I just bought my first EV. I'm never going back to ICE. Effortless acceleration, a super quiet drive, being able to plug in at home and always leave the house with 100% capacity... People try to argue that they're bad because of something they remember seeing once a couple of decades ago or whatever. It's nice correcting them based on personal experience. Also if they go for a test drive they change their minds REALLY quickly. That EV power off the line is a pretty compelling argument all on its own.
Reminds me a lot of the battery versus petrol RC car debate back in the day. Anyone who remembered NiCad batteries and brush motors had a justifiable hate for electric RC cars and opted for the petrol option... But if they refused to try LiPo and brushless they ended up stuck with noisy, finicky, and ultimately slower cars.
You gotta be willing to accept that as technology improves the balance can (and rapidly does) swing in favour of something that you remember sucking.
MS products in general are a Rube Goldberg machine of domain redirects and authentication requests so you could easily(...?) slip another sneaky phishing site in the middle of the 14th ball drop and 18th cup-on-a-string-swinging-over-a-gap and I'd be one to fall for it. I use 1Pass and it's pretty much constantly popping up in MS website dialogue boxes demanding another password sacrifice before it will let me access some MS service that I was just on five minutes ago.
We currently run HFC NBN and Starlink at our work. It runs a failover setup so when HFC dies it swaps to Starlink then swaps back when HFC comes back.
I literally have to pay for two services to maintain reliable internet because HFC constantly goes down for the whole area.
If I move to EE, I pay a fortune for the install and miss out on access to NBN FTTP plans.
HFC has been so bad the past week that we've mostly been on Starlink. I got the shits and unplugged HFC to stop it swapping over so we've spent the past few work days purely on Starlink.
It's worked perfectly for VOIP and all the other typical office tasks (email, remote hosted files and documents). It's a third the price of EE, cost all of 400 bucks for the hardware, was delivered in like 48 hours from the order, and took maybe an hour to setup on the roof. I can't even get a budget estimate for EE install costs in 48 days, let alone actually get the thing running. At which point it will cost me a massive premium for our internet forever.
I'm going to cancel HFC. What an embarrassment the Liberals left us with. Thanks Malcolm and Tony, sweet legacy you disgusting worms.
I've used Thunderbird for years, and still do. I love it.
IMAP, 30GB account, contacts and calendar synced with our Nextcloud server. Can search for a term and receive a list of emails going back years instantly.
I can open Thunderbird, search for an email from 2016, and be replying to it faster than my wife's identical PC can even finish loading the Outlook splash screen (may contain traces of hyperbole).
Benefits for both types of super exemptions were skewed to higher income earners. In 2020–21, 90% of the contributions benefit went to people with above median income, and 30% went to people in the top tenth of taxable income earners.
The biggest takeaway, in my opinion. As always the biggest tax breaks benefit the rich the most.
"But they pay more tax!", cry the temporarily embarrassed millionaires defending their future socio economic peers.
That's the whole point of a sliding scale ffs. Everyone should be able to afford the essentials (tax free threshold). If you work harder and earn more money you should be able to keep most of it (lowest tax bracket). But once you've got your cake, and eaten it, and are now trying to gobble up everyone else's cake too you need to have some of that cake withheld to ensure there's enough for everyone.
Having all these concessions that only the rich get to take advantage of totally poops all over the whole concept.
👋
Checkmate.