Hacker News: frmersdog

New comment by frmersdog in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

frmersdog — Fri, 22 May 2026 23:26:47 +0000

>The buyers would be only those that can make efficient enough returns to offset this tax

Or people who aren't wealthy enough to have to pay it.

New comment by frmersdog in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

frmersdog — Fri, 22 May 2026 23:17:35 +0000

You could also just... not pay. And then lawyer-up when the IRS comes after you. (They will not come after you, because they know you've lawyered-up and aren't going to make it easy.)

IIRC this is part of how they avoid taxes in general. Penalties don't hurt enough for the ones who do eventually face them.

New comment by frmersdog in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

frmersdog — Fri, 22 May 2026 23:14:39 +0000

Boy, that's going to suck for people whose credit situation has shut them out of most traditional housing situations. Or people who rely on what other people don't consider food for sustenance, for whatever reason (protein powder? multivitamins? supplies to grow/produce your own foodstuffs?). Just as examples.

New comment by frmersdog in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

frmersdog — Fri, 22 May 2026 23:09:51 +0000

Yeah, "It won't affect the 99%," is the wrong framing. The entire point is for it to affect the 99% (by undoing the effect disproportionately high wealth among the wealthiest and disproportionately low wealth among the middle and least wealthy).

I think your assumptions are off, though; less wealthy people might not be "forced" into investment at all, but given the "opportunity" to pay off debt or increase/diversify consumption. In the end, the important part is the wealth transfer downward, wherever it ends up. No trickle, but you can pump it.

New comment by frmersdog in "At least 100 deaths reported in Ebola outbreak in DR Congo"

frmersdog — Thu, 21 May 2026 23:14:47 +0000

In a globalized society, all of this is downstream of a dysfunctional economic system, which itself is downstream of the misplaced priorities of the countries with the most power. Speaking out of my ass, but I'd bet that the amount of money spent on wars by 5 certain countries over the past 5 years could have been used to eradicate Ebola. But we chose one use for all of that time and energy, and not the other, so here we are.

New comment by frmersdog in "At least 100 deaths reported in Ebola outbreak in DR Congo"

frmersdog — Thu, 21 May 2026 23:09:02 +0000

People figure out things to say about topics they care about. But the kind of person who comes to HN doesn't care about the DRC, so yeah, not much commentary. Not surprised, just disappointed. If such people also dislike being called out for their concern, that's kind of them to reconcile.

New comment by frmersdog in "News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism"

frmersdog — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:54:19 +0000

As good a time as any to remind people that the Southern Strategy was never really all that Southern:

https://www.uh.edu/news-events/stories/052815watchingtvracia...

https://www.mediamatters.org/legacy/video-what-happens-when-...

Historically-speaking, if your local news can twist the context to make you easier to sell to (products, services, ideologies), they will do that.

New comment by frmersdog in "At least 100 deaths reported in Ebola outbreak in DR Congo"

frmersdog — Mon, 18 May 2026 18:37:05 +0000

>Zero comments half-an-hour later, despite being on the front page

That tracks.

New comment by frmersdog in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

frmersdog — Thu, 14 May 2026 22:00:21 +0000

That's strange, I was just asking Claude to write a motion for me earlier, and I've never even taken the LSAT.

New comment by frmersdog in "Online age verification is the hill to die on"

frmersdog — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:25:08 +0000

>Banks

I wonder how many months until this suggestion becomes slightly embarrassing. I barely want my banks to know what I buy and to be responsible for my money. I really don't want them knowing everywhere I go online. Especially when "my" bank goes under and all of my data gets sold off to whoever takes it over.

New comment by frmersdog in "ChatGPT Images 2.0"

frmersdog — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 23:55:21 +0000

Image editing program -> different versions of the image, each with some but not all of the elements you want, on each layer -> mask out the parts you don't need/apply mask, fill with black, soft brush with white the parts you want back in. Copy flattened/merged, drop it back into the image model, keep asking for the changes. As long as each generation adds in an element you want, you can build a collage of your final image.

Tell HN: I will pay money for a YouTube front end that stops the "Rec Roulette"

frmersdog — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:05:39 +0000

Front page recommendations that don't change until I give the go-ahead (by explicitly clicking a "refresh" button, and not a moment before, even across sessions). Per-video recommendations that don't change at all (or, at least, not for a set, calendar period). How it used to be. How it should be. How it needs to be for YouTube to be a service that doesn't prey on its own users.

Please, for the love of god. I'm tired of seeing an interesting thumbnail out of the corner of my eye right as I'm clicking on another, and not ever being able to find the first again.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711458

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by frmersdog in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

frmersdog — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:09:12 +0000

And this is almost certainly the direct cause of the Dot Com Bubble bursting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcv0600V5q4

We were bamboozled on a massive scale.

New comment by frmersdog in "Show HN: A game where you build a GPU"

frmersdog — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 19:21:01 +0000

You need to have a, "Okay, I've tried 10 times, it's not working, what's the answer?" button. That will help not just us rubes who can't understand, but also in the off chance something is broken and even "correct" answers are being rejected.

New comment by frmersdog in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

frmersdog — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:13:37 +0000

We had a deal and we tore it up. More than once, if you include the inciting incident of undermining a democratically-elected leader who was bringing the central player in the Middle East into the mainstream economic and political global order that America had set for everyone. "Not like that!"

Frankly, it's hubris all the way down. Kalief Browder.

New comment by frmersdog in "'Backrooms' and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic"

frmersdog — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:11:19 +0000

I dunno about that. At a previous job, we temporarily relocated to a building that featured a series of identical classrooms that were accessible by connecting doors in the back (it was really one long room with heavy dividers that did a good job of looking like regular walls).

You could look from one end to the other, seeing a series of doorways, and then walk through them all; every time I walked from one room to another, by brain would do a little power cycle as it tried to deal with the sensation of having walked into the room I'd just exited.

The deeper-in I got, the more I couldn't shake the feeling that something was "off" about the whole set-up; there were windows, but looking out them, the view felt... fake? It's hard to describe.

This was a few years after SCP became popular, but before the Backrooms - which was why I immediately understood the appeal.

New comment by frmersdog in "'Backrooms' and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic"

frmersdog — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:59:32 +0000

I don't think it's too far to include Earthbound. After all,

  You cannot grasp the true form of Giygas' attack!

New comment by frmersdog in "SpaceX Targets More Than $2 Trillion Valuation in IPO"

frmersdog — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:51:04 +0000

https://archive.is/iioaU

SpaceX Targets More Than $2 Trillion Valuation in IPO

frmersdog — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:49:10 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-02/spacex-is-said-to-target-more-than-2-trillion-valuation-in-ipo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619314

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by frmersdog in "Consider the Greenland Shark (2020)"

frmersdog — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:30:49 +0000

There's a business lesson in the longest lived creatures being the ones that move slow, abide small insults, and make themselves generally unappetizing.