eertami

People on Twitter really overblow it's importance, but the vast majority of humans do not use it. Things posted there really only matter to other Twitter users, and are inconsequential in the real world.

True it's not a direct property tax, but house value is included in total wealth and is thus taxed through the general wealth tax.

Yeah as a rule I cancel every service immediately after payment. If I still need it in the second month I'll just buy another month, it takes seconds and I don't need to track anything. (Only exception being a music subscription, the only thing I use on a daily permanent basis.)

I would much prefer if all services offered an option to buy only one period rather than always requiring manual deactivation - but I also understand they make a lot of money from people paying for things they aren't using.

But the legal notion from where you grew up might not apply worldwide right? People aren't saying you are wrong, they are just saying things are different in other places.

Where I grew up you do have legal right and social expectation not to be under surveillance at work. You even have an expectation of privacy in public spaces - I know this is not the case in other countries, but I accept/know that and it would be senseless to imply this is expected everywhere.

Europe is a big place, but in my area of Europe it is very illegal to monitor employees this way. If you were to be fired for something that illegal surveillance turned up, I would consider it a good thing - with the settlement money you could take a couple years of vacation.

To provide my anecdata, my work MBP is 48GB and with nothing more than our dev environment, VSCode, Slack and Chrome it's at 34GB memory used. Modern NVMe drives make swapping to disk bearable (and it's the same on MacOS and Linux), but it is still swap and there will always be a performance penalty.

Sure I could survive with a 32GB machine but over the many years of life a laptop has, the extra cost seems negligible, and I would prefer to have slightly more RAM than I need rather than slightly less. With how bloated the web is becoming I wouldn't recommend an 8GB machine in 2026 to someone who intends to use it for the next decade. (I know people still using 2013 Macbooks with 16GB that are still fine for the kind of usage the Neo is aimed at.)

I think it isn't as absolute as you suggest, and that it depends on city planning. I own a car but in the city I live it is not a better solution for everyday trips. Walking, cycling, or bus/tram are all far more convenient - it is only when leaving the city that the car becomes better.

(Even then, it depends on the destination - if it's to another city then the intercity trains are still better but for 2+ people it ends up being the premium/expensive option and the car is cheaper.)

> For the most part he's not making streets safer, but just costing people money.

It's not just a fine when caught using your phone while driving, it's also 6 penalty points (of a maximum 12). Being caught a second time (or if you are within 2 years of earning your license) results in a ban from driving for 6 months.

People who are caught once will likely think twice about using their phone again, not wanting to risk the ban.

I know what you mean, though I have a device running SteamOS though and it runs extremely smoothly, the latency is no different than my windows PC (on titles where it can achieve the same framerate).

I'm sure that it must be possible to replicate whatever optimisations SteamOS has on other distros, but unfortunately I am not sure what those are exactly.

I somewhat suspect our difference here is cultural divide - I've never been to the US, but none of the things you mentioned have involved salespeople in my experience in Europe.

I live in a city, have a car (bought second hand), buy things in person, go to restaurants. We have no tipping or gratuity, apartments have a fairly standard application process and often it's a previous tenant showing you around because they want you to take over their lease, unless the apartment is empty.

Why would I, as a user, ever opt in to this instead of just using adblock and never seeing adverts at all.

Surely OLED is bad for a productivity device due to poor text rendering. For games or media, sure.

That isn't quite true, because the law was enacted on October 26, 2023, which was still the same party that drafted it.

Of course, it is true that it is being supported by the current government, however the only way a future government could have avoided the law coming into force would be to repeal it with a new act of parliament (because it was already enacted).

I somewhat suspect you would not find it so amazing if you paid £9000/year for it, though.