Be careful what you wish for. California capped property tax increase since 1978 with prop 13 and most experts say this is a major factor in their insanely expensive housing market. Most people are heavily incentivized to never move to keep their low property tax rate, but this in turn prevents most new development and upzoning while simultaneously leading to the worst sprawl in the nation.

It also starves the state of tax revenue requiring them to levy the tax further for new buyers and seek other income streams like heightened income and sales tax. Policies like this somewhat unintuitively only benefit those who are already well off. Renters and younger people gain no benefit and ultimately pay higher property taxes than those who already are financially established enough to own a property.

A healthy property tax disincentivizes housing as a speculative investment, improving the overall market for people who actually live there. There should certainly be breaks for poverty and financial distress but capping or cutting rates broadly encourages speculation. For a basic human need such high degree of speculation benefits nobody.

It’s crazy that for something so important the dems are handling it as if they had no plan. Donald Trump should be the absolute easiest possible competition for their candidate to beat. It’s like they learned nothing from 2008 and the energy around Obama. We need younger candidates who can communicate to the public well. Better policy means nothing to most swing voters if it can’t be communicated effectively.

And probably well within the margin of error. It could be correlated to any other habit people who drink every day may also be more likely to have.

The problem is so many services requiring SMS to be that second factor. From what I’ve heard it’s easy enough to steal a sim that if you’re being explicitly targeted it’s basically the same as no second factor. Yet even if using an authenticator app most services require you to still have SMS/phone as another option for the 2FA.

For Authy specifically they’d need to guess your master password and then hijack your phone number, and for users of Authy I suspect their passwords are not easily guessed as it’s already a step above the standard SMS only 2FA most services require.

Absolutely this. AvE had exactly the same thing happen but Canadian and with tools. Now they’re both just too political for me to put up with sticking around for the technical stuff.

I’m not Australian and I’m not Canadian, so if I’m watching a technical video why do I need to know their political opinions?

To a lot of these voters it’s not about having a logical cabinet nor even policy. It’s the individual as a character representing our nation, and to them Trump is better spoken than Biden even if what most of he says has little basis in reality.

This is why Obama had such a good time with swing voters, it’s not really about the policies from what I see. I’m shocked no party since 2008 has tried running a younger candidate. I’d love to see someone younger debate Trump. Like Pete Buttigieg for example. Like ya he’s still a career politician, but I suspect he’d do much better at making the insane stuff Trump says sound insane.

The US really doesn’t understand that there is simply no competing with these batteries. To try to block the import of them is only going to set our own local industry back in their ability to compete in the global economy. And ironically the BMS systems for CATL are still using American semiconductors, so the US still gets some revenue from their massive expansion.

The most viable competitors to CATL are all in China too. I’d be somewhat supportive of a CATL specific ban due to their notoriously terrible employee working conditions and crazy NDAs/non-competes, but to ban all Chinese batteries in the US would be a huge mistake.

I’m in China right now and frequently visit for my job. The concept of privacy in public is indeed very different but it is mostly viewed as for the public good. There are very nice cameras even in the smaller cities that track where you go and when. You will get a fine for crossing the street in Shenzhen through facial recognition. You can also pay for vending machines with your face. There are cameras on most roads with flash to track which vehicles go where and when. To someone from the US it feels incredibly different and invasive, but practically speaking if you respect the laws there is nothing to worry about.

One interesting place this extends to is police surveillance. There is much higher trust of police here than in the US and every interaction I’ve had with them has been excellent, overall far nicer than any I’ve encountered in the US. They’re monitored in public the same as everyone else after all.

So in short what you hear regarding lack of privacy is mostly true, but likely neglects the general mindset around it. Obviously for minorities who speak out against the party it’s pretty problematic, but for most who have political opinions it makes more sense to simply join the party and work within its framework. I’m always surprised how eager people are to discuss politics in China, I originally expected it would be entirely unacceptable to discuss. Also note that in many ways audio is a bigger invasion of privacy than video and we all carry microphones in our pockets at all times even in Western countries.

At least in what they say they certainly recognize this. The middle East as a whole talks about climate change much more than the US in my experience, mostly because to them it is an actual existential threat. Money is money so I’m sure they’ll keep extracting oil while it makes money, but every single middle Eastern economy’s goal has been to diversify from oil for many decades now.

Exactly this. The only annoying part is that it then doesn’t count toward your deductable and out of pocket maximum. It’s crazy how nominally $1k+ medicines become like $30 when you pay without insurance.

The problem is that this isn’t really even trickle charging. Customers would absolutely complain and say it’s not working because it couldn’t charge the battery more than 1-2% in an entire day of sun. EV batteries are 60kWh+ yet getting more than 2kWh/sq meter daily from residential panels is hard for much of the US. Add to that the:

• weight of panels
• cost of panels
• heat trapped in the car from having a roof literally designed to absorb solar radiation
• fragility of panels (although all these glass roof EVs have that problem already) And it’s really not worthwhile.

One solution to the apartment street parking problem is adding charging ports to streetlights (they do this in Europe). But for most of US apartments there’s already dedicated parking space so also space for chargers. The unruly size of new vehicles is a much bigger problem in my mind, if there were actual motivation to fix this problem in government it would already be solved through some tax credits.

New outlook is less functional but much better UI design (it’s just outlook web access after all). Outlook hasn’t changed in forever because so many corporate high ups use it and think they know how it works. They always respond to emails that are already answered because they didn’t see the newer reply in their inbox. I suspect this resistance is why it’s a totally separate program to the old outlook. Yes, there are settings to group threads in outlook, but the interface is still pretty unintuitive and the vast majority of these users don’t change their default settings anyway. In my experience the terrible defaults create more problems than outlook solves. And the server syncing can be really slow at times. Personally, I’m very happy that MS is finally showing some interest to modernize outlook, the more people who use it the easier my job will get.

Also ya the name is stupid. Teams (New) gets me the most. Idk who possibly thought this naming scheme was a good idea.

Just ublock origin with default configuration. My complaints aren’t for page loading so much as scrolling. Stutter when scrolling is really annoying to me. Interestingly as mentioned the nightly version fixes this, even when ublock is also installed on it.

My occasional page related complaints are for stuff animating correctly. This is very rare and a minor inconvenience usually, but sometimes stops you from being able to do what you came to accomplish (usually on jank websites, rental car companies for example).

Pretending Firefox mobile is already great is counterproductive to fixing it’s issues. They don’t have extensive development resources particularly for the mobile version so it makes sense it’s worse. But to a non-techie switching to it isn’t a good experience yet. It definitely can be in the future but without at least acknowledging it’s current flaws why would anyone switch who has previously tried switching?

Same. The preview works but when it loads fully it’s just broken. I’m using the connect app but it’s probably some buggy metadata.

Firefox mobile isn’t there yet. Passwords will conveniently autofill from your Google account thanks to the Android level implementation of password management, but more importantly it’s resource heavy and bad UI design. Ublock support is nice but some websites just don’t deal with it well. The nightly builds do fix my main problems with the UI but they crash all the time. So there’s hope for the future, but for now it’s not great unless you absolutely need proper browser level ad blocking rather than Blokada.

So maybe my experience is unique but websites don’t always test with Firefox now and some simply don’t work with it. I use it anyway out of principle but occasionally I need to open Chrome.

On mobile it’s even worse. Firefox is stuttery on my Pixel 8 Pro and doesn’t handle more than ~20 open tabs well. The nightly version fixes the stutter but crashes all the time (it’s a nightly build after all so this is expected).

Almost no countries allow meat products due to potential exposure that couldn’t be easily seen. Sometimes for commercially prepared meats there are exceptions but these are in relatively few countries. For countries with substantial livestock keeping diseases out is critical to their economy and therefore treated with such a high level of urgency.

They take pork products particularly seriously. At least on their flag carrier, China Airlines, it would be incredibly hard to ignore the video played prior to landing with the talking pigs specifically pointing this out.

This has been the case forever. Itemizing receipts for hotels is always a pain and at least my company’s expense tool has buttons for more than 7 different tax fields each night. It’s like filling out a whole spreadsheet it the nightly rate varies.

True but efficiency is not the same and not as simple to compare since we don’t know how much of the ship’s battery is converted into motion. Similarly we don’t directly know it’s mass. ICE cars can use ~20% of the energy in fuel while EVs 90%+ of the energy in a battery. But now much can that ship effectively use? I have no idea how efficient boats are or aren’t, hence the roundabout method above.