USA was still very much on the rise at the advent of the internet. If you define the advent of the internet to be Arpanet, then that was 1969, the same year the USA landed on the moon. If you define the advent of the internet to be the first use of the World Wide Web that would be 1989 the same year the Berlin wall came down and 3 years before the Soviet Union collapsed, which was arguably the most powerful the USA has ever been as it was before China’s rise.

It’s not common for people to itemize any longer after Trump’s tax updates a few years ago

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 Trump passed put in place permanent tax cuts for corporations and temporary tax cuts for individuals. The individuals tax cuts expire next year in 2025 so in 2026 the current standard deduction for single filers of $14,600 drops to $8,300. For joint filers is currently $29,000 and dropping to $16,600. source

Unless these tax cuts for individuals are renewed, we might see many more folks itemizing again because the standard deduction is too small again.

I had a long reply typed out exploring the various aspects and raising questions to the methodology and applicability of the advice in the article to different groups of people in different geographies and stage of life. However the tone of replies seems to just want to accept the article as is. Its a yahoo finance article, so the depth is pretty shallow and only speaks in broad generalizations. Your reply is doubling down on exactly that. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it looks like the there isn’t a desire in this thread to explore it any further.

So we’ll just accept the article answer which you summarize well: “generic/average month-to-month overview, home ownership is almost always more expensive.”

Conventional wisdom says keep renting folks and don’t question it.

Did you not read the comment? Property tax, insurance, and upkeep are all perpetual costs. The down-payment, closing fees, and potential mortgage insurance are the only up-front costs.

I read the comment. It doesn’t address the question. “Over what period of time?”

Are they judging on owing a house for 30 years vs renting for 30 years or are they judging owning house for 1 year vs renting for 1 year?

Once you factor in things it mentions like insurance, taxes, upkeep along with others like a down payment then it’s very easy to see where the 14% numbers comes from.

So you’re agreeing with me that they’re only comparing the first month of ownership of the house with the last month of renting? There’s no factoring in the long term rise in rents to their math?

There’s a lot of additional and hidden costs with home ownership.

There certainly are, but its very situational. A 100 year old home will have very different upkeep costs than a 10 year old home. A home in a hurricane zone will have different upkeep than one that isn’t.

First, musk is an ass. No defense of him.

Spaceflight, however, is awesome.

I’m a space systems propulsion design engineer by profession. I worked on a project which I will not name that requires on-orbit refuelling. (It’s not this one and I don’t and will never work for Elon Musk).

I’m just an enthusiast so I trust your professional opinion more than my own knowledge.

The technology for in-orbit refuelling doesn’t exist, and there’s a whole lot of new technology required.

I’m assuming your referring to the SpaceX on-orbit refueling of cryogenic propellants requirement, which I agree hasn’t happened yet in history by anyone. However, there is a regular on-orbit refueling of cryogenic propellants for years on a regular basis with Progress spacecraft refueling the 400 liters worth of tanks (860kg of hydrazine) on the ISS for its orbit raising rocket engine located on the Zvezda module of the ISS. Cryogenic propellants would be a whole different animal however.

I’m sceptical that they do have current solutions which are feasible and useful, rather than something like a one-shot refueling subsystem that weighs 250kg and delivers 15 litres of hydrazine.

As this technology is in regular use in space today, I don’t doubt SpaceX could do this, but we agree this doesn’t accomplish anything close to what is needed for the lunar mission SpaceX signed up for.

On paper, owning a home is almost always more expensive than renting — about 14% more, on average, after factoring in expenses like insurance, taxes, and upkeep.

I’d be interested in seeing how they arrived at the 14% number.

When I bought my first home a couple of decades ago I moved out of my 1 bedroom apartment which I was paying a monthly rent of $700/month into a small starter home with a mortgage of $1000/month. 20 years later that exact same apartment rents for $1350/month. All of the years I lived there my house payment never rose higher than the $1000/month mortgage payment while the rent on the apartment apparently continued to increase year over year. Meanwhile I ended up selling the starter home for $110,000 than my purchase prices nearly 20 years ago.

So is their 14% number just calculated on the first month of each (renting vs buying)?

Not defending apple, but they’re not talking about themselves. My reading of their point is: “If you force us to give away our tech, then that rule must apply to everyone with tech. If that applies to everyone with tech, why would anyone spend the millions or billions developing anything if they’ll be forced to give it away for free”.

Again, I’m not agreeing with Apple, I’m just able to understand their language.

“Source close to to the Milei administration share plans about future sources of revenue” /s

Why can’t humans stop being dicks to other humans for even like 5 minutes?

Being dicks to one another is where the huge majority of wealth and power come from. Asking humans to give up being dicks to one another is asking them to be satisfied with the tiny fraction of wealth and power that is derived from NOT being dicks to one another. Being satisfied with less is not really human nature.

Did Britain or Rome know the moments when Pax Britannia or Pax Romana had hit their tipping point to decline? I doubt it.

I think the tipping point will only be observable through the lens of history many years from now with a subject heading of: This event was the beginning of the end of Pax Americana.

Most people expect their parents to be ultimate protectors and the ones to encourage their children’s flourishing, but many are often unwilling or unable to change as their children change.

One of my personal milestone measurements of becoming and adult is realizing that your parents aren’t ultimate “anything”. They’re just people like you are. They make mistakes and hopefully learn from them, but sometimes not. When each of us has grown up and has our shit together, there should be a recognition that they are not your superiors, but your simply your peers. I personally think this is healthy because it doesn’t hold parents to any high expectation, but also allows us to forgive their faults like we would our peers. Also as peers, you can choose you don’t want to share your life with them. Thats your choice as an adult.

I’m not going to say it was your intention, but it reads like “immigrants are lowering the literacy rate”. It’s something I’ve seen too often.

I’m having trouble seeing the mental gymnastics to get that reading when I’m saying that the immigrants are unfairly being called illiterate, when they ARE literate, just in a different language.

The emphasis is because “American” is not the same as “foreign-born resident”.

I’m discarding any of the statistics from that page I linked because I don’t trust their methodology. I linked it not to support OPs argument about the rate if illiteracy, but to discredit it for being questionable based. The stats from my linked page match much of the stats from their linked page. My guess is that both draw from the same flawed measures and should not be trusted.

Of course it is a low confidence answer for that non-English but literate population. I’m not saying that 100% of those called illiterate are actually literate in another language. I’m saying that the statement that the illiteracy rate is as high as posted is likely wrong because it only accounts for English.

The “may” statement you’re taking issue with is a quick attempt to find out possibly how big that non-English but literate population might be. Its not a definitive answer. You’re welcome to spend your time chasing a more precise number. I’d exhausted my interested when I got my number.

There’s a history of Chinese ships dragging their anchors and damaging undersea infrastructure:

Russian communication lines and Baltic natural gas pipeline severed Nov 2023

By your logic:

No, not by a long shot.

I am responding directly to your statement from your OP:

Skip the middle men and just start leaving shit in insecure places you want the press to get, I say.

I’m saying the person with the data they want leaked can create the insecure place where they know it will get picked up but still maintain plausible deniability. I’m agreeing with you.

Totally not how that works.

Its not the ONLY way how it works, but it absolutely can work that way.

Like you think “hackers” are just scanning the entire Internet like in Matrix world and stumbling on stuff?

You don’t have to take my word for it. You can, like, read the article I posted where they detail another IT professional went through the steps and recorded actual results. Is clicking on the link and reading too difficult because you’re too busy with “Lelz”?

Well then you’re still respotfor pointing people to it somehow.

There’s no need to point it out. Hundreds of hacker scanners are running all the time across the internet looking for unpatched Operating Systems with known exploits. These are automatic by the hackers because the flaws are well documented.

Imagine being told that there is one person in the world that will give you a million dollars cash and the only thing you need to do is ask them to give you the money. Now, imagine you have the phone numbers for every single person. It is trivially easy to set up a computer script that will go through the entire list and send each phone number a txt message asking them to give you the money. You’d start up this process and never have to revisit it except to check ever few weeks if someone responded that they’ll give you the money.

This is how the hacker exploit scripts work. So for my example above, if I wanted my Windows XP computer hacked, I just need to leave it unpatched and plug it into the internet without any firewall. The hacking literally takes only 10 minutes for your Windows XP computer to be hacked.

Time magazine “Person of the year” doesn’t necessarily mean “good” it means “pivotal to change”. The “change” may not be a good change.

Hitler, Stalin, Khrushchev, Kissinger, Ted Turner, Newt Gingrich, Putin, Zuckerberg, and Turmp have all been Person of the Year.

Skip the middle men and just start leaving shit in insecure places you want the press to get, I say.

Should we call these Honeypot leaks? Create a server running on completely unpatched Windows XP then put what you want leaked, then attach it raw dog to the internet without any kind of firewall.