This is exactly why I like the colors. My wife and I use Ting for our wireless carrier and are charged in buckets. Knowing that the person I'm texting is also using iMessage means I can make shorter texts and not care. Though, perhaps ironically, we both generally use Facebook for messaging between each other anyway and have never left the first bucket on Ting (100 messages).
My first programming language was unlike most posting here as either Fortran or Basic. I went straight to a box I found in my dads room, full of the Borland C++ compiler on about 30 floppy discs, and its technical manual explaining each function. I remember installing this on one of our 7 computers, a strange amount for a family to have back in 1998, and getting familiar with the Borland IDE.
For Christmas that year my parents got me more programming books, and I continued my self study for the last two decades and have held various jobs programming in anything from PHP and Python, to C++ with Qt, or most recently, C#.
Here in Oregon, more specifically the greater Portland Metropolitan area, we actually have quite a few choices. There's even a local fiber company called Fibersphere that if you are lucky enough to be in their service area, offers 100Mbs at $40/mo, or 1Gbs at $80/mo, up and down. Currently I live in a building 4 years old that doesn't have their service, and I pay for Comcast at the introductionary rate of $50/mo for 200Mbps down and 12Mbps up. Kitty corner from us is a building which is 1 years old and has Fibersphere's service at the aforementioned rates. My previous location also had their service, and it was superb. To be able to have both upload and download at such amazing speeds was fantastic. The only issue I had was my old WRT 54gl could no longer handle the speeds and I had to upgrade to newer router.
Not everyone is paranoid about their stuff being stolen. It might surprise you, but not that many people want your underwear. I used to live in an apartment complex with nice roof access. It was common for there to be lines full of clothing. I could see the other buildings around with similar setups.
My inlaws don't even own a dryer and live on an island. Sure, during the rainy season it may take a bit longer to dry, but usually washing clothes at night and hanging them they'll be dry enough in the morning, or at least by the next evening. I'm assuming you have more than one set of clothing. They also simply wash their undergarments every day by hand, and typically wear the same pants throughout the week, cutting down on the amount needed to be done in the washer.
It's not too hard. I max out my 401k, HSA, and Traditional IRA. Now that money will begin to make investment income, in tax sheltered devices. Later on when I begin early retirement I'll start to convert my Traditional IRA's to Roth IRA's, keeping it under the amount of taxable income to avoid paying any taxes on it, and start a ladder process that in five years will mean I can begin to spend the principle tax free. This gets me over $35k a year of tax free income, saving roughly $10k in marginal taxes, meaning I would only have to save $25k of after tax income.
Of course, this sort of goes to show how the middle, or upper middle class, has a huge advantage, if they are willing to take it. My yearly expenses are around $25k, meaning I would have to make at least $79k to take full advantage. You might thinking, but 35 + 25 = 60. Ahh, but then there is Social Security tax that you still pay, so divide 60k by 0.076.
But as a percent of income the rich buy less, thus paying less taxes. That's why sales taxes are considered regressive, hitting the poor and middle class more.
Banks purchase these miles in bundles of billions, giving the airlines a nice fat line to pad their paperwork with. If miles expire, or otherwise go unused then that is money in the bank for the airlines. Not every person who has points is savvy with how to use them. You can get 3-4c/mi if you like international business class. Most aim for about a 2c/mi redemption rate.
I'm flying international business round trip on JAL to SE Asia for 140,000mi, or about $1400. A round trip economy ticket is about the same price, whereas the business ticket would run somewhere around $4000. I do have to be more flexible in my timing of vacations, but I'm willing to work with that to have 6ft of legroom and lay flat seating.
From TFA: In the absence of more targeted grant or scholarship programs, more people are taking out student loans, and they are borrowing more. All that borrowing adds up to a total of $1.3 trillion, nearly triple what it was a decade ago.
Yeah, TFS didn't go far enough down in TFA to substantiate the TFT.
Best deal on internet I had in the US was actually through my HOA. Cost for our 600 unit HOA was $30/mo/unit for 100Mbps up and down with an option to pay an extra $40/mo for 1Gbps. On a Diablo III update I actually saw the download peak at 12MB/s. I did have to retire the good old Linksys 54GL as it wasn't capable of handling the higher speeds.
Now I've moved and am paying $50/mo for Comcast with 200Mbps down and 10-12Mbps up (2 Year contract to lock it in for 2 year, even though it was also offered with a 1 year contract).
But in the case of a passenger giving you directions they don't have to give you directions for the entire route. As you learn the route you can rely on the passenger less. It's not quite as easy to have the GPS give only the directions that you don't know yet, it's either on or off.
I learned Chinese by immersion, and also taught myself to write, due to a lack of the use of a computer during the first couple years. Once I got a computer and began typing in Chinese I've found myself now unable to write out most characters from memory. I can still read, and if I see a character I can copy it using correct stroke patterns. My wife, who is a native, also finds herself struggling a little with writing out characters. Though this has nothing to do with dexterity, but moving too quickly, or for too long, away from more manual methods can cause us to forget how to do them with primitive tools.
Quite often I want to "print" a page to PDF. But I suppose, to me it's a moot point as long as we still have the keyboard shortcuts that I rely on instead. I didn't even know where in the context menu Find and Print are located. For find, I'm going to be typing what I want to find anyway, so I might as well use the keyboard shortcut to start the search.
It's funny how scared Americans are of restrooms and genders. I spent a decade in Taiwan where it isn't uncommon for the female janitors to walk in and clean the men's restroom. You know what happens? Everybody just goes about their business. If I'm taking a shit I keep the door closed, if I'm using a urinal I point my dick at the urinal, shake it off, and put it back in my pants without flashing them, offering them the same level of respect that I do the other male occupants. It's really not a big deal and it's funny how much Americans get their briefs tied up in a knot over it.
Not only did they add the "Undo Send" feature, they broke their links that now open in Safari rather than Chrome. They made settings even harder to get to, especially if you have a lot of labels, but added a "open in app" setting, which oddly is missing Chrome, though most other Google apps appear, and if you don't have one installed instead of a toggle it shows "Install" which takes you to the App store to let you install the app.
Upon first use I kept getting "Background send process failed" popups. They also changed the organization of tabs so that the Primary tab is the main tab always available, all other tabs must be backed out to the Primary tab before you can look at other tabs. So instead of going to "Updates" to see important updates, then switching to "Promotions" I have to now go to "Updates", then back out to "Primary", then switch to "Promotions". Thanks Google for making learned tasks more complicated and having to reteach my muscles how to switch tabs.
Chinese input using New Phonetic Method actually does this too. Basically after I type the sounds then tone and move on to the next character it will change the first character based on the sounds and tones of the following characters and continue to do so onto I press enter. Often I will type out an entire sentence before pressing enter, though sometimes it starts to spit out bad results if you go for too long. It also does some recognition based off previous character choice such as when using gendered pronouns, which I would assume the speech recognition they are claiming would have a lot of trouble with as the pronoun in speech is the same for all genders, such as the word you, or s/he/it.
On the iPhone they go one step further with a slightly different form of input where even the tone is not required unless you are having trouble finding the correct character. I can start typing just the sounds of multiple characters strung together and the suggestions bar will show possibilities. Going a step even further, my Taiwanese friend showed me that you don't even have to type out all the sounds, just the beginning sound is enough, so I can type out an idiom by merely pressing the first phonetic symbol of each of the typically four characters. The problem with these latter methods is training to know which words can easily be found by omitting the ending phonetics and which cannot.
I'm assuming Baidu is probably doing this for Simplified Chinese rather that Traditional, though it would be great if it could do it for both.
The largest problem still remains, most likely, with bilingual input. Typing I can easily switch between typing Chinese and typing English, but speech recognition has so far not offered this option. At my inlaws house conversation can easily go from Mandarin to Taiwanese, with random English words thrown in within the same sentence and not missing a beat. Humans have no problem being able to recognize the meaning of these kinds of sentences if they speak, or at least understand, all three languages. Even a basic understanding isn't necessarily required, as is the case with English in this situation there tends to be certain words that everyone understands without having any ability to speak any more of the language.
There's a great IQ^2 debate on this topic and what people really want is extended healthspan, not just extended old age. If you could be 60 with the body of a 30 year old, and 120 with a body of a 60 year old, then we've made real progress, but extending the life of the elderly once they're in the high care state with low quality of life, as others who read the article indicated (I only read the summary, but I'm on/. so that's sort of redundant), doesn't add value other than setting records.
The myths and stories are always about a fountain of youth, not a fountain of eternal old age.
In Taiwan standard practice is to queue in the intersection, but how they queue is one person queues, then the next person drives past them and queues parallel to them, and maybe even a third or fourth if room and time permits. What I mean by time permits is that usually the first or second queued car has already started edging into the lanes of oncoming traffic blocking them and forcing themselves through, and as soon as one left turner gets in there another five might shoot past before oncoming traffic can continue to proceed.
It's actually quite easy to do. 1) Ditch the commute 2) stop buying shit 3) invest your excess money
At a savings rate of 50% you can retire in 10 years. Many people have already done so, there are blogs about how they did it, from living in an RV, to cycling to work, and not giving up their standard of living. It means you can still have great coffee, just make it at home instead of paying $3/day at Starbucks. It means you can still have great cuisine, but you buy better quality foods and make it yourself. It means you can still get that really cool flashy item you wanted, but after you've thought about it, shopped around, and still decided that you actually do need it and it won't end up in the piles of boxes the next time you move.
Similar story as the parent above, I was spending at least $300 a month on gas just to get to work. After a year of trying everything from daily public transportation, to gym workouts to wait out congestion, we moved to within 5 miles of work. Stress goes way down, free time goes way up, I'm more fit since I bike to work, no longer need a gym membership, saving more money, and fill up the car about once every two months instead of once a week. 4 years from having spent everything I had to move to the US and I now own a house and have a savings rate of around 60%. We eat great, have all the gadgets we could want, eat out still, and look forward to enjoying early retirement after a few more years of working. All this while my wife hasn't had to work while living here. If she did work we could probably retire a couple years earlier.
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This is exactly why I like the colors. My wife and I use Ting for our wireless carrier and are charged in buckets. Knowing that the person I'm texting is also using iMessage means I can make shorter texts and not care. Though, perhaps ironically, we both generally use Facebook for messaging between each other anyway and have never left the first bucket on Ting (100 messages).
My first programming language was unlike most posting here as either Fortran or Basic. I went straight to a box I found in my dads room, full of the Borland C++ compiler on about 30 floppy discs, and its technical manual explaining each function. I remember installing this on one of our 7 computers, a strange amount for a family to have back in 1998, and getting familiar with the Borland IDE.
For Christmas that year my parents got me more programming books, and I continued my self study for the last two decades and have held various jobs programming in anything from PHP and Python, to C++ with Qt, or most recently, C#.
Here in Oregon, more specifically the greater Portland Metropolitan area, we actually have quite a few choices. There's even a local fiber company called Fibersphere that if you are lucky enough to be in their service area, offers 100Mbs at $40/mo, or 1Gbs at $80/mo, up and down. Currently I live in a building 4 years old that doesn't have their service, and I pay for Comcast at the introductionary rate of $50/mo for 200Mbps down and 12Mbps up. Kitty corner from us is a building which is 1 years old and has Fibersphere's service at the aforementioned rates. My previous location also had their service, and it was superb. To be able to have both upload and download at such amazing speeds was fantastic. The only issue I had was my old WRT 54gl could no longer handle the speeds and I had to upgrade to newer router.
Not everyone is paranoid about their stuff being stolen. It might surprise you, but not that many people want your underwear. I used to live in an apartment complex with nice roof access. It was common for there to be lines full of clothing. I could see the other buildings around with similar setups.
My inlaws don't even own a dryer and live on an island. Sure, during the rainy season it may take a bit longer to dry, but usually washing clothes at night and hanging them they'll be dry enough in the morning, or at least by the next evening. I'm assuming you have more than one set of clothing. They also simply wash their undergarments every day by hand, and typically wear the same pants throughout the week, cutting down on the amount needed to be done in the washer.
But do they come to your room, say sorry, but our employee has to spend the night here, pack up your bags and leave?
It's not too hard. I max out my 401k, HSA, and Traditional IRA. Now that money will begin to make investment income, in tax sheltered devices. Later on when I begin early retirement I'll start to convert my Traditional IRA's to Roth IRA's, keeping it under the amount of taxable income to avoid paying any taxes on it, and start a ladder process that in five years will mean I can begin to spend the principle tax free. This gets me over $35k a year of tax free income, saving roughly $10k in marginal taxes, meaning I would only have to save $25k of after tax income.
Of course, this sort of goes to show how the middle, or upper middle class, has a huge advantage, if they are willing to take it. My yearly expenses are around $25k, meaning I would have to make at least $79k to take full advantage. You might thinking, but 35 + 25 = 60. Ahh, but then there is Social Security tax that you still pay, so divide 60k by 0.076.
But as a percent of income the rich buy less, thus paying less taxes. That's why sales taxes are considered regressive, hitting the poor and middle class more.
Banks purchase these miles in bundles of billions, giving the airlines a nice fat line to pad their paperwork with. If miles expire, or otherwise go unused then that is money in the bank for the airlines. Not every person who has points is savvy with how to use them. You can get 3-4c/mi if you like international business class. Most aim for about a 2c/mi redemption rate.
I'm flying international business round trip on JAL to SE Asia for 140,000mi, or about $1400. A round trip economy ticket is about the same price, whereas the business ticket would run somewhere around $4000. I do have to be more flexible in my timing of vacations, but I'm willing to work with that to have 6ft of legroom and lay flat seating.
Last year a 105yo Frenchman set a cycling distance record for centurians.
From TFA:
In the absence of more targeted grant or scholarship programs, more people are taking out student loans, and they are borrowing more. All that borrowing adds up to a total of $1.3 trillion, nearly triple what it was a decade ago.
Yeah, TFS didn't go far enough down in TFA to substantiate the TFT.
Best deal on internet I had in the US was actually through my HOA. Cost for our 600 unit HOA was $30/mo/unit for 100Mbps up and down with an option to pay an extra $40/mo for 1Gbps. On a Diablo III update I actually saw the download peak at 12MB/s. I did have to retire the good old Linksys 54GL as it wasn't capable of handling the higher speeds.
Now I've moved and am paying $50/mo for Comcast with 200Mbps down and 10-12Mbps up (2 Year contract to lock it in for 2 year, even though it was also offered with a 1 year contract).
But in the case of a passenger giving you directions they don't have to give you directions for the entire route. As you learn the route you can rely on the passenger less. It's not quite as easy to have the GPS give only the directions that you don't know yet, it's either on or off.
I learned Chinese by immersion, and also taught myself to write, due to a lack of the use of a computer during the first couple years. Once I got a computer and began typing in Chinese I've found myself now unable to write out most characters from memory. I can still read, and if I see a character I can copy it using correct stroke patterns. My wife, who is a native, also finds herself struggling a little with writing out characters. Though this has nothing to do with dexterity, but moving too quickly, or for too long, away from more manual methods can cause us to forget how to do them with primitive tools.
Quite often I want to "print" a page to PDF. But I suppose, to me it's a moot point as long as we still have the keyboard shortcuts that I rely on instead. I didn't even know where in the context menu Find and Print are located. For find, I'm going to be typing what I want to find anyway, so I might as well use the keyboard shortcut to start the search.
It's funny how scared Americans are of restrooms and genders. I spent a decade in Taiwan where it isn't uncommon for the female janitors to walk in and clean the men's restroom. You know what happens? Everybody just goes about their business. If I'm taking a shit I keep the door closed, if I'm using a urinal I point my dick at the urinal, shake it off, and put it back in my pants without flashing them, offering them the same level of respect that I do the other male occupants. It's really not a big deal and it's funny how much Americans get their briefs tied up in a knot over it.
Or we could follow China's lead and just have the entire country in a single time zone.
Except that you pump your own diesel in Oregon.
Not only did they add the "Undo Send" feature, they broke their links that now open in Safari rather than Chrome. They made settings even harder to get to, especially if you have a lot of labels, but added a "open in app" setting, which oddly is missing Chrome, though most other Google apps appear, and if you don't have one installed instead of a toggle it shows "Install" which takes you to the App store to let you install the app.
Upon first use I kept getting "Background send process failed" popups. They also changed the organization of tabs so that the Primary tab is the main tab always available, all other tabs must be backed out to the Primary tab before you can look at other tabs. So instead of going to "Updates" to see important updates, then switching to "Promotions" I have to now go to "Updates", then back out to "Primary", then switch to "Promotions". Thanks Google for making learned tasks more complicated and having to reteach my muscles how to switch tabs.
Chinese input using New Phonetic Method actually does this too. Basically after I type the sounds then tone and move on to the next character it will change the first character based on the sounds and tones of the following characters and continue to do so onto I press enter. Often I will type out an entire sentence before pressing enter, though sometimes it starts to spit out bad results if you go for too long. It also does some recognition based off previous character choice such as when using gendered pronouns, which I would assume the speech recognition they are claiming would have a lot of trouble with as the pronoun in speech is the same for all genders, such as the word you, or s/he/it.
On the iPhone they go one step further with a slightly different form of input where even the tone is not required unless you are having trouble finding the correct character. I can start typing just the sounds of multiple characters strung together and the suggestions bar will show possibilities. Going a step even further, my Taiwanese friend showed me that you don't even have to type out all the sounds, just the beginning sound is enough, so I can type out an idiom by merely pressing the first phonetic symbol of each of the typically four characters. The problem with these latter methods is training to know which words can easily be found by omitting the ending phonetics and which cannot.
I'm assuming Baidu is probably doing this for Simplified Chinese rather that Traditional, though it would be great if it could do it for both.
The largest problem still remains, most likely, with bilingual input. Typing I can easily switch between typing Chinese and typing English, but speech recognition has so far not offered this option. At my inlaws house conversation can easily go from Mandarin to Taiwanese, with random English words thrown in within the same sentence and not missing a beat. Humans have no problem being able to recognize the meaning of these kinds of sentences if they speak, or at least understand, all three languages. Even a basic understanding isn't necessarily required, as is the case with English in this situation there tends to be certain words that everyone understands without having any ability to speak any more of the language.
Why yes I can.
Perhaps he thought the CFO would think Elon Musk took one from Clinton's playbook and was using private email for official business.
There's a great IQ^2 debate on this topic and what people really want is extended healthspan, not just extended old age. If you could be 60 with the body of a 30 year old, and 120 with a body of a 60 year old, then we've made real progress, but extending the life of the elderly once they're in the high care state with low quality of life, as others who read the article indicated (I only read the summary, but I'm on /. so that's sort of redundant), doesn't add value other than setting records.
The myths and stories are always about a fountain of youth, not a fountain of eternal old age.
In Taiwan standard practice is to queue in the intersection, but how they queue is one person queues, then the next person drives past them and queues parallel to them, and maybe even a third or fourth if room and time permits. What I mean by time permits is that usually the first or second queued car has already started edging into the lanes of oncoming traffic blocking them and forcing themselves through, and as soon as one left turner gets in there another five might shoot past before oncoming traffic can continue to proceed.
I broke that code with my Indian coworkers and found out they make about $0.87 on the dollar that I make.
It's actually quite easy to do.
1) Ditch the commute
2) stop buying shit
3) invest your excess money
At a savings rate of 50% you can retire in 10 years. Many people have already done so, there are blogs about how they did it, from living in an RV, to cycling to work, and not giving up their standard of living. It means you can still have great coffee, just make it at home instead of paying $3/day at Starbucks. It means you can still have great cuisine, but you buy better quality foods and make it yourself. It means you can still get that really cool flashy item you wanted, but after you've thought about it, shopped around, and still decided that you actually do need it and it won't end up in the piles of boxes the next time you move.
Similar story as the parent above, I was spending at least $300 a month on gas just to get to work. After a year of trying everything from daily public transportation, to gym workouts to wait out congestion, we moved to within 5 miles of work. Stress goes way down, free time goes way up, I'm more fit since I bike to work, no longer need a gym membership, saving more money, and fill up the car about once every two months instead of once a week. 4 years from having spent everything I had to move to the US and I now own a house and have a savings rate of around 60%. We eat great, have all the gadgets we could want, eat out still, and look forward to enjoying early retirement after a few more years of working. All this while my wife hasn't had to work while living here. If she did work we could probably retire a couple years earlier.