bux93

The only reason I don't drive an EV is that I live in an apartment building that won't install chargers. Given this limitation, I drive a Corolla hybrid and it's great - it drives smoothly like an EV, and mileage is good (although war in the middle east isn't great for prices). If it was practical for me to have an EV, I would probably stay clear from Toyota. Even though they have a great reputation for reliability of their hybrids, they spent decades bad-mouthing EV and the bz4 is markedly less reliable than their hybrids. Hyundai Ioniq 6 is looking good I guess.

It's a race to the bottom. Users have to anticipate designers making inconsistent apps, so designers feel vindicated in their idiosyncratic and frankly user-hostile designs.

Walk into bank? The last time I opened a bank account (2023), I tapped my driver's license to my phone, it got my details+photo via NFC, I took a "liveness check" video and was onboarded. This has been the workflow for many years now for consumer account openings, or installing a banking app on a new phone. I think bunq did it first around 2017. As soon as (EUDI) wallets are more standardized, both neobanks and high streets banks will adopt that too.

Note that the caps were introduced because the EU already had widespread use of bank cards, but local schemes were being replaced with Mastercard/Visa debit - the caps were brought in to prevent the duopoly from profiteering. (Apple/Google pay also use Mastercard/Visa virtual cards in the EU.) Before the cap, credit cards had way higher fees and there were some reward cards, which led to merchants simply not accepting Mastercard/Visa. Local schemes included Mastercard-owned Maestro (used in Germany, The Netherlands and for some reason Brazil) but also local schemes like Belgium's Bancontact/MrCash. It's unfortunate some of those schemes didn't just merge and started competing in foreign countries as well.

The fact that Lotus Notes offered attachments with e-mail wasn't as novel as the article suggests, to anyone who had been using uuencode (since 1980) or fidonet (1985).

I have fond memories of filling in time sheets on Lotus Notes. Although it's always an annoying thing to have to do, at least the Notes form that the local IT guy made for it allowed for retroactive changes and comments. Never had any issues communicating with finance over discrepancies or billing. And it synced from basically everywhere, using a 9600bps mobile dial-up connection if needed.

It's substantively different. The level of compensation you could expect from copyright needs to be high enough that creators/inventors in general feel that it may be worthwhile to create/invent stuff. That level of compensation may be exactly enough to pay for a musician to make a track. We know this is not the case, it's more like a lottery ticket; some musicians make millions (much more than would be needed to entice them to choose this line of work) and many make almost nothing, but still persist. If you relax copyright provisions so that average compensation is halved, this would presumably have a non-linear impact. Maybe a 50% decrease in expected compensation only results in -10% new works. Maybe in -80%. For example, it is completely implausible that retroactively extending copyright (as has been done) results in any additional works being created at all - just higher profits for existing owners. This also applies to the costs; a higher cost of production (e.g. cost of living) doesn't necessarily need to lead to more stringent copyright restraints, nor lower costs to more lax restrictions.

Cool! But who remembers phone numbers anymore? Maybe a small screen that you can navigate by dialling 1 (down), 5 (up) and 0 (select) would be a cool add-on (after dialling 0 or 411 to reach the operator perhaps).

One advantage in print; pages are often not entirely opaque. So on page 3, you see a bit of the text of page 2 shine through. If page 2 has a jagged right margin, this also makes the left margin of page 3 look uneven.

Meanwhile, the right margin of page 3 looks has a "shadow" that goes all the way to the right because the left margin of page 2 pokes out underneath it - your eye might want to glide to the end of the block, but the sentence stops earlier.

It looks better when it's aligned, which is also why you can specify a left- and right margin that alternates on odd and even pages.

This is obviously only a concern for books and papers, and not so much for e.g. glossy magazines.

I complained to the relevant GDPR authority (German) and never heard back. It's blatantly illegal - overprocessing of PII - to require registration for connecting two devices owned by the same person, in the same room. There's no fathomable necessary or legitimate use.

You're not wrong in theory. If you're a small country, your currency's day-to-day purchasing power is influenced strongly by your imports and exports. If you have few things other countries want to buy, there's less demand for your currency, and it will go down in value as expressed in your trade partner's currency. A sustained trade deficit (more imports than exports) might mean your currency goes down and down in value. Certainly if some politicians decide to close the borders, you will export even less, but will probably still need some necessities from abroad, and you have a financial crisis.

The US is a huge whopping exception to this strong correlation between the balance of trade and currency strength. US exceptionalism is usually wrong, but in this case, the US dollar being the 'reserve currency' of the world is an incredible boon. The US has been able to sustain a huge trade deficit for decades without sky high inflation (you think it's bad now, it's nothing). In fact, foreign goods keep getting cheaper and the US dollar and services keep getting more valuable. A lot of this is because foreigners are willing to keep their savings invested in dollars (stocks & bonds, including the magnificent 7) rather than selling off their dollars to buy e.g. Chinese goods.

Also note that the tech companies make up a small portion of imports/exports.

But.. If trade restrictions (or security concerns) make it harder for the magnificent 7 to make money abroad, their profits will go down and there could also be an outflow of capital that puts inflationary pressure on the dollar, just because US stocks and bonds are less attractive - the trade deficit increasing would also contribute a bit, but it would be a much smaller effect.

An economy being propped up by foreign capital is not just a US phenomenon, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, Turkey 2000, Mexico 1994 - these crashes all were cause by sudden capital outflows. The proximate cause was a short term arbitrage trade, rather than those currencies being in extensive (structural) demand.

This concern is also why China doesn't let foreigners invest directly in Chinese companies. You can only buy weird derivative certificates that trade on a Hong Kong exchange and are subject to tight capital controls if need be.

Things like a domestic tax on imported goods/services (also called tariffs) are unlikely to lower the trade deficit unless there is already an industry domestically to absorb the demand.