Sounding off as another kagi user. It’s great. If the company doesn’t do anything extra stupid or come out pro-techno fascist they’ll have my business for life.
If for no other reason than to decrease my digital footprint, get rid of ads, and pay billionaires less.
I’m self-hosting my own music as of recently. I’m paying for every song. I don’t have as much music as I did on Spotify, but I’m also A) owning the music B) slowly acquiring more and C) actually paying the artists. For me this is a good step in the right direction.
I’m seeing a lot of comments about music discovery being the reason to not stop paying Spotify. Idk if that’s something I’d agree with. First of all, I personally listen to singles and not albums but I’ve been buying albums simply because that’s easiest for a lot of sites (or cause I’m getting them on vinyl). So swapping over has led me to listening to full albums and thus a bit of discovery. That may not apply to everyone though. Several of those albums or artists have had collabs that have turned me on to other artists, again, maybe the music discovery people think this is child’s play but it’s led to a noticable increase in my collection.
Second, can’t you just use Spotify free version to discover music? That’s what I plan to do if I’m feeling like my current collection is getting stale. But between friends, other web services for discovery, various platforms like YouTube that happen to unveil a song here and there, indie concerts that show off new openers to me, or what have you I feel like my discovery is more than sufficient to grow the list of music I need to pick up faster than I’m burning it down or becoming bored with it.
Also, I don’t understand how discovery can represent a majority of a person’s listening habits. Like isn’t the point of collecting favorites songs and making large playlists to listen to those things. I’ve got playlists with like 48 hours of music on them which cause me to not hear a repeat idk, more than once a month if I’m not seeking them out. That’s partially because I have 3 playlists or so I rotate through but like… Is music discovery so critical and so exclusive to Spotify that it’s worth the subscription. More me it’s not.
Not to yuck anyone’s yum or anything. Just trying to add an alternative perspective to these pro-spotify comments.
I liked the technical discussion so thank you. Keep it up, I got into this career because there was always so much to learn.
Ya, I can’t believe how negative people are towards LTT. That channel is the reason I de-googled when I did, dove into home assistant, even checked out Linux (and now use arch full time by the way). I’m not super interested in defending a company let alone a YouTube personality, but like Jesus Christ some most of the people commenting negatively about LTT need to chill the fuck out. They’re not that bad, they clearly pay people well, they’re open and honest about most shit. If your bullshit detector is going off with LTT I think it needs tuning because you’re probably hitting a lot of false negatives IMHO.
I have no doubt being as wealthy as Linus is is changing him, I have no doubt that’s effecting the company, but there’s nothing I’m seeing as a regular watcher that is glaringly bad or evil and I recognize in myself I’m actively starting to default to “fuck off” for millionaires so like ┐(￣ヘ￣)┌. I don’t think the channel is getting grandfathered in on that clause either, they just seem to like people doing their best.
I don’t like Linus’s time-theft stance as of late, the most recent multi monitors vid had a comedic discussion between him and an employee and I recognize his job in that role is to be the straight man and say time charging fraud is theft or whatever but it feels out of touch. That’s a negative thing I can point to I guess. Am I gonna consider Linus or LTTY evil or shit because he’s vocal about theft being theft even though I think corpos can fuck off because they’re getting more productivity then we’re getting paid - no, no I’m not.
Ah, to own a house… Wouldn’t that be neat? And imagine if it wasn’t a piece of shit produced at the lowest cost possible by overworked and underpaid builders. Hell, imagine a custom house for my particular tastes!
What a world we could live in if we just taxed the rich out of existence and owned a portion of our work place.
It seems you’ve been scorned from treating investing as gambling and I’m sorry to hear that but that’s not how this works. Yes, markets can go down and you can lose money but:
This is all calculatable. The problem is we’re all paying for some jackass’s yacht when we should be paying for community rail and affordable housing.
Buddy, you seem to have a problem around investments because again that’s not how this works. You shouldn’t be investing in individual stocks unless you like gambling or have insider information (which is supposed illegal but the US is really showing that it’s not as of late). You should be invested in broad index funds, like ETFs, which track the entire market (to simplify they own a fraction of every company on the market). The market, over the long run, always goes up so you always win (although again, with the US in very interested in understanding what happens when a country collapsed, from what I read about Germany it was actually surprisingly fine if I’m not mistaken).
You seem to be looking at investing as a way to get rich quickly, a gamble that may pay off. But good investing is slow, consistent growth that guarantees a safe retirement (but also unfortunately does not give us an escape from this capitalist hell hole of permanent work).
100% I would do that but that’s a bit unfair because:
I just don’t expect to stop working in retirement, I just plan to work doing stuff I love instead of stuff that pays well.
So if anyone in the comments is a wealthy person or dying with no heirs feel free to send me enough money to retire. I would love to create things for people for the rest of my life and not worry about anything but if I could afford a thing I don’t need and if my hobbies are worthy of other people’s time/attention.
Investing in an index fund can net you an income of between 3-10% per year on average. I think most people estimate between 4 and 6 % when talking about retirement. This post ignores providing any monetary values but your question makes it seem like investing is magical and arcane and will inevitably go to zero but that’s simply not the case.
If you had 100 dollars in investments every year, on average, you could spend 4 dollars and that 100 bucks would never disappear. You’d have a 4 dollar income for as long as you live; let’s call that your permanent income. If you had 1 million in investments you’d have a permanent income of 40k. At some point, you have enough money in investments that you could quit your job and live within your means for forever.
At some point you have so much money you could never spend your entire permanent income even if you live an extravagant lifestyle and you have to reinvest the returns by buying more assets (which then further increases your permanent income).
We should tax that second group of people more. I’d argue out of existence as there should be a cap in the amount of wealth a person should be allowed to have.
Unless all of the rich megadoners die at the same instance, nothing will fundamentally change. We’re in a class war, not a Democrat vs Republican war. Trump may be the man leading the consolidation of power push today, but the reason that movement is working is the environment being ripe for the movement.
Trump dies and the minimum wage doesn’t go up, fox news doesn’t dissolve, and taxes on the rich sure as hell don’t start up. Nothing fundamentally changes, and with the state of all the fundamental and important agencies worsened and delegitimized things probably worsen significantly for those orgs and their services in the short term while power is redistributed, reconsolidated, and resolidified.
Trump dying would likely just be the temporary slow down of the currently inevitable decline. You’re right to say things get more chaotic and there is a large opportunity for things to improve or change - but believing the GOP disappears, and therefore we enter into a utopia, seems to ignore the underlying cause for their existence in the first place. The rich and powerful want to remain rich and powerful, and ideally become more so, at the expense of everyone else so they fund systems that further those goals.
Crawl - technically pvp, arcade game Overcooked - try to manage a kitchen together Duck Game - completely pvp, ducks with guns, very fun
Why does this website claim DOGE saved any money?
I’ve got him tagged as “likes Elon” just as a heads up.
That makes sense. My point isn’t to tax the property it’s that the property is taxed, if that makes any sense. You tax based on the property, it traces to the owner, the owner gets taxed based on the property. If the owner lives in Beijing or Antarctica the property is still here and gets taxed, they can’t avoid it by moving unless they can take the property.
So in that case, an exempt amount is fine. I’d just want it to be steep up to a point where it’s 98 or 100%.
No one gets a third house before everyone gets one kinda thing. And also no one is allowed to have enough wealth they can destabilize democracy or even a city.
I mean if the billionaires own the houses and factories and land it’s the same thing right?
Although I appreciate the thought here, and I think the investment idea may even be good regardless of what I’m about to say, that’s not exactly how this works. If you tax the assets the rich own, where they own them, it doesn’t matter where they go. And they can’t live in Germany and not get taxed, so they can change citizenship all they want if they live here they will get taxed here. And based off of the most recent studies/reports I’ve seen (but not read) rich don’t actually move when taxes go up - which makes sense. People have lives, family, friends, favorite restaurants and hobby spaces.
The rich will try to dodge the taxes, they may even succeed but we don’t have to legistate a bullet proof solution we just have to agree:
But yes, I’m a big fan of no outside investment. I’m also a fan of government investment requiring ownership purchases. I’m also a fan of requiring companies to be partially or totally owned by their workers. And I don’t think anyone should have a net worth over let’s say 50 million.
Merz is predictable and a traitor to the German people. He will usher in the fascist power grab through conservative policies - the AFD will grow in popularity as conservatives protect the 1%.
Die Linke’s tax plan would have paid for the yearly debt of the government and then some; their secret - tax the wealthy.
We can afford all of our costs, we can improve society, we can provide a thriving economy for all Germans if we simply tax the ultra wealthy out of existence. No one should have a billion euro net worth, nor 100 million nor 50 million. No one need own 3 houses while others go without even a flat.
We have enough wealth in this country, it’s just in the hands of the hoarders. Don’t look towards conservatives or the right for change, look towards those that address the root problem!
You’re missing the point I think. People want better politicians, Democrats are better than Republicans meaningfully but not so meaningfully that they could fix the issues we’re seeing in society. People like Cuomo and Newson are just power hungry people, who may be better than Trump but the people won’t be satisfied with replacing their turd sandwich with ultra processed fast food, they want a healthy nutritious meal. Newson is fast food, it’s a meaningful step up from turd sandwich but it won’t fix the American diet.
It’s Germany being upset at the traffic light coalition and then electing Merz. They went from one back stabbing party to unhealthy and destructive fast food. This will only upset people enough to eventually elect their version of a turd sandwich - the AFD.
/thread
We left this month, wife is moving to YouTube premium as a way to ease her out of straming services and I’m building our collection of music every month through self-hosting so when she’s ready there’s a large library for her.
It’s been great buying music from artists and listening to whole albums which is not something I normally do.
Spotify doesn’t support their artists as far as I’m aware, what money they do spend on creators it’s people like Joe Rogan, and they continue to increase the price every month. I’m tired of paying for techno fascist’s next Yacht (or election) and this is just one way we’re slowly pulling away from subscriptions.