the AC standard introduces an increasing amount of unnecessary friction close to the point of delivery.

Illustration: if your home charges from the grid, that’s one conversion AC —> DC. If you then use that power to charge an electric vehicle, that’s two additional conversions AC —> DC —> AC —> DC (currently few EVs support DC charging unfortunately). If you then charge your laptop in the car using the official charger, that’s two more conversions AC —> DC —> AC —> DC —> AC —> DC. Altogether this requires about 3x as much power than necessary with residential DC electrical, since then the power can go from solar to storage to car to laptop without the need for power inverters.

Go camping together. Nothing fancy, just a weekend at a park with a small tent and backpacks.

Let your team know you’ll be unreachable. Once there, phones off. No working. Just walk and talk, rest and eat, explore your surroundings, focus on what and who is in front of you.

You may not sleep well on night 1, but you will on night 2, especially if you covered some ground that day. The morning after night 3, however, will be the most well-rested you’ve felt in a some time. The effect carries to subsequent nights, then eventually wears off, but can give you the chance to restructure your days for better sleep in the long term. Use as needed.