Hmm, I don't quite understand this methodology. This site lists my state, Massachusetts, as having a 3.29% individual income tax burden, but our income tax rate is a flat 5% (no brackets). I'm looking at the exemption list (https://www.mass.gov/service-details/view-massachusetts-pers...) and I can't see how it could possibly make that big of a difference.
The dependent exemption and old age exemptions definitely look like they could knock out 1.5% of income. If you have an income of 70k and two dependents, you would have an effective tax rate of 2.14%.
See also “git prune” to remove references to branches and objects no longer on the remote server. Check the docs though I think in some cases I might delete local branches or objects so make a backup first.
But the new Workspace plan is still different for 5+ users:
" Customers that have 5 or more End Users will receive a total amount of Google Drive storage equal to 5TB times the number of End Users, with more storage available at Google's discretion upon reasonable request to Google. "
Existing customers (under G-suite) may be grandfathered for an arbitrarily long time, in which case I would agree you don't need to worry.
Note that I have heard of a number of data hoarders who have jumped onto those new enterprise plans with lots of data stored, and there are no reports of caps or data culls - yet.
That's correct. But the new, Google-involved behavior is that for 5+ users (which was previously "unlimited"):
" Customers that have 5 or more End Users will receive a total amount of Google Drive storage equal to 5TB times the number of End Users, with more storage available at Google's discretion upon reasonable request to Google. "
That is new behavior, and rubbing some people the wrong way.
I think the more curious thing is how long will they grandfather in the existing Gsuite users to the old, "unlimited" behavior. If they do that for long enough, at least it wouldn't feel like a bait-and-switch.
Interestingly, on my early 2015 13" MacBook Pro, the very lowest brightness setting seems to have no change in brightness on those last three subdivisions. Once I get down to one full "block" of brightness, option-shift-F1 moves the slider down in quarter-block increments but the screen gets no (perceptibly) dimmer until it shuts off entirely. All the other brightness settings have perceptible changes in brightness at every subdivision level.
Unfortunately it doesn't reduce the dimmest level on my MBP. The bottom 4 subdivisions look identical. Like level 0.25, 0.50, 0.75 and 1.00 are all the same brightness, only 1.25+ starts to get brighter.
The lowest level is still too bright at night. That's unfortunate.
However it does reduce the dimmest level of the keyboard illumination!
That's great. I always found the keyboard too bright at its lowest level at night, but some illumination at night would be helpful for obvious reasons. Now I can enjoy 3 subdivisions lower - thank you :-)
With a properly installed thermostatic mixing valve, you don't even need that. The water will always exit at a safe, constant-ish temperature regardless of the water temperature in the heater, by mixing in the cold supply.
"I don't think Houston is a city that was designed to be evacuated. It's just not feasible"
Such an interesting contrast to this frontpage post yesterday:
"The highways themselves were specifically intended to facilitate the reasonable objective of Houstonians not to get annihilated by a nuclear blast...[In] case of atomic attack on our key cities, the road net must permit quick evacuation of target areas"
Houston's population was 1.7 million in 1970[0], it's 6.4 million now. I'm making the guess that their highway system was approximately done in 1970, but it's basically the same story if you put that number at 1980 (2.4 million) and so on.
FWIIW underutilized modern highways are amazingly efficient and pleasant to drive on. As far as I can tell they're limited to recent construction in Europe (Spain for example; it appears to have a 2005 era German highway system designed for 2-3x their population).
We have two loops in Houston — an inner loop and an outer loop. Freeway expansion is non-stop and we still don’t have enough road for all of our traffic...
> So one might ask, if all these highways don't even permit quick transit, what the heck are they doing?
Who said that Houston's highways don't permit quick transit? They do. They're just not equipped to easily facilitate a once-in-a-generation exodus of 8 million people all in one day.
Well, considering Rita was in 2005, Harvey was in 2018, and Laura was in 2020, I think that some redesign may be in order. It's occurred more than once in a generation. It's likely to stay that way or get worse.
Quicker transit than the same roads but half as wide? I guess evacuation is in the aftermath of the nuclear strike to escape radiation for those that were not hurt initially.
Populations, traffic patterns, and risks have evolved since 1950.
The idea was that sprawled freeway-based cities such as Los Angeles were already sufficiently distributed such that risks of nuclear attack were minimised. Effectively they were "pre-evacuated".
2020 is not the 1960s when that may have been part of the decision making and the city was much smaller and less congested. But even then, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t envisioning an evac of 100% of the pop.
I was curious about this a while ago and did some napkin math.
Natural gas is roughly $15 for 1 million BTU. There are 3412 BTU in a kwhr, so if you heated resistively, you'd need 293 kwhr to get 1 million BTU.
In my area, which I feel has pretty high electricity cost, we pay $.24 per kwhr, so that'd be $70.
Therefore, you need a 70/15 (4.666) COP for your heat pump to match natural gas by price. My understanding is that that would be an unusually high number for cold weather conditions.
The State of NH Office of Strategic Initiatives has a nice Fuel Price comparison page that they keep up to date (and are adjusted according to cost per MMBTU):
You can see that as of June 2, measured at $ per MMBTU (million BTU):
Natural Gas $8.31
Oil $17.62
Propane $32.93
Wood pellets $21.92
Resistive electric $48.84
Air src heat pump $18.74
The fossil fuels are all measured assuming 80% heating efficiency, whereas for propane or natural gas you might well have a high efficiency unit up to 97% which gains you a bit more savings.
These prices may vary depending on location and also I think natural gas isn't that common in NH as it's a mostly rural state.
I'm really glad I recently replaced my old 80% efficient oil boiler with a 97% efficient natural gas boiler. My winter bills are less than half what they were and it barely uses any gas during the summer for hot water.
With 80% efficiency, you have to burn 1/0.8=1.25 units of fuel to get one fuel unit worth of useful heat. With 97% efficiency it's 1/.97≈1.03 units.
So if fuel prices and the amount of useful heat usage stayed the same, then your bill should be 1.03/1.25≈82% of what it was before. If your bill is "less than half" then something else must have changed.
Yes, I switched from an oil burner (#2 heating oil) to a high efficiency natural gas boiler. The other key ingredient is that the oil boiler was 20 years old and did not have "cold start" (so it always keeps itself at temp even in the summer).
Any modern boiler (gas or oil) will almost certainly be cold start, so it only fires when there's a call for heat. This alone probably saves a gallon of oil a day at least.
There's a reason the Energy Saving Trust over here in the UK discourages people from replacing their gas boilers with heat pumps thinking it'll save them money, even though our climate is more suited to it than the colder parts of North America. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop our press pushing the idea we should go for heat pumps because Germany has. (They don't have such widespread natural gas connections to homes as the UK and so are reliant on oil-fired home heating, which as you can see has very different economics.)
We also don't know what the long-term fallout is going to be. Natural gas has been unusually cheap recently because it's a byproduct of fracking for oil. But low demand for oil means less demand for fracking which mean less natural gas production.
It's really hard to predict where prices are going to be in a year, because you really have to predict how well the oil industry can predict future demand in this environment. If they shut down too much production and then demand comes back there could be a price spike. If they expect a quick recovery and are wrong, prices could remain on the floor for a good while.
