jonathanlydall

Apparently petrol here is almost never mixed with ethanol so at least I don’t have that to worry about.

I’ve already topped out the tank with 95 (as it apparently has a better shelf life than 93) and will be driving in HEV mode until it’s nearly empty, thereafter I plan on generally only filling up with 10l at a time unless I’m going to be doing a long distance trip.

The engineer is the former founder of a company acquired by Cisco, so there is reason to believe they are exceptional and possibly more experienced and mature than most others at the same age.

27 is still quite young though and very possibly over confident.

It only has 13kW/h of batteries and an advertised electric only range of 50km making it considerably cheaper than a full electric SUV, and I can still use the same vehicle for the occasional long-distance trips with zero stress or concerns about charging infrastructure, e.g. 600km drive to holiday destination which I've done once already and have already planned to do again soon.

I work from home and my wife is hybrid, special school for my daughter is 8km away which is 22km from where my wife works. In practice we manage to cover about 98% of our day-to-day driving using electricity.

A while back I had a job which was 40km from where I lived, if I still had a work commute like that, I would have purchased (from BYD) either a Dolphin Surf (I think ZAR 340K for 300km range) or their Sealion 6 (I have a 5) with advertised electric range of 100km.

People should purchase the vehicle which makes sense for their circumstances.

VWs are decent cars, but they've been somewhat "premiumly" priced since at least 2000, in my view the brand is irrationally overvalued by South Africans.

When I looked at a Polo around 2018, the finishes were a bit nicer, but compared to the Honda Jazz I went with (with CVT, cruise control, climate control) it was considerably more expensive.

BMWs and Mercedes are apparently having a really hard time here right now. Chinese cars are really comparable in terms of features and finish but for like half the price, the only other reason to buy a luxury German car is as a status symbol, but for the genuinely affluent here, a Mercedes or BMW isn't exclusive enough.

They're not dead yet as there are still quite a few South Africans who deem it essential to their social status to have the nicest possible car at the absolute limit of what they can afford. My theory on why they do this is because others can see the car they pitch up in, but don't see that each night it's parked outdoors of a rented apartment worth barely more (possibly less) than the car.

I appreciate the warning, will certainly do some homework here.

Here in South Africa I’m seeing more and more BYDs all the time, the high fuel prices due to the Iran war is making their entry level EV pay for itself for people with any kind of commute.

I’ve been super happy with my Sealion 5 (PHEV) I bought in May, tank is still over half full since last filling it up mid July and having done about 4,500km since.

I have had two minor software issues. One time the one parking sensor warning indicator kind of got stuck on the centre screen (no noise though). The other was my wireless CarPlay refusing to connect. In both cases they self corrected once the car had been turned off (and unplugged) for a little while. A bit annoying at the time, especially as there seems to be no manual way to force a reset, but super isolated.

It has etymological roots in the Arabic word, but is spelt differently and it has no meaning or use except as a slur of which there is nothing more offensive to say to blacks (“blacks” is a completely acceptable term here).

We don’t have much of an Arabic community here.

I'm South African so wouldn't really know culturally how African Americans would see it, but wondered at the time if the changing of the Git default branch name to "main" was an initiative by European Americans worried about offending rather than actual offense taken by African Americans.

It is interesting how different locations find different things offensive. Only when I was living in Europe for a while (doing Blizzard Customer Service) did I became aware of how big a deal the usage of N word was, as over here the K-word (look up "South Africa k-word" if you don't know it) is the word of choice for the, unevolved, die hard racists.

Was similarly unaware, (but not really surprised in hindsight) how World War II references were much better left avoided and Nazi references an enormous no-no. Over here references to Nazism are very rare and while South Africans did fight and die for the Allies in Europe, the impact of WW2 over here was no where near what it was like for most of the rest of the world.

Sounds like SVGs would work well for this.

In some situations it is most convenient/practical to have your router do dynamic DNS updates and depending on your router the options may be limited giving you no "great" options.

Regarding your valid concerns about the PSL, as long as you have a domain already, you can just make a CNAME record to a free dynamic DNS provider's sub-domain record, I've done this for years with a No-IP ddns.net record. I don't especially recommend No-IP as the 30 day verification is a bit annoying, but at < 1 minute of work per month, it's tolerable for a free service and $2.50 a month is an order of magnitude more than what I feel a single dynamic DNS record is worth.

Since I moved to having a pfSense box at home, I'm using Cloudflare for dynamic DNS, no extra fee and works perfectly, but like I said above, probably not available on typical home routers without a regular machine behind the router having to poll your IP to detect needed updates of a dynamic DNS record.

As I was on Namecheap, I was initially going to use their dynamic DNS option, but it turns out it's behind a higher fee to enable full API access to administering your domain, totally stupid, but with their having been bought out by the PE entity I wouldn't want to stay with them anyway.

My father runs a few guest suites and he explained to me why the cleaning fee is really helpful in terms of keeping a room's price reasonable per night but him not getting a bad deal for a single night guest.

The more often you wash linen then the faster it wears out and needs to be replaced.

While he has a cleaner who daily makes the bed and does basic cleaning (labour is far more affordable in South Africa), on checkout rooms need a more proper clean with additional use of a cleaning detergents.

Without a cleaning fee which is charged per stay, you'd have to increase the per night fee to cater for single night guests.

With the cleaning fee he can still keep per night rates as low as possible with single night guests still covering their actual overheads.

Makes a lot of sense.

My father runs a few guest suites out his house and the cleaning cost, wear and tear of washing linen makes single night stays really impact his bottom line, hence him having a cleaning fee which is per stay rather than per night.

Prospective guests can then choose for themselves if they feel the overhead of the cleaning fee for such a single night is worth it for them and my father doesn't land up with uneconomical stays.

Comes across as double dipping to me if the cleaning fee is exorbitant AND the guest is expected to make an accommodation spotless before checkout.

I'm not in any way saying it's respectable to leave "a mess" in an accommodation which charges a cleaning fee, but a small amount of dirty dishes in a sink (if there is no dishwasher) or not having washed linen is not in my view leaving a place "in a mess" as the host is expected to do a certain amount of cleaning regardless since trusting guests to do it would be reckless and this can be unreasonably time consuming for guests and challenging if they have small kids.

If there is _no_ cleaning fee and the terms were clear that full clean-up of the accommodation is expected, then fair enough, guest saves on cost by doing the work themselves and if they don't they deserve a negative rating.

I guess AirBnb has found that many hosts use it as an excuse to penalize guests or to claim it's not the host's fault if the place was not clean on arrival of the next guest, so it's just simpler for AirBnb to set a baseline of host service expectation.

My understanding is that hosts optionally specify cleaning fee charges.