They definitely can take what you don’t have. That’s what debt is.

Ok. So what’s your point? Like, what do you expect any individual person to do with that information? The person who notices that “life’s little luxuries” are impacting their financial security and cuts down on them will be in a better financial position than someone who lives in denial and digs themselves into a financial hole.

It will be $600 less to make in interest payments as you gradually pay the debt down.

More poignantly, however, it would be very useful for a $600 copay. And these are significantly more common.

You need your car to get to work. Your car gets a flat. $75 for a used tire.

Without emergency fund: $75 unexpected expense goes on credit card. Since you are still drinking fancy coffee, you have no slack in your finances, and interest starts compounding on that $75 which you cannot pay off. Eventually you figure out you can pay the debt down gradually by cutting back on having someone else make you coffee. You manage to gradually pay down your debt over several months. By the time you pay it off, the tire cost you $150.

With emergency fund: you are pissed off about the flat, but shell out $75 from your emergency fund. Your fund recovers in a couple months.

A mocha pot? But then I’d still have to buy coffee beans, which are a luxury, right? Not buying a mocha pot means you don’t have to buy coffee either, thus saving even more money.

There are degrees to all things. Doesn’t mean some things aren’t better or worse. If you are getting a latte at a coffee shop every day, making them yourself is a comparable amount of luxury for significantly less money. If you are actually strapped for cash, then indeed, simply give up coffee entirely.

But if you are struggling to save even $600 in a year, you are truly in a financial emergency, and doing something about that should be at the top of your list. If you are regularly buying fancy coffee, this is obvious low hanging fruit.

And that could go for all luxuries, to the point that life is just working to be able to work.

Sure. Again, degrees, choices. But again, if you struggle to save $600, then you need to save $600. Life can just be work for a while until you are in a more stable financial situation.

And none of this would be necessary if wages were higher overall, and there was a good social safety net.
Tell government to tax the rich, instead of telling people to forego their pleasures.

Okay, I’ve done those things. Now what does the financially struggling individual do once I have told the government that, and the government has ignored me? If their plan is to continue having no financial safety net while drinking cafe coffee every day, I’m just gonna say that that isn’t the best choice.

If the government turned around and did those things, that sure would be nice. But I’m not gonna count on it, and if you are struggling financially, you shouldn’t either. If you sit around waiting for the government to save you because they should, my bet is that you’re in for some disappointment. A better bet is to see that social safety nets are bad and likely to get worse, accept this fact, and the fact that you can effectively do nothing about this and other large mechanations of the world, and ask yourself what you can do to improve your own situation.

If you can barely save $600 in 2 years, then you 100% need a $600 emergency fund

Getting down voted for not being homeless. Lemmy moment.

Because then you have $600 in an emergency fund so you can use that to pay for an emergency rather than going into debt. It isn’t hard to understand that $600 is $600 more that you can use to make you life better, rather than frittering it away on coffee.

You’re literally trying to justify shooting yourself in the foot via self pity and learned helplessness. Just buy a mocha pot at the thrift store.

If you have supportive friends, a lovely partner or partners, can go on walks, and look at the moon, but think life isn’t worth living because you can’t drink a cup of coffee… Imma say that’s a you problem.

When people talk about AI taking off exponentially, usually they are talking about the AI using its intelligence to make intelligence-enhancing modifications to itself. We are very much not there yet, and need human coaching most of the way.

At the same time, no technology ever really follows a particular trend line. It advances in starts and stops with the ebbs and flows of interest, funding, novel ideas, and the discovered limits of nature. We can try to make projections - but these are very often very wrong, because the thing about the future is that it hasn’t happened yet.

Yeah, imma need a source for those numbers.

dmgl

The internet hate machine is hardly an exclusively American problem.

The great irony being that Us Magazine is a tabloid that reports almost exclusively on celebrity gossip - people who clearly aren’t “Us”

She’s an OF model and this is her niche. It’s literally her job.

Typically professionals do ensure all their partners are tested beforehand.

what are the chances that the next person “inspired by” her will also do this safely?

Puritanical hand wringing. Tons of people have unsafe sex every day. If you want to lower STI spread, create public awareness campaigns and improve sex ed for students.

Some children need choke collars

Life’s a lot of work when you could just be dead instead

I feel like the unsaid joke of that movie was that going to White Castle is such a weird desire that you’d have to be high.

Otoh, it also provides jobs for the community, either directly (cleaning, handyman work, management) or indirectly (additional tourist dollars in local establishments).

The reality is, in almost all places, short term rentals have an extremely negligible impact on the housing market. And in the few places where they have a measurable impact, we need to ask: why can’t that area just build more housing? And the answer, almost invariably, is restrictive zoning codes, coupled with land speculation. Solving the problem of lack of housing doesn’t require banning short term rentals, an action which would likely have a significant negative impact on local businesses who rely on the tourist dollars. Solving the problem involves liberalizing zoning ordinances to allow more housing to be built, and adopting Georgist Land Value Taxes which preclude investors’ ability to speculate on land value rather than only earning money via value they provide to other people.