Spyke

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What is an absurdity that has been normalized by society?

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In all but the most niche cases, they do in fact know that you had a kid. That being said, most things they have a pretty good idea about (or could) and they could easily adopt the system that they do in a lot of other countries where the government sends to a tax form all filled out that says, “we think you owe this much.” Then you just provide the exemptions you listed.
This would save a considerable amount of time when I file my taxes by just being able to double check they got cost basis correct on stocks sold and applied appropriate credits for mortgage interest and what not.

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If my home instance defederated from another, can I still post to the other instance? What about posting to an instance which has been defederated from my home instance?

If an instance is defederated with another instance that all content in and out is ignored after the point at which instances defederated. So, in this example, you might see old lemmygrad.ml posts in your lemmy.world instance. If you comment on one of those posts, only other lemmy.world users will see it, meanwhile none of the lemmygrad.ml users will see it. Likewise, none of comments/posts that have happened after the instance defederated will appear on lemmy.world.

It’s akin to having a conference call/speaker phone conversation. Everyone in your room can hear and speak. Likewise everyone in the other room can hear and chat too. When the call drops (defederates), each room can continue having conversations on what they were just talking about but neither room has any clue about the other’s conversations.

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What discontinued feature do you miss from phones or other technologies?

I like where phones are now for the most part, but the thing I miss the most is that magic moment of what leaps and bounds new technology/form factor/whatever was being incorporated into a new phone. Like when the iPhone was first announced or when Motorola announced (and marketed the hell out of) the original Droid - I can still hear the boot up sound.

I remember the debates and arguments had when the first 4+” phone was released and how it was “way too big” compared to the ideal sized 3.5” iPhone. The idea of swiping to type!? What a breakthrough! A fingerprint scanner to unlock your phone, that took like three or four tries some times and was met with skepticism by others.

Now I feel like, despite how monstrously capable are phones are now compared to even five years ago, there’s just not as much of a spark anymore. New phones are iterative and have been for a while. Bendable displays are sort of neat, but just doesn’t quite tap the same bit of magic for me.

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They’re not. They used to be the cheapest cut of chicken because most places would just toss them out. As buffalo wings became more popular people have been consuming them more driving up the price. They taste good, but they’re definitely not priced well at 3.99 a pound. I would expect them to be on par with the cost of chicken breasts.

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What is your "inexpensive" hobby that turned out to be expensive/ you gradually invested lots of money into?

It’s a toss up between cooking and home networking for me.

Cooking because it started off as just finding neat recipes and giving them a shot to now experimenting with new techniques and harder to procure ingredients. My pantry looks like a mini spice market and keeping them fresh is its own hassle. Plus needing all the gear gets expensive!

I also got really into home networking during the start of the pandemic. I went from having a simple off the shelf mesh network to a full network rack in my basement serving some high end access points and cat6 drops in every room. Now I have a pretty secure iot stack that’s separate from my main vlan and one devoted to my work computer.

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What is an absurdity that has been normalized by society?

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I was assuming social security could share that information since now there’s a new taxable citizen. The IRS could easily prepare tax amounts assuming married filing jointly, married filing separately, and single. You would just choose one. And like it currently is, if both people attempt to claim dependency, someone gets slapped with a fine.

Tax law is absolutely complicated, and I definitely won’t deny that, but the IRS can make things easier and could do the basic filings.

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How racist/controversial would this skit from the 90's be today?

I think it’s a very difficult choice to navigate. The biggest example of brown/blackface where it doesn’t work I can remember is Fisher Stevens playing an Indian guy in Short Circuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Circuit_(1986_film). In that movie, he’s playing an Indian person as a stereotype to juxtapose with how white counterpart. Contrast that to Robert Downey Jr. being nominated for an Oscar and BAFTA for his blackface roll in Tropic Thunder. The way it was handled within the movie itself was legitimately a good representation of why blackface is usually on the wrong side of “is it racist?”

I think just based on the little I’ve seen without any other translation besides your edit, it looks fairly racist.

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Your thoughts on The Orville?

Up until Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, it was hands down the best modern Star Trek (like) show. It’s definitely a little clumsy early on, but after a few episodes it’s very clear that Seth is finally fulfilling his childhood dream of doing Star Trek even if it’s his own version of it. I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope season 4 happens.