In the US at least this isn’t really true, at least not in a practical way for most people.

Charitable donations are tax deductible true, but they are for most people covered under what is called the standard deduction, which is a standardized amount that aims to estimate would a regular person would be able to deduct from their taxes. The standard deduction is applied automatically and is $14,600. This means that if you don’t do anything abnormal on you it taxes, your taxable income is reduced by the standard amount. For most people they wouldn’t typically be able to find $14,600 in tax deductible expenses, so the standard is worth it.

The catch is that if you take the standard you cannot itemize, as taking the standard deduction is basically saying to the IRS “yea I donated here and there, bought some stuff for work, did this and that”. Itemizing is listing out your individual tax deductible expenses (and justifying why they are deductible) so if for example you had a single year where you donated $20,000 you could itemize that instead of taking the standard deduction for a total reduction in income of 20k plus whatever you could come up with.

The other reason why that isn’t really applicable is that a deduction is not a credit, that is to say, deductions reduce your total taxable income amount. If you deduct $1,000 (a 1k donation for example) that would have been taxed at 20% you will receive back from the IRS, $200. Meaning that you still had to pay $800 out of pocket for the donation that will not be refunded to you.

Deductions pretty much never result in getting more than the tax that you would have paid refunded. Even if youanahe to deduct more than you make, the resulting negative would just result in a carry over loss for the next year. You can effectively pay an income tax of 0 but it requires losses and other deductible expenses that are greater than your income, which means you didn’t actually make any net income for the year (on paper and practically)

Other countries are different of course, but I wouldn’t want someone going out and donating their life savings thinking they will get it back in tax season.

Email is far too important to be set up in a fragile home server.

Unless you have concurrent redundancy with HA servers and multiple Internet connections, it’s just not worth missing important emails imo.

This is just an ad.

Big mesh networks are ‘easy’ but I think the reality is most people don’t want to be responsible for it. They want to use utilities not run them.

Another aspect is that different people will have significantly different burdens, if you live in a dense apartment building, it can be easy to wrap up the infra for the building into an HOA or other collective, but people in suburbs or less dense areas will need huge long range antennas and underground cables that have a disproportionate cost.

I think more than a community run physical internet layer, we need neutralized, municipal internet as a utility.

I’ve had this discussion with many people. Just because that’s how you define it, doesn’t mean that is how it’s actually defined. We aren’t talking about your definition, we are talking about a government’s decision.

I think it would be foolish to expect any governing or organization to classify sites/services like lemmy or reddit as something other than social media, when they are literally completely made up of users interacting which each other with all of the content being posted by users.

Also, you can argue about your definition all day, but the Australian government’s decision included Reddit, lemmy likely has not yet been affected due to the gov just not knowing of its existence.

I mean, not really. Your online banking or bill pay site isn’t social media, neither are (most) storefronts. A simple site disseminating information ( https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ as a bit of a contrived example ) has no direct engagement or content creation between users and no community forming.

But it makes sense that most of the hobby/fun website and applications will be social media because the primary purpose of the Internet is to connect computers and by extension humans and humans like to interact with each other, the main thing the internet does is let us talk together. It’s not implicitly a bad thing that we do it.

While the term didn’t exist at the time, I would also classify newsgroups and BBS’s as social media as well.

It’s exactly social media, just because it’s the one you like doesn’t make it less so.

“websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.” -oxford

“forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)” - Merriam Webster

Lemmy and forums fit the bill pretty clearly.

Valve index, pimax, vive, varjo?

Everyone’s out here acting like the two options are the quest or the psvr, there are tons of headsets out there, especially if all you want to do is jork it

I agree with this sentiment. I vaped for years and years because I didn’t actually want to stop.

But once I did make the decision the vape made it considerably easier.

I did but it took me a long time, years and years, with occasional dips back into smoking.

Now though it’s nearly been 2 years no vape or anything and at least three years of no nicotine.

I went up and down in nicotine levels, I used big huge cloud throwing fog machines and little tiny disposables.

I eventually settled on a unit with a built in rechargeable battery and pods with replaceable coils (geekvape aegis)

I don’t think vaping will naturally result in quitting, it I do think it’s the most effective harm reducer out there and as a tool has many ways to help reduce use over time.

High nicotine disposables (elf bars, juul) I would stay away from if you can though since the nicotine concentration is so high that it can deepen the addiction.

The amount of things plugged in doesn’t really matter, it is the current draw that would cause problems.

I think in this scenario you just have to pretend we are ok economically, because of the Internet went down entirely, the world economy would completely collapse in a few hours to days.

They help with discovery for users making it easy to find curated lists of people to follow.

Because people are using it

What do you think the millions of people flocking to a new service as refugees would do?

Do you think George Takei or Flavor Flav care about federation and instances, or did they just see that Bluesky works similar to twitter and make accounts.

Most of the people joining are going to use the default recommended instance because those people aren’t joining out of technical interest.

Google could pay chrome billions just like they pay mozillla and apple…

Besides it’s not like that’s really true anyway, chrome would make tons of money independently, it would just sell user data to Google or other parties instead of Google getting it for free. Chrome ‘doesn’t make any money’ because it doesn’t need to on paper, the same way a parking lot doesn’t make any money for a grocery store, but if a third party owned the lot, the grocery store would just pay them to use it, or the individual people using the lot would.

Chrome is the biggest browser and successfully collects data on billions of people, additionally, chrome development would absolutely be supported by all of the companies that build chromium based browsers like Microsoft, opera, brave, etc.

Why does it need to be sold to another big company, why can’t they just break Google up so chrome becomes its own business?

Why?

Well, a lot of stock trading isn’t as simple as just stock picking, buying and selling individual stocks.

Much of the market is made up of derivatives trading, such as options, where you aren’t trading the stock itself, instead you are trading the option to buy the stock.

The value of the option is derived from the value of the underlying asset, but it is not absolutely coupled to it (this is how a lot of the money is made, by finding market inefficiencies and capitalizing on things like slippage, where there is a mismatch in the value of the derivative and it’s underlying)

What the person above is saying is that, when it becomes no longer profitable to trade underlying assets directly, new derivative markets will be invented that trade around other underlying assets.

Think about unregulated Bitcoin trading for example, while contrived, imagine a crypto currency that is coupled with the price of another asset (these exist, like USDcoin) such as a stock, future, option, or something else.

I should add, typically the derivative kind of collapse into the underlying at some point, but in the case of an option, it might be traded 100 times before that happens, during each of those trades the actual asset (e.g. the underlying stock) doesn’t actually change possession, and a given side of the contract may or may not be changing possession. If you write a call option for a 100 shares of Ford you own, you aren’t selling the stock unless the actual call gets assigned and you are required to fulfill the contract, but the ‘buyer’ side of the contract could have been sold 100 times in the meantime.

All this to say, it’s complicated and there are lots of opportunities for shady shit to happen.

You know, you can just do things. Like, laws don’t need to be applied unilaterally. You can, at the same time, tax a 100,000,000 dollar loan, and not tax a 1,000,000 dollar loan.

Kind of like how generally, low income people do not pay much or any income taxes, or how certain products are subject to additional sales taxes.