In South Africa we have a TV license which any shop selling TV’s is required by law to report the buyer’s TV license number for any purchase.
The idea is that it funds public broadcasting and productions thereof, but like a lot of SOEs here, there is loads of corruption and inefficiencies, I only use my TV for streaming of content which is not produced locally, so I resent having to pay it each year.
However, it’s apparently a mission to get off it, even if you sell your TV you’re most certainly going to be harassed for years by debt collectors and what not.
Unlike your case though (where I expect the fine is not nothing), it’s only like R250/y (like 13USD) and they’ve smartly (which is surprising for an otherwise largely incompetent org), made it easy to pay. I get an SMS reminder and can have paid it by credit card within 2 minutes. So I’ll probably not bother trying to get off it as it’s so much more effort and a pretty small amount of money and hassle.
Heh, took me about a year after moving from SA to Ireland to get them to leave me alone about my tv license.
Here they have a tv license as well, but so far I've sidestepped it because I shipped my TV over, but one day I'll probably need to pay for one again. Only problem is now its something like 250 euro, not Ront, so it's a lot more pricey!
I'd rather pay EUR 250 a year when I know the money is used for genuine public benefit rather than ZAR 250 a year where it's mostly enriching people who don't do anything of real value.
The successful standards, platforms, libraries, tools, etc. will be the ones that LLMs can understand. Like a good GitHub readme, or website, or Discord community, I strongly feel that making sure you've (perhaps personally) written enough about your offering for AI to understand it will be an important factor in how successful it can be in markets or communities.
I wrote a similar HN comment around this yesterday, but the short version is that we found for our product that the years of investment in our Docs (which were seemingly never good enough) are now paying enormous dividends in that LLMs seem to understand our product really well. This has manifested in the LLM in our product being highly effective and a few additional clients who found us through AI chats. Turns out the problem with our Docs wasn't so much with their content, but rather that people just weren't looking at them much.
Funny timing for this article to appear on the front page as I was just thinking of Zendesk today.
We kind of tried Zendesk maybe 8 years ago and even integrated the chat into our Electron app.
What put me off though is that support articles didn’t work off markdown, there was no way I wanted us having all our docs formatting and images locked up by them. We had already started using DocFX which was working pretty well for us.
As it happens, the integrated chat wasn’t that popular amongst our users anyway so we cancelled it not long after.
Fast forward to today, and it turns out that in the age of AI and LLMs that our Docs (which over time had become really good) are an enormous asset.
They allowed the AI integration in our product to work really well since the LLMs already understood a lot about our product from our Docs and they also behave as kind of marketing material as they organically show up in search results or LLM chats (we’ve gained a couple of clients who found us through ChatGPT).
A funny thing about our Docs, we always felt they were lacking and resigned ourselves to doing the best we could, even though it seemed they would never be good enough.
Then seemingly all of a sudden this year, we were almost surprised to find that they actually do seem to be quite good now.
I think it’s largely that we were continuously investing in them, but also that once we saw how LLMs could answer questions on our product really well, it became apparent that a lot of our customers just weren’t really looking at them, but now many of them kind of are, just via an LLM.
When I was little and playing SimCity 2000 I looked at the tax rates for the city and noticed that the sales tax rate was like 2%, and based on our 14% VAT at the time, it seemed super low to me so I upped it to 12% and was surprised at how unhappy the citizens were.
This gave me the impression that Americans wouldn’t be happy with a significant sales tax, or perhaps this was a city sales tax on an existing state sales tax, which yes, would be outrageous, or maybe Americans get taxed in some other way which makes up for our VAT.
Anyway, I look back and chuckle at my own lack of knowledge at the time.
I would love a VAT tax instead of the never ending stream of taxes we pay on everything else.
Americans are stupid. They see a higher tax on an iPhone they don't need, they will cry about it.
But they pay more at the end of the year on income tax, property tax, car registration, etc., they could care less.
Most Americans don't even look at their pay stub, and are more than happy to overpay their income taxes every paycheck so they get a bigger tax return at the end of the year.
They don't realize that money was theirs to begin with.
They complain about not being able to become wealthy while they give the government an interest free loan, when they could be investing that money and earning on it.
I’m pretty happy with my Omada controlled EAPs around my house.
Running Omada on my Windows Server was painful (doesn’t really run properly as a service, software updates are a chore), but since I moved it to run on Proxmox using a super simple LXC image (I maybe got terminology wrong here) it’s been very nice.
Supposedly I should have excellent roaming between the APs, but I’m not sure how to check. Certainly, walking from one end of the house the other while on a Teams or WhatsApp call on my phone has maybe only a super minimal amount of time that I might not hear the other person (sub second for sure, if at all), but mostly I don’t notice.
Author is correct that if you don’t live in the house long, the overheads such as transfer duties and legal fees make it somewhat expensive.
But over here we have a pretty high interest rate of around 10% and comparatively high inflation rate, which makes the initial purchase of a house be a bit challenging, but if you start paying more than the minimum as soon as possible you can find yourself in a financially more comfortable position.
My bank allows me to have something they call an access facility on my bond account (the account for the debt on my house). With this I can transfer extra money into my bond at any time and I can draw this extra money out at any time too, this extra money counts as extra paid on the principal.
This essentially means that any extra money I put in it is worth about 10% p/a in terms of the interest it saves me.
They calculate interest per day so even if extra money sits in there for only a few days, depending on the amount the interest saved could be worth a coffee or possibly a meal.
Although I settle my credit card every month, everything I route through it and don’t have to pay back interest free for the next 30-45 days is essentially saving me that portion of interest on my bond, so easily over a percent. And that’s before credit card rewards.
And while I don’t recommend this except for the most financially disciplined as it is a little precarious feeling, I have a second credit card which I’m able to settle using my first credit card, this adds yet another 30 days of essentially interest saving to me.
It’s a great way to save for something big over say a year or two, even if you draw everything you deposited out again two years later, it’s saved you from the interest in the meantime, so you’re still better off.
Then there is the effect of inflation. If you’ve been able to put a good amount extra into your bond each month, you will find that after 5 years or so it’s probably less financially burdensome than renting.
This is because since you bought the place, property prices have gone up, so has rent and so has your salary, but your principle debt has not increased with it, meaning you’re paying no more than you were 5 years ago for the monthly instalments, but due to inflation it is comparatively less expensive.
Anyway, that’s the financials aspect, but on the quality of life aspect, a few years ago we finally bought a house that should be very nice for our family for the next 20-30 years, in terms of size, comforts and security.
We also bought a house with an old interior and renovated it, making the bathrooms and kitchens modern and how we wanted them. Was also able to chase conduits into all the walls (brick and mortar houses are the norm here) so that every room has CAT6 going to it.
Is South Africa a place your family will want to be (or be able to be) for the next 20-30 years? What are you doing for electric power, water, and physical safety from violent thieves?
Electricity has been essentially uninterrupted since the last load shedding about two years ago. I did get some solar panels and an inverter installed while load shedding was common as I work from home and didn’t want the stress due to lack of power. Another thing I put in our new kitchen is a couple of gas hobs next to the main induction ones, allows us to cook even during power outages. But as I said, no real outages in two years now.
Water is quite reliable, maybe interrupted half a dozen times in a year. I have 2kl of water backup tanks and a booster pump so I don’t generally feel any outage, although not uncommon, I expect that most middle class don’t have backup tanks like this. Regional water infrastructure hasn’t been keeping up with growth, so there is a large issue looming there.
Crime is common, but not so common that most people have been a victim of it. Most (middle class) people have house alarms linked to armed response services. I’m a member of community association which amongst other services they provide from membership fees, they also have a special arrangement with a security company and additional patrol vehicles are dedicated to our suburb.
Most security systems are door sensors and interior passive beams. I did however add outside beams which tends to catch intruders by surprise and gives early warning. I actually had an intruder in my garden last year and the outside beams caught the guy by surprise, he had dashed by the time the armed response got here. Harrowing for sure, but not tragic fortunately. Since then I added some IP cameras and there was a gap in my electric fencing above my garage which is where it seems they got in from, so I also had that remediated.
Our suburb (like many others, but not most) has road closures (gates get closed across most streets on the suburbs border) in effect except during morning and evening peak traffic times, this helps a lot, but criminals are regularly trying their luck in the area.
The intruder aside, and without load shedding, and being vigilant in case of criminals, it’s not that different than my 2 years I spent in Cork in Ireland where there was the occasional violence incidents with chavs and several water outages.
If I was living in a township (inhabited by those living well below a middle class wage) my experience would be quite different, probably lots more crime and I expect water and electricity to be quite spotty.
How will things be 10, 20 or 30 years from now?
My biggest worry right now is the water supply, but it’s more a worry of inconvenience of it being turned off regularly to manage demand. I’m expecting within 5 years they’ll have addressed it. Basically it’s a repeat of the electricity capacity shortage issue of the past, despite people telling government for over a decade they need to increase infrastructure to meet expanding demand, they do nothing until they run out.
Otherwise, I’m optimistic things will improve overall, not get worse. I think our democracy is maturing. The ANC which has managed to stay in power since the first democratic elections in ‘94 has been progressively losing voter share, it seems the masses are finally saying no to their excessive corruption and incompetence.
Apple TV free trials due to new hardware (e.g. new iPhone) is like this too, I just set a reminder on my phone and cancel it one day before they’ll start billing me. The UI for cancelling is also painless.
It depends on what you need to be "smart" about your house. If you live in an apartment there is not much to be automated. However, (if like me) you live in a free-standing house with solar panels, possible power outages and all heating done through electricity, a PHEV you want to charge, being able to have smart energy management is actually very useful.
Ideally my house should have 3 phase power, but I'm not yet inconvenienced enough to go through the headache of getting this organized. This means that at any time my maximum power draw can be 13.8 kW (60A at 230V).
Generally this is enough, but I have on occasion tripped my mains due to drawing too much at a particular moment, I have the following significant power draw items:
- 4x underfloor heating circuits at 3kW each.
- 2x electric geyser at 2.5kw each.
- Electric oven and induction stove, not sure on amount but I think they can collectively pull 6kW easily.
- Pool pump at 0.6kW.
- Inverter re-charging batteries at night (I only have 10kWh of storage and want backup power at night in case of a power outage), I can configure maximum draw here, but could probably pull up to 8kW if I wanted.
- PHEV at 3kW.
When we had regular load shedding here (South Africa) it was very easy for the power to trip if I didn't manage things, particularly if I left underfloor turned on in the winter at night. What would happen is that power would have been off for ~2 hours, then comes back and everything on a thermostat would turn on AND the inverter would start charging its battery.
If I proactively turned the floors off then I wouldn't generally have an issue.
Even without a power outage, it is possible to trip things when using stove/oven with underfloor heating turned on or if both the geysers happened turn on their elements at an inopportune moment.
IoT can allow this to all be managed, it can have rules like:
- Don't run ALL the underfloor heating circuits at the same moment, alternate between them.
- If the stove/oven is in use, don't turn on the element for either of the geysers, it can wait.
- Temporarily stop charging the PHEV or inverter's batteries until there is less power demand.
- Temporarily turn off the pool pump if it would help.
It can also create other opportunities around solar energy production, you can do things like have only "excess" energy go into your (PH)EV provided it has a minimum charge level.
Other automations which I wouldn't mind:
- Exterior lights on a schedule based sunrise/sunset.
- When I'm away it would be nice to be able to remotely turn on/off particular interior lights and open/close curtains at particular times of the day.
What I actually have automated:
- My alarm system has (not great) app, I have wired it up to my garage door so I can remotely let in the armed response security company in the event of the alarm going off and I'm not at the house.
- I use the Tuya ecosystem to automatically turn my geyser and pool pump off on a schedule and if there is a power outage or load shedding. This allows me to heat the geyser still even if there is a power outage and it's the middle of the day with lots of sun on my solar panels.
HA is something I want to look at one day (when I have more time), meanwhile the Tuya ecosystem is very useful considering its minimal amount of time investment required.
My Windows machine goes weeks between reboots which are 95% of the time due to software updates, occasionally I restart just Explorer itself which can glitch out.
I think it’s largely a factor of what additional drivers, services and security software are installed.
My laptop (very deliberately) only has the integrated Intel GPU, uses vanilla Windows Defender and I avoid installing any additional stuff, e.g, stick to just Dell’s Command | Update as opposed to having any of their other completely unnecessary software installed, also always avoid their SupportAssist.
I also have Windows 11 widgets turned off and have set the registry key which stops web results appearing in the start menu search which changes it to work really well as opposed to constant source of frustration. (Similarly, I found on iOS turning off Safari results from global search also a huge quality of life improvement.)
The idea is that it funds public broadcasting and productions thereof, but like a lot of SOEs here, there is loads of corruption and inefficiencies, I only use my TV for streaming of content which is not produced locally, so I resent having to pay it each year.
However, it’s apparently a mission to get off it, even if you sell your TV you’re most certainly going to be harassed for years by debt collectors and what not.
Unlike your case though (where I expect the fine is not nothing), it’s only like R250/y (like 13USD) and they’ve smartly (which is surprising for an otherwise largely incompetent org), made it easy to pay. I get an SMS reminder and can have paid it by credit card within 2 minutes. So I’ll probably not bother trying to get off it as it’s so much more effort and a pretty small amount of money and hassle.
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