qwertfisch

There seems to be a misunderstanding.

The maximum payroll tax is 42% for incomes above 62k Euros. The part of income below has a tax excempt amount of ~10k, then a linear progressive tax. (There is an rate of 45% for incomes over 250k, but let’s skip that for the argument.)

There are also some tax reducing things, but let’s say you have a taxable gross income in the range of 60k. The deductions are as follows: - 25% payroll tax (which is the tax _average_, only the amount above 62k is taxed with 42%) - 7.3% healthcare (or 14.6% if you are self-employed) - some percentage for other public insurances

Gives you around 65% net income, from which you pay 19% VAT for most things you buy as consumer. But e.g. rent doesn’t have a VAT.

If your income is higher (as I wrote in my other comment), the healthcare / public insurance cost is capped, so every Euro above 62k is taxed with 42 (or 45) percent. If your income is lower you simply pay less taxes (relatively) and might have 80% or more net income.

Edit: forgot about tax average …

The public healthcare rate is indeed 14.6% but half of that is paid by your employer. Of course in the end it doesn’t matter, just that only 7.3% from your gross income will be reduced (also there are rates for nursing care insurance, pension insurance, unemployment insurance – a middle-class income pays 35–50% for tax and insurance).

Public healthcare is obligatory for all employees except you’re earning more than ~65000€/year or are a civil servant. In which case you are entitled for private health care which might be (or in fact is) more expensive but has more options for treatments and some prioritizing on waiting lists and doctor’s appointments.

Family (husband, wife and children) is always insured for free except they are also employed. Children have to pay seperately after reaching age of 25, and if they still study they pay only a low flatrate.

The rate is always 14.6% of gross income except for very low incomes, in which case the employer pays everything, or very high incomes. There is a cap: everything above 65k is not rated – which seems unfair to me.

Modern Samsung TVs don’t even let you change any settings if you don’t provide Internet access and accept the TOS. Only thing possible is changing channels and volume.

(Yes, that restriction includes changing the HDMI source for your Apple TV. Simply not possible without.)

Miles ahead? Last year I bought a new generation LG (WebOS 22), and its menus are so damn slow. Everything is an app. Open settings to change the picture or something? Yes, please wait five seconds to load the first menu. And then it’s still stuttering and reacting slowly.

Ridiculously bad is the „Home Screen“ (Netflix-like UI with every app and suggestions and so one in one place), which needs even longer to start.

And the worst thing is: all of these internal apps are reloaded EVERY TIME I use them. No preloading, no caching. Everything lags and needs several painful seconds to display.

(And then LG did not even bother to pay some cents for the DTS license so that I am unable to watch movies from USB sticks with DTS audio track, and I would have to convert them to Dolby AC3 first on my computer …)

The LG display is nice, though it’s far from perfect, which is a problem of ALL televion sets, and I don’t know why because _monitors_ on the other hand are always pixel perfect, but televisions seem never be able to get configured pixel-sharp, even with perfect video material. It’s ok for the money I poured into. Just a big screen.

An also bad part of LG is the lack of apps and the control LG holds over the store. There isn’t even a web browser available, just the crappy thing from LG built-in, which does not even have all TLS certificates. I wish I had bought a TV with Android.

I learned in school almost 30 years ago that some plants emit ultrasound when they are stressed or in danger. Might be not the same kind of “pulsing” as described here, but this is clearly not news.

John Gruber seems not to be a gentleman after reading about his behaviour in the story of CommonMark’s name: https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...

Jeff Atwood instead is remarkably compliant. I personally would have been instisting on „Common Markdown“. Especially with the reasoning, with John Gruber just not-replying until publishing and then being a child and applying double standards, when he himself caused the need for CommonMark due to the inconsistent description of Markdown’s grammar.

XeTeX allows me to use the system’s Truetype/Opentype fonts and Unicode without any of pdfTeX/Metafont voodoo necessary in previous times, and it did this flawlessly for more than ten years for me. LuaTeX took ages to finally get a 1.0 version, so there was at least a period of 8 to 10 years where XeTeX was simply the best and only solution.

Most comments lean onto the unscientific results about fashion and design, which follows fashion. But the article also displays one categorie that should be independent of fashion and solely rely on creativity: media.

This chapter proves the premise with statistics about film grossing and the increasing unoriginality that influences movie plots. When I was a teenager or years 20 to 30, I went to the cinema up to a dozen times per year. Almost no matter what genre, there was always an interesting movie with a fresh plot or story background. But since 2010 I visited less and less, and (also pandemic-related) the last movie I watched in the cinema is from 2018. But also at home I got the feeling there were less interesting movies. I thought maybe I am getting old. But these statistics tell me, this is not a feeling, it’s a machinery of permanent repetition without being creative AT ALL. And why is that? Because people still watch these repetitions and seems to not get tired of them.

Yes, I watched the phenomenal 22-movies-Marvel-universe with a great finale. These are of course part of the repetition statistic, but it was a new idea at the time, and Marvel clearly went to the success lane with this movie-spanning story. But now? Story’s over, they still produce new mediocre (but still visually pleasing) action movies which do not have any hint of a new spanning plot, and people STILL go watching them and create giant revenues. If people just would boycott any one of these movies, the financial desaster (200+ million dollars of cost per movie!) would end this at once.

So … is it a problem of the society that they expand fashion also to creative things and seem to be happy with any different-but-same movie? I am tired of these movies, I am also tired of TV/streaming series with the same plots again and again. There is more film material produced than ever but for me there is much less to watch than say from 20 to five years ago.

But it's one thing to emphasize a naming convention, and another thing to simply not compile because I want the function be named doSomething() but am forced to name it do_something(). With a naming convention or an included formatter I still can write my style. At least until I'm used to the language's native naming style.

Being forced just annoys me and keeps me from using the language at all. (Because languages differ here extremely.)

But then you use a service (reading a digital version) which you did not pay for. You only paid for the paper version.

Doesn't the BBC offer a service where you can request recordings of any historic broadcast?

The German public-service broadcasters like ARD, ZDF and many regional ones offer such a service. I can request a program from the 70ies, tell the name and (helpfully) where and when it was broadcasted. Then they search through their massive archive, make a copy on DVD and send them to you. It's not cheap (up to 40€ per hour of program), but it is legal for personal use. No need here to pirate anything, except very very old broadcasts from before ... around 1967.

Would be great if companies could also get into the correct mindset. In Germany we have an electronic ID for more than ten years now, and everyone could prove his/her identity even over the internet. But there are very few companies supporting this, even now as more than 60% of all IDs have this functionality available (in the first years it was optional).

The companies STILL prefer that I wave my ID to a person on a videocall, then they read the ID and accept it. What an anachronistic and very analogue way. And this needs manpower and availability of it (so no opening accounts in the middle of the night).

Depends on the clerk and if there are other possibilities to prove your identity. I once had to fill out a postal identification to prove my new (online) bank that I am the person trying to open an account. The clerk needed to check my identity, I showed my ID and had to sign as authentication, but as I have (like OP) no consistent signature, it took three attempts until it was accepted. But then I think, why do you not look at my ID? There's a picture of me in there!

The calculator seems off. If I enter e.g. the default values of 95/85cm for bust and band size, I get a result of 75E (EU size), but it should be 85B. Seems as it uses 75cm for the band size. I played with the values: the entered band size will be reduced by 10cm and then calculated (correctly).

This would also be great in Germany, but it's impossible to establish, because people want a seat. In contrast to TGV, tickets for the ICE do not include a seat reservation. And if you pay extra for it, there is this the possibility of unplanned shorter trains, substitute trains without carried-over reservation numbers or any other failure.

It's the other way round: freedom is slavery. This was meant to say that a supposedly positive and worthwile feature as freedom would only be slavery in the end (for every "good" citizen), according to the totalitarian system of Oceania's society in "1984". The other two philosophies are "war is piece" and "ignorance is strength", with same intentions.

I know this was the test sample in the sound configuration utility for a lot of mid-90s games – but do you know the origin of it? Anybody?

So we better define a maximum phone width instead of a maximum diagonal display size. The aspect ratio changed from 16:9 to 19:9 or longer over the years, but the “extra” display area is the space that was occupied by hardware (sensor) keys for navigation, which you still had to tap … That leads to longer diagonal sizes per se.

So phones are not really getting longer in aspect ratio (except for some VERY long Sony phones), and they got more display area because of less thick edges. Naturally the mathematical diagonal size is larger, but that is a moot measurement compared with older phones with their 16:9 displays.

I am comfortable with everything less than 70mm width, and because the aspect ratio is kind of settled on 16:9 + navigation keys (or 19:9 complete display), the length is naturally restricted to ~150mm or less.

My A40 has 5.9" but still only 142 to 69mm in size. It does not feel like a 6" thing from 2017, and the reason is its small width and weight. Unfortunately, most new phones have width from 75+mm and weights of 190g or more.

Yes, very strange. GSMarena lists it as 6.1 inch, and its length of 150mm (5.9") might be acceptable, but the width (76mm / 3") is large.

Comparing with my Samsung A40 (5.9" diagonally), the latter is much smaller, and also lighter: https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=9320&idPhone2...

Edit: Both smartphones have the same display aspect ratio, but the XR seems to have thicker edges. The screen-to-body-ratio is only 79%, compared to 85.5% on the A40. So it must be wider and higher.

I also used an S4 Mini for a long time (more than five years), but its size and very small weight came at the price of not having the Full HD display of its big brother S4. It didn’t even have a 720p display! Also the battery was much too weak.

Still I searched the whole year 2019 for a replacement and finally settled on the Samsung A40, which has a FullHD(+) display, reasonably good battery, all features I wanted and is still lighter than other phones of same size.

You are right, around 140mm length would be fine, and then an equivalent weight of 140 to 150g. I cannot stand these bricks with their 180, 200g of weight, no matter the display size. These are just not usable for me.

> Sometimes I almost feel like companies sometimes intentionally sabotage experimental products just not to deal with the headache of supporting more options in their supply chain.

Except companies like Samsung throw out dozens of new models per year, which all differentiate only marginally, and none of them gets a SFF while maintaining higher quality of features (i.e. no cheap phone with 720 display and such).

Sometimes they get it right, like with the Samsung A40 from 2019, only to not pursue the sales for a true successor. Heck, me and a lot of my friends and relatives bought an A40 because of its size and fantastic display.

Samsung A40 had a nice 5.9 screen with full HD+ resolution. Sold for under 250€. Unfortunately Samsung only releases such a phone once every five years. The successors were bigger, more expensive and less powerful.

Are there really? It's not just the size, but also the weight: cheaper components have larger weight. At least for me that is a dealbreaker.

Then you want the display to be small but of high resolution (and quality!), so 1080 pixels in width is necessary to have at least 320 to 350 dpi. My Samsung A40, which I bought for 220€ in 2019. has 440dpi (with 1080 pixels width), and this is marvellous because I cannot see single pixels anymore.

Third reason is the processor. There are still enough cheap ones built-in, that cause stutter and pauses.

I don't want just a small phone, I want a nice and reasonably-priced small phone. It was sold for less than 250€, so even in smaller batches it should be possible to reach a 500€ mark.

No, M64 was never free, as far as I can tell. I remember stumbling over M32 around 2006, when I was interested in OS development while being a CS student. I kept interest, and some time later a 64 bit version was published, but no source code, unfortunately.

The project kept growing a bit, very slowly. Seems like after v1.00 the author lost most interest. So if it is still a prototype work without any commercial usage, it would be great to have it published with source code.