A strictly logical clock for a 24-hour day would have 0 at the top with 1 on the right and 23 on the left. And it would be only ever set to UTC.

I took a screenshot of this page

(Screenshot removed because it takes forever to load and is not interesting enough to waste bandwidth on)

I am connected to a 4K monitor and this picture is also at 3775 × 2119. The total file size:

12.1 MB

I have never had a screenshot exceeding 40 MB. That is humongous.

There are eight genders: null, undefined, false, NaN, 0, “0”, {}, and “”.

Your lawyer would be more than happy to learn that they tried.

It gives the average person more purchasing power but it also opens up new supply by opening the foreclosure auctions to the average person. The increased demand I argue is partially or wholly counteracted by pushing out the house flippers from the foreclosure markets; those people are generally only interested in buying properties at severely under market prices at foreclosure auctions or similar sales. Essentially, I am saying that the entire “flipper” business model should be destroyed as it does not provide sufficient value to the taxpayer to offset its negative effect on the market and this policy could do severe damage to that sector.

Quadratic property tax is a combination of the “quadratic” nature of quadratic voting and, of course, taxation. I made this term up hoping people would know what I was talking about but it turned out to not be as obvious as I initially thought.

Essentially, the taxation scheme takes into account the number of lots owned by a person in addition to the value per lot. Consider the following sample scheme:

The amount of tax due on any given property is calculated according to the following formula: r×(1 + Np)²×V, where N is the number of lots owned by the taxpayer beyond the first and V is the value of the lot. The variables r and p are determined by the local taxing authority which correspond to tax rate (higher = more tax per unit of money) and the penalty for owning excessive numbers of lots (higher = greater penalty for owning multiple lots).

If a local taxing authority selects values r = 0.002 and p = 0.05, the tax due for a lot worth 100 units of money would be as follows:

• An individual or family who owns only that lot pays 0.002 × (1+0×0.05)²×100 = 0.2 units of money per year.
• A small individual landlord who owns this property and 2 others would pay 0.002 × (1+2×0.05)²×100 = 0.242 units of money per year.
• A corporation who owns this property and 10 others would pay 0.002 × (1+10×0.05)²×100 = 0.45 units of money per year, which is more than double the individual family
• A huge real estate conglomerate who owns this property and 100 others would pay 0.002 × (1+100×0.05)²×100 = 7.2 units, which is so high that it probably would not be profitable to even own this property.

It is “quadratic” because the tax rate scales with the square of the number of previous lots owned.

Coupled with counting rules that ignore subsidiary corporate entities for the purpose of determining ownership, finely-tuning values of r and p will discourage corporate ownership of housing without punishing individual homeowners or small-time landlords.

While this strategy has not been tried in real life to my knowledge, interestingly, some Minecraft servers have implemented a similar scheme to prevent hoarding of desirable lots in the overworld to varying degrees of success, mostly depending on whether those in charge admit any loopholes for privileged players to exploit.

While I agree with this principle generally, and I believe that if my solution were to be implemented it would need to be alongside other schemes like increased public housing projects, relaxing zoning laws to allow densification, and anti-scalping measures like a quadratic property tax.

But even if my suggestion were implemented alone, it wouldn’t result in increased prices. That’s got to do with the fact that ordinary people, right now in the US, largely do not bid in foreclosure auctions. All that housing supply is actually not going to end consumers at all. The type of people who would bid at foreclosure auctions are not those who want to live in the house but in many cases, those who want to resell it. Making the foreclosure process more similar to normal house-buying and thereby increasing the hammer prices drives out scalpers and flippers because it’s not profitable for them any more. Hell, if you’ve seen the videos these people post, they start pulling back even if the price is tens of thousands of dollars under market.

The counter-intuitive solution is probably to make it easier for banks to evict people for not paying their mortgage.

In most of the US, foreclosures are a legal process that requires a court order. The bank has to take the borrower to court, prove the loan is not paid, and then the court has to find in favour of the bank and then issue an order to have the sheriff auction off the property.

In many cases, these auctions will result in the property sold far below market value because the borrower will drag their feet and not co-operate. In many cases, buyers can’t do a thorough house inspection and thus the hammer price suffers because they have to account for that risk.

The bootlicker-sounding but actually smart solution, if you consider it beyond the initial knee jerk reaction, is to make it so that when the court enters a foreclosure order, the homeowner is immediately evicted and the house is now in the custody of the State until it is sold. The borrowers can have a reasonable time to leave, but when they do, the sheriff should then open the property to the public for inspection and hire or allow buyers to hire house inspectors, perform title searches, and all the other formalities associated with selling a house in the ordinary manner.

All buyers then submit written offers (bids) to the sheriff like they would for any other house purchase but these bids would be published to avoid accusations of impropriety; the highest bidder gets the house. As with any other auction, the bank bids the amount of the mortgage plus court costs as a baseline. After it is sold, the sheriff takes the traditional 6 per cent estate agent fee for their trouble and then pays off the bank and the remainder goes to the borrower.

As terrible as it sounds for the ordinary borrower, this actually results in a better outcome for them because it would result in a higher sale price for the house, meaning the mortgage is lower risk for the bank by reducing the likelihood that the bank bid is the highest, allowing them to extend those loans to more people, and a defaulted borrower gets more of their money back in the end.

The idea that creating more housing stock will lead to prices decreasing is still economically sound.

Rowling was always known to be slightly racist but people mostly dismissed it as a sort of fantastically stupid racism. As in, the “ha ha this racist stereotype is so dumb, see how ridiculous it looks when I put it in my wizard book” sort.

I don’t think it was until she started going full TERF that people began to realise that she’s not making fun of the stereotypes; she actually thinks casual racism is a funny and cute thing to do.

Important distinction: A triangle is a three-sided polygon. For example, a quarter-circle is not a triangle, despite being a three-sided shape.

Is there a word in English that means “Labelling everything you don’t like as [extreme negative word] and thus watering down the meaning of [extreme negative word]”?

Firstly this is surprisingly high-quality coverage. I’ve never heard of this website but I’m pretty impressed.

Secondly, regarding the lawsuit in general, I think that patent and intellectual property law regarding game mechanics and software processes in general are badly in need of reform. There doesn’t seem to have been significant legislative action to address this in any major economy that I know of. The number of bullshit parents being filed, unclear and vague rules as to how copyright/patent law works with respect to software, AI, and game mechanics, is really leading to a lawsuit culture where the only way to find out what the bounds of the law are is to spend millions of dollars on lawyers to litigate it in court, when really, legislatures should be actively writing new and clearer rules to deal with these issues before people need to sue each other to find out.

The Internet of 2025 is just way too different and complex to operate using the copyright rules of the 1990s.

If I were in writing the rules, there’d be separate categories of intellectual property for software libraries, game mechanics, fictional characters, and so on, with clear definitions on what is and is not considered fair use of these sorts of intellectual property. It should not be possible to copyright the design of a widely-used software API or game mechanic. And any such protection on those things should be comparatively short in duration (not more than a decade) so that others can eventually re-implement the design, and probably do so better than the original inventor.

Paper money doesn’t exist

I don’t think a BRICS currency will be successful in replacing the dollar unless the governments of the participating countries force their businesses to use it. The reason why transactions are denominated and settled in US dollars is because of the perceived stability of its value and the openness of the US financial system to international trade. People use the US dollar because they trust the American government to not excessively devalue it and for it to be reliably useful later on.

And yes, I recognise that all of these are under attack by the current US government.

Flathub is almost the perfect distribution system for software on Linux. The only thing it’s missing is a billing system. If it had that, it would probably attract more game developers to make their games available as Flatpaks.

Okay, you got me there. I’ll admit that’s a pretty good use for cryptocurrencies

Blockchain is the perfect solution to none of life’s problems

Why not a community order?

This is such a strange punishment which is completely unconnected with the offence in question.