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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • And this is why the UK has separated hot and cold water taps.
    Your hot water used to come from a rainwater tank on the roof, and it was illegal to pipe it to a mixing faucet because if something went wrong with the cold water site it could pull undrinkable hot water from these tanks and faucets and contaminate all the drinking water.

    Works for these plug-in solar panels too - illegal here in Finland, because if the grid went down, these types of panels could keep feeding the house, out to the street, and electrocute a line worker.

    (Also because installing solar panels is a well protected job over here, can’t touch that occupation and their revenue stream)




  • There are a lot of requirements to be able to join the EU, and many of them are deal breakers for the UK that they never implemented - like having to switch to the Euro and joining Schengen. They would undoubtedly demand to get the same special exceptions they had before, and require every EU country to unanimously agree to give them, which almost certainly would never happen.

    And even before that, one of the requirements is a “significant, stable and long-lasting majority public opinion in favour of rejoining”. One interpretation of this was requiring a few years of at least 65% public approval for the join.











  • I’m fairly certain he pays every last cent he government asks of him.
    The problem is that the government has been unwilling to ask for more, and the current one certainly won’t.

    He has been advocating for higher taxes for while though, like backing the Washington Income Tax initiative with his father:

    Bill Gates Sr., father of the Microsoft Corp. co-founder, and about two dozen other supporters of Initiative 1098 turned in 350,000 petition signatures Thursday in Olympia, many more than the roughly 241,000 required to get on the ballot. The campaign says it will turn in an additional 20,000 Friday. Gates said that it was time “to make our tax code fair for the middle class and small businesses.”


  • So then, Bill isn’t a billionaire, by definition?

    But honestly it does kinda fit, someone like Elon Musk is a billionaire with the sole goal of gaining more useless wealth at any costs, while Gates kinda realised over three decades ago that he has so much already he doesn’t have a need to actually get more.
    He’s already given around $100 billion in donations, and probably actually would have ran out of money by now if not for the fact that even though he has sold off his Microsoft stock from the initial 45% down to just around 1%, that 1% has been growing like crazy -15 years ago, it would have been worth around $2.5 billion, today it’s over $40 billion.

    That original 45% would be worth 1.5 trillion today, btw.