Being able to play without a bunch of setup in your room and without worrying about getting tangled in cables seems great. I have a Valve Index—which is a pretty remarkable device, that I definitely enjoyed—but the hassle of cable management/etc adds some real hassle. And I say this as somebody who actually set up a pulley system to make it work better in my home office :P
Row types are great. I'm doing a PureScript project right now and absolutely love having row polymorphism.
I'm also a fan of effect systems, although I haven't used them as much. Having an IO type in Haskell is great, but the ergonomics aren't (among other things, you get async-like function coloring). Effects seem like a much nicer, more composible way to get the same benefits.
That's a big if. I've learned far more from settings and courses I enjoyed than from ones I hated. I expect the causation flowed in both directions, and there's no way I'm unique in that regard.
In my big box of cables I have, among other things, a double-ended USB-A cable. I understand that this is absolutely not standards compliant, and I have absolutely no idea of where I got it from. I have never used it. But it is a thing that exists.
Getting rid of almost 10 different proprietary charging cables for pre-smart phones and some old laptops felt great though :P
You and the other responders are probably familiar with it, but you made me look up this decent StackExchange answer again, coming from a search for "the forbidden usb cable" :)
I had one of those to charge a bicycle headlight. I gave it away with the bicycle, but in the span of time I had it, one visiting guest borrowed it to recharge a portable generic USB battery pack. So there you go, two product categories known to use that sort of cable!
I installed some HP slide-out rackmount keyboard/monitor units that used these as the host connection. This was back in the days when PS/2 was still around so they usually weren't used.
mine had 2 male USB ends on one side and 1 on the other. It was to power a laptop hard disk drive from USB if one port couldn't provide enough power. Feels illegal. I bought it off eBay with a money order in like 2003.
If driving is dangerous and carries a bunch of negative externalities, shouldn't we expect "good people" to look for alternatives? Not self-driving cars, necessarily, but maybe transit and walking and biking.
And, of course, to support the policy choices that reduce how much we subsidize driving and improve infrastructure for those alternatives.
It really isn't. You could—and we did!—solve that problem by letting people defer property tax payments or borrow against their equity. California literally has a property tax postponment program for seniors. If we just wanted to keep people from being pushed out of their homes by rising house prices, we'd just expand that program.
The point of Prop 13 is to let people have their cake and eat it too: you get to keep the equity you gain from increased housing prices, but not pay the property tax that comes with them.
With postponement you then can get the opposite problem of people getting stuck in their houses because if they sold they would have a huge deferred tax.
The approach in Washington works well. There is a senior property tax exemption based on age and disposable income. To qualify in King County (where Seattle is) in 2027 you need to be 61+ and have a household disposable income under $101k.
That gets you (1) a freeze on the assessed value for taxes equal to the current assessed value, and (2) an exemption from the statewide school tax and from "excess levies" (basically city and county levies that are voted on).
If income is under between $76k and $89k they also exclude from tax 45% of your assessed value or $70k, whichever is larger, but not more than $200k.
If income is below $76k they exclude 80% of your assessed value or $80k, which is larger.
The income levels are based on median county household income so vary from county to county.
Disposable income is basically everything that goes into AGI plus a list of other things (like any Social Security that is not already in AGI). There are also a bunch of deductions, mostly medical including Medicare premiums, with a $7500 deduction you can elect to take instead of taking any of those specific deduction. Income includes all adults living in the house.
In my county the levies that are not "excess levies" are county roads, sheriff, conservation, mental health, veterans relief, fire district stuff, public utility district stuff, and regional library. The "excess levies" are a couple of school district levies. Overall the excess levies are about 28% of the property taxes in my county. The statewide school levy that is exempt is another 10%, so the bottom line is that the property tax rate for seniors under the income limit is about 60% of the non-senior rate.
I do own a house in California and I pay closer to $30k in property taxes. The previous owners of my house paid $7k. My neighbor—who has a bigger, more expensive house!—pays $9k.
It's pretty clear that this kind of tax policy is going to totally mess up the housing market. It's not the only factor, but it's a big one.
Prop 13 massively distorts the real estate market and creates some strong incentives for home owners. Those distortions and incentives would go away regardless of whether abolishing Prop 13 led to a net increase or decrease in total taxes.
Like, if I had an AI detector that actually worked—and all the other ones didn't, which they don't—I'd put it exactly the same way.
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