From my own comparisons, when converting, say, $1000 USD with Wise the spread+fee is about half of any of the banks that I have accounts with. Where Wise takes a huge cut is if you convert $10 at a time.
Landlines only work when there is no power if:
- you use an old school landline phone (not cordless)
- your landline is actually copper going to the house (I've seen fiber to house + conversion to twisted pair by a box with a battery)
- upstream infrastructure either still has (possibly battery) power
I think specifically for example of getting Nvidia chips to China, many Singaporeans would say that that is only illegal because the US deems it so. There is no moral reason.
I agree with you that the migrant workers are effectively a serf class. However, I think it's fine that the SG government severely discourages owning a car. It's a small island with lots of people, there would be gridlock if everyone wanted their own car. The public transportation system is amazing and works well.
I think you could replace Nextcloud's syncing and file access use cases with Syncthing and Copyparty respectively. IMO the biggest downside is that Copyparty's UX is... somewhat obtuse. It's super fast and functional, though.
There are some new NAS boxes hitting the market (UGreen being one of the brands that are cheaper, but also Minisforum) which have solid hardware but aren't locked down at all. They're just x86 boxes with bog-standard hardware so you can just run whatever OS you want, and they support that use case.
Multimode transceivers are still a slight bit cheaper ($30 for 10GBASE-LR vs $22 for 10GBASE-SR on fs.com) but that's more than offset by the single mode fiber being slightly cheaper, even for short distances.
IMO US elections have already been less-than-fully-democratic for a while, what with the voting registration and ID nonsense, as well as obvious gerrymandering and voter intimidation. At the very least, significantly less democratic than a number of other western countries.
> There was a LTT video where they mentioned how WiFi used to be better in some locations so those rooms were more desirable and the hotel's solution was to make it standard for everyone. They seemed to be suggesting that they brought down the quality rather than balanced.
This was from their podcast 'WAN Show' a week or two back, specifically about hotels in Las Vegas.
There's some fusion startups successfully making >10T magnets using ReBCO tape now, so hopefully things will scale up/cost down enough to be used in MRIs.
There's a few fusion startup companies using superconducting ReBCO tape to make their magnets. From the results that they're getting, I think we've largely cracked the engineering problems of making "wire" from ReBCO and it's largely just a scaling game now. I do want to point out that they're still cooling with liquid hydrogen at ~20K for high current capacity though.
When I bought my Paperwhite around 2013, I noticed that ads were an option on the kindles sold in the US but not in Canada. In Canada there was only the no-ads version.