I don’t know about encouraged, but it’s definitely not uncommon in some places. Small talk doesn’t have to be a lot of communication either, it can be as little as basic platitudes. It’s things like sitting at the bar in a pub and the guy beside you points out an amazing play on the television or it could be the person on the bus pointing out something crazy they see out the window.
Personally I think that small talk is also regional. Some places small talk might be discouraged at a store while other places it might be encouraged. The same might be for the subway, a restaurant, the bathroom, etc, depending on the country or culture it may be totally ok or exceptionally discouraged.
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Sounds like you had a new guy checking you out who didn’t know about the discounts or didn’t care. The experienced pharmacist stepped in and applied the correct discount codes.
It’s just like with your taxes, you’re more than welcome to overpay on your taxes if you don’t know the discounts available to you.
In a just world the system would just apply all the applicable discounts without your input, but I guess that’s the free market in action. One pharmacy will lose your business for not applying the available discounts while another will gain your business for doing so. It’s truly fucked up.
Eh, a quick Google search said that Tesla wasn’t profitable for 17 years and survived due to government subsidies and investor funding. After that they’ve been making ~$15 billion per year and sold around 1.3 million cars worldwide per year.
In contrast Toyota sold 10.3 million vehicles and made $61 billion in profit.
As with their 17 years of unprofitable business they are currently more proportionally profitable, but a big portion of that is Musk fanboys and limited supply. If they actually started selling more cars they probably wouldn’t be as proportionally profitable.
Additionally, Tesla is supposedly becoming less profitable due to several factors including not making a new model in 10 years, reports that they fraudulently marketed features (being sneaky with how range is calculated so that the true range is way less than advertised), and Elon’s antics hurting sales. Elon’s antics are a big deal, some people who wanted Teslas before don’t want them anymore because they don’t want to be associated with him (like flying a Gadsden Flag in the mid 2000s vs now).
Elon’s antics don’t stop there, he’s also hurt the investor’s opinion as well. A big reason Tesla’s stock was so high is because people were buying them and not selling them. This caused their price to stay super high, but when Elon bought Twitter he sold a ton of stock. The price was at an all time high over $400 per share, his selling cratered it to ~$115, and is currently around $165. Investors don’t like it when the owner of a company single handedly tanks their investment so the owner can make a bad investment, even more so when the writing on the wall says he’ll sell even more of the stock to fund the bad investment.
The example is the Telluride though? That’s the whole point. Of course any sane person would pick a cheaper car. For that matter why would you ever buy a brand new car?
I definitely agree, but I went with the option which would have the lowest monthly payment. On the other end local rates have a 36 month loan at 6.75%, but that’s $1,800 per month.
I just Googled and the 2024 Telluride has an MSRP of ~$55,000 in my area, used 2023 models are about ~$45,000.
Looking at an auto loan calculator, that’s between $700 and $900 per month with a 96 month 9% auto loan.
Point is, if you can afford the car you’re probably not worrying about the subscription except on principle. If you can afford the car and have principle concerns you’d probably buy a different car.
Bonus points if Granny still has the original strip of bag she cut the recipe off of.
Yeah except that Dwarf Fortress was a complete game for years and free. Under the hood it’s the same game, it only costs money now if you’re getting the better graphics and music added.
In my mind Early Access is for games that are so close to completion that they can ask for money and withstand criticism.
It should go:
If your game suffers in Early Access then it likely means your game wasn’t ready for Early Access. Too often a game that should still be in Closed Alpha or Closed Beta is thrown up on Steam as Early Access. If you’re gonna do that then you have to take the criticism as well.
If you’re on desktop and open several videos at once (such as getting home from work/school and opening all the new videos on your subscriptions tab) you really don’t notice.
What I do notice are the ads at the beginning, quarters, middle, and end of a video
I have Windows 10, so things may be different for 11 or whatever version you’re on, but can’t you just uninstall OneDrive without specifically closing it? I feel like that’s what I did when it was default installed.
Weird, you’d think that Google would give them more options than that and allow them to tailor their ads to their audience. I guess this is how google puts forth the minimum effort for the maximum profit. Thanks for the insight.
I’d really like to know what the level of input creators have over the ads that appear in their videos is. It feels like some videos are just whatever Google throws out there while some videos seem to have no ads and finally some seem to have very limited ads.
Is there some sort of dial that the creator has behind the scenes that determines how shitty the ads for their video are?
Ads on YouTube used to not be so bad, a 5 second ad that was so unintrusive that I’d just let it play, a 15 second with a 3 second skip, and it also didn’t feel like the same quantity of ads.
Before an ad would roll at the beginning of the video and I’d likely quickly skip it. If the video was fairly long there might be an extra ad in the middle. Sometimes the creator might also have an embedded ad, but I generally don’t mind those.
Now it’s a double 15 second ad at the beginning, only the first one is skippable. Then there is another double ad every 15 minutes, plus the embedded creator ad, and if you make it to the end of the video there is an end of video double ad before it auto plays to the start of the next video and next set of double ads.
Make the ads short and unintrusive or make them long, skippable, but rare. I hate having to constantly tab out to go click the skip button every few minutes.
When the YouTube ad blocker ban started I was on chrome with uBlock and it seemed to be refreshing the block even with uBlock. I thought to myself, “Hey let’s try it with the ads, I’ll whitelist YouTube and support the content creators.” After about 3 days I said fuck it, dropped Chrome and updated uBlock again; I haven’t seen an ad since.
I was trying to say that being big country does not prevent one from having universal healthcare, decent social security and a lot of other social benefits.
For this I’ll refer to another comment I made
My point was more that it’s hard to make Federal government comparisons between small European countries and the US. A topic like healthcare or education varies greatly municipality to municipality and state to state. A city like Washington DC or NYC might be a better comparison to Belgium, but Butte Montana isn’t. If you’re trying to compare the US average to the Belgium average you have to average Butte in with NYC.
Decisions such as universal healthcare and national public transportation are Federal decisions and so it’s hard to make a comparison between something like the Netherlands and Moscow.
If you want Netherlands compared to something with similar polulation, density and budget, Moscow(which as saying goes is not Russia) is a good choice. Aaaand it’s still shit compared to Netherlands. Or Netherlands can be compared to city that was built by dutch long time ago - Saint Petersburg. Shit too. Small polulation? SPb+LenOblast is even worse.
I don’t know much about these regions so all I can do it point to the statistics.
Moscow Metro Area
-Average Salary: ~1,100,000 RUB/year = ~24,000 Euro/year
-Area: ~48,000 km^2
-Population: ~21.7 million
Saint Petersburg Metro Area
-Average Salary: ~1,3700,000 RUB/year = ~24,000 Euro/year
-Area: ~11,000 km^2
-Population: ~6.2 million
I don’t know enough about how the internal workings of the Russia Federal government works to speak authoritatively. What I can say is that even with similar size and population the citizens of the Netherlands make nearly double the income of the most wealth places in Russia.
In other examples I compared the percentage of income that goes to funding healthcare in the US vs Belgium (~10-15%) either in the form of taxes or direct payments. Looking at this site (https://www.internationalinsurance.com/health/systems/russia.php) only the employer makes a tax contribution on behalf of the employee and it equates to ~2-3% of the employee’s salary. All of Russia spent ~88.2 billion Euros on Helathcare in 2020 while the Netherlands spent ~107 billion in 2022.
For the same reasons why it’s hard to compare Belgium to the US it’s hard to compare the Netherlands to Russia.
I guess I’m still missing what point you’re trying to make. What I think you’re trying to say is that the USSR was the same size of the US in 1991, but this region is the size of the Netherlands so it should have been comparable to the Netherlands.
I’m going to continue assuming this is what you were meaning. I honestly don’t know enough about the internal government system of the USSR in the early 90’s or much about this region. Taking a look at the statistics it appears that Ryazan Oblast has an area of 39,605 km^2, but a population of only ~1 million. The Netherlands has an area of ~41,000 km^2, but has a population of ~17.5 million. Next, the average annual salary of the region in 2019 (the highest in at least 5 years) was ~31k (RUB) and the highest exchange rate in the last 5 years was approximately 1 RUB: 0.018 Euro.
So in summary, the size is about the same as the Netherlands, but has 5.7% of the population of the Netherlands and the people in the Netherlands make ~23x more money at their jobs even when considering the highest salaries Ryazan Oblast had in the last 5 years and the highest exchange rate the RUB had in the last 5 years.
My example was looking at similar sized, similar population, and similar income groups; by that comparison regions of the US can be compared to Belgium. On the other hand, the only thing in common between Ryazan Oblast and the Netherlands is their size so it’s not a good comparison. Why doesn’t Ryazan Oblast have more people or make more money so that they can be compared to the Netherlands I don’t know, but it looks like these conditions have been this way since at least the late 1980’s?
I’m not really sure what you’re trying to say, it almost sounds like you replied to the wrong post and meant to reply to someone else?
I once went to a public swimming pool in Austria, half the pool was for nudists and the other half was for clothed persons. The restroom for clothed people was very long, but the restroom for nudists was busy but short. I ended up going to the nudist restroom and a 50+ year old naked guy walked up and started talking to me while using a pissoir. Basically he was asking why I was dressed at the nudist portion of the pool, I told him the line was shorter, he laughed, and went about his pissing.