blindsight @ blindsight @beehaw.org

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6

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758

Joined

2 yr. ago

I think you're missing that you (likely) get more money back than you pay in. It's a restriction, not a tax. It's only the most egregiously inefficient drivers/home owners who are paying more.

As someone commuting in a reasonable car driving a reasonable distance in a reasonably efficient home, you have more money in your pocket every month. And if any of those aren't the case, then maybe it's time to make some changes (which is the whole point!)

80% of Canadians get more back than they pay. It's not a tax, it's a redistribution.

On the margin, it adds small incentives to shift consumer behaviour. Lots of people in warmer climates in Canada are shifting to e-bikes, for instance, and heat pumps are becoming increasingly common.

Sure, some Canadians are paying more than they get in rebates... like my old neighbour who commutes to work in an F-350, but that's the point. He shouldn't be driving to an office job in an industrial truck!

Single Transferable Vote is perfect for Canada. It's, essentially, proportional representation within multi-member ridings. So, a Quebec riding could get 5 seats, and get 2 Bloc, 1 Con, 1 Lib, 1 NDP (for example) giving most people in the riding a representative who more accurately reflects their views.

STV perfectly meshes with our constitutionally-protected geographic representation while also giving roughly proportional representation, and without giving seats to tiny fringe parties. It's also been used successfully in Ireland for over a century.

That's surprising to me, too. I never had an OG Deck to compare, but on paper it's such a small difference I wouldn't have expected it to feel significant.

I tested mine briefly when it arrived before putting it away for Christmas and I was impressed with its responsiveness and screen. I'm looking forward to putting a lot of hours on it. (Well, a lot for me. Life is busy with kids!)

On the last point, a better comparison would be base 6 or base 14.

10 = 2 × 5
6 = 2 × 3
14 = 2 × 7

Or maybe a better way of thinking about it is the percentage of numbers that divide nicely in the base, as a percentage.

Base 10 has 2, 5, 10 = 30%

So maybe base 3 is the closest, at 33% of numbers being easily divisible.

Either way, 7 is a significantly worse base than 10.

Same. I have an 08 sedan with 220K km. I'm not going to pay for a new car so long as my old car is still working reasonably reliably. It's at the point that I won't pay for a big repair, so it's just a matter of time.

That said, if electric cars aren't available to buy reasonably quickly, then I might not have much of a choice. I'm lucky that I don't need to drive much for work, but I do need to often enough to need a car.

And fuck Tesla. I've heard way too many horror stories about their lack of quality control that I'll never even look at buying one

The lead in to Good Riddance by Green Day is messing up the opening twice in a row. He even swears after the second fuck up.

And look toward the Gemini constellation which is about halfway between Orion and The Big Dipper.

I'll miss it, as usual... It's grey-sky season here. Maybe one year I'll get lucky!

Capital gains should be treated the same as income, full stop. Why does capital get extra status over labour?

It's not a flagship, but I'm really liking my Sony Xperia 10V. It's lightweight, narrow, has amazing battery life (I'm at 80% after a full day of light use, 1h37m SoT), has lots of RAM, microSD, and 3.5mm. Its processor is weak, apparently, but I haven't noticed; I don't do heavy gaming on mobile and it's snappy enough for web browsing and has enough RAM to keep lots of apps running.

So, there are good compact phone options. Hopefully other people keep buying them to keep them profitable for companies to support!

Back when you had to manually configure your gamepad...
Uniquely for each game...
By looking up specific numbers in your gamepad manual.

Kids have no idea how easy they have it these days.

Alt text:

The full analysis is of course much more complicated, but I can't stay to talk about it because I have a date.

I agree. I wish the voting age was 16. (Or even younger, but 16 would be a big step in the right direction.)

At 16, students could take half the day off to go vote. Hell, it should be a grade-level field trip. Research shows that those who vote in their first eligible election are likely to continue voting, and democracies are dying from a lack of political engagement.

I like base 12 a lot, but Reverse Polish Notation is a mess when you get up to working with polynomials.

With polynomials, you're moving around terms on either side of an equation, and you combine positive terms and negative terms. In essence, there's no such thing as subtraction. (Similarly, division is a lie; you're actually just working with numerators and denominators.)

Reverse Polish Notation makes that a mess since it separates the sign from its term.

Also, RPN draws a distinction between negative values and subtraction, but conceptually there is no subtraction with polynomials, it's all just negative terms. (Or negating a polynomial to get its additive inverse.)

But, yeah. It's a shame we don't use base 12 more.

You monster.

I literally can't believe that someone authentically believes that. My mind jumps to you trolling.

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I didn't see anyone pointing out explicitly that this was not in native Linux games, but in Windows-native games running Proton.

When I read the headline, I thought that of course Linux will outperform Windows on native apps. It's more surprising that Linux outperforms while running the overhead of a compatibility layer.

That's the "affiliate nonsense" that parent poster was referring to.

Context article explaining what this all is about.

It's a legal loophole to get around our gambling regulations. Raffles are regulated, but tests of skill can be rewarded.

So now it's a raffle followed by a "skill testing" arithmetic question.