On the other hand, providing capital increases the value of the labour applied. Giving a tradesperson and additional capital might mean they can afford better tools that allow them to work more quickly, accomplish more per hour of labour and therefore be able to charge more for that hour while the customer simultaneously pays less for the task being done. The tradesperson is then able to pay back that capital plus some gains for the person providing the capital. Everybody wins, the investor gets more money than they started with, the tradesperson earns more after paying back the investment than if they hadn’t taken it in the first place, and the customer gets a lower rate for the tasks that need to be performed.

The problem is when we let that scale up to the point of there being people with essentially endless funds to spend on things like mega-yachts and ridiculous mansions, while others aren’t even getting their basic needs met. The answer to me isn’t removing the benefits of capital income at all, but adding some progressive taxation to keep the net income more modest, and maybe some stronger/target employment regulation so the capital holders aren’t getting rich off labour that’s supported by government social programs.

I feel like this is just the effect of a new and growing industry. Gas stations are free to set their own pricing, but if it’s more than a few cents off the next nearest place they won’t get any sales. Reliability is also only an issue if there’s few stations, if there’s a station on every block, like we have gas stations now, then people will just go to the next nearest station, which gives companies a pretty good incentive to keep the chargers working.

I’m also okay with allowing different charging structures, but again I think that settles itself when availability increases. If charging per joule is cheaper for the consumer than charging per minute then that’s the station they’ll choose. Really, we just need to make sure it doesn’t end up an oligarchy like the cell networks where everybody just colludes to keep prices and margins high. Or put in some high marginal corporate tax rates to disincentivize those large margins.

The thing to be careful about here is it only spans about 10 years, and it’s based on reported crime rates. That means you get somewhat skewed results because lots of people don’t bother reporting minor crimes thinking nothings going to happen anyway. You may not ever hear back about that police report for your stolen bike, but decisions do get made based on the aggregated reports. You also get things like they make targeted enforcement effort, maybe in a rough neighbourhood, or targeting a specific type of crime that seems to be on the rise and you see the reported crime rate rise because of that effort. We would also expect it to be a lagging metric, an increase in budget doesn’t always mean immediate results. It takes time to decide where to use that increase in funding, maybe time to source new equipment and train officers on its use, maybe they’re able to hire more officers but there’s a training period before you see the results of increased staffing. If budgets aren’t committed ahead of time the department might be conservative about spending on things like increasing the workforce that creates and ongoing cost vs programs that can be rolled back if the budget falls, or capital expenditures that provide value beyond the initial cost.

This is the real answer to me. Often, the premium version is still out there but people go for the budget version anyway. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. When we can furnish a whole room for what a couple pieces used to cost, that’s a win for a lot of people even if some of those items wear out prematurely. It also depends if we’re talking about a mostly mechanical and utilitarian item, vs something that relies on modern software ecosystems. Toasters haven’t changed much in 40 years, but a 10 year old cell phone is pretty much useless, possibly not working at all with current network technology. Durability is less important when an item becomes technologically obsolete anyway.

From an efficiency standpoint sure, but then a person has to be able to consistently put out the amount of power the compressor is designed for at the times the compressor needs to run. At least with a storage system the work doesn’t have to be done at the same time it needs to be used.

I heard about a concept like those for a gym powered by their stationary bikes, but the math just doesn’t work. A pro rider can put out about 2000 W for a short sprint, but about 300 W for an extended time. That 300 W works out to about 5¢ worth of electricity per hour of working out, or about $20 if a person averages that for an hour per day for a year. That $20/year has to be able to cover the cost of the added generator system in the bike, whatever battery/inverter system that’s storing the energy, and/or the interlock system to put that power into one’s electrical service.

It’s great if you want to power the electronics of the stationary bike, maybe with a USB port to power one’s phone/music player. Trying to offset electrical costs with human/animal labour is not going to be net positive except in very niche situations.

While that’s true for taxes alone, there are income gaps where a small increase of income can result in a loss of various benefits that were worth more than the increase. This can be things like food stamps, subsidized rent/childcare, etc.. People end up stuck because while they could potentially earn significant advancement and increased wages over a 4-7 year period, they’d have to weather a significant deficit through intervening years.

Ideally there should be no cliffs, and all these social programs should have a sliding scale of benefits so a person can always benefit from increased income. Part of the problem is they’re managed across multiple levels of government that don’t always play well together, and a sliding scale might mean more benefits paid out to people that don’t currently qualify. That’s probably actually a good thing, but gets spun politically as undesirable.

Not sure about elsewhere, but in Canada a Charity is a special kind of non-profit that has more public oversight as to how they manage their money, and allowed to write charitable receipts. Non-profits might do some good things, but you don’t get a tax credit for donating money to them, and there’s less oversight of how they’re managed.

Not really. The plan that Apple backpedaled on was to compare hashes photos on device to hashes of known CSAM material. They wouldn’t see any user-generated photos unless they was a hash collision. Other companies have been known to report false positives on user-generated photos and delete accounts with no process to recover them.

Could be about the children in the second row. Referencing that children in the front row can often make noise and otherwise be distracting, so the tall ones are glad to get the chance to ruin the kid’s experience specifically. Looks like all the other seats are filled, so it’s not like the tall ones are choosing the spot to block the view. They’re taking what was left for them.

USB-A, USB-B, USB-B Superspeed, mini-USB, micro-USB, micro-USB-Super Speed. Some of those also presented the issue of not having a simple visual indication of whether it was USB 1, 2, or 3. At least with USB-C, the cables should all work, even if you get slower speeds, whereas a USB-B-3 connector wouldn’t fit a USB-B-2 port at all.

The solution to the USB-C mystery cable is to just get a pile of Thunderbolt cables and then you can be sure it’ll handle whatever the attached devices do.

This here. I still check Reddit regularly, but I’m mostly just checking in on a handful of communities, not nearly as much engagement as last month, so if daily active users is their metric then I guess I haven’t moved the needle, but if it’s about actual API usage, number of posts viewed, votes given, comments made, etc. it’s probably 5-10% of what it used to be.