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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • You can also take a fairly selfish view and come to the same conclusion. Like, I don’t want to see homeless encampments, or really sick and untreated people, or panhandlers, or (…) while I’m walking around in my city. I can solve this problem by 1) moving to a nice suburb, or 2) having my tax dollars go to fix a problem that affects me. 1) is off the table because I want to live in the city, and 2) — while it helps the greater good — also helps me directly. (2 can also be addressed in a draconian fashion, which is not what I’m advocating at all.)

    I think one problem is looking at things as zero sum. It’s not. If you are healthy and housed and fed then you’re not — to be very crass — an eyesore, you’re adding to the fabric of the city. I want street musicians who are playing for fun, not because they’re trying to make enough to afford dinner.




  • I think (?) it’s generally true that the root user should never mess with users’ files.

    Imagine your home directory is shared across many systems on a network (my alma mater did this). It would be really bad if a sysadmin for alpha.university.edu removed a program, and suddenly your personal settings were removed from beta.university.edu — even though that computer still has the program.

    This is one of the “UNIX on the desktop” issues — a lot is designed for a sysadmin/multiuser situation, and it has some gotchas when using it as a desktop machine (I’m used to/really appreciate the directory structure and settings management at this point, but it may take some getting used to).








  • My kiddo is just a toddler, but in our VHCOL area, at this age the only thing that really matters is childcare expenses. If we had family/grandparents taking care of them, the additional cost would be pretty minimal, in the scheme of things.

    The max contribution to dependent FSA (tax free account for daycare) is a joke, less than 2mo of care.

    The material things we’ve needed probably amount to less than one month of daycare expenses (diapers notwithstanding).

    Saving for college, on the other hand…