Minor things that bother you

[SSOWorld]

I received my property assessment this week and saw that the market value of my home has gone up 19% in the past year and 46.5% from two years ago. This means that the assessed value of my home, due to the filed Texas homestead exemption, is going up a full 10% for the second year in a row. This has the domino effect of my homeowner's insurance going up at the end of this year. As a result, the escrow portion of my mortgage is increasing so that the escrow payment is now slightly higher (almost $2) than what I pay in combined principal and interest.

Thank goodness I'm a homeowner, not a renter. Homestead exemptions only apply to principal residences, not rental properties, so the full brunt of that increased property tax will be passed along in increased rent.

We don't have homestead exemptions, and that lack bothers me.

It also means you're paying a shit-ton more taxes on it.

[kphoger]

When I play an album on YouTube, and it starts with track #2.  I mean, why??

[mgk920]

I received my property assessment this week and saw that the market value of my home has gone up 19% in the past year and 46.5% from two years ago. This means that the assessed value of my home, due to the filed Texas homestead exemption, is going up a full 10% for the second year in a row. This has the domino effect of my homeowner's insurance going up at the end of this year. As a result, the escrow portion of my mortgage is increasing so that the escrow payment is now slightly higher (almost $2) than what I pay in combined principal and interest.

Thank goodness I'm a homeowner, not a renter. Homestead exemptions only apply to principal residences, not rental properties, so the full brunt of that increased property tax will be passed along in increased rent.

We don't have homestead exemptions, and that lack bothers me.

It also means you're paying a shit-ton more taxes on it.

As a renter, I have found the Wisconsin homestead tax credit to be more paperwork trouble than it is worth.

Mike

[kkt]

I received my property assessment this week and saw that the market value of my home has gone up 19% in the past year and 46.5% from two years ago. This means that the assessed value of my home, due to the filed Texas homestead exemption, is going up a full 10% for the second year in a row. This has the domino effect of my homeowner's insurance going up at the end of this year. As a result, the escrow portion of my mortgage is increasing so that the escrow payment is now slightly higher (almost $2) than what I pay in combined principal and interest.

Thank goodness I'm a homeowner, not a renter. Homestead exemptions only apply to principal residences, not rental properties, so the full brunt of that increased property tax will be passed along in increased rent.

We don't have homestead exemptions, and that lack bothers me.

It also means you're paying a shit-ton more taxes on it.

Why, yes.  Yes it does.

[J N Winkler]

Today's minor thing is a fairly obscure tech issue.

I use LaTeX so I can keep source files in plain text format for large writing projects.  Up to now I have been using ANSI encoding since that led to the fewest hassles under Windows 7, but I have been pondering a switch to UTF-8 to accommodate character sets outside Western Latin.  Converting the source files is just a matter of running iconv on each.  It also turns out that TeX distributions have defaulted to assuming UTF-8 as the input encoding (when this is not explicitly specified in the TeX file) since about 2018.

However, as I have experimented with random snatches of Polish, Russian, Vietnamese, and Chinese in a test file, I have run into snags.  The Polish typesets just fine, but pdflatex complains about the Cyrillic and Chinese characters as well as the Vietnamese characters with doubled-up diacritics.  When I typeset the Cyrillic by loading a Russian language package, Computer Modern (which I find fussy and far less readable than Roman type) becomes my only font choice for multilingual English/Russian text unless I explicitly specify a Russian font package and specify which parts of the input text are in Russian.

[kkt]

Today's minor thing is a fairly obscure tech issue.

I use LaTeX so I can keep source files in plain text format for large writing projects.  Up to now I have been using ANSI encoding since that led to the fewest hassles under Windows 7, but I have been pondering a switch to UTF-8 to accommodate character sets outside Western Latin.  Converting the source files is just a matter of running iconv on each.  It also turns out that TeX distributions have defaulted to assuming UTF-8 as the input encoding (when this is not explicitly specified in the TeX file) since about 2018.

However, as I have experimented with random snatches of Polish, Russian, Vietnamese, and Chinese in a test file, I have run into snags.  The Polish typesets just fine, but pdflatex complains about the Cyrillic and Chinese characters as well as the Vietnamese characters with doubled-up diacritics.  When I typeset the Cyrillic by loading a Russian language package, Computer Modern (which I find fussy and far less readable than Roman type) becomes my only font choice for multilingual English/Russian text unless I explicitly specify a Russian font package and specify which parts of the input text are in Russian.

I used Latex for a while.  Kinda fun, quite a learning curve.  I'm glad it's still around.

[DTComposer]

Where I get my haircut, the background music speakers must have the polarity reversed, since anything panned center is phased out, so you don't hear most lead vocals or other solo work. I'm only there for 20 minutes every six weeks, so definitely minor, but definitely bothersome.

[kphoger]

Where I get my haircut, the background music speakers must have the polarity reversed, since anything panned center is phased out, so you don't hear most lead vocals or other solo work. I'm only there for 20 minutes every six weeks, so definitely minor, but definitely bothersome.

Reminds me of when I was stuck working from home during COVID lockdowns.  I plugged my guitar amp into my computer, so I could play CDs through it while I worked.  Except I hadn't learned how to change the sound settings on my computer, to combine both sides of a stereo mix into one channel.  This didn't matter until I popped in a Beatles album, and I only heard half the instruments and no vocals.

[kirbykart]

When people say somebody's opinion is wrong. The only time an opinion can be wrong is when it contradicts a proven fact.

[J N Winkler]

I used Latex for a while.  Kinda fun, quite a learning curve.  I'm glad it's still around.

I came from the WordPerfect universe, so I've always really liked the fact TeX has explicit markup.  And with recent distributions it has become much more user-friendly than it was back in the mid- to late 1990's, when producing PDFs from source meant a two-step process involving DVIs and Ghostscript.  However, my experience with the Cyrillic, Chinese, and Vietnamese tells me that TeX does not necessarily have the out-of-box support for the entire Basic Multilingual Plane that one might expect from an ordinary Web browser, let alone Word.

[CtrlAltDel]

When people say somebody's opinion is wrong. The only time an opinion can be wrong is when it contradicts a proven fact.

I don't know about that. If there's one way an opinion can be wrong, it seems like there can be others.

[J N Winkler]

When people say somebody's opinion is wrong. The only time an opinion can be wrong is when it contradicts a proven fact.

I tend to feel it's usually antipersuasive and thus counterproductive to say "You're wrong" bluntly, even when the assertion is contrary to proven fact.  Whenever I feel tempted to do so, I try to ask myself these questions:

*  What harm, realistically, will it do if I say nothing and simply allow the individual to be yet another Person Who Is Wrong On The Internet?

*  If I decide I must intervene, how can I best do so without encouraging the other person to dig in his or her heels?

[vdeane]

The quiet but high-pitched whine that my speakers have had ever since I moved into my new apartment a few days ago.  It's especially noticeable if I have my headphones plugged in to the speaker (instead of directly to the computer; I get better audio quality and louder audio this way).  It goes away if I play something at sufficient volume, but if I have something quiet on or no audio currently playing, it's absolutely maddening.  Not sure what it is with moves breaking computer equipment, but at least my desktop didn't die this time like when I moved into my last apartment (although that desktop was fairly old by that point).  I tried calling tech support, but the manufacturer no longer supports these speakers (or any wired speakers, apparently), so it looks like I'm SOL unless the internet somehow has the answer, and Google hasn't been very helpful so far.

Also, the fact that laundry now takes about twice as long on the units in my apartment than the ones I used to use in the laundry room.  This might complicate my plans to make my bedding into a separate load so I can wash it all at once rather than splitting it in half to do the sheets on alternating weeks.

[ZLoth]

I'm one of those people who has set up all of their computers to backup every day... usually when everyone is sleeping. Those computers backup to a SMB share on my TrueNAS server, then the TrueNAS server does the off-site backup to BackBlaze which is a offsite storage solution. At $0.005 per GB per month, my bill runs under $5 per month. There is a cost to download a file beyond a certain file size, but if that occurs, something catastrophic has happened. So far, so good?

I just built a new computer (after eight years, no less). My old computer was running the Acronis backup software (now called "Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office") under an older incremental backup configuration. That meant that a full backup file was created, followed by several smaller incremental backups. Each of these backups were a separate file. However, when I checked my new computer, there is only one single file created. Per Acronis, this is intentional with the new file format. I can understand the reasoning, however, that means that 84GB file is now being uploaded every night to my offsite storage provider. With the backup copies, that's about 235GB at $1.18 per month. Because Cloud Sync tasks are a low-priority/low bandwidth event, it takes 2½ hours for the file to upload each night. I might as well make a full backup each night.

Minor, but irritating.

This is fixed now, but in a roundabout way. I tried editing the file that was created, but no luck due to the Acronis file protection. Turns out, I have a perpetual license for Acronis True Image 2019, which is the last version to use the old TIB files. I finally had time this afternoon, so I ended up uninstalling Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office, installed Acronis True Image 2019, configured the Incremental backup, validated the backup configuration, updated to Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office, and validated the backup configuration again. No more full backups each night!

[SSOWorld]

When people say somebody's opinion is wrong. The only time an opinion can be wrong is when it contradicts a proven fact.

From my perspective, the only opinion that's not wrong is mine

[kphoger]

When people say somebody's opinion is wrong. The only time an opinion can be wrong is when it contradicts a proven fact.

I don't know about that. If there's one way an opinion can be wrong, it seems like there can be others.

That's just, like, you're opinion, man.

*  What harm, realistically, will it do if I say nothing and simply allow the individual to be yet another Person Who Is Wrong On The Internet?

My two older sons seem completely incapable of letting some spoken error go uncorrected (surprise, I know, and I have no clue where they get it).  They'll argue about the stupidest thing and just keep going for minutes.

–  Why are you guys still arguing?
–  He said ___________, so I told him ___________.
–  Yeah, I get that.  But why are you STILL arguing?
–  Because he thinks ___________.
–  And ...?

[kphoger]

That Netflix has a 'Smoking' warning on its platform.  (Yet showing people drinking scotch at the office is apparently hunky dory.)

[Max Rockatansky]

Speaking from experience it is way easier to fire someone for tobacco use in the office than it is for alcohol consumption. 

[roadman65]

This reminds me of the mighty David Siegel who uses blood tests and visuals to fire someone for tobacco use as nicotine is hard to remove unlike alcohol that disappears at once.

[kphoger]

My point is that, if I wanted to avoid exposing my children to tobacco use, I'd basically have to keep them locked up in the house, because everyone from our next-door neighbor to restaurant employees on break smoke tobacco.  But the streaming platform doesn't have any problem showing my children that it's OK to drink on the job–which is something they aren't already exposed to every day simply by going out the front door.  And, for that matter, they don't have a warning for bacon cheeseburger consumption on screen, even though heart disease kills roughly as many people as cancer.

[Max Rockatansky]

The reverse is potentially worse, when you over warn the general population your message becomes background noise.  Here we have P65 labels on almost every literal thing sold in California.  Potential risk of cancer warnings become silly/ignored when they target things like cars and Red Dye #2

[1995hoo]

Am I imagining something, or did this thread get truncated? I was going to agree with vdeane's bemused comment about certain posts above.

[formulanone]

My point is that, if I wanted to avoid exposing my children to tobacco use, I'd basically have to keep them locked up in the house, because everyone from our next-door neighbor to restaurant employees on break smoke tobacco.  But the streaming platform doesn't have any problem showing my children that it's OK to drink on the job–which is something they aren't already exposed to every day simply by going out the front door.  And, for that matter, they don't have a warning for bacon cheeseburger consumption on screen, even though heart disease kills roughly as many people as cancer.

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I'm absolutely sure some of the streaming platforms warn of alcohol and/or drug use. I can't speak for all of the different streaming platforms out there; we only use three of them.

[kirbykart]

Am I imagining something, or did this thread get truncated? I was going to agree with vdeane's bemused comment about certain posts above.

If it's the one I'm thinking it is, she made that comment in 'Your Favorite Forum Quotes'.

[kkt]

That Netflix has a 'Smoking' warning on its platform.  (Yet showing people drinking scotch at the office is apparently hunky dory.)

Drinking Scotch doesn't have much effect on the non-drinking people around it, as long as they don't get in a car driven by the drinker.