Toronto sales tax is 13%, whereas Cali is still sub-10%.
A lot of the US vs Canada argument is that "Canadians pay slightly more taxes and gets a lot more services". Funny thing is, both left and right agree on this. Both sides want to get what we pay for. The difference is, the left wants to fix this by bringing our services up to the standards that we're already paying for. The right wants to reduce our taxes and keep existing service levels. And both ignore the fact that our giant global military presence is why we manage to pay more and get less.
The facebook way is best of both worlds - you can see the edit history so if replies to "I love puppies (edited)" are all "wtf John Smith you sick bastard why do you kill puppies!" you can see very clearly what was originally there...
While at the same time not allowing a typo or misspelling to attract the "I can't refute your argument so I will discredit you via 5th grade grammar" folk.
The move to widescreen allows for a numpad on the built in keyboard (if the screen is sufficiently large), which makes up for it slightly.
16:10 was the perfect all-purpose aspect ratio, however it was doomed as it confused non-pc hardware manufacturers (plugging tv-oriented things into the HDMI port of a 16:10 monitor resulted in vertically stretched images, and customer complaints).
Maybe Apple doesn't care about them and sees more profit by catering only to the web surfing masses.
Funny thing is that market's already cornered by Chromebooks, for 1/10th the price and 5x the battery life. And it's surprising what is available for them, including ssh, RDP, VMWare and Citrix clients, media players, etc. The only awkward part is that it's easy to forget everything you're doing is in (essentially) a Chrome browser window, so pressing ctrl+w while in a remote session will close it out.
Not all banks charge a fee. Heck some even refund your ATM fees spent at other ATMs. Brokerage banks (Charles Schwab, et al) that have a tiny ATM/branch office footprint will do both of these things. I don't know what their deposit minimums are for these features but for about 2 years I had $100 sitting in there untouched, came back and found it had grown to about $100.30...
The catch is of course that they have maybe 1-2 "branches" all located in major cities only.
While $600 in the 90s -> $1200 now doesn't track with regular inflation, it absolutely does track with passenger transportation inflation. In the late 90s, gas prices hovered around $1.40, they are now hovering around $3. More than doubled. In the mid 90s, the NY subway cost $1.25, now $2.75. More than doubled.
Intercity bus got cheaper, but that's mainly thanks to competitors sprouting up and challenging the 'hound, and the internet making it easier for people to find these competitors.
So a flight going from $600 to $1200 in that same time frame is still not bad. And trans-pac seems to have gotten cheaper, I recall pricing out round trips to Australia in the late 90s and not finding anything under $2400. Now I can get ~1800-2000 prices.
If they had gone with Fedora and/or CentOS they could have nabbed a slice of the business market. I have nothing against Ubuntu at all, but TPTB in IT shops will go with RedHat based distros more often than not when purposely ordering something for Linux use.
Not that the OS that comes on it has much bearing. It was quite satisfying the other day taking a brand new server the other day and wiping out the preinstalled Server 2016 to install RHEL 7.
I once toured an American factory for specialized communication equipment. They were proudly stating that all their products were made in America, but I couldn't take my eyes off the giant MADE IN CHINA emblazoned on the PCBs the workers were soldering things to.
I understand what they mean by Made in America, but China was pretty brilliant to get that stamp on the largest internal piece of hardware.
Walmart has the advantage of already having property somewhat suited to the task in virtually every population center in the US. Even in an ordinarily bad scenario, a Walmart closing, it can be converted to a straight up warehouse practically overnight. Amazon had to buy Whole Foods to get that kind of footprint, and even then having a grocery store in every town isn't as good as having a grocery + mega general store in every town.
At least there's cross-licensing. Some TV shows and movies are available on both Prime and Netflix, for example. That said, with Disney trying to move their (substantial) IP to their own streaming service, and newcomers like that nonsense CBS all access, I see the ecosystem fracturing rather than consolidating. The era of Big Three streaming providers of just Netflix, Prime, and Hulu is coming to an end. Sad because by having 2 out of 3, I had everything I could possibly want.
It's strange that for streaming services, fewer providers is better (at least before they have driven the final nail in other forms of video distribution, at which point they'd become just as expensive as cable packages).
Heck there's still planes flying around that require 3 man crews in the cockpit. Figure the time from when the first MD-11 / 747-400s rolled off the production line to whenever Fedex retires their last DC-10 is at least how long it will be before our current two man crews are reduced to one (going two to 0 is probably too much of a jump).
Trains are pretty safe (at least for the passengers on them). And railway crews, unlike flight crews, get paid like normal people - regular pay or OT for every minute they're on the job, whether the train is moving or not, whether they're in the cab or in a station or crew office. Might be why there's not much of a shortage there.
How the hell did airline crews get such a crappy deal?
Agreed. Here's also a fun calculation I once did for Economy Premium versus Economy: The economy premium cabin on international flights is typically 3 rows by 8 columns (24 seats). That same space, were it to be configured for economy, would be 4 rows by 10 columns (40 seats). I took the discount (no perks no refunds) economy price, multiplied it by 40, then divided by 24, and found it equaled the (yes perks and refundable) Economy Premium price.
In other words, people are paying the same price per square foot of the plane they are occupying in both classes. Yet people still chose the cheaper ticket and complain about the "shrinking airline seat" and "no frills" travel. If airlines could configure the entire plane as Economy Premium with some guarantee that all the seats would fill up, they'd love it! But they cannot fill the plane at that price point, because people would rather pay less, squish in like sardines, then complain.
No, please. The US is about the only reason cartels and local corruption haven't ruined the island like they have so many other places. I mean, they are also the reason cartels ruined other places, but who says the guy who cut off your leg can't also be the one holding the tourniquet on?
The Filipinos probably want to know what their grandparents were smoking when they voted on that... they went from territory to being a country that requires a lengthy visa application/interview process even for tourists trying to visit the US.
And now the descendants of the guys responsible for the Bataan Death March are the most prominent investors trying to improve their infrastructure. Funny how that works...
The dems know PR probably wouldn't vote democrat once they became a state anyway. (1) A Puerto Rican has one advantage over a mainland American, and one over any other Hispanic country - fluent in two languages, and US citizenship. Grant US citizenship to swaths of undocumented, and that advantage is weakened. Unlike other Hispanic communities, they have no complications in bringing someone from "back home" over - a Puerto Rican driver's license and $150 flight is all they need. Opening up immigration doesn't help Puerto Rico in the slightest, so the democrat platform is currently against their interests. (2) The island is overwhelmingly Catholic, which aligns more with conservatives. If the local padre tells them to vote (R), they will, no matter how flashy the ad campaign is.
Puerto Rico is extremely white for a Hispanic island, and they also speak English pretty well. The radio DJs code switch, and if you only know one language you can't follow the conversation. It's basically the US's Quebec. If you even attempt to speak anything other than Caribbean Spanish to them, they will speak only English back if they know it - PR is pretty useless for practicing your Spanish. I suspect the reason they don't let more English into signage and whatnot is to scare off people who might turn it into the East Coast's Hawaii (incl Hawaiian prices).
The difference in response was logistics - you can drive trucks from all over the US to the problem spots on the mainland. But try and get things to PR, nightmare. The infrastructure was also trashed to the point where few people could even get to the docks to unload the supplies and equipment that were arriving. Outside the cities, other than the three unsigned (partially built) interstates, PR is two lane roads on flat land and 1.5 lanes in the mountains (where you must honk when taking blind turns and downward traffic must pull off to the side of the road to let traffic travelling up continue at speed). Those roads have dips that flood 3-4 feet deep during run of the mill rainstorms. After Maria there were probably marine ecosystems developing in those huge pockets of deep water.
Also, your post shows that you do not like law enforcement and government for some reasons, period.
Huh? I think both protests are stupid, meaning I support both law enforcement and law abiding citizens having guns. As do most pro 2a people. And most law enforcement and military, for that matter.
And there's a difference between liking government and trusting government. You can like what the government does without trusting that they will continue to do so perpetually. They've already broken that trust a few times (e.g. Snowden revelations) without so much as a slap on the wrist. If that's what they do with an armed citizenry, imagine where they'd go without one?
Ever read the terms of a life insurance policy? They say a lot of things which don't quite make sense when viewed through that lens. Like, mixed in with things intended for you to use in times of need; eg: -if you have lost two limbs in an accident, you are entitled to a 50% benefit -if the aircraft or other vessel you were travelling on has disappeared, sunk, or wrecked and your body has not been found within one year, you will be presumed dead.
Like, two different people are going to be reading those two lines at the time they would apply...
Most underrated comment in the thread. The more laws we throw on the books, the more we'll have selective enforcement. The phrase "there aught to be a law!" is extremely dangerous.
What really boggles my mind is the same people complaining and protesting about police misconduct one day are complaining and protesting to make sure only police have firearms the next.
Consider I've actually gone there post-hurricane and spent money infusing the local economy, I can claim to have done something to help. Many places still weren't accepting credit cards, and functioning ATMs were non-existent outside the CBD of San Juan, so simply showing up with a pile of cash from the mainland and leaving with an empty wallet does a lot.
I will say that Musk sounds like he has done more for PR than FEMA though: everyone there bitched that all those guys did was take up hotel rooms in the tourist areas so they could drive 3+ hours each way every day to where the actual problems were. They took up rooms but didn't spend any money at the local businesses. If it weren't for the cruise ships and the few tourists who could afford the inflated room prices, places would have had to close.
There's COBRA, they usually email you a nice juicy packet about it where you pay the full freight of what your former company was paying on your behalf to continue your insurance. Usually so expensive it's not worth it.
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Toronto sales tax is 13%, whereas Cali is still sub-10%.
A lot of the US vs Canada argument is that "Canadians pay slightly more taxes and gets a lot more services". Funny thing is, both left and right agree on this. Both sides want to get what we pay for. The difference is, the left wants to fix this by bringing our services up to the standards that we're already paying for. The right wants to reduce our taxes and keep existing service levels. And both ignore the fact that our giant global military presence is why we manage to pay more and get less.
The facebook way is best of both worlds - you can see the edit history so if replies to "I love puppies (edited)" are all "wtf John Smith you sick bastard why do you kill puppies!" you can see very clearly what was originally there...
While at the same time not allowing a typo or misspelling to attract the "I can't refute your argument so I will discredit you via 5th grade grammar" folk.
The move to widescreen allows for a numpad on the built in keyboard (if the screen is sufficiently large), which makes up for it slightly.
16:10 was the perfect all-purpose aspect ratio, however it was doomed as it confused non-pc hardware manufacturers (plugging tv-oriented things into the HDMI port of a 16:10 monitor resulted in vertically stretched images, and customer complaints).
Maybe Apple doesn't care about them and sees more profit by catering only to the web surfing masses.
Funny thing is that market's already cornered by Chromebooks, for 1/10th the price and 5x the battery life. And it's surprising what is available for them, including ssh, RDP, VMWare and Citrix clients, media players, etc. The only awkward part is that it's easy to forget everything you're doing is in (essentially) a Chrome browser window, so pressing ctrl+w while in a remote session will close it out.
Not all banks charge a fee. Heck some even refund your ATM fees spent at other ATMs. Brokerage banks (Charles Schwab, et al) that have a tiny ATM/branch office footprint will do both of these things. I don't know what their deposit minimums are for these features but for about 2 years I had $100 sitting in there untouched, came back and found it had grown to about $100.30...
The catch is of course that they have maybe 1-2 "branches" all located in major cities only.
While $600 in the 90s -> $1200 now doesn't track with regular inflation, it absolutely does track with passenger transportation inflation.
In the late 90s, gas prices hovered around $1.40, they are now hovering around $3. More than doubled.
In the mid 90s, the NY subway cost $1.25, now $2.75. More than doubled.
Intercity bus got cheaper, but that's mainly thanks to competitors sprouting up and challenging the 'hound, and the internet making it easier for people to find these competitors.
So a flight going from $600 to $1200 in that same time frame is still not bad. And trans-pac seems to have gotten cheaper, I recall pricing out round trips to Australia in the late 90s and not finding anything under $2400. Now I can get ~1800-2000 prices.
If they had gone with Fedora and/or CentOS they could have nabbed a slice of the business market. I have nothing against Ubuntu at all, but TPTB in IT shops will go with RedHat based distros more often than not when purposely ordering something for Linux use.
Not that the OS that comes on it has much bearing. It was quite satisfying the other day taking a brand new server the other day and wiping out the preinstalled Server 2016 to install RHEL 7.
I once toured an American factory for specialized communication equipment. They were proudly stating that all their products were made in America, but I couldn't take my eyes off the giant MADE IN CHINA emblazoned on the PCBs the workers were soldering things to.
I understand what they mean by Made in America, but China was pretty brilliant to get that stamp on the largest internal piece of hardware.
Walmart has the advantage of already having property somewhat suited to the task in virtually every population center in the US. Even in an ordinarily bad scenario, a Walmart closing, it can be converted to a straight up warehouse practically overnight. Amazon had to buy Whole Foods to get that kind of footprint, and even then having a grocery store in every town isn't as good as having a grocery + mega general store in every town.
At least there's cross-licensing. Some TV shows and movies are available on both Prime and Netflix, for example. That said, with Disney trying to move their (substantial) IP to their own streaming service, and newcomers like that nonsense CBS all access, I see the ecosystem fracturing rather than consolidating. The era of Big Three streaming providers of just Netflix, Prime, and Hulu is coming to an end. Sad because by having 2 out of 3, I had everything I could possibly want.
It's strange that for streaming services, fewer providers is better (at least before they have driven the final nail in other forms of video distribution, at which point they'd become just as expensive as cable packages).
Finally, a practical reason for the A380.
Heck there's still planes flying around that require 3 man crews in the cockpit. Figure the time from when the first MD-11 / 747-400s rolled off the production line to whenever Fedex retires their last DC-10 is at least how long it will be before our current two man crews are reduced to one (going two to 0 is probably too much of a jump).
I figured landing happens whether you want it to or not. Landing the plane such that it can take off again is where things get hairy...
Trains are pretty safe (at least for the passengers on them). And railway crews, unlike flight crews, get paid like normal people - regular pay or OT for every minute they're on the job, whether the train is moving or not, whether they're in the cab or in a station or crew office. Might be why there's not much of a shortage there.
How the hell did airline crews get such a crappy deal?
Agreed. Here's also a fun calculation I once did for Economy Premium versus Economy:
The economy premium cabin on international flights is typically 3 rows by 8 columns (24 seats).
That same space, were it to be configured for economy, would be 4 rows by 10 columns (40 seats).
I took the discount (no perks no refunds) economy price, multiplied it by 40, then divided by 24, and found it equaled the (yes perks and refundable) Economy Premium price.
In other words, people are paying the same price per square foot of the plane they are occupying in both classes. Yet people still chose the cheaper ticket and complain about the "shrinking airline seat" and "no frills" travel. If airlines could configure the entire plane as Economy Premium with some guarantee that all the seats would fill up, they'd love it! But they cannot fill the plane at that price point, because people would rather pay less, squish in like sardines, then complain.
No, please. The US is about the only reason cartels and local corruption haven't ruined the island like they have so many other places. I mean, they are also the reason cartels ruined other places, but who says the guy who cut off your leg can't also be the one holding the tourniquet on?
The Filipinos probably want to know what their grandparents were smoking when they voted on that... they went from territory to being a country that requires a lengthy visa application/interview process even for tourists trying to visit the US.
And now the descendants of the guys responsible for the Bataan Death March are the most prominent investors trying to improve their infrastructure. Funny how that works...
The dems know PR probably wouldn't vote democrat once they became a state anyway.
(1) A Puerto Rican has one advantage over a mainland American, and one over any other Hispanic country - fluent in two languages, and US citizenship. Grant US citizenship to swaths of undocumented, and that advantage is weakened. Unlike other Hispanic communities, they have no complications in bringing someone from "back home" over - a Puerto Rican driver's license and $150 flight is all they need. Opening up immigration doesn't help Puerto Rico in the slightest, so the democrat platform is currently against their interests.
(2) The island is overwhelmingly Catholic, which aligns more with conservatives. If the local padre tells them to vote (R), they will, no matter how flashy the ad campaign is.
Puerto Rico is extremely white for a Hispanic island, and they also speak English pretty well. The radio DJs code switch, and if you only know one language you can't follow the conversation. It's basically the US's Quebec. If you even attempt to speak anything other than Caribbean Spanish to them, they will speak only English back if they know it - PR is pretty useless for practicing your Spanish. I suspect the reason they don't let more English into signage and whatnot is to scare off people who might turn it into the East Coast's Hawaii (incl Hawaiian prices).
The difference in response was logistics - you can drive trucks from all over the US to the problem spots on the mainland. But try and get things to PR, nightmare. The infrastructure was also trashed to the point where few people could even get to the docks to unload the supplies and equipment that were arriving. Outside the cities, other than the three unsigned (partially built) interstates, PR is two lane roads on flat land and 1.5 lanes in the mountains (where you must honk when taking blind turns and downward traffic must pull off to the side of the road to let traffic travelling up continue at speed). Those roads have dips that flood 3-4 feet deep during run of the mill rainstorms. After Maria there were probably marine ecosystems developing in those huge pockets of deep water.
Also, your post shows that you do not like law enforcement and government for some reasons, period.
Huh? I think both protests are stupid, meaning I support both law enforcement and law abiding citizens having guns. As do most pro 2a people. And most law enforcement and military, for that matter.
And there's a difference between liking government and trusting government. You can like what the government does without trusting that they will continue to do so perpetually. They've already broken that trust a few times (e.g. Snowden revelations) without so much as a slap on the wrist. If that's what they do with an armed citizenry, imagine where they'd go without one?
Ever read the terms of a life insurance policy? They say a lot of things which don't quite make sense when viewed through that lens. Like, mixed in with things intended for you to use in times of need; eg:
-if you have lost two limbs in an accident, you are entitled to a 50% benefit
-if the aircraft or other vessel you were travelling on has disappeared, sunk, or wrecked and your body has not been found within one year, you will be presumed dead.
Like, two different people are going to be reading those two lines at the time they would apply...
Most underrated comment in the thread. The more laws we throw on the books, the more we'll have selective enforcement. The phrase "there aught to be a law!" is extremely dangerous.
What really boggles my mind is the same people complaining and protesting about police misconduct one day are complaining and protesting to make sure only police have firearms the next.
Consider I've actually gone there post-hurricane and spent money infusing the local economy, I can claim to have done something to help. Many places still weren't accepting credit cards, and functioning ATMs were non-existent outside the CBD of San Juan, so simply showing up with a pile of cash from the mainland and leaving with an empty wallet does a lot.
I will say that Musk sounds like he has done more for PR than FEMA though: everyone there bitched that all those guys did was take up hotel rooms in the tourist areas so they could drive 3+ hours each way every day to where the actual problems were. They took up rooms but didn't spend any money at the local businesses. If it weren't for the cruise ships and the few tourists who could afford the inflated room prices, places would have had to close.
There's COBRA, they usually email you a nice juicy packet about it where you pay the full freight of what your former company was paying on your behalf to continue your insurance. Usually so expensive it's not worth it.