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Comment Re:Any who cares (Score 1) 85

As someone who does video editing, and often edits or reviews video at full screen on both my 15" M3's screen and a 5K2K monitor... what?? These are not any sort of issues I've either had or heard about from others. Of all of the problems I've had with macOS these past few years - and I have a number of criticisms - the desktop drawing "garbage" over many of the "tiles" is certainly not one of them. I'm familiar with different AV products and potential glitches and can visualize what you're saying, and that's not even something vaguely relatable from my use of many Macs on many monitors for many years.

I think we would need to know more about what model of Mac you have and what your setup is if you actually want help with these issues. The issues you're describing are not necessarily limitations or endemic problems with macOS. Are you perhaps using a third party USB to HDMI or Displayport adapter? That's certainly what this sounds like.

Comment Re:Credit Cards (Score 4, Insightful) 304

You're wrong, re: "They make NO money from people who have a credit card and just pay it off."

They absolutely do make money off of the rich folks who pay off their cards. This is the entire point of the article. Except for rare situations, the interchange fees for a credit card transaction on a high-end credit card are, these days, around 4% on any given transaction. Because American merchants rarely charge a lower cash price than for those using a credit card, the rich can make back most (but not all) of the interchange fee with rewards, while those with poorer credit who don't quality for the better cards with higher levels of rewards pay more.

"I have a 0% interest on a card that I used to pay the legal fees to buy my house. Say I used it to pay 1000 whatevers. I only pay 1000 whatevers back. But several years later and in small increments. I transfer it whenever the 0% deal runs out and often pay a tiny one-off fee. "

The credit card company, despite offering you 0% interest, has charged a 2-4% interchange fee to the merchant for every transaction you make. They have made their money. That "tiny one-off fee" is only more money in the bank.

Not to mention, most car dealers, government agencies or, yes, lawyers will charge you a surcharge to use a credit card to recover the interchange fees. It's often more beneficial to pay them by check, as archaic as that sounds (and is).

Please read the article. The article explains the economics involved.

Comment Yet free local backups still exist... (Score 2) 169

I'm able to connect my modern iPhone to my modern Mac, select "Back up all of your data on your iPhone to this Mac" and... back everything up, as often as I want, for absolutely no cost whatsoever. As much as I think it'd be great that we all got free wireless cloud backups of our phones, the fact that local backups remain available at functionally no cost really seems to impede the argument that there's some sort of illegal monopoly.

Comment FLAC has simply replaced Vorbis (Score 5, Insightful) 148

With storage costs being as low as they are, and with FLAC being truly lossless, FOSS, and space-efficient, and with streaming taking over the rest of the market, it's just very difficult to recommend Vorbis over FLAC for audio these days. There would have to be a very storage and/or bandwidth-constrained environment to choose Vorbis over FLAC these days.

Comment Longetivity of electric car batteries (Score 0) 193

Currently, Tesla's EV batteries have remarkable longevity. Everybody talks about replacing them, but you really don't need to. Tesla Roadsters (lithium-ion) and 1st-generation RAV4 EVs (NiMH) are still on the roads with their original battery packs and much less range degradation then expected, the 2nd generation RAV4 EV has an 8 year/80k warranty on its Tesla-manufactured batteries, the Model S has an 8 year/125k warranty on its batteries, and both are going strong after a couple of years and are expected to last substantially beyond their warranty. My understanding is that most people in the EV community expect these cars to be fairly easily able to go 10-15 years on their original batteries, albeit with reduced range.

I think we can reasonably expect the Tesla-produced EVs to provide reasonable range for over a decade and for 150k miles. After a decade or 150k miles, assuming electric vehicles will continue to be mass produced at the same rate they are now and are not rarities, resale value of these 10 to 15 year old cars will already be greatly reduced due to other factors, as they are with decade-old gas cars. There will be wear and tear on the body and interior, weather and paint damage, dents, issues with the electrical and HVAC systems due to age. Even if battery packs are $8000 or even $5000, folks will still be wondering whether it's worth it to replace them, much like engine replacements are reasonably uncommon in older gas-burning cars due to other wear and tear. At some point between 12 years and 20 years, 150k and 200k miles, the battery pack will actually die, and that's pretty close to the average lives of gas burning cars. That's *without* the gigafactory.

I'm elated that Tesla is working on producing cheaper, higher-capacity, more performant batteries, to bring the costs down on their cars and make the EV experience better. But longevity? It'll be nice for sure, and I certainly look forward to cheaper and longer-life EV batteries, but things are good enough today that I'm just not sure that's the biggest issue Tesla has to deal with. There's a lot of FUD in the non-EV community about EV batteries, when in fact, long term reliability on Tesla's existing packs has been quite good.

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