SteveGerencser

I was in high school when the demoscene took off in the 80s. It forever tainted my view of software development as full of lazy programmers not bothering to optimize code as hardware got better and better. Myself included.

We are clearly talking about different things. I'm talking about protecting single home homeowners on a fixed income from being forced out of their homes. Staying in the only home she owns is not hoarding.

Telling people that the solution is to sell their home to an insurance company as a solution is most certainly a corporate land grab.

You seem to be arguing about people/corporations that own multiple homes or even entire portfolios of property. These are not the same argument.

Of course, let's let yet another corporate land grab take even more residential property off the market for profit-based motives. This can't possibly do any more harm than locking property taxes at the time of sale.

Where I live, we are looking at locking property taxes once you hit a specified age (65) and have under a specified income ($40k+/-). The current debates revolve around exactly what those numbers are and at what level the taxes get locked. The goal is to protect the elderly who have already contributed to the economy and society for 40+ years and not force them into a financial situation forcing them to sell their home just to pay even more property taxes that they have paid for the entire ownership.

So your solution is to force her to sell her home and move? Move where? I've seen this in so many areas of the country where property taxes on your property are tied to market value rather than purchase price. It drives retired and lower income people out of neighborhoods that they have lived in for decades, forcing them to move down the scale of home ownership.

Perhaps the retired person is living on a fixed income of $40k/year. Over time their proterty taxes on the home that they have lived in for decades can now be more than half of their total income? How is this fair at any level?

And it's still 100x easier than trying to add your own business or set up a Google Business Profile. Shoot a video from outside showing the buildings around you, show the address and permanent signage on the building (they don't always accept door signs), unlock the door to show that you own the space, then show the interior of the space with things like signage, letterhead, business cards, etc. Then hope that the video was 'good enough' to get a listing.

And heaven help you if you choose to get an office on an upper floor where an elevator ride is required, or you get a space in a building that also has/had a co-working space in it.

Surveys, at least here and I assume everywhere, also contain parcel numbers, the neighbor's parcel numbers, and the legal owner of each parcel's name right on the survey. Along with the date of the survey. I live in a pretty rural area where 20 acres is a small lot, so having proof of where the property lines are tends to be just as important as the title.

Not saying that this is the only reason, but it is a big reason why we have a land survey of our property on hand on paper and stored online. If something ever happened to the registry, we could at least establish our claim to our land.

I had a client send me an ACH that was legitimately a fat finger extra zero. For me, it was a "lot" of truck payments. For them, it was a rounding error that they were unaware of until I reached out and let them know about their mistake. I couldn't wait to make it right with them because it bothered me so much because suddenly I had a pile of money that was theirs and not mine.

I'm fine with a simple, basic test to be able to vote. 5 T/F questions, you only need to get 3 right to vote. Basics. Is the earth flat? Did humans land on the moon? Do brown cows produce chocolate milk? You know, the basics. If I couldn't pass such a test, I should not be allowed to vote.

I agree. I have never taken a discount from a friend or family member for work that they do for a living. It never made sense to me how anyone would want to underpay someone in their family or close circle of friends. I do however, go out of my way to make sure that they are charging what they are really worth.

I began migrating from network/hardware/IT work and into marketing after nearly 2 years of heavy lifting getting ready for Y2K. In the end, "nothing happened," so all that time and money was wasted, according to nearly every company I worked with. Even had one demand a full refund. I agreed as long as I could revert all the work that I had done. They agreed, and the next day after that their entire system collapsed.

I couldn't even get my own dad to pay for network support for his company since he would never pay my rate for anyone no matter what. After 2 other people failed to solve his problem I fixed it in 15 minutes and then he "really" didn't want to pay because it only took 15 minutes.

I was very good at what I did but got no appreciation for keeping things from breaking, only for fixing things after they broke. Marketing paid better, and I could point at real world numbers daily and justify my pay. I don't like it anywhere near as much, but at least it gets more respect than any other IT work I did.

Why would a billion-dollar company pay their employees so little that they need assistance to live? Or need to urinate in a bottle to keep their delivery times up? Greed and a belief that the rules don't apply to them.

This is a direct result of pretty much all of the LLMs using Reddit as a training tool. People are selling GEO services with reddit spam being a big part of that.

The cost for access can be surprisingly low. Not all that many years ago it was pretty cheap to pay an editor at wiki or DMOZ or any of a few dozen other 'trusted sources' on the internet to get something added, or removed. I stopped traveling in those circles a long time ago, but I know that they are still very active and the cost is still surprisingly low.

While not code level access, these sorts of things are far more common than anyone wants to admit to.

It wasn't very welcoming in the 90s either.

I got to meet Frank in the mid 90s while studying architecture in New Mexico. He was incredibly generous with his time and ideas to us students that stayed extra late to catch him touring the studios with the dean around midnight. His midnight critique of my design that was due the next morning made me throw it out and start over to include some of his ideas.

We cancelled our install after TN removed the state level breaks. It pushed the payback out past the expected lifespan of the panels (25 years). I would have been fine with a 10 year payback, but 25+ was just not worth doing.

You would be surprised how little water drop is required to cause wells to "go dry". When wells are punched into an aquifer, they stop when they hit water, they don't keep going to be deeper. A water level drop of just 2 inches caused all sorts of issues for locals when Intel built its new Fabs in New Mexico.

Intel said that it wouldn't be an issue, yet when it happened, they did nothing to help and forced a huge number of people to have to put in new wells. The same will happen in Ohio.

> don't aspire to be like Altman

Aspire to be like Aaron Schwartz.

I submitted several scientific/research papers my wife wrote or co-authored in the late 90s early 2000s and they were all flagged as AI written by multiple tools. It was good for a laugh.

Boeing merged with Lockheed/Martin when L/M was in serious trouble and rumors say it was pushed by the DOD because of all the L/M defense contracts involved. This then lead to the worst parts of L/M (management over engineering) gaining a foothold at Boeing (Engineering over Management).

The rest is a long, slow, decline into Boeing being what L/M was when they needed to be rescued.

People like Matt Cutts left Google to do exactly this. Much happier than when he was the head of the Google Search Spam team.

We are in the 45 million. When we moved here over a decade ago we were told by TDS that they were expanding their service and should be able to provide us with 50Mbs 'soon'. 10 years later we are still 5Mbs (3 in real-world situations). With no plan to expand here ever. Fortunately, the local electric company got a grant and is rolling out 1Gbs fiber to 100% of their customers. TDS couldn't do it because it wasn't 'profitable'. The electric company is fast-tracking the build-out and we should have service less than 18 months after they started.

A not-so-secret dirty little secret is that many of the reputation management agencies also own many of the public records websites that publish mug shots, court records, and so on. When you hire them to remove that information from the internet it puts you into a cycle of being removed from one or two of their website and added to something else.

You end up in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Complete with monthly fees.

Years ago Google banned BMW (I think) for their then very spammy tactics. Then they were forced to restore BMW because people searching for BMW expected to find BMW in the results.

The Google spam team has always been underfunded, and understaffed, and when the choice was 'do the right thing about spam' vs 'do the thing that is profitable', they always choose profit.

At 58, and playing 'video' games since the late 70s, I'm happily pulling the average age of gamers higher every year. Better than that, at 58 we just started work on our first video game that we have talked about making for over 20 years.

My wife (engineer) taught a class called 'Math for Teachers', which was designed to teach elementary school teachers basic math. Not how to teach it, just how to do basic math themselves. A significant number should have failed that class but the administration refused to allow her to fail teachers who were failing for 'reasons'.

She quit the job.

And that's what we did. I was working for a Rolex AD for about 10 years, and they were an AD for decades. One day they got fed up with the 'rules' and dropped their AD status and started selling Rolex on the "secondary" market. These were never worn watches in original boxes and papers and in no way different than the watch we sold as an AD. Just second-hand. We suddenly had access to the inventory that our customers wanted when they wanted it, and told Rolex to get stuffed.

And yes, watching objectively well off people argue about luxury items as if it's important is always entertaining to me.

My granddaughter and I build a ton of 'boring adult sets' together, and then she gets to take them home, tear them apart, and make anything she wants with the pieces. But she also loves Minecraft (she's 8) and we buy the Minecraft specific sets as well. It is quite possible to do all the things, it's not necessarily an either/or scenario like many people like to present as their argument against something.

Perhaps, but he does deliver. As a rural internet customer who has been told for a decade now that "fiber is coming to our area" by the local telco, I am more than happy to give Musk the benefit of the doubt as one of the cleanest players in a filthy industry full of lies and graft.