riskable

You could just pay your taxes of the current year at the actual tax rate and accept that you're paying for society to function. That paying a little extra when you made more money is how a progressive tax system is meant to work.

...or you could go way out of your way to avoid paying an extra 3-5% by coming up with a sophisticated tax avoidance scheme like you're some rich person where 3-5% is actually a large amount of money (that could've been used in any number of more useful ways than hoarding wealth).

That's the part I don't get: Chaos is a lot more comforting than believing that there's a collection of people who can actually make things happen (fast) and yet always seem to cock everything up; even for themselves. At least with chaos there's always a chance to get things done on your own or slip your own ideals into the mix 🤷

If there's a god controlling literally everything like the ultimate micromanager playing pretend with themselves there's nothing you can do to change your situation. You're forever stuck; a slave to their will. Why bother even trying to change things? To me that's just an excuse to be lazy or ignore the problems all around you (or to just be an asshole).

If someone believes that, "it's all in God's hands" that person can never be trusted to solve problems or make things better.

No idea 🤷

I had no idea it was that easy to ensure your citizens will never get married!

We will respond to the, "revenge on society" crimes by giving you all more reasons to get revenge!

China produces more solar panels every year than the rest of the world combined. But it's still not enough.

There's just too many Chinese people! Too much manufacturing. Too much of everything in China.

China is huge but there's still not enough space to grow food for all those people so they have to import loads and loads of it just to feed everyone. They're well on their way to putting solar panels everywhere they can but any space that has food growing potential is a no-panel zone.

They also lack the infrastructure to transport solar energy across the nation. It's another thing they're working on... So even if they cover a huge area of unlivable desert with solar panels they don't have the means to get that power where it's needed.

The problem is controlling the gearbox. In order to do that you need lots of parts from steel cables to crimps (that go on the ends of said cables) to derailleurs to levers and shifters and lots of other things to route the cables.

By only having two gears--and a simple mechanism to switch between them--this bike is able to avoid all that complexity. Not to mention the tools needed to repair said complexity.

A chain link remover is a tiny little thing that can be strapped (or taped) in a pouch and kept on the bike along with extra (tiny) chain links.

The thing they really need to work on next is the tubes. When I was really big into mountain biking I never had to repair my chain but I always carried two extra tubes (and a pump!) when riding because I had two flats on long rides more than once.

This style of art can really tip the scales in favor of getting caught in law enforcement's net.

How's the software in these "luxury" vehicles? I mean, every Chinese-branded device I've ever owned has had either the most minimal interface (which can be good or great depending on the use case) or absolute garbage.

Some can be buggy AF but that's not what I mean when I say, "absolute garbage". I mean, they can be:

• Stupidity slow due to underpowered processors (whole automotive industry seems to suffer from this).
• Very poorly designed from a UX perspective. Example: You'll have seven extremely similar icons for completely different things or having to click/swipe way too many times to reach the most often-used features.
• Very strange color choices (not a big deal but more of a, "LOL WTF‽" situation).
• Piss poor integration with anything and everything (e.g. Bluetooth barely works, clock doesn't sync the time, only half your contacts sync, names for people/things appear with mixed-up first name/last name, left/right audio is swapped, and similar, "they didn't actually test the thing" problems).
• Nothing customizable. Whatever the stock theme is, that's what you're stuck with forever. You'll have six sounds to choose from for everything with no way to add new ones. This is typical for the automotive industry as a whole though.
• Everything looks like the developer used a placeholder/minimum viable interface and just left it like that forever. Example: Even though it's a bad idea to use fonts with varying-width numbers for a digital clock or timer that's what they'll use because it was the default and they couldn't be bothered.

It's like in China software is always an afterthought. Craftsmanship of the code or even just, "quality" seems to be irrelevant. "Does the thing" is all that matters.

For a second there I thought the image was a picture of cheese cubes on a skewers being dipped in cheese. Then I looked a little closer and saw it was bread 🙄

Someone (with money) needs to make the cheese-covered cheese-on-a-stick happen! Let us know how it goes. I'm sure that not all cheeses will work well for this purpose. Here's my ideas:

• Smoked Gouda dipped in proper Mexican (white, not orange LOL) Salsa con Queso.
• Extra Sharp Cheddar dipped in sweet cream cheese frosting (like you'd put on cinnamon rolls).
• Pepper jack dipped in a mild cheddar then chilled and coated with caramel/butterscotch hard shell topping with just a smidge of finely shredded Parmesan sprinkled on top before the topping becomes hard.

That's actually just a silly Star Wars reference. "It's an older code but it still checks out."