Before he went national, NYC politics were more important to his business, and NYC politics - like all major metros - are Democratic.

In US metros, they’re typically around 2% of the home value, with discount maybe 50% for owner’s primary residence. Depending on the locality, the home value may be reappraised every year only only after a sale. If you bought a $100k house, planning retirement on $1000 annual taxes, and the area gentrifies your house to $500k, the extra $4k/year in taxes can be a budget buster.

My first server was a single-core Pentium - maybe even 486 - desktop I got from university surplus. That started a train of upgrading my server to the old desktop every 5-or-so years, which meant the server was typically 5-10 years old. The last system was pretty power-hungry, though, so the latest upgrade was an N100/16 GB/120 GB system SSD.

I have hopes that the N100 will last 10 years, but I’m at the point where it wouldn’t be awful to add a low-cost, low-power computer to my tech upgrade cycle. Old hardware is definitely a great way to start a self-hosting journey.

So much of nvidia’s revenue is now datacenters, I wonder if they even care about consumer sales. Like their consumer level cards are more of an advertising afterthought than actual products.

The usual math goes something like

Annuity: $2B paid monthly over 30 years is $5.5M/month; $3.5M after taxes.

Lump sum: $1B, $670M after taxes. Invested in index fund at, say 8%, can be expected to earn $4.5M/month, $3.6M after more taxes, which are lower for capital gains & dividends.

There’s more complicated maths, if you want to model taxes, future values, and variable market returns, but they all say pretty much the same thing. They have to: the annuity works because They put the lump sum into escrow, pay a trustee to manage it well enough to pay the annuity and pay the trustee’s salary. That means the trustee will invest said lump sum (before taxes) in low-risk, low-return assets, take his vig, and pay out the annuity from what’s left.

“Panel” in most cases means “400W nominal panel,” which may include higher-efficiency, same-size panels with 420W nominal, so you can just math whatever panel numbers they give you by 400 to get the answers you want. Like, if they tell you a “10 panel” system will generate 3240 W, you can figure that means 75-85% of nominal peak power. A lot of the calculators are meant to help sell installations, based on people’s current electric usage and constrained by their roof area. That makes ‘number of panels’ a very handy measure.

Encrypt email with anyone who publishes a key. If “bad” emails are the only ones you encrypt, then that metadata can be used to raise suspicion of you and to trace your contacts.

I would expand this to say that it matters how many people in the household. For one person, 55 Mbps is fine for streaming video and 350 GB is fine for downloads, unless you’re d/l multiple AAA games. 350 GB might also cause trouble if you do significant cloud backups.

If you’re in a household of 4 people, that 350 GB is likely to bite, and 55 Mbps is likely to struggle if you’re all watching something different.

Congress makes a big show of restricting their official compensation. Have voted down “cost of living” pay raises every year since 2009. Voted away speaking and publication fees. All these things to “prove” that they hold their positions for civic duty more than money, but the flip side of this is that only people with independent wealth can afford to be in congress. If most of their money comes from investments or unofficial sources, then it can be even easier to funnel money to them - insider trading tips, legislation favorable to their own companies or investments, jobs for their relatives. Benefits structured not to count as compensation or salary, like free travel on “official” business or below-market rent.

It’s a little misleading to describe ‘feeling good,’ including selfless acts of altruism with the phrase “enrich themselves.”

Having a single, central receiver to collect inputs from 5+ A/V sources and deal them back, arbitrarily? to 6 different outputs seems awfully complicated. Something like Jellyfin or mythtv with one or more TV tuners would let you originate all of the TV & streaming signals from your central source to client players - kodi or whatever - in the player rooms. Most of those have at least some control through homeassistant. Kodi on RPis with some basic class D amplifiers in each room, run through the TV, if the room has a TV. Probably couldn’t get synchronized audio in all rooms that way.

They probably do not get the same tax cuts: a “normal” person, making a paltry $250,000/year only reduces taxes by 24% of their giving, where the ultra-rich get 37%.

But the real difference is scale. A million people each giving $100 to their favorite charity is going to distribute that money more-or-less according to the community’s overall priorities. One person giving $100M to their favorite charity has no connection to the broader community and social goals. They supercharge that one thing, which takes attention and resources from everything else.

4 - High-end philanthropy is subsidized by regular taxpayers.

I feel like this is really under-appreciated. Like, Rich Dude decides he wants to donate $100M to…whatever - early childhood education. In the US, he avoids up to $37M taxes, which you can either look at as other taxpayers making $37M matching donation or $37M taken from other society objectives.

To the extent that government is a (marginally) publicly accountable system for funding a society’s competing goals - education, health, defense, research - charity allows the very wealthy not just to bypass the social structure for prioritizing goals, but to force other taxpayers to adopt their personal priorities. Maybe the goal is good, maybe it’s not - the point is that they’re completely unaccountable.

It sounds like he’s not being given a house, but cash that the donor intends OP should use to buy a house.

To me, this sounds like a combination of “you’re going to inherit significant money” and “here’s a strategy to survive on it long-term.” If OP’s family member has made their life as a landlord, then that’s just them passing on their own experience. OP is unhoused, and it’s reasonable to imagine their family member distrusts OP’s financial awareness.

The inheritance may or may not specify how the money is to be used. If OP just gets some lump sum of money, then there’s the financial question of how to extract the greatest quality of life from that money and each strategy has its own ethical question. Would it ethical to buy two homes - even if they’re the same physical building - and rent one out to pay for both? Plus OP’s living expenses? Would it be ethical to invest it all in United Healthcare and live off the dividends? To open a restaurant?

If OP gets a lump sum, there is also the ethical question of whether they are bound to use it in the fashion recommended by their family member.

How do you see this situation as different from splitting rent with a housemate?

To me, the ethical questions lie not in the situation, but in how you handle it. Charge your tenant high enough rent to cover the full mortgage, maintenance, and renovations of the whole building? Sounds sketchy. Charge “market rate” just because that’s what the hedge-fund landlords demand? Sketchy. Find a rent level that accounts for your costs & maintenance of the rented space, an allowance for vacant time, and risk of bad tenants? That’s a great way to help people find housing, without being an actual charity, and make more sustainable use of a big space than living in it all by yourself.

1200 sf townhouse. I can clean it top to bottom under an hour. It takes 5 minutes to mow the lawn. Only time my electric bill tops $100 is August, and gas only in January. No one even thinks about you hosting family gatherings or parties. Don’t have to buy a monster TV so you can see it across the 20’ room.

I suppose, if you really like gardening, or hosting parties, then those could be negatives, but it seems like the main reason to have a big, fancy house is so other people know you can afford a big, fancy house. Personally, they make me uncomfortable, and I would hate to live in one, nevermind the maintenance.

They both have “I’ve made a huge mistake” energy.

There’s no wrong or right way to enjoy games, and so many ways to find enjoyment in those games. Some people love the novelty, or the stories, graphics, music…

Based on the favorites you’ve mentioned, I feel like you really enjoy specific mechanics or the physical experience/practice of the game. Back in the day, I could spend hours running through Diablo 2, and that was entirely based on button mashing and running. Something about its pacing, interface, and the match of its challenge with my coordination just hit exactly right - difficult enough to be rewarding, easy enough that repeatedly dying didn’t frustrate me, and always another fight just seconds away. I played that for years.

Now that game launchers track my time, it’s really obvious that I like certain games for their mechanics - mostly Skyrim & Fallout - other games for sandbox/crafting - Valheim, Rimworld, X4 - hundreds of hours in each, even though I’ll try other games, at least long enough to finish their stories, once. Sometimes just because I paid for it & feel obligated to get to the end. It’s OK to have favorites.

Super easy, as it turns out. I run my own DNS and web servers, so I pointed quicken.com at my web server to capture the request, then used curl to capture the response. Both turned out to be plain ASCII, request like

stk.1=SMCI;.2=NVDA;.3=INTC;

as POST data, and responses like

qwin.quotes.ASTM.symbol 4 ASTM
.last 7 18.7400
.time 10 1573074000
.time.str 5 16:00
.change 6 0.4000

plus a whole slew of other optional fields for fundamentals, dividends, etc. It was a simpler time on the internet, when no one cared about leaking data and companies didn’t care if a handful of geeks reversed engineered their data structures.

This won’t help you, but I want to brag. I started using Quicken to track my finances at the turn of the century, back when it was all local storage. Quicken 2012 was the last iteration that used http (not https) to update stock prices. When they discontinued support, I captured the interaction and deciphered the formats. Wrote a proxy to intercept the request, look up the security info, and send back the data.

So, I self-host quicken.com. It’s saved me having to update Quicken or submit to their subscription model.