The story is talking about the portion of your monthly budget occupied by housing. If you only "count" the interest on a mortgage payment, then you're ignoring a material amount of money out the door every month, and that would render the whole dataset questionable.
The only honest way to discuss "is housing too expensive?" is to ask "how much do you pay someone on the first of the month to live in your home or apartment?"
This can take several forms, but the majority are either:
* "My rent is $X;" or
* "My total mortgage payment, including interest and principal, is $X;" or, in some cases,
* "My total mortgage payment, including interest and principal, is $X, and I also have to pay $Y in condo fees / HOA fees / building fees."
That last category might just be an American thing; I have no idea. I just know that many if not most condo developments/buildings have an additional fee you have to pay even if you own your unit outright, and it can be significant.
yeah most countries have version of that: service charge (and ground rent) in the UK. Not usually supposed to be very expensive, but service charge can be predatory: in London it can be in the thousands of £ for no apparent reasons. There's all sorts of messed-up incentives driving up this service charge, too:
- The freeholder (owner of the building itself) is in charge of the maintenance of the building, usually delegating it to a management company
- However the freeholder is not responsible for _paying_ for maintenance, that's what service charge for the flat owners (leaseholders) is for.
- So the freeholder has no incentive to look for a cheap management company, or to do preventative work, as they don't pay for maintenance
- The management company does not have incentives to be cheap and do preventative work either, as their client (the freeholder) is not the payer.
- Where it gets really fun is that management companies actually _give a kickback_ to freeholders on maintenance costs, to get their business. So when leaseholders are charged £100 for maintenance, £2 of that goes back to the freeholder!
- So the freeholder actually has an incentive for maintenance to be _expensive_, it's a source of income.
It's incredibly fucked up, I don't understand how it's legal. Add onto that building insurance shenanigans and you get service charges of £3k or £4k for a one-bed flat (I've seen up to £8k). Which makes the flat entirely unsellable of course, so the flat owners are stuck in sometimes _very_ desperate situations.
The Legacy is famous for going fast (especially the twin turbo one, when the second turbo kicks in, it feels like when a plane applies take-off thrust), and having great handling, they're still frequently used in rally racing in my country for that reason.
They're also famous for being incredibly expensive to replace the spark plugs in due to the engine's boxer layout meaning you need to remove the engine to get at the plugs. But so much fun to drive.
Depends on which Legacy you mean. I had an '05 Legacy GT wagon (EJ255 STI engine with smaller turbo / intercooler). I did plugs myself maybe 4-5 times. It was always a pain, taking 2-3 hours, but I always did it with the engine in..
Who cares about carplay or androidauto when plain ass bluetooth does most everything you should be caring to do while operating your vehicle (which you should in fact be 100% focused on and not touching your damn phone or other screens or anything else.)
At least Android Auto supports integration with steering wheel buttons and center console display on many cars — I imagine CarPlay too — this means you can can keep your music and navigation (favorites and such) in one place.
I am counterpointing that you need to look at the screen with Android Auto: you don't.
My older 2008 car also had a bluetooth system with similar capabilities, except that it did not have navigation (that was a 2000 EUR add-on). I did have to copy my MP3 music to a CD to play in the car — only once I added an aftermarket infotainment could I use USB or SD cards to put music on them.
That car even supported something called rSIM (remote SIM, where phone exposes your SIM card over a special protocol for modem in the car to use — I guess similar to eSIM today, except that the phone could decide to share it). The only problem was that only Nokias supported that well, and not for long, but it used an external car antenna to improve reception when travelling :)
CarPlay, at least, exposes Siri, and Siri has generally been far more capable than native car voice control. "Siri, navigate to John Doe's house" will access your contacts and give you nav cues to that address. "Siri, play ___" will play whatever music you ask for.
CarPlay can also read texts to you and prompt for (voice) responses.
So yeah, it's far better than just in-car bluetooth, and does far more things, all without compromising safety.
I don't know, my Volvo supports both and I pretty much never bother using Android Auto, it's just such a faff. The built in interface(sensus) works great and the navigation is really good. Like, what do you use either of those two systems for?
Subaru's bluetooth implementation adds multiple seconds of delay, so your navigation instructions will be so late that you'd miss turns if you relied only on audio.
OP, I have been a user of the AppleTV family of products for years. I have no complaints. So far I trust Apple more than Roku or Amazon, and I find the devices work far more smoothly and easily than other players in this space.
Consequently, I have no interest in hooking ANY TV directly to the network. It seems pointless.
I'm 100% not interested in any discussions that begin with "buy model XXX and then install different software..."
I'm not going to hack my TV. I have no interest in sysadmining my television. Success for me would be finding a TV that would work fine for its working life without ever being attached to a wifi network, and that will not try to do so on its own (ie, by joining known-open networks like those provided by Comcast and ATT).
By setting up a jobs market for foreigners but not for Americans, and by allowing corporations to install immigrant intake machines at the expense of Americans? Yes. That's what needs fixing.
I'm in favor of legal immigration. I'm not in favor of H1Bs and the "default" pathway.
If we don't get educated and employed as Americans, then yes, we'll be committing suicide.
If someone's post-graduate work is that important, and that particular individual is so unbelievably critical to that particular post-doc work, then surely the fee would be worth it. If it's not, then advantaging the market for post-docs in America to actual Americans seems like a good thing, something governments are meant to do for their citizens.
Is there a reason the American government shouldn't be allowed to act on behalf of its citizens and must act in favor of everyone else?
This comment is an excellent of scarcity mentality* (I can't decide if that's an insult; if it is, I apologize).
It's in America's best interest as a nation to have as large a pool of smart students to choose from as possible. The loser nations are the ones whose brightest minds leave (aka: "brain drain")
If the people of a nation capable of attracting foreign students are resentful about it, the real problem probably lies elsewhere (eg: inequality, economic depression, or broken media environment)
Except we know for a fact that the exact effect the H1B program had on science is to depress the number of Americans hired for post-docs hired for work in American universities.
You can wave around theories, or we can discuss what actually happened with the program. In the 1940s and 50s we had refugees, but we also had an extremely robust academy producing the likes of Feynman, Wheeler, Thorn, Everett and many more. Then we blew that up, because foreign students were cheap virtually indentured servants.
Enter today's world where tech is doing the same. America doesn't have an obligation to favor or subsidize foreign employment. If we had a system producing more Wheelers, Feynmans, and Thorns, it would still be worthwhile to immigrate and work with them, for a full salary. The same goes for tech. I want to attract foreign students and foreign workers to the American system, not to the American subsidy.
I assure you that you do not know for a fact that H1-Bs have prevented the US citizens from getting postdocs. Partly because postdocs are hired on J-1, not H1-B.
In any case, postdoc salaries come from research funding, which is basically a fixed pot for the entire country. Salaries for American postdocs would not rise if the labor supply falls. We would just have fewer postdocs and less highly skilled labor.
At the PhD level, if we admitted every American who applies without evaluating their record, we would still need to admit foreign students. Few people want to sign up for that challenge, and it just so happens 95% of all other people are not American citizens.
For tenure track faculty, we hire for fit and quality without regard for nationality. This is a requirement of Federal law, and it makes the country better overall.
Qualified foreigners have no advantage over qualified Americans for academic positions. If you don’t believe me, most state universities have salaries publicly listed for their faculty. You could easily see if foreigners are paid a lower wage.
An argument against foreign students and academics is an argument for a smaller scientific workforce, not a more “American” one.
Keeping highly educated and productive foreigners, whom which another country paid to raise and school, IS America acting on behalf of its citizens. These grads will pay tons of tax, create economic activity, perhaps even new companies. And it cost America zero. It’s an insanely good deal.
Even if we admitted 100% of qualified American citizens who apply, there wouldn’t be enough filled slots to run the programs and do the research.
Moreover, educating foreigners in America does benefit Americans: we get the research, schools get their foreign tuition dollars, local landlords and business absorb their cost of living expenses, local governments get tax money from them, they have kids and they become Americans. Or, if they go home they have great stories to share about how amazing America was for them, inspiring a new generation to come here and grow our country.
When the American government acts as it does now, all that happens is that economic activity moves somewhere else. There is no void filled by Americans, there’s just a void.
"which was perfectly correct for someone not being used to computers."
I disagree.
Even someone with no experience with computers understands, generally speaking, that the mouse is tracking the surface of the desk somehow. I have had this conversation many times (or did, back in the 1990s when mice were more novel for most people). Nobody picked it up.
The ones who do in these anecdotes are, IMO, examples of the sort of people who absolutely shut their brains off in protest when asked to work with new tech. I have been blessed in that I have only very, very rarely been asked to work with or even know such people.
The story is talking about the portion of your monthly budget occupied by housing. If you only "count" the interest on a mortgage payment, then you're ignoring a material amount of money out the door every month, and that would render the whole dataset questionable.
The only honest way to discuss "is housing too expensive?" is to ask "how much do you pay someone on the first of the month to live in your home or apartment?"
This can take several forms, but the majority are either:
* "My rent is $X;" or * "My total mortgage payment, including interest and principal, is $X;" or, in some cases, * "My total mortgage payment, including interest and principal, is $X, and I also have to pay $Y in condo fees / HOA fees / building fees."
That last category might just be an American thing; I have no idea. I just know that many if not most condo developments/buildings have an additional fee you have to pay even if you own your unit outright, and it can be significant.
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