• 102 Posts
  • 293 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 30th, 2023

help-circle
  • If you have a paper check in your name, you must trust someone (the issuing bank, the casino, or some dodgy checks cashed business).

    • checks cashed business: these tiny operations are the least secure from data breaches and the most costly. OTOH, they charge enough that they don’t need to profit from selling your data. But in the end you still have trust them not to sell your data and you can be relatively sure their infosec is the lowest grade.
    • issuing banks: they’re going to get some of your data no matter what because they sit at one end of the transaction. So that much favors using them. They will get some more date when you cash out with them. Banks are rife with data abuses and notorious for breaches due to weak security. Accounts are gratis because they have mastered profitting from all possible resources (data and money). And because security is a cost they minimize as much as possible, they get breached all the time. Banks and CUs especially outsource like crazy. So you also expose yourself to multiple breach points with banks and CUs.
    • casinos: they have better security than banks. At least at one point they even had better facial recognition than the FBI. Their profit model is simpler than banks: they hope that by getting you in the door, you will give them play action. I don’t imagine that they have invested as much as banks in exploiting people’s data for advertising purposes because it’s not their business and casinos really don’t want to scare people off with enshitification (because people don’t need casinos). They do get breached just as banks do but it seems to be less common according to various breach lists I’ve seen. OTOH, the casino is not a bank so the check would eventually go to /their/ bank. Though I’m not sure the extent of your data being proxied. I don’t know if the casino proxies the transaction for the bank, or if the casino just becomes a 2nd party to endorse the check over, in which case the bank would only get your name. Casinos don’t have the kyc extremes that banks do. Casinos also understand their customers want privacy and they respect that. They tend to comply with KYC to a bare minimum. Banks do not. Banks and CUs are KYC overachievers. Casinos also have a strong interest in keeping their clients secret from other casinos. Whereas banks are less worried about other banks poaching from them, at least in a targeted fashion.

    So there’s your pros and cons. It’s your choice and no choice is “the correct” choice. It’s a gamble regardless.

    I would love it if a bank would respect their customer’s privacy to the legal maximum and really try to earn patronage the same way casinos compete for your business. This opportunity is lost on banks. They all think customers give more of a shit about how many fractional pennies of interest they will get and have the working assumption that all customers will prostitute themselves fully, for mere pennies. And so banks are fully enshitified.





  • The article has some interesting info but there are some oversights:

    • Unburnt natural gas is methane gas, which is over 25× more impactful as a greenhouse gas than CO₂. And you cannot burn natural gas without unburnt gas escaping – not just at ignition but the whole infrastructure leaks unavoidably. So some folks are saying natural gas is more environmentally dentrimental than coal. The gas is also toxic and kills brain cells. Nasty stuff.
    • Follow the money. If you consume natural gas, you likely pay for it using banking services. Some regions in Europe have secretly/silently removed the option to pay for gas using cash. Banks are terrible for climate (ref: “Banking on Climate Chaos” annual reports). Even if you can pay with cash, the gas companies themselves finance republican politicians in the US. Republicans are terrible for the environment.



  • Can you actually tell us what your post had to do with the abolition of work?

    I’ve posted there in the past about mitigating work (incl. concepts like ”quitting” but working which just means ways to not work your ass off pleasing a boss and just working at a content pace). I posted about new work reduction laws. I never posted about full abolition of work. And I commented then that it was strange that the sidebar seems to only mention full abolition of work, and I asked if there were any objections to chatter about work reduction. There were none. And those other posts were not suppressed. So I figured the sidebar was unintentionally narrow.

    I stand by the decision to remove the post and I think its kinda ridiculous how out of proportion you are blowing this instance of mod action.

    The rationale in the modlog was nonsense. Now you are giving different rationale.


  • original post text

    Progressive tax regimes are conducive to anti-work philosophy, right up until you take a year or more off.

    Having a progressive tax system means tax rate increases disproportionately with the more work you do. And that’s a good because working less is encouraged by a reduced avg tax rate.

    But what happens when you take a year (or 5 years) off? You live off savings that were taxed in higher brackets while earning zero. IOW, consider:

    • Bob works 6 years straight earning 50k/year.
    • Alice works 3 years earning 100k/year then takes 3 years off.

    They both had the same gross earnings per unit time but Alice gets screwed on taxes because of the progressive tax system. My pattern is comparable to Alice due to forced full-time gigs that refuse part-time. My refuge is to subject myself to being over-employed for a stretch then quitting for a stretch of bench time. The only remedies I see:

    1. Take a 1-year contract starting in June. Do not work the first ½ of the 1st year, and do not work the second ½ of the 2nd year.
    2. Form a corporation, work as independent and direct your own “false independent” 1-person company. Money builds in the company as you pay yourself the same amount whether you are working or not. (Some people put the company in Hong Kong because it accommodates this well and the company feeds the director gradually and persists well after retirement – or so I’m told)
    3. Work in a country that adjusts for income fluxuations by giving you a tax credit if your income drops substantially from one year to the next.

    I made up number 3. Does that exist anywhere?

    Any other techniques to hack around forced full-time scenarios? Or to deliberately fluxuate working hard and not working without the tax penalty?


  • When I say “more work than necessary”, I mean more than necessary for me. I only need 20 hours of employment, generally. The employer needed full-time. There is an infinite stack of work. The work is trivially divisible but the manager can organise the work more conveniently if dividing across fewer workers. When a manager insists on structuring work into only full-time positions in my line of work, they are a lazy manager. (Though I push back and put those lazy managers to work by giving them a part-time or nothing ultamatim, and bounce if needed).

    I always start off a new job full-time to accommodate the up-front training in order to reach a point of positive productivity. After becoming established in a position for ~2—3 years many employers allow a transition to part-time. But some do not. In any case, the moment the job imposes more work than the worker needs, the worker is over employed (which can of course be attributed to workers living cheaply as that’s a factor in how much work is needed). I am over-selling my time and over employed the moment a manager refuses my request for part-time.


  • Over employment existed long before teleworking multiple IT gigs. What you describe is just one recent trendy and specific form of overemployment. Over employment quite simply means to be on the hook for more work than necessary. It’s usually forced on you, unlike the very recent phenomenon of IT workers doing so deliberately (and often they double-book their time to effectively be overpaid for their their time).

    In my particular case, I only needed 20 hours/week of employment but my employer gave a full-time or nothing ultamatim. Because I worked more than I needed, I was over employed. But I was not “overworked” because that’s a higher degree of exploitation which often (but not always) entails underpayment.



  • You’re basically complaining that Roth 409s/IRAs exist

    You’re basically saying “fuck Europe” (to use your technique of building a man made of straw). This is not a US-only forum. Roths are a US invention and they are US-specific. Canada has something somewhat like it but not quite (no conversion option IIRC, which blows it), and at least parts of Europe (if not all of Europe) have nothing at all like it.

    Apart from that, it’s bizarre that you think I would have any problem with Roths. Where do you think you read that? Roths are a great tool that actually supports my goals – though in one country only. And only for as long as conversions are allowed, to the extent they are allowed, and to the extent of 401k limits and conversion limits.

    I might have ignored this post without all the anti-NEET, anti … landlords? company owners? contractors? … all the tears of people who seem to me to be in the wrong place, in the comments.

    Ah, so anti-work is an elitist movement that excludes some demographics of people you hate? Nonsense. Middle class people can (and should) practice anti-work philosophies. Please fuck off with the: this is for poor people only exclusivity. The geocentrism can fuck off too, particularly when simultaneously coupled with pretentious ass-hattery. Uber Eats contractors would be appalled with the prejudiced grouping you have stuffed them into. The poor people you want to restrict the anti-work movement to don’t have the 401ks needed for the Roth conversion approach to work for them.


  • There are some models for sabaticals, like lower pay and then basically a year of paid vacation. It also includes insurance policies, as there is an obvious incentive to just fire you before you take the time off.

    None of my employers have offered that. Colleagues would take a sabatical but I think it must have been uncompensated – just an understanding that the gig was held for them. Is there a particular region where this arrangement is common? If it’s just 1 year off every 7 years, that’d be useful but doesn’t match up to my pattern of working about ½ time on avg (1yr on, 1yr off, 1yr on, 1yr off, 6 on, 6 off, etc).


  • That paying a little extra when you made more money is how a progressive tax system is meant to work.

    You think the progressive tax system deliberately punishes people with unstable or fluxuating income? That’s foolish.

    Whether that’s by design or not, no self-respecting anti-work proponent endorses it.

    BTW, different countries have different tax tables, but 5% is ~100 hours. Would you like to work an extra ~1—2½ weeks per year for free? If yes, what are you doing in the anti-work community?

    by coming up with a sophisticated tax avoidance scheme

    The intellectual dishonesty here is atrocious. We’re talking about working less/minimally by leveling income across fiscal years (or achieving that effect) to avoid penalties for anti-work practices.



  • Great article. I think there are some flaws but it gives lots of good ideas.

    Possible flaws:

    • Insulating the underside of the work surface would prevent the work surface itself from getting warm. Hands have the most need for warmth. So I would be tempted to insulate the underside of the work surface as suggested but cut out a deliberate thermal bridge around the keyboard and mouse area – or maybe supplement a heating pad on top of the desk. But taking care not to add heat to the laptop.
    • Space heaters are discouraged by the article because they output too much power (as they are intended for heating a small room). But space heaters often have thermostats. I have an a/c powered oil radiator on wheels. It may be high wattage but I think it will know when to quit. And it would save me the effort of rigging up a thermostat.
    • IIUC, they rely on the blanket to mitigate heat loss around the sides of the desk. That’s where I would be tempted to use insulating radiator foil, perhaps in addition to a blanket.

    Thick insulation foam for roofing is often thrown out, like when a neighbor re-roofs and buys too much. I will be on the look out for scrap pieces to use under the desk.