• 28 Posts
  • 2.02K Comments
Joined 6 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 26th, 2020

help-circle

  • As the other poster said, this post is bait, but it’s not how social security works at all.

    As I understand it, social security payments to beneficiaries come from the currently incoming payments, not from an invested account.

    Also social security is structurally set up to fail, because you don’t contribute to it on income over $150k, meaning that inflation decreases the amount the rich pay in every year.



  • E-bikes are great.

    I think the way the average non-cyclist engages with them is problematic, though. First question I always get asked by “normies” (non-cyclists) is “how fast does it go?”. The second question is always “how far can it go on a single charge?” These two questions indicate how utterly missing the point of ebikes most people are. Which, I think, is why you see so many of those e-motos around with 1000W motors and huge double batteries. I think those things are annoying and unsafe.

    But I have to bite my tongue about it, because:

    1. They’re still better than cars for everyone involved, and the people riding them would almost certainly otherwise be driving.
    2. Boomer state legislatures are frothing at the mouth to ban e-motos without understanding anything about ebikes and almost always inadvertently nuking regular ebikes (or enacting significant barriers to them) with collateral damage















  • California does the same in the central valley.

    Almonds too.

    The whole central valley is sinking at an alarming rate because of how quickly the aquifer is being depleted. No California politician is brave enough to do anything to take on the massive agribusiness using all this water irresponsibly because these companies run a lot of the state’s politics and also they’re afraid of the “ancient water rights” dating back to Spanish colonial water rights.