• 2 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • nikt@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzOrinthology
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    7 months ago

    That was my first thought too. This Cooper’s Hawk is way too small.

    Turns out (according to Wikipedia) their adult size can vary a lot depending on location and other factors, from 14”-20”. The ones I see around here are def closer to 20 than 14, and the sharp shinned hawks are relatively small and slender.






  • It’s possible to use rising home values to your advantage without selling, by borrowing against that value to start a business, purchase a second property, etc.

    Leverage is obviously risky, but you shouldn’t leave this out in your analysis.

    There are other advantages too, like the fact that home ownership can act as a good counter against inflation, since hard assets like houses tend to be inflation-proof. Or the value of a home in estate planning, since (here in Canada anyway) when you die you don’t have to pay capital gains on a home you pass to your heirs.












  • nikt@lemmy.catoSocialism@lemmy.mlRecord profits are unpaid wages
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    1 year ago

    I’m a socialist, generally vote for socialist or at least left-leaning candidates, support socialist policies and agree with the premise that record profits are basically unpaid wages.

    But, seeing the hammer and sickle pop up in my Lemmy feed makes me really uncomfortable. I grew up under communism, and a good chunk of my family was killed and oppressed by people in uniforms with that symbol. To me it represents all that can go horribly wrong when socialism is stripped of empathy and compassion and married with violence and intolerance.

    For me, it’s a bit like seeing a swastika. Really hard to get behind it, even though I know the symbol predates the NSDAP.

    Is there really no better alternative for symbolising modern socialism?


  • The other day I used Apple Maps in my car for the first time in a few years. I gotta say something about it felt nice.

    Maybe it’s the aesthetic? The names of towns and geographic features are in big letters and flow across the map nicely — the name of the peninsula I was driving across was stretched along the length of the peninsula itself — and it felt a bit like I was traversing an old timey map, maybe like in an old Indiana Jones movie.

    If I need to find some obscure business, I’ll still use Google Maps, and if I’m on a well known commute I’ll still use Waze, but for just general ambient map display, I think Apple Maps might be it now.


  • Def the other way around.

    Writing a privacy policy generally forces a company to make commitments about what they will and won’t do with data they collect about you.

    No privacy policy means anything goes — they didn’t say what they will or won’t do, so you can’t sue them if they do something sketchy.

    But many jurisdictions require companies to publish a privacy policy, so just about any company these days will have one. The devil is in the details though, as this article points out.


  • Because Apple’s core business is selling their stuff to you. Google’s core business is selling you to other companies.

    Google’s consumer software and products literally serve no other business purpose than surveillance to figure out how to turn you into a more lucrative advertising target.

    Apple has realized they can capitalize on this by making privacy a core selling feature for their stuff — one that Google cannot challenge them on as privacy is directly at odds with the core premise of their entire business.


  • Well no, a lease is literally a lease. People do lease houses too you know. When people “buy” a condo, that’s not a lease.

    The point I’m making here is that the housing analogy doesn’t work (“Imagine buying a house and not being allowed to X”) because people literally “buy” houses and are not allowed to do basic things that you’d assume come with house ownership.

    I’m not defending that this is ok. For me buying a condo would be as ridiculous as buying a DRMed Tesla.