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> This came out to about a 2x savings over AWS.

Is that a typical way to describe cost savings? I would have said 1/2 the cost of AWS. It almost sounds like cloudflare would pay them money (e.g. you go to the store and see something marked 200% off, so you get paid to buy it, like when oil prices went negative).

Related: I've always found the 2x, 10x, etc notation confusing. Does a 2x improvement mean a 100% increase (e.g. 10 -> 20) or a 200% increase (e.g. 10 -> 30)? Would someone ever say a 1x improvement or a 0.5x improvement?


It's funny how your first paragraph makes it clear you're not confused about this at all.

2x savings means you need to double the new price to get the old

10x savings means multiple new price by 10x to get old

59x savings...multiply by 59.


Yeah, I could guess based on context. I would prefer notation that's clear on its own without needing to look at context. "1/2 the price" is clear on its own.

And it still makes me feel nervous that 3x improvement = 200% increase. It seems to me like a big opportunity for misunderstanding.


Thank you so much for saying this! It has always bothered me


1/59th the price isn't as clear.

If even a person asking how it works knew how it worked, how confusing can it be?


I think 1/59th the price is clearer than 59x cheaper. In 59x, what is the x for? Multiplication? What is being multiplied?

"1/59th the price of AWS" is clear because you take the price of AWS and multiply it by 1/59. Probably more clear would be "1.7% the price of AWS".

When I think there's an opportunity for misunderstanding, I point it out. I don't think I'm more likely to misunderstand something than the average person, but I am more likely to speak out if I see something potentially confusing.

I would be interested in seeing a poll where we ask people to estimate "59x cheaper than $200", vs "1/59th of $200" vs "1.7% of $200". Obviously the last one is easiest to do exactly in your head, but we can still get a fair comparison by just seeing whether people are at least in the neighborhood vs way off.

I would also like to see it with 2x, 1/2 and 50%.


Why does the crime elder abuse exist? Because older people often have a harder time with physical and mental tasks.

I agree that whether she has grandchildren or not doesn't matter much, but people say grandma to be more polite than saying old lady.


She's 52.


Yeah, you're right, she's a bit younger than the typical grandma, so the use here does seem mostly for sympathy.


How often do speed traps tow cars? Brookside tows 1.7 cars per year for each household.


That part of the story was too light on details to comment. Why are they towing the cars? (Almost certainly for reasons totally within their purview.)


A town this abusive is certain to have all their technicalities in line. Here, it's that unattended vessels be towed off of public roadways or property. They're unattended because of frivolous detainments.

PSA: when getting pulled over, you should, after appearing controlled and predictable to the police, find private property to pull onto and call a friend or family to be ready to retrieve your car to prevent this particular abuse.


"It went from towing 50 vehicles in 2018 to 789 in 2020 – each carrying fines. That’s a 1,478% increase, with 1.7 tows for every household in town."


The police are financing themselves with the fines. Without the fines, they wouldn't be able to go from 1 officer to 8 officers in a single year.


https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/5Ge7V/2/

They're probably financing a lot of the rest of the town, too.


Not all information is copyrightable. Just because there's a copyright notice doesn't mean there's actually a copyright.


Yeah, I think there's a healthy middle ground between "courting is inherently unhealthy" and "you should quit your job and court full time".


And it doesn’t even have to be conscious decisions either. In my case: I was working for two clients as a freelancer but mid projects it clicked with an exchange student who was about to head back to her home country in two weeks. But it really clicked, such that I neglected my ongoing projects in a really unprofessional manner. I didn’t want to, because I really needed the money, however I just slowly stopped working on the projects so I can spend as much time as possible with this exchange student. And when I wasn’t with her, I was losing sleep thinking of her, even writing songs for her - a prototype courting behavior. Needless to say, my unprofessional behavior came back to bite me years later when I was interviewing and the potential employer was checking references including my former clients. Was that all healthy middle ground? I don’t know. I just know that 10 years later, 5 of those married, and now with two children, I don’t really care :). I'm just as happy as one can be.


The other point of view is that parents splitting up is very traumatic on kids, so effort should be spent on trying to avoid that. A promise to stay together (marriage) is one possible way to try to avoid that.

I don't think courting is trying to front-load the effort, but rather to avoid back-loading effort. Raising kids is a lot of work, and to prove that the two of you are willing to put effort into that, you put effort into planning cool dates while courting. Once the kids come along less effort is spent on cool dates, and more effort is spent on the kids.


That’s making an assumption one route does better than the other. How do you know your assumed correlation isn’t backwards? Or that parents staying in an unhappy and abusive marriage isn’t very traumatic on kids?

In all my long term relationships we lived together for a long period of time and only one resulted in children. So I don’t think courting was particularly required to get to know one another or find a stable situation to raise kids.

On top of which the idea that planning cool dates is a good proxy for raising kids or even long term compatibility is utterly hilarious.

And that’s dodging round the implication that the main reason to have a relationship is to have kids which isn’t true at all.


When you meet and it just clicks wouldn't you want to spend time together, plan dates, talk about your future together, send love letters (or texts), give gifts? Wouldn't that be courting? To me it seems courting is just dating with an eye toward marriage, so talking about a potential future together.

Your analogies kind of contradict each other. If someone goes hunting for several days but doesn't get a kill, would that person say they're owed an animal? Hunting isn't a transactional activity. Dating/courting aren't transactional either.


I agree. When you like someone, you make it a priority to spend time with them, be nice to them and all that other stuff. What is weird is when you quit your job to court someone. When you make a joke that there is "prophecy" that you and she will be together. On its face, it's pretentious and a laugh, but there's a subtext that if a man makes the decision he wants a women and he performs certain tasks, she has no agency in the manner.


>I don't see a scam anywhere.

They are telling the government they will pay out if the insured party is at fault for an accident, but in some (many?) cases they don't actually pay out. That sounds like a scam to me.


> They are telling the government they will pay out if the insured party is at fault for an accident

No, they aren't.

They are telling the government and their customer they will pay out if the insured party is found to be legally liable for injury or property damage while driving. (That is, in exactly the situations where the customer would legally be obligated to pay.)

They are also telling their customer that they will defend them from such claims to the extent reasonable, settling where it makes sense to contain liability. That is actually a big part of why one would pay for insurance rather than posting a liability bond (as most states allow) unless you have the funds to keep a general attorney on retainer and seek task-specific representation as needed.

Had they paid out when there was no expectation you would establish liability, that would be a scam against their paying customer.


In this case, who is legally liable?


No one. It's up to a court to decide. If you haven't been declared liable/guilty by a court, you're not liable/guilty. It's simple as that.


> They are telling the government they will pay out if the insured party is at fault for an accident

A police report doesn’t establish proof of fault. Neither does a video. Neither does eye witnesses. All of those are evidence of fault, but not legal proof of fault.


>sex slave nudebeach

Umm no


This is what ultimately killed Second Life. In the early days it was being used by businesses, for meetings etc. Then all the people with kinks moved in and now no one takes it seriously.

Shame really.


> This is what ultimately killed Second Life. In the early days it was being used by businesses, for meetings etc. Then all the people with kinks moved in and now no one takes it seriously.

You got your order of events reversed.

In the early days of SL (2003-2007) it was mostly chaos: kinky content, ponzi-schemes, gambling and scams.

It is in this chaos that SL boomed, but sometime close to its peak (2006-2007) the management realized this isn't sustainable (for both legal and business reasons). So, they started to moderate user-content in order to make it more attractive to mainstream-consumers as well as businesses.

And we've seen how that went. Very few are interested.


Ah fair enough. I just remember those early days they were trying to push the Linden dollar as a way for business to monitize the virtual spaces and objects. It seems to have had a bumpy history.


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