Tax unrealized gains

“Oh, but that’s not real money, they’d have to sell their assets to get the cash to pay those taxes, thus diminishing the value of the assets.”

Oh, so the value of the assets is over valued then? So them taking out loans with those assets as the collateral is fundamentally allowing them to take out more money from the financial system than they are realistically due? Damn, tax their fucking loans against their assets as well.

“NOOO! That’s not fair! Then they’re paying a higher tax rate than specified by the law!”

Crazy how that works, crazy how tax rates actually payed can be different from those specified in the laws. Hey did you know that Warren Buffet pays effectively a lower tax rate than his laundry lady, being stated as unjust by himself. Crazy how right now people working for wages get taxed way more than people working for asset valuations.

… shut!

the leadership at a lot of companies have a very poor read on public sentiment, kind of strange given how much data they collect and how much they like to talk about how good they are at using that data.

And a lot of high level leadership at collages run in the same circles are executives at big companies. These speech events are sort of a benefit for both sides, the leadership at the collage gets to advertise what a good job they’re doing that they were able to get someone so influential to speak, and the speaker gets a sudo-academic platform to state their ideas and an ego boost from the huge in person captive audience.

A lot of them just kind of write off the discontent they see as “a vocal minority”, so when mass confronted with actual public sentiment, i do think it kind of blind sides them.

I think, she has a very small set of sincerely held beliefs, one of them being that the US should completely disengage from all foreign entanglements.

I think that she tried to seek opportunities to gain influence and power in the Democratic Party to enforce those goals, she was disillusioned and saw no route for her self there, so she pivoted to maga because it looked easier to advance to a position of power within. She was willing to say and do anything to get that position where she could pursue her deeply held belief, and she got there, and found that by the very nature of the easy power, she had completely given up any autonomy to act upon her beliefs.

Now, it’s pretty clear that this is not the beginning of a political movement she can harness, but the death of one that used her, she’s stepping away to not be associated with the worse to come. Maybe she’ll be able to salvage a career of some sort, but really, the best she can hope for is not be noted in history text books as a key player in the clusterfuck coming.

So, it’s not just benzene but a whole cocktail of aromatics (carbon molecules with rings in them) in addition to the ethane which is used to make poly ethylene plastic.

To answer your question, no, they never alter production for the sake of making more plastic, rather changes in production are driven by the availability of certain types of crude oil (heavy vs light, sweet vs sour) and demand for certain types of fuel. These changes result In more or less production of plastic precursors as a side effect.

Demand for plastic is almost entirely driven by the availability of the precursors, more supply means a lower price, means more uses for plastic become cost effective and displace other materials. They make far more money selling fuels than they do selling plastics. The margins on fuels are much higher as plastic requires additional inputs, additional manufacturing/processing, and additional marketing to be sold.

The fuel sales are effectively subsidizing the cost of plastic, as it would not be cost effective to produce on its own. Other, cheaper, and easier to manufacture materials would displace its uses if it wasn’t already being produced as a byproduct of fuel.

Actually it was a response to local governments attempting to ban plastic packaging. You know, because they were the ones who had to pay for disposing of it.

Glass bottles of milk or soda got picked up and re-used by the companies that sold stuff in them, metal cans got bought up for use as scrap metal. Municipal garbage only had to deal with stuff like wood, paper, cardboard, and food scraps; stuff that rotted and broke down over time. Plastic though, well, it didn’t break down, it filled up the dumps, and suddenly towns had to constantly be digging new dumps. This was expensive and a bunch of local governments started banning the use of single use plastic packaging. Oil/plastic lobbyists went to state governments and got them to ban the local bans.

Of course this was going to be unpopular, so they also spent a bunch of money funding PR blitz’s to convince everyone plastic recycling was viable, and that it was actually the responsibility of average consumers and municipalities to implement it. And now local governments are burdened with the cost of dealing with all the waste generated by oil and plastic companies.

And in real life, the shredder is plastic packaging and junk that everyone else has to dispose of when they’re done with it. Not the oil companies problem, now it’s the responsibility of local municipal governments. Your tax dollars subsidizing the disposal of oil company byproducts.

So, there are certain products of refining oil that are just in the wrong range of properties to be used in their own right as fuels, over a century of work has gone in to finding uses for the stuff that can’t be fuels, or performing alchemy to make it in to fuel, what’s left over at this point is stuff that just… can’t be made in to fuel. Some of the thickest, densest gunk gets turned in to asphalt for roads, this is called bitumen. Above that is heavy oil used in ships or for heating, then diesel, then kerosene/jetfuel, then Naphtha, then petrol/gasoline, and then stuff like butane and propane.

Naphtha is just in this weird space where it’s too thick to be useful for places where you need the fuel to vaporize in to a gas easily like butane or gasoline, but to light to be used in something where you need it to stay liquid at high temperatures, like diesel. Lots of stuff was tried to find a usage for Naphtha but none of it was economical or had a large enough demand to use enough of it. So they started doing catalytic reformation to it, basically smashing the molecules up to make them lighter. This produces a new mix of stuff, the heavier bits are added to gasoline to raises its octane, but the lighter half of this stuff is too short for use in gas. This lighter stuff is mix of some useful stuff like butane and propane, but then there is ethane and a mix of weird aromatic compounds. These are just not useful as fuels and there isn’t an affordable way to process them in to fuels. So… something needs to be done with them; just venting them is not an option because a lot of it is super carcinogenic stuff like benzene.

And this is the issue, this is the bottom of the barrel left overs after so much processing, it can’t be dumped, it can’t be sold as fuel. It’s only useful as chemical feedstocks for making various plastics and chemicals. If we’re going to refine oil to make diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline, we’re gonna end up with these byproducts and we’re spent a century trying to figure out how to use them as fuel, and there just isn’t an economical way to do so. Ether the fuels get way more expensive to cover the costs of disposing of the junk safely, or they get passed along as plastics, chemicals, and asphalt for everyone else to deal with when they’re not useful anymore.

Yah, but hear me out, growing trees doesn’t make the planet get hotter.

“ NOOO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND BRO! OUR BUSINESS MODEL DOESN’T WORK IF WE CAN’T DO MASS SURVELIANCE BRO!”

I don’t think third party hardware is even a good excuse for Microsoft. Like sure, they’re working with third parties on hardware for the most part, but most of the manufacturers are targeting their software.

Meanwhile most linux distros and desktops will run fine on 4 gigs, and they’re doing most of the work to get their stuff compatible with the hard wear.

Even when Apple was running on intel chips, they were still way better about resource usage than Microsoft was.

I think Microsoft is just… really bad at making an OS because they’ve been coasting on being the default for so long that they didn’t have to care about optimization, manufacturers were just obligated to target what ever bloat-wear they put out.

Yah, Apple is hungry and coming to eat Microsoft’s lunch.

Most distros are fairly light weight by default, it’s the desktop environment that will be the deciding factor. Someone else said they were running Debian with XFCE on a 2 gig system.

There are other lightweight desktops but XFCE is quite good.

But you might not even need that unless it’s a really old or really low spec laptop. I’ve got a 2012 MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of ram running Arch with KDE plasma and it’s quite snappy. Although, it did run out of memory once when I tried compiling a browser from the AUR.

Plastic recycling basically everywhere is a scam. It requires direct government subsidization to be cost competitive with new plastic. Companies actually advertising that they do it or could do it are missing the forest for the trees or just greenwashing.

Because plastic is a byproduct of oil production. It is a way to get rid of fractions of oil that are not used as fuel. No matter how efficient plastic recycling gets, it will never be cost competitive with new plastic. Refineries will just drop the price of the new plastic to ensure all of it gets sold, since if they couldn’t sell it, they would have to pay to dispose of it.

The real value of plastics isn’t that they’re good materials for things, it’s that they’re a way for oil companies to push the responsibility of disposing of their waste products on to public waste management by laundering it through packaging and cheap junk.

I mean, I wouldn’t say it’s that extreme, but a lot of the data labeling needed for training/post-training is done by people in slave like conditions.

There have absolutely been cases of that kind of menial computer work being done through slave labor, notably a lot of pig butchering scams. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that through a chain of outsourcing and independent contractors, some data labeling work is being done through slave labor.

I mean, Microsoft’s biggest mistake was shoving it in front of everyone’s faces. The real reason that all the other “agentic BS” is received well is because the people who use them have an actual use case, or, are very enthusiastic about the technology and enjoy messing with it. Thus the discussion is mostly from that small group of people who will have something positive to say.

The truth is, that all the models and harnesses suck for most use cases that most people have. When you shove it in front of a general audience and make them interact with it, then the discussion will be about how bad it is.

Gondwana, Laurasia, Pangaea.

An impact on early education stunting people’s reading capabilities wouldn’t show up for about 10~20 years… so… between 2015 and now is where the impact would be most obvious.

There are of course other factors, such as the cost cutting and underpaying of teachers leading to shortages and larger class sizes, but the introduction of whole language absolutely lines up with the dramatic spike seen recently in functionally illiterate young adults/teens, if you account for the fact that the effects wouldn’t be fully manifested until people taught it in kindergarten reached a point where they’re expected to be functionally literate teens and young adults.

A big part of the issue is a lot of states abandoning “phonic” based teaching for “whole language”. In phonics the focus is on teaching how letters come together to form the sound of a word, while whole language is based on just memorizing the pronunciation of words. kids being taught how to sound out words will take longer to get to a point of being able to read out short simple text, but whole language can get them reading simple stuff with all the words they’ve already been taught very quickly.

The problem is that when you move past simple stuff only using words they’ve memorized, a kid taught to sound out words will be able to figure out words they haven’t seen before, meaning that they can start to learn new words passively just by reading more complex books. The whole language taught kids need to learn every new word by instruction or by just guessing based on context, making it much harder and slower. It gets frustrating quickly and kids taught this way rarely develop a real interest in reading due to that difficulty.

Arch is fairly easy in my experience to install. I did install in manually once and that took a while but wasn’t difficult.

Since then I’ve just connected to WiFi then just run the arch install script which is prepackaged in the ISO now.

Actually using it has had minimal issues except for the time I didn’t use the machine it was on for a few months and couldn’t get it to update because the signing keys for stuff was out of date. That and an issue with running out of memory when trying to compile a browser from the AUR (I just installed it through flatpack instead).