Komunitas
hexbear.net
archiving this as a whole HTML file, since there’s a paywall that archivers don’t bypass (I think I got to the article on some kind of free trial? I put in my email, didn’t pick a subscription and then it just unlocked so I downloaded the page itself) The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 Is the New Poverty The poverty line, a six-decade-old benchmark, claims to define the threshold to the middle class. The number is a lie. ::: spoiler more For my whole career in finance, I have distrusted the obvious. And yet, for many years there was one number I assumed was an actuarial fact: the U.S. poverty line. Yes, I saw Americans feeling poorer every year, despite economic growth and low unemployment. But ultimately, I trusted the official statistics. Until I saw a simple statement buried in a research paper. And I realized that number—created more than 60 years ago, with good intentions—was a lie. The statement was this: “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.” When I read it I felt sick. And when you understand that number, you will understand the rage of Americans who have been told that their lives have been getting better when they are barely able to stay afloat. In 1963, Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration, observed that families spent roughly one-third of their income on groceries. Since pricing data was hard to come by for many items (e.g., housing), if you could calculate a minimum adequate food budget at the grocery store, you could multiply by three and establish a poverty line. Orshansky presented her findings in 1965. She was drawing a floor, a line below which families were clearly in crisis. For that time, that floor made sense. Housing was relatively cheap. A family could rent a decent apartment or buy a home on a single income. Healthcare was provided by employers and cost relatively little (Blue Cross coverage cost in the range of $10 per month). Childcare didn’t really exist as a market—mothers stayed home, family helped, or neighbors (who likely had someone home) watched each others’ kids. Cars were affordable, if prone to breakdowns. College tuition could be covered with a summer job. Orshansky’s food-times-three formula was crude, but as a crisis threshold—a measure of “too little”—it roughly corresponded to reality. But everything changed between 1963 and 2024. Housing costs exploded. Healthcare became the largest household expense for many families. Employer coverage shrank while deductibles grew. Childcare became a market, and that market became ruinously expensive. College went from affordable to crippling. The labor model shifted. A second income became mandatory to maintain the standard of living that one income formerly provided. But a second income meant childcare became mandatory, which meant, for many, two cars became mandatory. The composition of household spending transformed completely. In 2024, food-at-home is no longer 33 percent of household spending. For most families, it’s 5 to 7 percent. Housing now consumes 35 to 45 percent. Healthcare takes 15 to 25 percent. Childcare, for families with young children, can eat 20 to 40 percent. If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three. It becomes 16. Which means if you measured income inadequacy today the way Orshansky measured it in 1963, the threshold for a family of four—the official poverty line in 2024—wouldn’t be $31,200. If the crisis threshold—the floor below which families cannot function—is honestly updated to current spending patterns, it lands at close to $140,000. Consider this: The median household income is roughly $80,000. We have been told, implicitly, that a family earning $80,000 is doing fine—safely above poverty, solidly middle class, perhaps comfortable. But if Orshansky’s crisis threshold were calculated today using her own methodology, that $80,000 family would be living in deep poverty. To understand why, you need to look at the real costs of sustaining a family today. I wanted to see what would happen if I ignored the official stats and simply calculated the cost of existing. I built a basic needs budget for a family of four (two earners, two kids). No vacations, no Netflix, no luxury. Just the “participation tickets” required to hold a job and raise kids in 2024. Using conservative data for a family in New Jersey: Childcare: $32,773 Housing: $23,267 Food: $14,717 Transportation: $14,828 Healthcare: $10,567 Other essentials: $21,857 Required net income: $118,009 Add federal, state, and FICA taxes of roughly $18,500, and you arrive at a required gross income of $136,500. This is Orshansky’s “too little” threshold, updated honestly. This is the floor. The single largest line item isn’t housing. It’s childcare: $32,773. This is the trap. To reach the median household income of $80,000, most families require two earners. But the moment you add the second earner to chase that income, you trigger the childcare expense. If one parent stays home, the income drops to $40,000 or $50,000—well below what’s needed to survive. If both parents work to hit $100,000, they hand over $32,000 to a daycare center. Then take housing. Critics will immediately argue that I’m cherry-picking expensive cities. They will say $136,500 is a number for San Francisco or Manhattan, not “Real America.” So let’s look at “Real America.” The model above allocates $23,267 per year for housing. That breaks down to $1,938 per month. This is the number that serious economists use to tell you that you’re doing fine. I analyzed a modest “starter home,” which turned out to be in Caldwell, New Jersey—the kind of place a Teamster could afford in 1955. I went to Zillow to see what it costs to live in that same town if you don’t have a down payment and are forced to rent. There are exactly seven 2-bedroom+ units available in the entire town. The cheapest one rents for $2,715 per month. So when I say the real poverty line is $140,000, I’m being conservative. I’m using optimistic, national-average housing assumptions. If we plug in the actual cost of living in the zip codes where the jobs are—where rent is $2,700, not $1,900—the threshold pushes past $160,000. The housing market isn’t just expensive; it’s broken. Seven units available in a town of thousands? That isn’t a market. That’s a shortage masquerading as an auction. Then there is everything else you need to function in society, the cost of the “participation ticket.” Back in 1955, that included a $5 phone line. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $58. Except that in reality, to function today—to factor authenticate your bank account, to answer work emails, to check your child’s school portal (which is now digital-only)—you need a smartphone plan and home broadband. That’s not $58. It’s $200 or more. Economists will look at my $140,000 figure and scream about “hedonic adjustments.” And yes, cars today have airbags, homes have air conditioning, and phones are supercomputers. The quality of many goods has gotten markedly better. But we are not calculating the price of luxury. We are calculating the price of participation. Now run this kind of participation audit across the economy. In 1955, Blue Cross family coverage was roughly $10 per month ($115 in today’s dollars). Today, the average family premium is over $1,600 per month. That’s 14x inflation. In 1955, the Social Security tax was 2 percent on the first $4,200 of income. The maximum annual contribution was $84. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $960 a year. Today, a family earning the median $80,000 pays over $6,100. That’s 6x inflation. And childcare? In 1955, this cost was zero because the economy supported a single-earner model. Today, it’s $32,000. That’s an infinite increase in the cost of participation. The only thing that actually tracked official Consumer Price Index was… food. Everything else—the inescapable fees required to hold a job, stay healthy, and raise children—inflated at multiples of the official rate when considered on a participation basis. Yes, these goods and services are better. I would not trade my 65″ 4K TV mounted flat on the wall for the 25″ TV that dominated a living room, but I also don’t have the choice to pay less money and buy the old model. ::: cont’d in response
Komunitas
lemmy.world
None of them. As a programmer, the only people you’re keeping out with those are the people who wouldn’t break into your home anyway. As soon as one of those hits the market, its out dated and no longer safe. Security is always playing catch up, just look at Kia as an example. Right now, you (yes you, with potentially no tech background) can go on the internet and download a program to a key fob using youtube as a guide, and steal a brand new Kia. Never trust one of these “smart” locks, a burglar is only one youtube video away.
Komunitas
lemmy.ml
“Paid for by a state actor” Yes, who knows. Could be a lone “black hat” or a group of “black hats”. Who knows. Could be the result of a lot of public criticism in the news regarding Pegasus spyware. Who knows. Could be paid by companies without any state actors involved. Who knows. Could be a lone programmer who wants power or is seeking revenge for some heated mailing list discussion. Who knows. The question of trust has been mentioned in this case of a sole maintainer with health problems. What I asked myself is : How did this trust develop years ago ? People trusted Linus Torvalds and used the Linux kernel to build Linux distributions with to the point that the Linux kernel became from a tiny hobby thing a giant project. At some point compiling from source code became less fashionable and most people downloaded and installed binaries. New projects started and instead of tar and gzip things like xz and zstd were embraced. When do you trust a person or a project, and who else gets on board of a project ? Nowadays something like : curl -sSL https://yadayada-flintstones-revival.com | bash is considered perfectly normal as the default installation of some software. Open source software is cool and has kind of produced a sort of revolution in technology but there is still a lot of work to do.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Remember when the meme was about Internet Explorer? IE: What is my purpose? Me: You download Chrome! IE: Oh…my god! Now Chrome isn’t trusted. Even duck duck go is getting dubious. It seems there’s almost nowhere to turn. Your data is their data, and if you dont like it, you can lump it.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
They don’t understand how to use a search engine effectively anymore or how to rapidly filter through large amounts of information to find answers This bit, at least, may be at least as much a fault of the environment - the increasing awfulness of search results these days. It used to be you could search a specific issue (e.g., “borked.exe high CPU usage” or “how to partition a drive”) and your first results would be relatively well-written sites run by actual tech people. More recently, though, it feels like: The first 5-8 results are near-identical “help” sites that are 40% introduction, 40% basic troubleshooting steps, 15% “download our app!”, and 5% actually useful tips. There are tech site results listed… but they’re from 2016, a different software version, maybe even a different OS. "Okay, so, to fix this problem you first need… [SIGN IN TO CONTINUE READING] If you’re very, very lucky, you’ll find a Reddit (or now, Lemmy) thread on the issue. I’d consider myself pretty technically savvy, and even I find it frustrating to search for IT info or fixes these days. The newest problem is AI-written answers cooked up for you on the spot, which are frequently completely unhelpful yet pushed to the top of the results.
Komunitas
lemmy.dbzer0.com
LibreWolf as my browser (it’s a more secure and private version of Firefox, comes with a pre-installed adblocker and removes all the unnecessary junk) (Flatpak) with some of the following extensions: LibRedirect for redirecting privacy-invasive websites to private frontends ff2mpv Read Aloud (text-to-speech) Buster for solving CAPTCHAs Dark Reader Violentmonkey for userscripts like Lemmy Universal Link Switcher (it’s really useful) DownThemAll Search by Image Server-Status (GitHub) shows information about a web server like country/region (via local GeoIP database lookup), SSL certificate information and more. Good open source alternative to Flagfox. Thunderbird for emails (Flatpak) Proton Mail Bridge (Flatpak) Merkuro Calendar Ptyxis (Flatpak) as my terminal. It’s optimized for containers (e.g. distrobox). foot is a pretty good alternative if you want something more minimalistic and don’t care about containers. There are countless other good options like Kitty, Alacritty, Konsole, WezTerm and many others. Emacs as my IDE KWrite, Kate or NotepadQQ for quickly editing text documents. There’s also Apostrophe for GNOME. QOwnNotes for local/Nextcloud-synced notes (Iotas for GNOME) There are other good options like Trilium Notes or Joplin. Speech Note speech-to-text note-taking (https://piped.video/watch?v=zlLVgTB42Bo) Akregator as my RSS client (Newsflash for GNOME) Strawberry as my music player (Amberol or Rhythmbox if you’re on GNOME) Spot for Spotify (Flatpak) Cider for Apple Music (unfortunately not FOSS anymore) Feishin for connecting to my self-hosted Navidrome music server rescrobbled for saving my music listening history to Last.fm. Also works with self-hosted ListenBrainz. Jellyfin Desktop for connecting to my self-hosted Jellyfin media server mpv as my video player (Celluloid on GNOME) FreeTube for watching YouTube videos This modded YouTube Music client that has an adblocker and many other cool features: https://th-ch.github.io/youtube-music/ Kasts for listening to podcasts (also has the ability to sync with gpodder.net or self-hosted GPodder on Nextcloud) LibreOffice (Flatpak) There’s also OnlyOffice. Skanpage for scanning documents GNUcash for accounting Notesnook or Standard Notes for end-to-end encrypted note-taking Anki Flashcards (Flatpak) Logseq (FOSS Obsidian alternative) Flameshot for screenshots (GitHub, Flatpak) Kdenlive for video editing GIMP, Krita and Inkscape for graphics stuff Blender for animation stuff Natron for VFX LMMS and Ardour for music production Virtual Machine Manager for creating/managing KVM/QEMU VMs (Boxes for GNOME) Nextcloud Desktop for connecting to my home server Signal Desktop (Flatpak) There’s also Flare for GNOME, which uses GTK instead of Electron and feels more native (Flatpak) Element (or NeoChat if you use KDE, Fractal for GNOME) for Matrix WebCord for Discord. There are some native GTK clients like Abaddon and Dissent. Paper Planes (Native GTK Telegram client) Konversation or HexChat for IRC (Polari on GNOME) Tokodon as my Mastodon client qBittorrent for downloading torrent content. (You can use KTorrent on KDE and Fragments on GNOME) Pika Backup for taking backups (There’s a pretty good video about it: https://piped.video/watch?v=W30wzKVwCHo) Timeshift for btrfs snapshots Gradience to customize GTK4 appearance Bitwarden for syncing my password database with my self-hosted Vaultwarden server (also works with their public cloud syncing option). Use KeePassXC if you prefer something entirely local. LocalSend for sharing files on the local network (basically works like AirDrop) (also works over NetBird or Tailscale btw) NetBird for creating a flat VPN network between my devices KDE Connect for better integration with my phone. Also works over NetBird btw. Check out GSConnect if you’re on GNOME. KRunner for quickly finding files or applications (Ulauncher for other desktops, rofi for window managers) Safing Portmaster (Firewall and DNS blocking solution. Check out OpenSnitch if you just need a firewall) LACT for controlling AMD GPUs Flatseal for managing Flatpak permissions (On KDE this is integrated in the system settings) Bottles for managing Wine prefixes (Flatpak) If you like gaming: Lutris for managing my games Heroic for Epic Games and GOG Prism Launcher for Minecraft Dolphin for emulating Wii and GameCube Ryujinx for emulating the Switch RPCS3 for PS3 emulation Vita3K for PSVita emulation PPSSPP for PSP Cemu for Wii U emulation For the CLI: fish shell starship tmux fd as an alternative to find bat instead of less (written in Rust, has some nice syntax highlighting) ripgrep fzf zoxide yt-dlp streamlink ncmpcpp ncspot newsboat
Komunitas
lemmy.world
A VPN is a must if you wanna go down this route Soulseek (and I recommend the Nicotine+ client over the official one) is a fantastic source for all music in all formats, and particularly obscure off-label shit you won’t get anywhere else. You’ll even have some success finding audiobooks there, although this is very hit-and-miss. I wish audiobook pirates would use it more heavily. It’s P2P, like Napster used to be. You’ll have to share something or you’ll get auto-ignored by most users. RuTracker is a great non-private/non-ratio-monitoring torrent site for music (does require a free account though). I’ve never had a single torrent from there that wasn’t seemingly seeded by a Godzilla’s dick. Obviously it’s in Russian, but there’s really no difficulty navigating around. The only thing you might struggle with is signing up for an account, but just have your favourite translation tool open in another tab 👍 If you don’t mind slow download speeds (from the likes of RapidGator), I enjoy Exystence. It’s a blog that shares link to the latest albums and offers both lossy and lossless versions. Nice RSS subscription to have. If you do find yourself using RapidGator a lot, don’t waste money buying a sub directly from them, it’s insanely pricey. Instead, get a reseller like Real Debrid, which costs like 10% as much and also covers you for about two-dozen other file hosters. I highly recommend putting as much distance between your credit card and the company as possible, just for safety reasons. Using PaySafeCard is fine, as Real Debrid will never see your details in that case. I don’t have any specific reason to be weary of them, I just don’t trust random/small/hitherto unheard of companies as a rule.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Steam made it easy to buy, download and play games. So much of the competition was focused on preventing piracy to the detriment of the user experience. Steam was buy, download, and play all your games in one place with a minimum of bullshit. Then they implemented Steam Greenlight. It let some smaller studios get onto a major platform and proved out that there was a demand for those titles. They were then smart enough to realize that trying to gatekeep those studios with the “Greenlight” process was stupid and opened the flood gates. Really, this goes back to Gabe Newell’s comments about piracy (a decade and a half ago [1]): We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable. Steam was a real competitor to LimeWire/Kazaa/etc. The other options, at the time, were stuck in the mentality of treating their customers like pirates. And once people bought into the Steam ecosystem, getting them to buy into any other ecosystem was almost impossible. Steam’s main trick wasn’t building a community, it was building trust. Users trust Valve to not fuck them over. That’s a hard thing to create and it’s fragile. If you look at a competitor like EA’s Origin, many folks won’t even consider it. EA’s reputation of fucking customers is well established. No one wants to sink hundreds to thousands of dollars into a storefront with such an anti-user reputation.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
I have my own backup of the git repo and I downloaded this to compare and make sure it’s not some modified (potentially malicious) copy. The most recent commit on my copy of master was dc94882c9062ab88d3d5de35dcb8731111baaea2 (4 commits behind OP’s copy). I can verify: that the history up to that commit is identical in both copies after that commit, OP’s copy only has changes to translation files which are functionally insignificant So this does look to be a legitimate copy of the source code as it appeared on github! Clarifications: This was just a random check, I do not have any reason to be suspicious of OP personally I did not check branches other than master (yet?) I did not (and cannot) check the validity of anything beyond the git repo You don’t have a reason to trust me more than you trust OP… It would be nice if more people independently checked and verified against their own copies. I will be seeding this for the foreseeable future.
Komunitas
awful.systems
Hi. I am a software engineer with a background in IT security. My girlfriend is a literal network security engineer. I showed her this thread and she said: don’t bother, just use http on your local network. Anyways, I am going to disengage from this thread now. Skepticism against things one doesn’t fully understand can be healthy, but this is an insane mix of paranoia and naïveté. You are not a target; the things you are afraid of will never happen; and if they did, they would not have the consequences you think they would. Your router will NOT magically expose your traffic to the internet (what would that even mean?? Like, if it spontaneously started port forwarding to your Jellyfin server (how? By just randomly guessing the port and IP???), someone would still need to actively request that traffic, AND know your login credentials, AND CARE). Your ISP does not give a shit about you owning or streaming copyrighted material over your local network. It has no stake in that. Graphene is not an ultimate arbiter of IT security, but the reason it “distrusts networks” is because you take your phone with you, constantly moving into actual untrusted networks (i.e. ones you do not own). Hosting Jellyfin on Graphene will not make it more secure, whatsoever. If every device is assumed compromised, and compromising devices with knowledge that you watch media is a threat in your model, then even putting an SD card with media in your phone and clicking play is dangerous. Which is stupid. If you actually assume your router is malicious, then please assume that when you initially downloaded your VPN client, it was also compromised and your VPN is not trustworthy. The way I see it, you have two options: educate yourself on network security to the point of being able to trust your network setup; or forget about hosting anything