“I’ve come to view home ownership and healthcare as destabilizing forces in my life,” said Bernie, a 45-year-old network engineer from Minneapolis. To finance owning his and his wife’s $300,000 home and saving for the future, the couple was foregoing medical and dental treatment of any kind and cutting back on expenses everywhere, he said, despite a pre-tax household income of more than $250,000.

I have no idea where in Minneapolis this person is but this is nothing like my own experience in the metro area.

My wife and I bought our home in 2021, for about the same price as he’s describing and with an income far less than theirs, and we’re expending less than 30% on our mortgage payment (including our insurance premiums and taxes). Maybe they bought theirs at the interest rate peak in 2020, whereas we bought ours when the interest rates bottomed out, but I can quite confidently say that our home is not the main burden on our finances.

What is killing us is raising food and healthcare costs, as well as our student loans. Our energy utility announced last year that they would be implementing surge pricing that could almost double our energy costs, and since the utility administers the state solar incentive program themselves, they quoted us a PV system cost almost twice what you can find on the open market (they use your average monthly energy bill to determine how much you can afford to pay for the system, which ought to be criminal). We’re getting fucked up down and sideways, but our mortgage payment is probably the most stable expense we have.

There are a lot of reasons things are shit and financially precarious, but owning my home has been a rare bright spot in our otherwise gloomy financial picture. If we were still renting, not only would we be in the same strained situation as we are now, but we’d be constantly anxious about our rent skyrocketing, too.

Home ownership isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but the alternative of renting is often just as expensive - on top of being at the whims of landlords. They’ve been publishing articles for a decade now trying to convince people that home ownership is overrated and renting is the way of the future, and I really wish I could trust them to report on it transparently.

As a rule I don’t announce my trackers publicly so they can continue existing as my trackers, but the one I use mostly is small-rodent themed.

I’ll DM you

I get my linux distros via torrent networks, mostly

As someone who likes to have a fallback way of purchasing digital content that I can remove DRM from, this annoys me.

I can still purchase mp3 and flac files from various online retailers, and I can rip bluray for my movies and tv shows, but now I need a new place to purchase ebooks that are downloadable. Anyone have any recommendations? The first few independent retailers i’ve found seem to require their own apps.

It’s been a while since I’ve heard about libgen and aa - and actually i’m not sure how they operate with direct downloads of copyrighted material? I find my ebooks through more conventional p2p means, but i’ve always just assumed that was necessary to avoid sudden takedowns

Lmao, yea I think they’re kind of playing a game with language here.

After doing some reading of various explanations, what they mean when they say they aren’t using electrons for computation is basically that the ‘thing’ they’re measuring that dictates the ‘state’ of the transistor is a quasi-particle… but that particle is only observed through the altered behavior of electrons (i guess in the case of the majorana particle, it appears as two electrons gathered together in synchrony?)

So the chip is still using electrons in its computation in the same say as a traditional transistor - you are still sending electrons into a circuit, and the ‘state’ of the bit is determined by the output signal. It’s just that, in this case, they’re looking for specific behavior of the electrons that indicate the presence and state of this ‘qbit’

That is just my layman’s understanding of it

Microsoft isn’t using electrons for the compute in this new chip; it’s using the Majorana particle that theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana described in 1937.

Ok now i’m gonna need an explain-like-i’m-not-a-quantum-scientist on what a ‘topological transistor’ is, and what it uses instead of electrons for its compute (and, like, what is the significance?)

I honestly think social media and internet subculture would be fine if it weren’t soured by moneyed interests

If work wasn’t so alienating and all-encompassing and we weren’t so stressed and insecure in our material conditions, then we wouldnt run to social media as an escape. If wasn’t also so rife with consumerist culture and advertisements it wouldnt be so corrosive. Maybe then we could use it to create communities that mirror and bridge into irl spaces and create meaningful relationships.

Instead, the entire network has been constructed around a capitalist organization and it only serves to make us more miserable.

In another universe, Meta is being sued for having leeched without seeding

Characterizing that as ‘unawareness’ is a little too charitable, I think.

Fair enough, but if you’re trying to avoid data collection then open-sourced projects are preferable

Preaching to the choir here but LibreOffice has been excellent since my MSOffice license expired. Unless you’re working in an enterprise setting with MS-specific macros or online collaboration, there’s no reason to be paying for basic document editing software in 2025.

There are also self-hosted and open-sourced collaborative editing suites available that I haven’t tried yet, but there are plenty of options

Was something supposed to happen?

There has been no official announcement that such a change is coming, but Reddit commenters speculated that possibly the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was requiring a change to stop American TikTokers from using the app to influence Chinese citizens.

Ah, that trustworthy and unbiased group of China experts that are Redditors

Two sentences before this they were explaining quite clearly why chinese users might actually be bothered by the flood of american users and why they might want the ability to filter by IP region, but because some redditors speculated that the SeeSeePee doesn’t want the Americans to spread their freedom-loving germs to their country then that must be why they’d do it, if that rumor were to be proven true

Not a chance lol

Most americans don’t know a single thing about China, but almost every one of them would tell you that it’s a anti-free speech hellscape.

The only thing that matters is that it originated in China. Nothing else they do could change the opinion of the american public.

Meta is already a willing partner of the USSD, they don’t need to ‘make an example’.

OK, so lets say they moderated it the same way here as they did in China… All good now?

I don’t think it matters at all how tiktok is actually being managed or moderated in the US - Americans simply do not trust anything Chinese.

The cold war never ended.

I honestly cannot tell if this is parody.

I’d imagine operating a quantum computer for blanket surveillance is cost-prohibitive, but yea, if you’ve given them reason to look at you just assume they have the means to break your encryption.

maybe it’s because i’ve been watching too much of the office lately but I expected you to end this comment with: