SUVs are unnecessarily large and heavy, dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists, blocking the view for other drivers, causing more wear to the street surface and take up precious space when parking in cities. And for what? Hummers might be an exception, but most SUVs aren't even suitable for off-road use. Not that most owners even need that.
So yeah, it is absolutely insane for people to drive a car that causes so much harm to other road users and society as a whole for no good reason other than "me want BIG BIG CAR" and so it should be taxed to offset these effects.
You could also say it's insane to allow private ownership of vehicles. If we instead invested in public transit, emissions would be lower, transportation would be ubiquitous, and fatalities would drop immensely. So we should tax all cars, not just SUVs.
I'd also add visibility/being able to check the blind spot in them. Also, they generally drive like they're invincible. Just a pattern I've noticed, hatchback boy racer vibes. I generally ride my bike a bit faster than the traffic and I'll get passed like I'm standing still. It's not really kosher having vehicles like that and inconsiderate drivers.
People need large vehicles for various reasons, commercial and private life. If you're insecure with there being variety on the road, which there always will be, then stay off it or take the bus. Builders are not doing their job in a Prius and a family isnt taking a ski vacation to the mountains in a Camry.
I know you're being facetious, but yes. Public transport is cheaper per person per kilometer than cars. Gasoline and motor vehicle taxes are very low in comparison to the cost of road maintenance and environmental and societal effects of individual transport, so you're indeed profiting off of tax money.
To which I’m also contributing by driving myself. Those roads aren’t built for my pleasure of driving to the office. They also serve crucial role in supply chains.
In fact, those buses are on exactly on those same roads. The existence of those roads facilities convenient public transportation.
These 2.5 billion euros is almost nothing for a country the size of Germany. I mean, it’s 0.1% of the total budget (€1762.4 billion last year). It’s nothing. Are you really getting all huffy & puffy about paying for a scheme that provides transportation to poorer people and helps the environment? And are you the same about all other tiny expenses, or is it just this one in particular.
No, I just said that I paid twice as much as last year for the heating oil and my tax obligations are increasing and this doesn’t benefit everyone. It turned into this discussion.
I really don't get it why Google doesn't show forests at >13 zoom. I've read people claim that this makes the map easier to read. But I can't be the only one who orients himself on a map based on boundaries between forests, residential areas, and fields.
Is there a way to make Goog's turn-by-turn to not be street name based but instead give directions like old timers did using landmark navigation?
At the old farm house, turn left. After going aways down the road, turn right at by the building with the white archways. Take the next left when you get to the statue of the first mayor.
For full flavor, you'd have to include references to landmarks which no longer exist: "if you pass the vacant lot where the old drugstore used to be, turn around, because you've gone too far."
I don't really get why the cancellation fee should be the issue here. When I purchase a subscription for a year, I assume that I will have to pay for the entire year. That's why it is cheaper per month than a monthly subscription.
The cancellation fee might be quite high, but it is absolutely expected that there is one. And if I'm not sure if I'll keep the subscription running for an entire year, then I'll look into the cancellation term beforehand or simply pick the monthly plan.
Because some people might not have the background to think exactly the way you do.
People are reporting that they were surprised by the cancellation fee. Is it reasonable to assume that these people were fully aware of what would happen? And chose this path anyway, in order to... what, exactly? It makes no sense. It's more reasonable to take what they say at face value, that they were in fact surprised and didn't understand in good faith what they signed up for.
Given that, what is so unreasonable about expecting companies to be upfront about the fee and explain it in the payment page? Why is this trivial disclosure and transparency to the consumer something to balk about?
I think the reason is pretty obvious. Companies have always loved it when confused customers have to pay money they didn't expect to pay. So the companies design their payment flows to encourage this, to the maximum extent the law allows.
It's sociopathic, and just because it's common and accepted doesn't mean I have to think it's okay.
On my work laptop (modern HP Elitebook), sleep doesn't work at all (laptop just turns on again after going to sleep), so I'm using hibernate exclusively. Waking up from hibernate takes longer than one minute.
On the other hand, my private laptop (Huawei Matebook) wakes up from sleep in less than 10 seconds.
On my MateBook 13 (2020) the Fn and Shift Lock lights are turned on, while the laptop is still powerd on, but not under OS control anymore:
Sleep takes 6 seconds down and 2 seconds up.
Hibernation is 9 seconds down and 20isch seconds up.
Shutdown is 20isch down and Boot is 22isch to desktop (fastboot=off).
I haven't used Google Chat yet, but Teams and Slack just feel very sluggish on my slow-ish work ultrabook. Switching between chats or starting a call takes two seconds while Electron gobbles all CPU and RAM it can get. Discord on the other hand feels almost like a native app.
I've seen arguments about removing unnecessary information and decluttering the map. But very often forests, for example, have very distinctive shapes, which helps immensely to intuitively recognize locations with a quick glance.
In many European countries, the 12-hour format is used in speech, but not in writing. You'd say "Let's meet at seven", but you'd write "Let's meet at 19:00". The context being software, I'd say it's a pretty solid claim to say most countries use a 24-hour clock.
>And yet 20+ years later no single Codec can produce MP3 128Kbps quality at 64Kbps
I don't have any hard data on this, but I'm pretty sure that Opus produces better quality audio at 64 kbps than a 2000 MP3 encoder does at 128 kbps. A current version of LAME will probably be as much better than some old Fraunhofer encoder as Libopus is better than LAME.
As always with lossy audio, different codecs have different "killer samples", but here are a couple of results from experienced testers that support the assertion that Opus at 64kbps is suitable as a modern replacement for 128kbps LAME MP3:
SUVs are unnecessarily large and heavy, dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists, blocking the view for other drivers, causing more wear to the street surface and take up precious space when parking in cities. And for what? Hummers might be an exception, but most SUVs aren't even suitable for off-road use. Not that most owners even need that.
So yeah, it is absolutely insane for people to drive a car that causes so much harm to other road users and society as a whole for no good reason other than "me want BIG BIG CAR" and so it should be taxed to offset these effects.