Russia’s the type of poker player that comes to the table with 100 times more chips than everyone else and then goes all in every single hand regardless of what cards they have, hoping that eventually they’ll either bully you into folding or that they come up aces before their chips run out.

A strictly logical clock for a 24-hour day would have 0 at the top with 1 on the right and 23 on the left. And it would be only ever set to UTC.

I hear that people usually use a fake coin for unlocking the trolleys. But because they only have one fake coin people don’t want to lose it so the trolley is always returned.

In Oregon, all eligible bottles can be returned at any retailer. Large retailers are required by law to accept up to 144 bottles from anyone. The deposit is $0.10 here, so the amount earned by returning a large number of bottles is pretty significant.

In the US, some states have a similar scheme. But usually there are dedicated bottle return centres which have a machine that dispenses cash when you scan the receipt printed by the bottle counting machine. And at supermarkets, if you scan the receipt from the bottle counting machine at a self-checkout, it will count as an item with negative price so it will dispense “change” if you finish with a negative total.

I took a screenshot of this page

(Screenshot removed because it takes forever to load and is not interesting enough to waste bandwidth on)

I am connected to a 4K monitor and this picture is also at 3775 × 2119. The total file size:

12.1 MB

I have never had a screenshot exceeding 40 MB. That is humongous.

Vere, Esperanto estas facila lingvo, sed iu ajn lingvo bezonas jaroj da studado antaŭ vi regos ĝin. La fakto, ke oni nur devas studi dum unu jaro por Esperanto estas mirinda. Ĉi tiu afiŝo aĝas nur ok monatojn. Post kiam mi afiŝis ĝin, mi komencis studi la lingvon per Duolingo. Oni diras, ke Duolingo ne estas la plej efektiva rimedo por lerni Esperanton, sed ĝi funkciis sufiĉe bone por mi. Mia gramatiko ankoraŭ ne estas tre bonaj. Tamen, mi povas skribi tiun ĉi komenton esperantan.

Por grandigi mian vortprovizon, mi legas Vikipedion, kaj uzas Vikivortaron (angle) kiel vortaro. Google Translate estas utila, sed iam malpravas.

There are eight genders: null, undefined, false, NaN, 0, “0”, {}, and “”.

r = 50 m by court order, but m₂ is also now 135 kg.

How do you get LaTeX in the comment?

Edit: Wait that’s not LaTeX that’s just cleverly-placed Unicode and Markdown formatting

Your lawyer would be more than happy to learn that they tried.

It gives the average person more purchasing power but it also opens up new supply by opening the foreclosure auctions to the average person. The increased demand I argue is partially or wholly counteracted by pushing out the house flippers from the foreclosure markets; those people are generally only interested in buying properties at severely under market prices at foreclosure auctions or similar sales. Essentially, I am saying that the entire “flipper” business model should be destroyed as it does not provide sufficient value to the taxpayer to offset its negative effect on the market and this policy could do severe damage to that sector.

Quadratic property tax is a combination of the “quadratic” nature of quadratic voting and, of course, taxation. I made this term up hoping people would know what I was talking about but it turned out to not be as obvious as I initially thought.

Essentially, the taxation scheme takes into account the number of lots owned by a person in addition to the value per lot. Consider the following sample scheme:

The amount of tax due on any given property is calculated according to the following formula: r×(1 + Np)²×V, where N is the number of lots owned by the taxpayer beyond the first and V is the value of the lot. The variables r and p are determined by the local taxing authority which correspond to tax rate (higher = more tax per unit of money) and the penalty for owning excessive numbers of lots (higher = greater penalty for owning multiple lots).

If a local taxing authority selects values r = 0.002 and p = 0.05, the tax due for a lot worth 100 units of money would be as follows:

• An individual or family who owns only that lot pays 0.002 × (1+0×0.05)²×100 = 0.2 units of money per year.
• A small individual landlord who owns this property and 2 others would pay 0.002 × (1+2×0.05)²×100 = 0.242 units of money per year.
• A corporation who owns this property and 10 others would pay 0.002 × (1+10×0.05)²×100 = 0.45 units of money per year, which is more than double the individual family
• A huge real estate conglomerate who owns this property and 100 others would pay 0.002 × (1+100×0.05)²×100 = 7.2 units, which is so high that it probably would not be profitable to even own this property.

It is “quadratic” because the tax rate scales with the square of the number of previous lots owned.

Coupled with counting rules that ignore subsidiary corporate entities for the purpose of determining ownership, finely-tuning values of r and p will discourage corporate ownership of housing without punishing individual homeowners or small-time landlords.

While this strategy has not been tried in real life to my knowledge, interestingly, some Minecraft servers have implemented a similar scheme to prevent hoarding of desirable lots in the overworld to varying degrees of success, mostly depending on whether those in charge admit any loopholes for privileged players to exploit.

While it does sound unfair, eBay policy requires you to upload a tracking number by policy. If there is no tracking number eBay will treat it as having never been shipped. This is laid out in their policy pages. You can only satisfy the shipping requirement by using a tracked service and the one indicated by the buyer.

It’s a strict logical operation. eBay sides with the buyer unless all of the following are satisfied:

• A tracking number is uploaded within the specified turnaround time on your listing (I believe it defaults to 2 or 3 working days)
• The tracking number corresponds with the buyer’s indicated shipping service (ex. using USPS Ground Advantage when the buyer indicated Priority Mail will fail this requirement)
• The package was shipped to the exact address given to you by eBay
• The tracking status indicates “delivered” or “available for pickup”
• If the order total exceeds $750, you required a signature for the package

If you fail any of the requirements, you are at the buyer’s mercy. It’s strict but it’s fair.

Shipping without tracking is pretty dumb though. I can’t speak for Canada Post but in your neighbour to the south, USPS in my experience has lost about 3% of letters with handwritten addresses and about 1% of those with a computer-printed address.

While I agree with this principle generally, and I believe that if my solution were to be implemented it would need to be alongside other schemes like increased public housing projects, relaxing zoning laws to allow densification, and anti-scalping measures like a quadratic property tax.

But even if my suggestion were implemented alone, it wouldn’t result in increased prices. That’s got to do with the fact that ordinary people, right now in the US, largely do not bid in foreclosure auctions. All that housing supply is actually not going to end consumers at all. The type of people who would bid at foreclosure auctions are not those who want to live in the house but in many cases, those who want to resell it. Making the foreclosure process more similar to normal house-buying and thereby increasing the hammer prices drives out scalpers and flippers because it’s not profitable for them any more. Hell, if you’ve seen the videos these people post, they start pulling back even if the price is tens of thousands of dollars under market.

The counter-intuitive solution is probably to make it easier for banks to evict people for not paying their mortgage.

In most of the US, foreclosures are a legal process that requires a court order. The bank has to take the borrower to court, prove the loan is not paid, and then the court has to find in favour of the bank and then issue an order to have the sheriff auction off the property.

In many cases, these auctions will result in the property sold far below market value because the borrower will drag their feet and not co-operate. In many cases, buyers can’t do a thorough house inspection and thus the hammer price suffers because they have to account for that risk.

The bootlicker-sounding but actually smart solution, if you consider it beyond the initial knee jerk reaction, is to make it so that when the court enters a foreclosure order, the homeowner is immediately evicted and the house is now in the custody of the State until it is sold. The borrowers can have a reasonable time to leave, but when they do, the sheriff should then open the property to the public for inspection and hire or allow buyers to hire house inspectors, perform title searches, and all the other formalities associated with selling a house in the ordinary manner.

All buyers then submit written offers (bids) to the sheriff like they would for any other house purchase but these bids would be published to avoid accusations of impropriety; the highest bidder gets the house. As with any other auction, the bank bids the amount of the mortgage plus court costs as a baseline. After it is sold, the sheriff takes the traditional 6 per cent estate agent fee for their trouble and then pays off the bank and the remainder goes to the borrower.

As terrible as it sounds for the ordinary borrower, this actually results in a better outcome for them because it would result in a higher sale price for the house, meaning the mortgage is lower risk for the bank by reducing the likelihood that the bank bid is the highest, allowing them to extend those loans to more people, and a defaulted borrower gets more of their money back in the end.

The idea that creating more housing stock will lead to prices decreasing is still economically sound.

The person in the picture is a Thai politician.

Let me just save everyone a click: