There's hardware transcoders on the chip that render your video stream. The menu system is just a terribly outdated Android SoC... the latency is entirely from the speed at which it can render the user interface and has nothing to do with how fast your 4K 120/240hz panel can draw a frame.
Have you tried the average "smart" TV you find at an Airbnb? I have and let me tell you, it does matter.
We were staying at one just a few days ago that had a cheap Samsung TV. The UI latency was so horribly laggy that simply clicking an arrow on the remote to try to navigate to the next menu would take up to 10 seconds to finally register on screen. It was also variable, meaning some button presses only took 1-2 seconds to respond, but some took 10 seconds, and if you pressed more than once you'd end up with a whole bunch of your delayed button presses registering at once and taking you to a menu option you didn't want.
Sad to say, but state of the art in these Android menu systems is horrible latency, most likely because the UI devs are building in new javascript features that run horribly slow on older ARM processors and they just don't give any F's about the actual user experience or testing...
I love your reference to AirBnB. That is precisely when I get to experience what I assume the rest of the world is used to. Firing up a random TV at an AirBnB is simply painful. You're 100% right that CPU power matters. The delay on every menu is painful. The UX is just atrocious compared to my AppleTV. I cringe that people use this for their normal viewing.
The problem is the bill creates a new secretary's office reporting directly to the president. This secretary is unaccountable to any voters and can designate any party as an adversary. Sure, it starts with only PRC, Iran, DPRK, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, etc, the typical "baddies" but the secretary can change the list to include any entity, foreign or domestic, at any time.
Then they can fine $250K and up to 20 years in jail if a US person attempts to access banned content. If a US person uses a VPN to try to circumvent this ban the fine increases to $1M.
It also enables them to use all devices on your private network, including routers, wifi APs, webcams, video cameras, smart speakers, etc, to spy on US citizens and persons without any warrant and no recourse for people that are spied on. They can spy on you and surveil your entire digital and physical life and you cannot do anything about it.
This is basically the PATRIOT act for the Internet. It makes it so this new, unaccountable government agency, who meets in secret and is not subject to FOIA, can ban any website, content, or entity they want online, then spy on and jail US persons who might try to access it.
It's pure evil and puts us in the same place that China is today.
Recently I’ve been having trouble with a few batches of cheap LED lights that were “Amazon’s choice” and advertised as having 23 year lifespan (3 hours per day) that died within 6-12 months.
Amazon tells me I’m outside of the normal 30 day return window, but I’ve just complained and said “If I bought a bulb at Costco advertised as 23 year lifespan that died after only a year I’d return it and they’d refund me, no questions asked.” This usually gets a store credit from the customer service person.
I think Amazon is going to have a huge problem with this because they’ve clearly been selling a lot of low quality merchandise from China (it’s actually marketplace sellers listing the products so quality is a race to the bottom). Because they don’t have any quality checks in their sourcing like other big box retailers do (such as Costco and Target) they just aren’t equipped to handle the inevitable returns and class action lawsuits that are coming their way when the 23 year lifespan LEDs and other product categories fail just outside the return window.
Yeah, hilarious how people are complaining about wipers when they literally have a 1-shot button on the stalk to trigger a quick blast at any time. Hold down for 2 seconds to get wiper fluid/de-icer. Seems like Tesla actually has the safety feature you want.
This will trigger it to run once, in the slowest setting. And then you have to wait for this to finish before it updates to the speed you've set on the touchscreen. Tesla could have also solved this by just letting the user decide if it should be a single wipe or toggle a certain setting.
Being able to toggle a single wipe, with or without wiper fluids is also something every single car I've ever operated has had. In addition to be able to control it from the stalk.
Not everything has to be reinvented. They walked back a little on the steering yoke, but for some reason they still remove the stalks and have touch buttons on the steering wheel. The one thing that everyone with the yoke categorically hated.
Yeah, the paywall is also a huge part of it. They basically committed suicide when they locked everything behind a paywall. At least most Substack authors are smart enough to make most their content free.
One small township near us does this. They passed a law that states restaurants must put an additional 2% charge on every bill that is used to pay "kitchen staff." When we asked our server about this surprise charge they said "the law requires that we charge it now."
We decided to simply reduce our normal 20% tip by 2% and pay that. We don't like the fact that the city has stepped in to mandate additional fees like this and think this practice should stop.
Outstanding, just outstanding. Way to stick it to your server to throw a fit about a duly-enacted law you don’t like.
I would have thought the price of surrendering one’s decency and regard for fellow humans would be somewhat more than two cents per dollar, but I suppose I was wrong.
It's a mandatory tip so we view it just like the restaurant that adds a mandatory 20% on a party of 6 or more. We'll pay it but we're not going to pay an additional tip. 20% (or 18% if you think it's not going to the wait/kitchen staff) is rather generous so please...
In the U.S., servers are commonly expected to tip the kitchen staff. If a locality mandated a 2% fee to pay the kitchen staff, that's 2% the server doesn't have to pay out, so this seems entirely reasonable to me.
What is unreasonable to me is the locality thinking by mandating a 2% tip the problem they claim to be solving will somehow magically disappear.
One thing I've noticed recently on 2 restaurant trips in the last couple weeks: The automatic tip calculations are wrong in the server/restaurant's favor. Most of us typically check the 20% option and don't double-check the math, but in the past these calculations were always done pre-tax. If your food came to $100 and you tipped 20%, the total would be $120 + sales tax.
Now, the last 2 times I've eaten out the automatic tip calculation was done on the post-tax amount. I live in Alameda county where the sales tax is over 10%, so this is a big difference. Not only that, the default tip options were something like 18, 20, and 25%.
The only reason I can see for restaurants to do this is that the minimum wage here is $15/hour, and if tips alone don't make that rate, the restaurant pays out of pocket because it is illegal for them to pay below minimum wage. This seems like yet another example of restaurant owners passing higher labor costs onto customers in a less than ethical way.
I suspect most people tip on the after-tax amount when they calculate it themselves. I get that you don’t. I also know people who tip on the non-alcohol amount. Personally, I have always tipped post-tax.
These are also low-margin businesses. A post-tax surcharge keeps your overall bill lower than if they had raised prices, which would also raise the tax amount. The high labor costs are going to be passed on to consumers regardless. The surcharge shorts the government (which most of us are probably fine with).
I think tipping post-tax is part of the longer term inflation of tipping. Once 10% pre-tax was the acceptable tip, then 15% during the 90s, and now it has drifted to 18%, 20% and possibly soon above. Somewhere during that drift it went from being pre-tax to sometimes, and even most of the time, post-tax. All this despite it being a percentage of cost and thus scaling with the price of goods naturally.
I always tip on my alcohol purchases, and usually tip 20% regardless of how good or bad the service was.
It's mainly because the sales tax is over 10.25% in our county. If the tax were only 5-6% like in most places in the US, it wouldn't be as big of a deal.
The food prices are also quite a bit higher here than in most places, but that's just due to cost of living. It is not uncommon to spend $200 to feed a party of 4 even without alcohol, so that tip on the extra $20.50 starts to add up.
I live in Ontario, and most people don’t (unless they use the button on the card reader). Sales tax is 13%, so a 15% tip is pretty easy to estimate as “whatever the tax is plus a bit more”.
Here’s a fun one to try next time you use UberEats.
Say your food is $12, and with delivery + fees it comes to $20.
The first “tip %” screen is based on the $20 figure. So 20% would be $4 extra.
If you decline that, you still have the option to tip before/after your food arrives. However, you’ll notice now the percentages reflect the pre-fees figure. So the 20% tip is now only $2.40.
>The only reason I can see for restaurants to do this is that the minimum wage here is $15/hour, and if tips alone don't make that rate, the restaurant pays out of pocket because it is illegal for them to pay below minimum wage.
There is no exception to minimum wage in California for tipped employees, and many cities in Alameda county have a higher minimum wage than the state minimum (Oakland for example, is $15.97/hr this year and Berkeley is $16.99/hr).
Salt Lake County, Weber County, and Utah County all suffer from inversions during cold weather months, which is much of the winter.
Inversions are where a layer of warm air traps cold, polluted air inside the valley and air pollution accumulates because it can't go anywhere. I grew up in Utah county and I remember the Geneva steel plant was a huge source of pollution. In my environmental studies class we calculated that on cold weather days when there was an inversion the amount of pollution each person breathed every day was equivalent to smoking 3 cigarettes.
Even before internal combustion engines and modern industry the campfires alone must have given Utah valleys the reputation as "smokey valley" by the native Americans. This is not a new phenomenon - the geography of high mountains with lots of population causing pollution in the valleys causes it naturally.
Geneva Steel in Utah County was constructed for World War II steel production, but fortunately has been closed and its site remediated for a couple of decades now.
