It works wonders on me and family members. Except we just always go for the Neil Med bottles from Costco or Target. They are also easy to disinfect in the microwave.
Always distilled water, though. It’s not worth waiting to boil the water, let it cool down, and then manage the dish used after. It’s also easy to get just the right temperature using distilled water in the microwave.
It’s a package of devices Apple is selling. They sell under powered smaller screen macs. They sell iMacs. They sell small iPads. They sell smaller watches. Some of these just don’t sell as well as their other offerings.
They should sell small phones. Because the whole family will be in on the brand, features, and services. I’ve heard many family members and friends say that they won’t give up their older small phones because Apple no longer makes new ones.
The idea that they don’t sell well is not a good enough reason when you are trying to capture the whole market for not just hardware but the lock in for services, apps, games, music, etc.
How can you be confident in this when you don't even see their sales data?
Still, I would like to see a smaller regularly updated phone. Bonus points if there is a high-end version, because small shouldn't mean budget (like with iPhone SE).
The last small flagship (iPhone 13 mini) sold poorly, but it was much more expensive than the SE2. This was at the tail end of covid, but before faceid worked with masks, so the SE's touch id was a huge selling point.
Other than that and the camera, the only functional difference I can find are that the SE line is still missing the UWB antenna.
I'd happily upgrade to a newer small iPhone if they made one. As it is, it looks like the only option is repeatedly repairing my 13 mini (and dealing with the hilariously bad 5G battery drain forever) or downgrading to a newer SE3.
I know there are a lot of people in this boat. I predict they'll produce another small phone in a few years. It'll sell well due to pent up demand, and someone will be declared a genius for selling 100M's of extra phones that year.
> I predict they'll produce another small phone in a few years. It'll sell well due to pent up demand, and someone will be declared a genius for selling 100M's of extra phones that year.
I’d wish this too. I’m afraid that Apple over the next few year would become more risk averse then ever before.
Also old Execs are leaving and retiring - so less people with hands on experience how to start new products VS keeping lights on.
I presume if you are caught, the IRS or the court will hold you in the wrong for fraud and tax evasion. Because they get to interpret the law, not you.
> presume if you are caught, the IRS or the court will hold you in the wrong for fraud and tax evasion
What is the difference between a discretionary bonus and a tip? What if I add a tip line to my business invoices?
The best solution is an income and deduction limit, e.g. you can't claim if you earn more then 2x median wage ($85,600 [1]) and/or the deduction is capped at the greater of $10,000 and 20% of your AGI.
Without an income deduction, I assure you, I will figure out how to get tipped.
> The best solution is an income and deduction limit
You don't have to help them try to make it make sense, it isn't intended to make sense.
A completely sensible proposal is to lower taxes on the middle class. But that's also entirely uncontroversial and furthermore they repeatedly say it and then don't do it so no one believes them and therefore no one pays attention to them if they say that.
"No tax on tips" gets people excited because a) there are a lot of service workers (which is the point; that's a lot of votes) and b) anybody can see that it's a tax loophole so large that even non-service workers can concoct a way to get in on it, but c) they haven't heard it before and it sounds like the kind of thing that could pass, because it won't cost the government too much revenue if the only people getting it would be a couple of waitresses and they themselves who will, unlike other people, come up with an ingenious plan to use this to avoid paying taxes anymore.
In other words, it's a silly proposal with extremely high memetic fitness. Don't try to fix it, just realize that what working people actually want you to do is lower their taxes.
The income tax burden on the middle class has been dropping for decades under tax policies across administrations of both parties, from an effective 19.1% in 1979 to 13% in the last pre-COVID year of 2019:
Not quite. That link is doing something weird and including the corporate tax rates to arrive at "total" tax rates. The median total of individual and payroll tax rates by those tables was 16% in 1979 and 11.4% in 2019. But even that isn't right because it apparently isn't counting the so-called "employer contribution" of FICA for people who aren't self-employed:
Using those numbers for the payroll tax rates, the median combined rate was 19.66% in 1979 and 17.7% in 2019. And this is slightly overestimating the rate in 1979 because the self-employed payroll tax was less than the combined employer+employee rate in 1979. So there hasn't been a significant reduction in 40 years, and the rate on small businesses has actually increased.
But that's not all. The start of that table was a high point. The median effective tax rate in 1950 was 5.5%:
That probably doesn't include FICA, but FICA in 1950 was only 1.5%/3% (and again less than the combined rate for self-employed back then), so the median federal effective tax rate would have been <8.5% in 1950 compared to 17.7% in 2019. And 1950 isn't even the low point, it's just the earliest number in that document.
The federal government dramatically raised taxes on the middle class in the early to mid 20th century and they've been stuck there since.
Presumably it’s including the average incidence of corporate rates because some small fraction of earners in the middle quintile pay those rates as business owners.
I happen to agree with you about who’s “really” paying for employer FICA, but there are many other taxes not directly assessed on the middle class that they’re likely paying for anyway. You can’t just tack on the full rate; not everyone in the middle class is paying FICA on every dollar of their income, there are many middle-class retirees.
Yes, the government is much, much larger than it was 75 years ago, and some of the burden for paying that has fallen on the middle class.
But the fact remains: Every major tax reform package from Reagan to Bush II to Obama to Trump has either lowered middle class rates, increased middle class deductions, or made significant new credits available to the middle class. Usually more than one of these.
You tip the person who pours you a drip coffee or a tap beer, but not the person who lugs an 80lb box to your doorstep. Would you advocate eliminating the $1 handing someone a cup tip, because it is expected service and not "above and beyond?"
The 20% performance fee in the 2 and 20 for hedge fund managers can easily become a tip on their tax returns, but I dont expect they will be back at the table asking what they did so wrong that would deserve such a paltry tip.
This is the same Justice System that recently ruled a gratitutiy for a Judge after a ruling isn't a form of bribery or corruption. So your mileage may vary.
They didn’t do that. They ruled that gratuities and bribes are two different kinds of corruption that require different proof and are made illegal under different laws.
Seems odd to attack my news sources, as if you know which ones I use instead of the argument itself. Under no circumstance should a Judge accept money from anyone even remotely involved in any case. It doesn't matter what they call it after.
I can’t recommend James Hoffmann’s channel enough - he’s such a passionate coffee guy who’s just as happy teaching what he knows about coffee to anyone and everyone. (He also won a world barista championship back in the day, too.) I daresay he’s even got me into coffee.
Personally I like Hames Joffman a bit more, but he's not posting as frequently any more.
Jokes aside, another endorsement from James. He's an absolute coffee weirdo, and he knows it, and he embraces it. The equipment and ingredients that he buys is so out of touch with my reality it can't even compare, yet I watch his videos.
I like his content because he does not take himself seriously, which is always a good sign to me. And because he's very pragmatic. Even though he takes snobbery to the next level, he will always sniff at a new product if it is complicated to use, because like me, his primary need for coffee is to overcome morning grogginess, and he does not want to faff about during that time.
I also like James Hoffman, a little bit more, a little bit less? I don't know.
Even his review of toy coffee machines[0] had me watching with full interest. This guy can sell you anything, but I think that is also part of being a barista?
Yeah, that's cool. As someone who fell down this rabbit hole well over a decade ago, complete with a history of my own large storage bins for green beans, multiple roasters, thousands spent in makers, etc... Yet, today, my most used preparation methods are an AeroPress or a Chemex pour over, albeit with hand-ground beans that a friend and neighbor roasts... I just don't think I want to hear 2 minutes of useful information from watching 25 minutes of videos (between the 2 that are linked here).
There are religious organizations that own hospitals. I was flabbergasted when I found out about this recently. My first thought was how they’ve got a perfect system to avoid all taxes.
Edit: it seems like the typical derailment is happening when it comes to religion. The topic is about taxes. I mentioned taxes. Not if religious organizations should own hospitals.
> There are religious organizations that own hospitals. I was flabbergasted when I found out about this recently.
Why would you be surprised at this? In (e.g.) Christianity, caring for the poor and sick has been one of the central tenants since its inception, so why wouldn't formal institutions be organized doing so?
Before the welfare state—which is a fairly recent invention—the largest organization would have been the Church (and its various religious orders: Dominicans, Franciscans, etc), which would have worked towards its three-fold mission of worshipping God, evangelizing, and serving the poor:
It can reasonably be argued that the very idea of taking care of the poor, etc, only came into Western civilization because of Christianity. As someone who presumably lives with-in Western civilization and adheres to its (general) values, you take the idea for granted, without perhaps examining where it/they came from:
> It can reasonably be argued that the very idea of taking care of the poor, etc, only came into Western civilization because of Christianity.
You can try that argument but it's not very convincing. I think you could do equally well arguing that slavery is the fault of Christianity, or warfare or various other things humans have sometimes done and sometimes not done...
The ancient Greeks (so, significantly before Christianity and also influential for "Western civilization") have a whole bunch of goddesses representing the idea of specific kinds of being nice to others. Plutarch is like "Philanthropy is a good idea".
> You can try that argument but it's not very convincing. I think you could do equally well arguing that slavery is the fault of Christianity […]
You can also argue for a Flat Earth, but all your arguments given would be bad: given that slavery existed before Christianity arrived on the scene, and early Christians (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa) argued against it, that would contain a bunch of bad arguments as well. The history of Western thought as outlined in (e.g.) Siedentop's Inventing the Individual shows how Christianity moved the needle from slaves to serfs to individual freedom:
This can further be expounded on in Brundage's The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession illustrating how everyone—pauper to Pope—was afforded a fair shake at justice (due process in law) going back to (at least) the Middle Ages:
> The ancient Greeks (so, significantly before Christianity and also influential for "Western civilization") have a whole bunch of goddesses representing the idea of specific kinds of being nice to others.
And how many orphanages did the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans have? (Versus leaving children outside to die from exposure.) Or hospitals:
> The declaration of Christianity as an accepted religion in the Roman Empire drove an expansion of the provision of care. Following First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE construction of a hospital in every cathedral town was begun. Among the earliest were those built by the physician Saint Sampson in Constantinople and by Basil of Caesarea in modern-day Turkey towards the end of the 4th century. By the beginning of the 5th century, the hospital had already become ubiquitous throughout the Christian east in the Byzantine world,[3] this being a dramatic shift from the pre-Christian era of the Roman Empire where no civilian hospitals existed.[1]
The current-day 'Western values' are Christian values. The most recent instance of non-Christian values being practiced in the West would probably be Nazism, and before that Nietzsche's observation that you either accept a supernatural entity and have (e.g.) Christian values, or you have nihilism and morals are arbitrary (in After Virtue, MacIntyre outlines why any one system (by Kierkegaard, Marx, Kant, Hume, etc) is just as arbitrary as any other (agreeing with Nietzsche in the binary choice that is available)).
> The current-day 'Western values' are Christian values. The most recent instance of non-Christian values being practiced in the West would probably be Nazism
I'm sure this feels right to you, but to get there you have to decide that the actual "Western values", which have little to do with Christianity, are instead somehow Christian, while the contrary practices of some Christians aren't.
The Nazis were mostly Christians, it could hardly have been otherwise given how Christian Germany was at the time. Yes, some Nazis wanted to destroy Christianity (and all of them wanted a Church subservient to their politics, but that was true everywhere, it's why the Church of England even exists) but on the whole they're a product of Christianity, even if that's uncomfortable for you.
Great points. But you missed the mark. The discussion is about taxes not if religions should own hospitals. The same poor people you mention have to pay taxes while the religious organizations get special cuts. If we are blind to how profitable and mutually beneficial relationships hospitals and insurance companies have, there is nothing else to discuss.
What's worse is they enforce their religious worldview at these hospitals, denying legal medical treatments based off of the largest human hoax and political control mechanism ever invented by man.
There's a bunch of local hospitals that are all run by a religion, but so far as I know, it doesn't dictate what they will and won't do for patients. So while I'm sure there are some religious hospitals that deny treatment, it's not all of them.
The US is a really, really big place. Our states are the size of many countries. I'm not surprised that there's incredibly diverse sets of circumstances here.
Plenty of good Christian hospitals here too. I suspect the parent is referring specifically to abortions, there are other procedures that a Christian would be potentially unwilling to perform (sex change operations, for instance), but they tend to require an experienced surgeon specifically trained in that operation, which wouldn't be hired by the hospital due to not aligning with their mission (would you want the government to force you to hire a .NET developer when you're purely an embedded systems shop?).
As for abortions in particular, if you are of the opinion that procedure would be murder, it would certainly be out of place for the government to force you to do it. How many folks who promote the government forcing doctors to do what they consider to be killing children would be okay with the government forcing them to kill another human in their day job?
The same is true in the US. Some of the best hospitals (and complete integrated health systems) are run by Christian churches. This is largely for historical reasons: decades ago, churches stepped in to deliver healthcare as part of their mission because governments and secular organizations weren't doing enough. Some of them do refuse to perform certain services, particularly certain women's reproductive services, on moral grounds. This can make it difficult for women in some areas to access care.
Ha. But it is weird as well in Germany, because the churches are not bound to the normal Labour law and can for example discriminate against gay folks without recourse. Which is even more ridiculous given that most of the funds for the catholic/protestant schools and hospitals are payed by the tax payer/health insurances.
> Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced renewed funding for the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI), DOE’s energy innovation hub for desalination. With $75 million over five years for this second phase of the Hub, NAWI will continue to bring together a team of industry and academic partners to examine the critical technical barriers and research needed to radically lower the cost and energy of water purification technologies.
> I don't think I've ever searched for something on the app store and not got a scam as the first result
It’s cool to crap on Apple and all these days but this is all categorically false. What you are referring to is the Ad on the top of the page. It’s clearly labeled as ad and has a light blue box around the whole ad.
I tried all those things you mentioned and the first result after the clearly labeled ad is what I searched for.
You might know this already but the Photos catalog/photiolibrary is just a folder. You can actually right click and “show package contents”. From there, you can use something like Daisy Disk to display all the files based on their size. A simple drag and drop has worked for me. Once you find the large file, you can search for the name in the photos app. I’ve deleted some quite large videos this way to clear up some space.
Always distilled water, though. It’s not worth waiting to boil the water, let it cool down, and then manage the dish used after. It’s also easy to get just the right temperature using distilled water in the microwave.
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