I feel like there’s got to be a decent middle ground between a pinned post that pushes this in front of everyone and requires further mod comments to try and stave off harassment and silently letting anyone who notices find the mod logs and make their own judgements of everyone involved. Like, in the absence of an actual announcement I think people would absolutely come to their own much more inflammatory conclusions if/when they noticed regardless of what the removed mod does, and the removed mod could make things into an absolute shit storm (which they don’t appear to be trying to do as far as I can tell, to their credit). But on the flip side, the way this post is set up is also an escalation in its own right and represents a more aggressive use of power by the remaining mods than was absolutely necessary.

If blahaj.zone has an instance business forum then making the full statement there (where it won’t get pushed out of sight as fast as the 196 churn would do to a non-stickied post) and linking it may have been wiser, since it preserves the immediate statement without shoving it to the top of everyone’s plate, and would still allow a stickied post on 196 itself if the situation escalated and it became more necessary.

I dunno, mod shit is hard and I’m glad I get to armchair quarterback it rather than actually making these decisions in real time. Props to the full mod team for keeping the chaos of 196 from turning toxic and destructive for however long it’s been here.

MYbe they meant to say “it’s not optional” instead?

Secretly?

My town’s pride event was this weekend. Regrettably the heat and social anxiety in my family won out over heading down there but even so please know that I did remember this exchange. You are still seen and recognized and valid, at least in whatever small ways a stranger on Lemmy can offer.

Stay safe out there.

For anyone else who was curious about the religious context, Luke 15 is about how much God loves repentance, featuring most famously the parable of the Prodigal Son.

You know, some cities (at least one because I live here) delay their local pride celebration until July to avoid competing with larger cities in the local metro area. Don’t get too comfortable if you want to avoid being seen and celebrated, is what I’m saying.

Also, I showed this to my wife since we’re all going through it, and she points out that that burger looks like it knows what an Atari is.

This may be true in the general case, but if you consider that my depression and anxiety make me vaguely megalomaniacal you would understand that I am different and uniquely terrible for having literally any problems ever.

My wife keeps lamenting that we haven’t found ways to help pet rats live as long as cats but I don’t think this is what she had in mind.

So did anyone else read the terrible Star wars novel “Darksaber” about the Hutts hiring one of the architects of the death star to build their own in order to hold planets hostage or something, and while the new Republic is trying to rally the gang to go do what they do to death stars the Hutts are so busy cutting corners and embezzling that when they go to turn the thing on for the first time it just fucking explodes?

I don’t know why that’s coming to mind right now.

Maybe my experiences are unusual, but I’ve seen more harassment and general shittiness from other commuters than I ever have from homeless people camping nearby. Not saying it doesn’t happen, but I feel like we’re back to the problem of harassment and violence already being illegal. Going back to the immediate question here, removing the benches doesn’t make harassment or assholery any more difficult or more consequential.

I mean it seems like a lot of that could be avoided by, for example, keeping the goddamn bathrooms open (or making there be public bathrooms). Drugs are already illegal. The station is still a roof over your head, making it preferable to the street whether or not there are benches.

Ironically it seems like the most direct harm done by homeless people sleeping on the benches is that those benches aren’t usable by commuters who may need to rest. And this certainly makes that problem go away, I guess. Wouldn’t exactly call it solved.

If I understand it correctly I think the most important part of the process is simply the fact that it’s putting some share of your current income into an actual growth investment. DCA in that sense is less about getting a better return on your overall investment, and more about starting to build those long-term investments in a way that has a predictable and minimal impact on your day-to-day household budget. It’s not answering the question of “what should invest in” but rather “how do I start investing?”. In that sense I guess we should probably be more clear that you can DCA into actual solid long-term investments rather than throwing your money at crypto. Hell it would probably be less destructive on net to take your monthly DCA to the literal casino and put it all on black.

That actually raises an interesting point. I would be curious to see if DCA is actually doing some harm mitigation by giving the truly pilled victims a maximum that they’re going to throw to the grifters, compared to how often people set it as a minimum amount of money. If they weren’t DCAing would they be investing less by waiting to see what was left at the end of the budget or more by not bothering to seriously plan their expenses at all?

Rather than trying to efficiently buy a diverse portfolio by investing in areas that are cheaper at the current time, which sounds like what you’re describing, the bitcoiner DCA goes like this:

Every pay period set aside a certain fragment of your paycheck to buy Bitcoin no matter what the price is. Sometimes you’ll buy 1/1000 of a sat because the price is high, which is okay because you’re getting a valuable asset. Other times the price will be lower and/or trending down, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t buy more it just means that this pay period you’re going to get 1/500 of a sat instead!

It’s yet another coiner “investment strategy” that cashes out to “stop asking questions and buy my bags no matter what”.

I feel like this falls into the classic blunder of smart dumb guys throughout history of using aggregation and abstraction to obscure what’s actually happening.

It’s not technically the same as chasing losses because the bet doesn’t technically resolve until you try to sell your Bitcoin. Unless you’re selling your stake and only then deciding whether on not to buy more, the theoretical final value of your Bitcoin could be anything. In that sense, DCA does make some sense in the hypothetical final accounting. UYour payout is whatever price you sell at, and your buy-in is a weighted average of the prices you bought at. For something like a stock portfolio where you actually have reason to expect the overall value of your investment to grow over time (because the economy generally grows and your portfolio is spread across a broad swathe of it) the math does work.

But the problem is that it doesn’t address the fundamental problem of crypto investing, which is that crypto is worthless and crypto bros are usually looking to concentrate their assets in this worthless category. “Look at my average cost go down!” isn’t actually a relevant response to “why are you throwing more of your money into a fire?” In average terms you may have paid less per unit you own, but in absolute terms you’re still throwing good money after bad.

Averages, samples, models, aggregates, whatever form it takes, the tools we use to track and evaluate the world don’t magically tunnel through space and time to change it. In terms our very good friends would recognize: the map is not the territory. But especially in finance it seems like making the map look the way you want gets treated by smart dumb guys as though it’s the same thing as changing the territory itself to be more favorable, when in truth they’re either finding a prettier vantage point for your landscape photography or else straight up lying and sketching in a non-existent beach.

Really needs to have the poison bar slowly filling to complete the FromSoft effect. It can’t just be a normal non-poisoned swamp.

Xerxes I dug this from scrap metal Mount Athos in a cave 492 BCE!

Don’t get me wrong, if Erika Kirk wanted to make the world a better place she could start by hastening her trip to join Charlie in hell. I’ll also happily agree that Charlie was less an innocent victim and more an enemy combatant in the ongoing conflict between fascism and humanity. Even so, I feel like the performative cruelty here isn’t exactly a good look. I’m not criticizing anyone’s feeling of catharsis or schadenfreude about Kirk’s fate, but this was a public display. It took effort and planning. They made props. And as a piece of political theater, this is not what we ought to be about. The message shouldn’t focus on Kirk’s death, but on making sure his life is remembered accurately: as a fascist debate bro who took massive amounts of money from the Epstein class to make internet memes for letting them do whatever they want. A man who immediately abandoned any libertarian small-government principles he used to claim once it became clear that openly hating gays, immigrants, and nonwhite people was politically viable.

If they ever raise the price then the humble Costco hot dog is going to be one of those things that serves as a legendary “economic indicator” up there with the stockbrokers jumping out of windows on black Tuesday.

The fewer checks there are on state power the more valuable corruption becomes.