You could attempt a conversion yourself. People take this up as a hobby (e.g. https://www.diyelectriccar.com/ ) ; presumably to be able to pull up next to a muscle car at the traffic light in their antique 2CV and then out-accelerate them when the light turns green.
Speaking as a car enthusiast who used to build cars and bikes in my youth, I would enjoy this very much.
Speaking as an adult who reluctantly owns a car because inadequate public transport and poor city planning force me to, I would want nothing less than a project car to buy groceries in (think of the insurance costs).
I don't care about flexing on people, I just need something that requires minimal maintenance, gets me to/from the supermarket and plays music/maps off my phone. 0-100 in 8 seconds and a 300km range is just fine by me.
I get funny looks from friends because I own a used 2006 Corolla despite being able to afford a much nicer car. I just don't care enough to spend 40k - 60k on a spaceship.
The only reason I don't drive an EV is that I live in an apartment building that won't install chargers. Given this limitation, I drive a Corolla hybrid and it's great - it drives smoothly like an EV, and mileage is good (although war in the middle east isn't great for prices). If it was practical for me to have an EV, I would probably stay clear from Toyota. Even though they have a great reputation for reliability of their hybrids, they spent decades bad-mouthing EV and the bz4 is markedly less reliable than their hybrids. Hyundai Ioniq 6 is looking good I guess.
I live in an apartment as well and my area has really good transportation. We don't commute to work with the car. There are various reasons why we did car-sharing nonetheless.
In the end our family decided to buy a car. We got an EV. Our use is sporadic and one could argue that if money was our priority, buying the car was a mistake.
So in this situation, having an EV is fine. The only downside that I found is that I spend a bit too much money on McDonald's. This is because the cheapest chargers are next McDonald's where I live. But it's not a problem, just a funny hiccup.
I had to sell my EV and go back to ICE for the same reason: my new apartment didn't have EV charging, and non-Tesla DC fast-chargers in my area (Seattle/Tacoma) were unreliable as someone would come along every few weeks and cut off the charging cables for the copper, and it would then take more weeks for them to be repaired. The infrastructure was simply too unstable, but it did only cost me $300 in electricity for the entire year previously that I owned it.
It's a race to the bottom. Users have to anticipate designers making inconsistent apps, so designers feel vindicated in their idiosyncratic and frankly user-hostile designs.
Walk into bank? The last time I opened a bank account (2023), I tapped my driver's license to my phone, it got my details+photo via NFC, I took a "liveness check" video and was onboarded. This has been the workflow for many years now for consumer account openings, or installing a banking app on a new phone. I think bunq did it first around 2017. As soon as (EUDI) wallets are more standardized, both neobanks and high streets banks will adopt that too.
Note that the caps were introduced because the EU already had widespread use of bank cards, but local schemes were being replaced with Mastercard/Visa debit - the caps were brought in to prevent the duopoly from profiteering. (Apple/Google pay also use Mastercard/Visa virtual cards in the EU.) Before the cap, credit cards had way higher fees and there were some reward cards, which led to merchants simply not accepting Mastercard/Visa. Local schemes included Mastercard-owned Maestro (used in Germany, The Netherlands and for some reason Brazil) but also local schemes like Belgium's Bancontact/MrCash. It's unfortunate some of those schemes didn't just merge and started competing in foreign countries as well.
At least in Germany as far as I'm aware all banking cards are in fact "simple" visa cards who uses "V-pay", since 2012/2014?
Personally I "like" or prefer V-pay because it made payment in the EU more easily for me without the need of a credit card even 8 years ago.
Since the pandemic, I only pay for a (real) credit card (with daily billing) because some goods or services can only be paid with a "real" card, like more expensive cars at a car renting company or sometimes hotel rooms and the like.
In general I try to pay with cash so nobody needs to pay extra fees. But more and more smaller businesses prefer electronic payments. Then I use the banking card with V-pay and to state it again, the real visa card is only used when no other options are available.
In the past I handled cash as an employee and as a volunteer. Like even a quiet night at a bar can sum up to a few thousand EUR.
Yes handling cash is not free.
But compared to some charges or fees it's often quiet cheap.
Sure you need to think a head like how much small change money you will need or how much cash for change in general.
You also need kind of routine and flow for counting and handling but even if I had to count up to 10k EUR in small bills t does not needed more then half an hour incl putting it into the safe or on the way home putting it into the banking machine...
At least in Germany it's not that big of a deal breaker.
I know of a large restaurant chain with some "bigger" branches: They often have to count two or three times with different people to be sure, that the amount is correct. Every evening.
Then you have transport companies which pick up the cach (or refill ATM) - you pay there for every time they stop, and you pay a tiny fraction per bill processed etc. (though, most restaurants do not use these services)
Then you finally have the very high risk of getting robbed.
You just triggered my PTSD. Worked in a gas station in college and changing over the till was a PITA -- I had to account for every cent, could be written up over 50 cents (too much or too little) and it was always this crazy dance to change over when we were busy since it messed with the counts.
I know: It is just hell! There is a gas station near my location, which closes the door from 23.45 to 24.00 for just doing this and handing over to the group.
That time costs money, the safe costs money, having cash attracts criminal elements like robbers or dishonest employees, your employee might get robbed on their way to the banking machine making it a workplace hazard, security guards costs money.
In 2009 Sweden had 58 armored car robberies, in 2018 there were 1. This used to be a big concern in Sweden, now it's basically a nonissue.
There were 1154 store robberies in 2009, in 2018 there were 515. Muggings are also down considerably. 2022 was the first year with zero bank robberies. This is mostly thanks to the much lower use of cash.
People often say that but does the cost for handling cash really scale (even approximately) proportionally with the number of transactions or revenue?
Or is it more binary that you have to decide, you either handle any cash and have the cost associated with it, or you refuse to take cash at all?
If the latter is the case, then avoiding cash altogether seems somewhat unrealistic where I am from. And if it doesn't scale then it makes a lot of sense cost-wise to try to do as many of your transactions with cash as possible.
Depends on, sure there is some "efficient frontier" where it flips.
Think about all the supermarket chains, handling millions of cash daily; in my region, those are relying heavily on outsourced cash recycling companies - why? Its more effort/cost if they would do this themself.
I'm quite opposite. I avoid any places that don't accept card payments, because it usually means they are avoiding taxes. And I don't have cash on me, or wallet. Only phone or sometimes only my garmin watch (with garmin pay).
The fact that Lotus Notes offered attachments with e-mail wasn't as novel as the article suggests, to anyone who had been using uuencode (since 1980) or fidonet (1985).
I have fond memories of filling in time sheets on Lotus Notes. Although it's always an annoying thing to have to do, at least the Notes form that the local IT guy made for it allowed for retroactive changes and comments. Never had any issues communicating with finance over discrepancies or billing. And it synced from basically everywhere, using a 9600bps mobile dial-up connection if needed.
Probably this is just an unfamiliar domain for most non-hardware folks, so it's a nice challenge that might introduce Jane Street to some people they might want to interview for non-hardware roles.
It's substantively different. The level of compensation you could expect from copyright needs to be high enough that creators/inventors in general feel that it may be worthwhile to create/invent stuff. That level of compensation may be exactly enough to pay for a musician to make a track. We know this is not the case, it's more like a lottery ticket; some musicians make millions (much more than would be needed to entice them to choose this line of work) and many make almost nothing, but still persist. If you relax copyright provisions so that average compensation is halved, this would presumably have a non-linear impact. Maybe a 50% decrease in expected compensation only results in -10% new works. Maybe in -80%. For example, it is completely implausible that retroactively extending copyright (as has been done) results in any additional works being created at all - just higher profits for existing owners. This also applies to the costs; a higher cost of production (e.g. cost of living) doesn't necessarily need to lead to more stringent copyright restraints, nor lower costs to more lax restrictions.
Cool! But who remembers phone numbers anymore? Maybe a small screen that you can navigate by dialling 1 (down), 5 (up) and 0 (select) would be a cool add-on (after dialling 0 or 411 to reach the operator perhaps).
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