Yeah like, they have negative charisma, so it’s extra baffling. I cannot imagine a world in which I’d support Donald Trump, but definitely not in this one where he routinely shits his own diaper. If he was only disgusting mentally but was a good speaker or handsome or whatever, it would make at least a little more sense

Fuckin Spongebob. She’s going to cheat on him, too, and hopefully he realizes he fumbled a beautiful doctor who, for some unknown reason, actually loved him.

I would love for there to be a decent pop culture community on Lemmy to break me out of non-stop doomscrolling. Maybe this will be the kick in the pants to make it happen.

I feel like the next headline is going to be, “AI-Assisted Rifle Robot Shoots Hobbyist by Mistake.”

Right? “I’ve been banned from enough communities on different topics that I can’t keep track! Could it be that I’m an asshat? No, it’s definitely the mods…”

My mom and I have talked about that kind of thing and she knows to call me directly if someone ever tries to say something happened to me. She’s not stupid, but maybe just not growing up with people constantly trying to scam her at every turn hasn’t prepared her for the depths these assholes will sink to, and they’ve gotten so much more sophisticated.

I keep kind of hoping I get this one. I’m ace, so I definitely haven’t been watching porn of any kind, and my house has changed dramatically since the last time google came by, so it would just be entertaining. But then I see people on nextdoor all freaked out that “someone has pictures of their house,” and it makes me wish for a large, extremely targeted sinkhole to open up under all these scammers.

I enjoyed it. It’s definitely a different feel than previous AC games, so if you go in hoping for that, you might be disappointed. I think it’s definitely worth checking out, especially if you can get it on sale.

And I want whoever came up with this idea to spontaneously combust, but neither of us is going to get what we want.

I’m assuming that if the genie is giving you the money, magic will take care of some of those concerns.

Depends on if you care about making set playlists. That’s the feature that generally costs more - Pandora is like $5 a month without that option, and $11 with it. I only listen in the car and don’t care about picking exactly what songs are on my stations, so I have the cheaper one, but for other people, that wouldn’t cut it.

My comment history was like 50% shitposting about the beauty industry and 50% hating on Christian fundamentalists. There’s honestly no way it won’t make AI at least a little bit worse, and I’m not mad about it.

Oh I 100% agree - when I finally managed to finish my degree a few years ago, I did my capstone research on suburban/rural homelessness, and I’m now an even bigger proponent of housing-first policies. Supportive housing works better than piecemeal programs, and outcomes are better for sobriety and mental health treatment than they are for programs that require those things as a condition of getting housing.

Unfortunately, people fucking love to hate the homeless. Everyone wants to put conditions on every scrap you give them because “I worked for what I have, they should have to, too!” There’s not a lot of political support to be found for policies that are based on meeting people where they are. Saying we should use housing that’s already vacant to help people get off the streets would get you booed right out of the room a lot of the time.

No clue - most of that is either a department I’m not in and don’t know much about, or it’s way over my head. I’m just a mid-level peon. And politicians are the ones who have to give us the tools to actually do our jobs and all of these companies have deep pockets. That’s the biggest impediment.

I mean, paying to sue a massive company that definitely has more (and probably better) attorneys than we do in order to collect a few thousand dollars more a year in sales tax isn’t necessarily the best use of city funds. If we were a bigger city, it would make more sense, but it would take us years just for the taxes to cover what we’d spend in attorneys fees and staff time. I don’t like that that’s the reality, but I can see why the idea isn’t popular.

Also, the police aren’t involved in regulating short-term rentals. I’m no fan of cops, but this is entirely civil and they have no part in this particular issue.

Unfortunately, I don’t know too much - most of the contact has been initiated by our sales tax staff to whatever department handles tax collection on the company side, but from what they’ve told me, they just don’t get a response. Our municipal code only allows us to go after owners if they fail to get licensed (and even that is a nightmare for us to try to do) but there’s nothing about the actual companies.

It’s kind of the wild west at the moment - the problem isn’t evenly distributed, so there’s not one catch-all solution. One of the mountain towns here said they have 700+ rentals and their official population is only like 500 people. We have <100 in a city of about 40k. It’s still a problem here, but nowhere near as bad as ski towns have it. Most of the laws I’ve seen are aimed at the owners, not at the companies facilitating the rentals, and they range from things designed to just make sure someone’s actually inspecting the rentals so no one dies all the way to making it unaffordable to rent multiple properties by charging a fuckton of taxes and fees. I’d kill for something forcing airbnb, vrbo, etc to actually cooperate.

My office regulates airbnbs for the city and it’s very hard to do anything about it. None of the rental platforms will work with us - we’ve sent them about a million notices that they’re collecting the wrong tax amount and they don’t even bother to respond, and they just send a check every quarter but refuse to break it out by address/owner. They won’t provide any data on what addresses are being rented, either. Apparently some other cities have successfully sued airbnb, but for a small city with a correspondingly small budget, that’s an expense that’s hard to justify to taxpayers.

We have some owners that are great - they get licensed right away, get their inspections done, no problem. Then there are other people who have done things like dig out their crawlspace themselves and turn it into non-conforming bedrooms with no egress windows - no permits or inspections, of course, and an engineer basically said the entire thing was in danger of collapsing any minute. Or the person who had a buddy do a bunch of unlicensed electrical work that was so bad the city couldn’t even let the owner stay there until it was fixed. I honestly wouldn’t stay in an airbnb now, having seen what I’ve seen - people will absolutely put renters at risk to make a buck. And we can go after them but only if we know it’s happening.

I’d personally love it if rental platforms were forced to provide owner data to cities/states, and for cities to tax the shit out of rentals that aren’t also owner-occupied, but I’m not in charge and the people with money have a vested interest in making sure that doesn’t happen. It sucks.

In my case, little of column a, little of column b.

I’m starting to question my life a lot. I’ve played over 4k hours of BoI since the first version. I remember when people warned about WoW before I really gamed and how people were sinking their whole lives into it and I was like, “wow, can’t imagine, that’s crazy,” and now I’m those people. I should go outside.

I know people say it doesn’t matter but I’m the same way with Stardew. I ended up downloading a cheat mod that lets you freeze time because I realized it’s supposed to be a nice, relaxing game, and I wasn’t feeling that way. I don’t use the freeze much, but it lets me enjoy the game without stressing.