oktoberpaard

It’s not 6% tax, the expected returns for investments are 6% and those are taxed at 36%. The first €57k (or €114k with partner) are tax free. So if you have €1M invested and have a partner, they expect you to make €60k and let you pay €20k.

You can invest in a retirement fund (managed by you, if you like) tax free from your gross salary (up to a limit). You’ll pay income taxes over your pay outs when you retire. The conditions are that you can only use it for your retirement.

Note, however, that the mere fact that all those apps exist for iOS adds a lot of value for Apple too. Apple wouldn’t sell nearly as many iPhones if the most important apps weren’t available on their platform. They spin it as if they are only creating value for the app developers without asking for much in return, while the App Store is an enormous cash cow, which they’ve been able to build due to the lack of restrictions (pre DMA). A good API is not just a service for app developers, it’s a way to enhance the user experience and sell more phones, because of all the work that app developers do to turn it into useful and exciting features.

If my calculations are right, at that speed with the numbers from the graph, that would put the energy requirement at about 10 kWh/km. That means that with your motor delivering half of that, the human output actually matches up pretty well with the graph. I’m saying output, because I’m convinced that the graph doesn’t take the calories being burned into account and only shows the work being done to move the bicycle.

I think many people peddle just as hard on an electric bike, so the 5.5 kWh/km is a given, the rest is the energy required to go faster. Since air resistance increases with the square of the speed, it might very well be the case that 14 kWh/km at 25 km/h is more efficient than what the human alone would need to deliver for the same speed.

Edit: I failed to take into account that for the human at the same level of effort the power remains constant, not the energy per kilometer. Going faster at the same power output would reduce the energy expenditure per kilometer for the human to about 4 kWh/km, which would indicate that 10 kWh/km is being delivered by the motor to go faster.

That being said, it might be the case that they just calculated the energy needed to move the bicycle without taking the energy efficiency of the digestive system into account.

It’s Markdown syntax. You can actually format it nicely in a code block:

bool isEven( long long x ) {
  if ( x < 0 ) x = -x;
  if ( x == 1 )
    return false;
  if ( x == 2 )
    return true;
  return isEven( x - 2 );
}

You do that by adding ``` above and below it. To force single line breaks, you can terminate your sentences with two spaces, or a backslash.

I don’t doubt the fact that they take some margin to extend the lifetime of the battery, but if we take iPhones as an example, they:

• charge at a slower rate when nearing 100%
• try to postpone charging the final 20% until the last moment before disconnecting from the wall outlet
• can be software capped at 80% by the user (in newer models)

This makes me suspect that that the margin between what’s reported in software as 100% and the actual capacity of the battery is less than 20%. This also makes sense from the standpoint of the consumer expecting a long battery life on their expensive high-end device, putting pressure on the companies to make the margin smaller and the charging algorithms smarter. Just my observations, of course.

I’m pretty sure that Chrome’s alternative is designed by Google to track you in a way that’s harder to block and gives them more control over the advertising market by forcing advertisers to play along and use their method instead of collecting your data directly. Sure, it’s more private, but it’s still tracking you.

Firefox, on the other hand, is focusing on completely blocking cross-site tracking. They have no incentive to completely block 3rd party cookies as long as there is also a legitimate use case for them, but I guess they will eventually also block them if Chrome is successful in forcing websites to stop relying on them for core functionality.

A non-political event, eh? Interesting: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/dec/30/eurovision-chief-russia-ban-stands-for-ultimate-values-democracy.

But then when you’re talking about 10:00 hours without specifying anything else, it actually means something completely different in the local context, apart from it being the exact same time globally. It doesn’t tell you whether it’s night or day at the other persons location. Your default point of reference in that system is the world, while even today, time is mostly used in a local context for most people. When I’m talking to someone abroad and I say “my cat woke me up at 5:00 in the morning”, I expect the other person to get the meaning of that, because the other person understands my local context.

When planning meetings you’d have to now the offset either way, because I’m not going to meet at idiotic times if there is an overlap in working hours between the two countries, which is something that you’d have to look up regardless of the time system. And if I send out a digital invite to someone abroad, the time zone information is already encoded inside it, and it shows up correctly in the other person’s agenda without the need to use a global time. In that sense UTC already is the global time and the local context is already an offset to that in the current system. We just don’t use UTC in our daily language.

But if it helps: I do agree that in an alternative universe the time system could’ve worked like that and it would have functioned. I just don’t see it as a better alternative. It’s the same complexity repackaged and with its own unique downsides.

But with such a system in place, what are we actually solving? If we’re agreeing on offsets (which would happen in a sane world), we’re just moving the information from one place to another. In both systems there is a concept of time zones, but it’s just the notation that’s different, which adds a whole new bunch of stuff to adapt to that’s goes very much against what is ingrained into society, without offering much in return. It’s basically saying “it’s 10:00 UTC, but I’m living in EST, so the local offset is -5 hours (most people are still asleep here)” [1]. Apart from the fact that you can already use that right now (add ISO 8601 notation to the mix while you’re at it), it doesn’t really change the complexity of having time zones, you just convey it differently.

Literally the only benefit that I can come up with is that you can leave out the offset indicator (time zone) and still guarantee to be there at the agreed time. Right now you’d have to deduct the time zone from the context, which is not always possible. That doesn’t outweigh the host of new issues that we’d have to adapt to or work around in my opinion.

[1] In practice we would probably call that 10:00 EST, which would be 10:00 UTC, but indicate the local offset.

Sure, but roughly speaking you know that 14:00 local time is probably okay for a business call, whereas 2:00 local time is probably not. You can get that information in a standardized way and the minor deviations due to local preferences and culture can be looked up or learned if needed. In contrast, with the other system there is no standard way of getting that information, except for using a search engine, Wikipedia, etc. The information not encoded anymore in the time zone, because there is no timezone.

Also, consider this: every software program would have to interpret per country what “tomorrow” means. I mean, when I’m postponing something with a button until tomorrow morning, I sure want to sleep in between. I don’t want tomorrow morning to be whenever it’s 8:00 hours in my country, which can be right after dinner. That means yet again that we need to have a separate source giving us the context of what the local time means, which is already encoded in the current system with time zones.

Not to mention the fact that it’s plain weird to go to a new calendar day in the middle of the day. “Let’s meet the 2nd of January!” That date could span an afternoon, the night and the morning after. That feels just plain weird and is not compatible with how we’re used to treat time. Which country will get the luxury of having midnight when it’s actually night?

Until you’re talking with someone from another country and you have no shared concept of time. Or you’re going abroad and you have to relearn what the numbers mean to fit the schedule. In the current system the numbers mean roughly the same in any country you visit.