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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: February 23rd, 2024

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  • I make a little more than double the cap. I’m in favor of increasing or eliminating the cap but that would double my check in the future. (Not quite, I haven’t made double the cap my entire working life, but it would increase it a lot.) That would still help a bit because not all of our withholdings go to basic social security. Some goes to disability, spousal benefits, etc. Increasing taxes and benefits proportionally, which is the way benefits are structured now, doesn’t solve anything.

    I believe social security has a lot of value so I’m in favor of not just fixing the funding, but expanding it as well. But if you want to make it healthier just with payroll taxes they would have to be progressive, like income tax, without increasing benefits.



  • Depends on your definition of crash. If you mean it starts in the air, some occurred on the ground. If you click through to the GA tab on the NTSB stats it breaks them down and you can see standing and taxi accidents. Unfortunately it’s a total from 2008-2022, but for those 15 years 457 were in taxi and 276 were standing so on average about 50 a year.

    Edit: For the NTSB accident vs. incident is defined by substantial damage, death, or serious injury. I’m not sure exactly what counts as substantial, but I think it meets a generic definition of crash.


  • It’s absolutely true. General aviation aircraft crash all the time, more than once a day.

    For some reason I couldn’t find an FAA Administrator’s Fact Book for anything more recent than 2012 (statistics for 2011 on most things, 2010 for some).

    In 2011 there were 1450 general aviation accidents, about four a day.

    In 2010 there were 450 general aviation fatalities.

    Source

    Edit: Here are some NTSB numbers for 2022. General aviation had 1205 accidents and 214 were fatal with a total of 339 fatalities.





  • Oh yeah, it’s absolutely a very interesting period in Japanese history and if Cruise’s character was used as a symbol of the fear of westernization of Japan post Meiji Restoration, that would be cool. Most of the criticism revolved around Hollywood’s habit of using western actors to tell other people’s stories. Samurai being is own plural form is just a happy accident that makes the jokes easier.

    But he was just there as a big name for box office draw, and probably as an excuse to ditch a lot of subtitles. If I’m inclined to be ungenerous, I have a few other suspicions as well.

    It’s kind of like Kundun vs. Seven Years in Tibet. It’s as if a studio executive said “Yeah, that’s a great story, but let’s stick Brad Pitt in there to put asses in seats.” But at least with the latter, it was based on a book written by the real life traveler.




  • It’s not even just cheapo stuff anymore. They’ve really stepped up their game in the last several years, with ICE and a good range of EVs. I know a few people that have Hyundai EVs, and they all love them.

    Their Genesis badge is also legit luxury. I would say they might be the best value in luxury cars right now because they can’t yet command the price the more established brands can.

    These aren’t the shitty tin cans from when I was younger. If you’re looking for a new car don’t dismiss KIA/Hyundai/Genesis without checking them out.







  • I think part of the difficulty discussing this is the discussions usually combine two different things. The production and distribution.

    I was informed elsewhere in this thread people can already produce these images/videos on their own machines with no third parties involved or remote processing. I can’t think of a single thing that can be done about that so acceptance is all we’ve got.

    Nonconsensual sharing, on the other hand, we can and should do something about. The legal system won’t be able to stop it altogether but it can push it to the fringes and stop it from becoming mainstream so any victims wouldn’t see fake images/videos of themselves proliferating everywhere.