We do something very similar. All pay goes into a joint account and all the bills and joint expenses come out of that one.
We pay ourselves each an allowance that covers our personal spending. That's basically everything I spend money on by myself, so lunch out, treats, games whatever.
I think its a really good way if avoiding any worry about "wasteful" spending. What we each value is different. If we need to tighten our belts we just reduce the allowance, we don't need to fight over what specific spending is or isn't acceptable.
Can you explain how does "we don't need to fight over what specific spending is or isn't acceptable" works? do you simply cut the personal spending symmetrically?
It's not actually really come up fortunately, but we have an agreement that we have £X allowance a month for our own spending. We don't then need to justify what can come out of that allowance, and if we need to cut back on that spending it will be a general cut back not "spend less on beer" specifically.
Obviously join expenses like meals out would still need to be cut back too, but we're at least doing those together in the first place.
Worth noting that UK missiles (but not warheads) are taken from a joint pool with the US. They have completely shared maintenance, so any reliability concerns are shared. Similarly, the testing is also joint so this should be seen as two failures out of all trident tests rather than two UK failures.
Not that that is a fun headline of course.
Obviously everything around it is super secret but the muttering around this one seemed to be that the rocket noticed the warhead seemed wrong (which it was because you don't strap a real nuke to it!) And aborted itself. I only add this because I think its interesting.
I've heard the sport idea thrown around a few times, but I'm not sure I buy it.
If you go to a sports event you are mostly buying the experience of being there, the energy of the crowd, the cheering all that stuff. The actual experience of seeing what's happening is not really better is it? That's why the stadiums have screens in them.
Replicating that experience at home is more like getting people around to watch a game together.
"legitimately better than a regular 4K TV broadcast by enabling hardcore fans to feel much closer to the action" sounds like it offers something new.
People who are sports enthusiasts have a proven willingness to drop thousands of dollars on large screen televisions, streaming services like NFL Red Zone, or thousand dollar Superbowl tickets, so the potential for sales is there.
My argument is that the experience of seeing sport from a specific seat is inferior to watching it multi camera with huge zoom lenses. The thing that draws you to the stadium is the sense of being in a crowds.
The technology to do this has been around for a while to has anyone tries. I'd certainly be curious to give it a go. I imagine there are some technical problems too, like if your team scores and you jump in the air and your view point stays still.
This did get me thinking if any sport might be better viewed in VR, and maybe games like pool, snooker, chess. Where you see the whole thing from one vantage point, and the scale is such that the 3d of it all would be meaningful.
The argument in favor of the tech Apple is using in this essay sounds pretty compelling.
> The NextVR acquisition is what led to the incredible Apple Immersive video format, which enables capture of 3D video in 180 degrees in 8K resolution at 90 frames per second, an absolute juggernaut format with 8 times the number of pixels of a regular 4K video. The best way to think of the new Apple Immersive video format is kind of like a new IMAX-3D, but the real magic is the fact that it’s projected inside an imaginary 180-degree sphere (horizontally and vertically) that takes over your entire field of view.
Vision Pro is the first VR headset that enables playback of 180-degree 3D video at what feels to the eyes like 4K quality.
"IMAX-3D" sounds much more compelling than watching a flat image on a television.
That's definitely impressive tech, and I'm sure the experience inside a headset is pretty incredible. What I'm saying is that it is not a good match for live sport.
When you watch sports they have multiple cameras all over the place. Fixed cameras with long lenses, cameras that zip over the pitch, cameras on blimps, slow mo cameras and so on.
These cameras are so much better for enjoying sport that they put giant screens in the stadium so you can see what happened after a goal is scored.
That experience is never going to work in a VR system (beyond VR as a way to have a big screen available) because if you kept shifting the position and focus you'll make everyone very motion sick.
I can certainly see a usecase for that and it's not sports (though I guess you could call it that lol).
But prudish Apple will surely block that from happening. I don't really get why. It's a valid request and one where the technology really shines. I use similar content on the quest 3 and it's great but it would be so much better on something like the vision pro.
I actually did this for a while (not condemn people :) -- I paid for Youtube and then never signed in and continued to use 3rd-party apps and uBlock Origin).
One big issue is that your payment then is basically just to Youtube -- and it's kind of impossible to avoid because the point is to stop Youtube from obsessively tracking everything you view and do, but in the process you stop Youtube from knowing which videos you're watching, so the creators are no longer getting their piece of that pie.
It's a tricky problem, I'm not sure how to solve it using Youtube Premium's model (that's not true I can think of ways to solve this using some kind of anonymous token system, but Youtube's never going to do that).
It's part of why I advocate now for supporting creators directly (and by extension not caring about Google's profits, although that's secondary). But you could still buy Youtube Premium on the side if you specifically want to support Youtube; it's just if you're using 3rd-party clients I don't think that gets rid of the obligation to help the creators themselves.
That is a good question. I would hope not, but I suppose an argument could and would be made that you are still violating the TOS by blocking trackers, and by blocking them, you are depriving YouTube (and its creators) from another means of compensation by stifling the effectiveness of adverts.
I think it's worth gaming out a world without nuclear weapons in the context of the Ukraine war.
It seems pretty undeniable that both Russia and NATO would be more willing to countenance a direct confrontation.
Not only that, surely by this point both sides would be dusting off plans to start construction once again. That immediately opens up the likelihood of preemptive strikes to prevent your opponent actually achieving a new nuclear weapon.
>>I think it's worth gaming out a world without nuclear weapons in the context of the Ukraine war.
I'm not so sure - someone else might equally argue that if Ukraine had nuclear weapons it wouldn't have been attacked in the first place, so maybe that's the path that it should have taken.
And equally - "both Russia and NATO would be more willing to countenance a direct confrontation."
Maybe. Or maybe it's posturing. I think EU's support for Ukraine is huge and populations of many countries still support sending them weapons and supplies, but if they had to send their men and women to die in Ukraine the discussion would be different. Not saying they wouldn't, just that it's easy to say "oh if only Russia didn't have nuclear weapons we'd definitely go and fight them". It's theoretical.
> It seems pretty undeniable that both Russia and NATO would be more willing to countenance a direct confrontation.
The only reason Russia is willing to engage in a direct conflict with Ukraine is their nuclear weapons make them feel secure that that won’t evolve into a direct conflict with NATO, which, without nuclear weapons, would be immediate ruin for Russia.
Nuclear weapons enable direct aggression by nuclear powers against anyone except other nuclear powers.
> It seems pretty undeniable that both Russia and NATO would be more willing to countenance a direct confrontation.
Without nuclear weapons, Russia would likely not have invaded in the first place, because a NATO intervention would have been likely and would have ended in the annihilation of the Russian military in just a few weeks.
I've seen this notion a few times, but I think it bares some scrutiny.
What places used to exist that no longer do where you can exist without the expectation of buying something?
Thinking about it, libraries are unusual in that they have no cost at all to enter. Top of my head only religious buildings seem to be similar in that regards.
There's quite a lot of options as far as no expectations to buy anything, but you need to pay some kind of fee - sport's centres, clubs that sort of thing. (One might argue they often contain a shop/cafe, but I'd argue you don't go there to use those, and they are very optional)
That might work as a first strike capability - although sailing a cargo ship from North Korea to Tokyo without garnering any interest from intelligence agencies might be more difficult than you give it credit for.
But the main thing you want nuke for is as a deterrent. Get in a fight with us and we press the button. It's hard to imagine the sneaky boat trick working when North Korea is under blockade by the entire US and Japanese navies. And even if they run the blockade they're going to have trouble getting close to Tokyo.
Speaking as someone now married to a woman he met on tinder.
I took the view that if I matched with someone and they replied to a message there was a pretty high chance they were interested in a date, so I would generally just ask on the second or third message. Something like
Hi, <basic small talk question based on something in the profile>.
Hopefully receive a reply with some kind of conversational hook.
<reply to the hook, ask a follow up question>.
Would you like to meet for a drink sometime this week, would central Gotham work for you? My number is 123556679
Pretty much everyone is on the site to go on real dates, so best to think of the messages as for organising them.
Your mileage may vary, but I'd say this led to a date 80% of the time (assuming the match and reply had already happened)
I've experimented and varied my time to ask out for a date. I've asked out after a few texts after matching, and also after a few days of texting. For me, it has mostly worked out when I gave it more time.
Most of my matches have indicated they like to get more familiar before going out with a stranger. But then again, I live in India, so that probably has a lot to do with my experience.
We pay ourselves each an allowance that covers our personal spending. That's basically everything I spend money on by myself, so lunch out, treats, games whatever.
I think its a really good way if avoiding any worry about "wasteful" spending. What we each value is different. If we need to tighten our belts we just reduce the allowance, we don't need to fight over what specific spending is or isn't acceptable.