throwaway48540

People can and do replace iPhone batteries, but it's usually taken as a sign that you had the phone long enough to morally justify getting an update. The old phone with dead battery is very often sold and the battery gets replaced - Apple sells refurbished phones too.

Well, they ruled for nearly 1000 years. The last 100 years might just be a fluke local minima and they still might recover and rule the galaxy...

People are social creatures, and if they see first hand that the world doesn't match their expectations, it might get them to think about it in more detail.

Of course not, there were scholars focused on analyzing and decrypting encrypted texts in Roman Empire and probably earlier.

So 15% of population in irrecoverable debt is fine? I don't think so. Every place has rich people and they are fine wherever they are - not really interesting or surprising.

Like self-landing rockets. :)

My own theory: it's a product of mental illness, or long term extreme boredom - maybe a person bound to their bed?

Holy shit, what? Do you have anything I can read about this?

Ah yeah, I have a friend who's working on an online grocery store. He generated all his images - instead of driving hundreds of kilometers for weeks to take all the pictures. Definitely a huge win for the environmentally friendly.

Define "doing fine", please. These people think they are doing fine. If you think this is not usual, why is 15% of my state population in irrecoverable debt?

Consider that it's not just a burden to the company, but also to the tax agency. Imagine being the guy who has to go through the papers (could easily be hundreds or thousands of sheets - my own small company submits around 10-20 sheets per month) and then make a transfer of hundreds of millions of EUR every month. Imagine you make a mistake there... That company definitely has lawyers ready to pick on every little thing you do wrong.

Accounts of businesses and governments are without VAT except for the most generalized cash flow tables. My own government reports both numbers (with and without VAT) in cases where this matters. I'm quite surprised yours doesn't do this. But yes, you're right - in your situation the actually spent amount would be different by the VAT rate.

Empirically researched data would be better - if people went and read the study in detail and saw that the questions asked don't lead to the conclusion that they claim, such as this case. They read a headline or check a sheet of numbers and think they understand the world.

Since people are apparently unable to do that, talking to people is the next best thing.

When the state buys stuff, the paid VAT always goes right back to it. In some/many cases it's easier to eat this inefficiency, but in some cases it's easier to not do the useless transfer - especially when we're talking about tens of millions of euro and products that only the government can buy. I don't see anything weird about selecting few specific industries where the transactions are always with the government and in high amounts to optimize this useless transfer and bureaucratic busy work away. Nobody paid less taxes than they should have, nothing has changed about that.

> Then, of course, If I produce pistol (as a company), and buy metal, and make a pistol, don't I end up paying VAT on the "added value" ? in other way, even if a company sell to other companies, the VAT% (10% or 90%) does or does not affect profitability?

No, profitability is not affected in any way. The consumer always pays, not any company in the chain of raw material to consumer product. VAT is irrelevant to them, it's just some bureaucracy that needs to be taken care of, but nothing else. It could be 110% and they wouldn't care - VAT is separately on top of the invoiced price and you never treat it as your money, you're just holding it for the government for up to 30 days.

> Then of course you sure have some percentage of buyers who cannot claim VAT (is it small, only consumers? what about not perfectly legal business.... )

Any business can claim VAT back if they choose to. Some countries allow small businesses to say "I don't care, don't bother me, I will eat the difference". This results in losses to the small business, it's done because the paperwork is really hard to do - takes a lot of time and money (you need an expensive tax advisor in many everyday cases). The usual limit of this is around 50k USD of yearly revenue. Above that, it's necessary to fill the VAT forms.

I live near 2 nuclear power plants producing practically zero CO2 compared to the energy output. We are there and have been for decades.

You're basically saying "I don't want to consider other ways to produce energy so you should stop doing all the fun stuff you do". Nobody is ever going to agree with that, and you're going to antagonize people from even trying to be environmentally conscious.

Try to talk to people instead of relying on some abstract numbers.

"Yeah I'm so happy I have a job paying 500 USD per month, and I am so happy my 1.5-room flat rent is just 350" is a very common thing to hear where I live. The tax rate is 35% btw.

Also, try to find newer statistics at least. 2016 was around the local maxima, everything went to shit - very noticeably - during and after covid.

I live in EU. What awesomeness? There are places with better social and health services while having less taxes and regulations. The regulations are making actual day to day life hard for everyone, directly as well as indirectly. EU is surviving, but I definitely wouldn't - and don't know anyone who would - say it's thriving. Most of my friends who work in software and other hitech are planning their move to US.

That isn't related at all. Please don't try to sell de-growth as some green strategy, you're only going to antagonize people.

De-growth will most likely lead to more CO2 emitted per person. Only high technology can change this.

Why would I think twice about it? It's a no brainer given last few years. I just hope they also include artillery shells and cannons too.

VAT is a tax levied on consumers, not companies/industries. Companies get it from consumers and forward it to the government, that's an optimization of enforcement, it doesn't mean companies pay it out of their pockets. Government pays companies back whatever VAT they paid on stuff they bought. It would make no sense for the government to pay VAT to itself when buying such expensive stuff; this is again a process optimization, not some fundamental change of how the tax works.

Why would you need lobbyists when you have Putin just behind the door?

No, not really. Proxmox is slowly improving, but not a replacement yet.

I don't recommend it unless you're doing it for its own sake. My 2015 Pro runs much smoother (better performance, less hot) with macOS. You can run these services on macOS too.

The setup wasn't fiddly at all. I had to fiddle much more with ordinary PC laptops. Any distro should be mostly fine - Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch...

Thank you!

I don't follow the difference between static and elastic workloads. OpenStack can create a VM just like VMware, and has more features that would otherwise be implemented as a K8s cluster running on VMs.

It's standard practice to run all your physical servers as ESX cluster. Doesn't matter if for hosting, internal needs or whatever. Nobody sane would just install Ubuntu on a physical server and edit the nginx config. Running virtualized makes it much easier to have standard backups, restores, upgrades, failovers and so on.

It's so rare, but it actually does happen, and the people doing it actually try to conceal it like a half eaten sausage that "just fell".

But this isn't even about this particular half eaten sausage. A dog doesn't know the difference between a pristine sausage and a half eaten one, to them it's just meat. And the point is that dogs should be taught to never eat any meat on the street - because they can't think "uh, looks half eaten, probably fine".

It can't replace Play Services.

That's not a trade, we used them like a tool without them even knowing or understanding it.

Even applications not using any of these services often require it.

European Union, yes the bank was insured, but the related court case is huge and moves slowly. No, I wouldn't say this is something that traditional finance are good at.

Except for the Android users who actually tried not using Google Play and know it usually results in a "Play Services are required" error message.

You can use a terminal if the backend is something like coder-server or openvscode-server