kyteland

I believe you have those inverted. Bronze has tin and brass has zinc.

Nothing out-of-the-box that I'm aware of from the manufacturer. But all of the data is stored locally on the base station and you can try putting into a model.

I'm the wrong person to ask, as I'm fairly new to this. This is my first foray into home automation in general, but this platform has a Home Assistant integration that I'm playing around with. But the included base station is what is aggregating all of the data from the sensors and sending it out to the cloud when connected to wifi. HA is able to poll that base station for the data as well, and I think you can do that purely on the local network. You can keep all of the data local to only the base station and not use their cloud service.

I picked this platform because it has a lot of out-of-the-box functionality as I'm just getting started. It looked like I can still play around outside their walled garden as I do more home automation stuff. Beyond the outdoor weather data a site like WU wants, it has sensors for indoor temp and air quality so I can set up some HVAC routines or monitor if my chest freezer for getting too warm. It has a soil moisture sensor and one day I'd like to set up an automatic irrigation system for my garden. I can expand the connected sensors as I think of more things I want to try.

I think I could have accomplished a lot of the same with bare sensors like you're suggesting but I wasn't ready to take that on. That was too much learning curve for me right now.

pokies = slot machines

cardies = video poker

I do it the opposite way myself. If the stock is increasing there's a nice tax bonus on most ESPP plans by holding it 2 years from the start of the plan. If you have a lookback provision, by holding 2 years you shift more of your gains from ordinary income into long term capital gains (LTCG).

So a common example is a 6 month buying period with a lookback and a 15% purchase discount. Say the stock was $10 at the start of the period and ended at $12. The lookback period takes the lower of those two for purchase. A common misconception is that it is the lowest price anywhere in the 6 month purchase period, but no it's just the start and end values.

So if you sold right away you'd end up buying at min($10,$12)x85% = $8.50. You'd sell at $12 (so that's your cost basis) and have $3.50 in ordinary income tax per share.

Now say you waited 1 year to get the LTCG. In that time it went up to $13 a share. You sell and now you have $4.50 in gains. But you're still before the 2 year period so your cost basis is $12 and the split is $3.50 in ordinary income and $1 in LTCG.

Now say you waited 2 years. This is where the tax advantage happens. Your cost basis is adjusted to the min($10,$12) value. Even if the price is still at $13 when you sell your tax split is $1.50 ordinary income and $3 LTCG, because your new cost basis is $10.

Keep in mind when the stock declines over the purchase period this advantage completely evaporates.

Another thing to note on the timing. The clock starts ticking on LTCG when the stock is purchased into your account. But for the tax benefit is it from the start of the plan, when they start taking money out of your paycheck. Where I work the plan is annual, with purchases every 6 months. So on the first purchase of the period 6 months have already elapsed and I need to wait 18 months to get the tax benefit. On the second purchase 12 months have passed so I only need to wait 12 more months, which aligns with the LTCG period.

Something that commonly happens is that your brokerage sent you the cost basis for those sales at $0 on your 1099 form. There's typically an adjusted cost basis buried on their website which is what actually needs to be entered into your tax software as the cost basis, not $0.

So say you had $50k in stock vest and you sold $10k to cover the income tax. It's likely that when you import your 1099 that the cost basis is set to $0 on the $10k which if treated as a gain is a $2k-$3k tax bill. But if you find the adjusted cost basis and enter it the taxes drop to essentially $0.

So if you've experienced a huge, unexpected tax bill from RSUs vesting, go back and look at your tax return. If you see a $0 cost basis on the form then you overpaid. It may not be too late to amend your return and get it back.

While income tax and short term capital gains do work like that (an increasing marginal rate) long term capital gains (LTCG) do not. They are paid fully at the bracket you fall in to. When calculating tax rates (US federal, states may vary) you apply income first and capital gains second to determine your rate.

If you're filing single the LTCG threshold is $518,900 in 2024. So as an example, if you made $400,000 in income and $118,000 in LTCG that would put you just under the threshold to pay 15%. you'd calculate ordinary income tax on the $400,000 and then you'd pay $118,000x15%=$17,700 in LTCG.

But if you made just $2000 more in LTCG you'd pay much more as you'd be bumped into the higher 20% rate. You'd end up paying $120,000x20%=$24,000 in LTCG taxes, an increase of $6300 in taxes on just and additional $2000 in gains.

Temps, Vendors, and Contractors

I'd describe it as being a mashup of voting machine development with game design. Gambling is a form of entertainment for most people who do it. When they go to a casino they vote with their dollars on which games they find entertaining. But we can't send our games directly to players, we sell to casinos. And every single one gets tested and approved by and independent regulatory board whose rules create a lot of boundaries/limits on how creative our designs can be.

And the mathematician part is exactly like being a "fun accountant" for the game. We set your fun budget and make sure the player (randomly, on average) never exceeds it.

It applies to all regulated gambling devices in a jurisdiction that has that rule. Virtual dice/card decks must behave like a fair version of their physical counterpart. And they basically all have that rule because Nevada has it. Every manufacturer wants to sell in Nevada and they only want to make one version of their software, so even if some places doesn't have that rule it's highly likely that the game still behaves that way anyway.

It is regulated. If it looks like a die in a game of chance then it is a fair die. If it looks like a deck of cards, it is a fair deck of cards. This is written into the gambling laws of each regulated gaming jurisdiction.

And like most regulations, these rules exist precisely because someone tried exactly this scheme at some point. And the regulators saw it and said "Oh hell no" and made a rule. As the saying goes, regulations are written in blood.

Source: Casino game developer and mathematician for 20+ years.

This guy wasn't proposing anything as crazy as pay-per-bullet. There's lots of games with limited ammo and you find more in the environment. Even in Doom you might run out of ammo for your favorite gun and need to put it away until you found another ammo pack in the level. This is why Valorant has a knife you can switch to, because if you waste gun ammo you run out on your main weapon. In Fortnite you have to find ammo and weapons in chests, etc. This guy was proposing an option to pay to refill your inventory immediately. But people heard "reload" and assumed something completely different.

The real problem with his proposal is it quickly falls apart if you think about it for even a minute. It's a classic pay-to-win mechanic. And once something is pay-to-win it becomes a slippery slope and a race to the bottom for the game makers. Every game has some amount of edge cases where you're playing only to realize "Damn, I'm out, this sucks. I'd pay a buck right now to refill." But once you add in some options to pay in those scenarios, the game maker has a perverse incentive to no longer make it an edge case. Some PM will realize if they make the rare event 10x more likely they'll make 10x more $$$$ and they're off to the races. They start messing with the ammo drop rates to create "pinch points" and now your super fun game really does require you to be "paying to reload" and it's not fun anymore.

This guy was trying (and failing) to present it as a player benefit but the reality is he know exactly where this road lead. It's the same place EA games with loot boxes landed in the end.

Thanks, that was the context I was missing from the parent post. Makes total sense.

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, but I'm assuming you mean they run each source in separate lines. That's the same in the US. The point is that these pipes aren't well insulated so the line has probably cooled even though it is a "hot" line. Running the water a little bit flushes the cooled water out so that only hot water goes into the dishwasher. Because even though it is a "hot" line it gets cold over time if it isn't being cycled. Maybe in the UK you're much closer to the hot water source, but in the US houses are often so big and poorly designed that you need to run the water a bit before you get really hot water from the tap.