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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • My old FR 110 is still working. Since then:

    • Vivoactive HR - 2 years in, the casing broke at one of the points where the wristband is attached. Material fatigue. Out of warranty.
    • Vivoactive 3 - 2 years in, altimeter went haywire. Also, battery life decreased to one day. Just out of warranty.
    • Fenix 6 - 1.5 years in, GPS got really bad. As in, drift of over 200m from route. Within warranty, so I contacted them and they sent me a replacement watch. That one is still working, and I hope it will for a long time.

    By now, I developed a certain expectation of the life of Garmin watches. I divided their price with expected lifetime, and compared that with similar data for Coros. Coros is simply better value for money.


  • I just saw DC Rainmaker’s video on this, and I’m not impressed. In any case, I’ve bern using my Garmin watch mainly for running, and I’ve been more interested in spot data than history on Connect. Still, I’m on my last Garmin watch. The hardware itself seems to last for only 18-24 months before problems start piling up, so I decided that my next watch will be Coros. I’m under no illusions that the hardware would be more reliable, but it costs half of what I’ve paid for my Garmin.


  • Last time I travelled to the US, I brought my old phone. It had plenty of text messages, a few photos of family and nature, and nothing else. They didn’t check it, but I guessed it would pass the “not a burner” vibe. Now I’m wondering, though, how people would react to me having no social media presence (other than Reddit at that time, which I accessed via browser). Not that I’m planning to travel to the US ever again, but I wonder whether there’s a market for perfectly inoffensive fake social media accounts.


  • There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

    • Isaac Asimov, 1980

    There were people warning against the glorification of ignorance in the US nearly half a century ago. It’s nothing new; it just reached critical mass (also thanks to social media where ignorant people can self-organise).



  • From the article:

    “We see some irony in the recent outperformance by foreign markets over the U.S. markets. In our view, foreign companies in Europe, Asia, and Latin America are likely to suffer even more from deployment of tariffs than companies in the U.S.”

    I think they are overestimating the amount of trade flowing into the US. Tariffs will directly impacg US companies and customers, but they’ll also decrease the demand for foreign products. That will cause a challenge, if not outright recession worldwide, but I still think that foreign companies would be able to mitigate the drop in demand from the US better than US companies coping with supply shortages and higher prices.


  • Vance is Peter Thiel’s hand puppet, just like Trump is Musk’s. Thiel and Musk first came to serious money when they merged their companies to create PayPal, and since then they’ve been cooperating on various projects. Their current project is to establish corpo-feudalism in the US, and for that they need geopolitical isolation (Thiel’s job) and the dismantling of all social safetynets (Musk’s job). That’s all the context needed to understand Vance’s behaviour.



  • Everyone who wants to sell goods or services in a country with VAT (not just the EU) must be registered with the country’s tax authorities, collect the VAT on behalf of the government, and transfer the collected tax money to the government. Not all VAT is bad, though, when trading across border. Here are two very common examples:

    1. Sale of goods from a higher-VAT country to a lower-VAT country. You have a Web site in Sweden where you list a product for €100. You sell the product to a customer in the UK. You ship the item, and charge the customer €96. That’s because the domestic VAT is already baked into the price (in the case of Sweden it’s 25%). Shipping outside the VAT jurisdiction, you don’t collect the local VAT on behalf of the government, and charge the VAT-less price of €80. You then add the UK VAT (20%). The customer is better off. (Of course, it also works the other way. I buy a lot from Amazon UK, but my country has a higher VAT than the UK, so I pay slightly more than the listed price.)

    2. VAT return when leaving the country. The reason you need to show your boarding pass when purchasing goods at the airport is that if you fly outside the country (or, if you are within the EU, the EU as a whole), you will be charged only the price without VAT. That’s because these goods are no longer considered to be sold in that country, so VAT cannot be collected on them.

    VAT is a little more complex than sales tax, but it affects the entire production chain, not only the final sale, so it allows the governments to collect on domestic economic output, not only on purchasing power. But it’s truly aimed at domestic production. For cross-border commerce, import taxes play a much more important role.




  • I used Classic Shell to make it look as much as WinXP Classic as possible, so I’m happy with how it looks. As for vulnerabilities, knock on wood, so far I didn’t have any issues (but I do run Bitdefender). I use it for gaming (GOG, newest game being older than my PC), photo editing (Gimp with Google Nik Collection), browsing, and office work. Nothing too demanding. But to be honest, I would have switched to Mint a long time ago if I found a Linux alternative for Smart Switch (my phone backup utility) and Garmin Connect for my watch. Those two are the only two pieces of software that keep me with Windows, and at this point I’m actually thinking of a cheap mini PC just for those two as a direct pass-through to my NAS backup.




  • I agree overall, but VAT is not all that difficult to evade, at least in the service industry. Paying handymen in cash is common in many countries, and that’s a means to evade VAT. Hell, even using them to buy the building or landscaping materials for you (being a registered business they purchase for prices without VAT) saves you on most of the tax. Then there’s service barter. I did it only once, a long time ago, but it can serve as an example: I did family portraits (photography) for my physio, in exchange for a number of physio sessions. If we charged each other, it would have cost each of us, say, 250 Euros, but we’d only see 200 each, and the state would get 100. So, savings of 50 for each of us.