Dude, most other countries, bar the dictatorships, have more changes happening than the US. Most other countries don’t have two-party systems with filibusters, debt ceilings disconnected from the budget, and whatever else.

Any country implementing parliamentarism, especially those not implementing first past the post, will have a lot less stalemates, because there are multiple other parties to make horse trades with. Do you have experience with any other country’s system of governance?

You can say what an increase in funding is meant to finance without earmarking the funds. Other countries do that just fine. In this example, you’d run on lowering property taxes, because campaign on the tax you’re increasing is never a good plan.

I get that there’ll always be some taxes collected at different levels, like some federal, some state level and some municipal, and that does to some extent direct how the funds can be used, but earmarking the funds beyond that just adds complexity and fucks up budgeting. It’s how you end up with stuff like every other thing on the budget borrowing from social security.

The real thing hindering these kinds of reform is that American politics are inherently resistant to change. With a two-party system in near equilibrium there will rarely be any opportunity to change big things, and in practice most big changes in the US happen at the judicial branch as a result. For example, WA doesn’t have income tax due to the WA supreme court declaring it unconstitutional, and changing the constitution is nearly impossible to get the votes for in the current political climate.

Why? Knowing that my property taxes pay for one set of things and my income tax pays for something else does nothing for me. In the end, all that really matters is how much my net pay is, and whether the government is spending its income reasonably.

In the school example, my area also pools it, I believe statewide. The schools also receive federal money from my income tax. I don’t care, as long as the schools have the funding they need. Which they don’t.

I don’t get to choose what kind of taxes I pay or what they go to (except that dollar to the presidential campaign fund), so how do I really benefit from knowing which goes where? Just pool it all and make a budget! It’s like Americans are addicted to overcomplicating things.

I know that’s how some places do it now, but why do specific taxes need to pay for specific stuff? Earmarking the funds just makes it harder to allocate them.

In some cases it makes some sense at face value, like having road or fuel taxes pay for road upkeep, but even then it results in having to scale the taxes to meet demand, in possibly untenable ways. Also, you don’t need to drive a car to benefit from roads and related infrastructure, so even the seemingly obvious connections aren’t necessarily fair.

I especially object to using local property taxes to pay for schools, because this just means affluent areas get lots of school funding (in addition to the donations they surely get), while schoold in poor areas get scraps. Which in turn makes it even harder for students to escape poverty.

I’d rather pay income tax than property tax. The problem with property taxes is that lots of elderly people in old homes with no plans to sell are getting taxed as if they have million dollar house money. They’re basically getting punished for the gentrification of their neighborhood.

If we collected that money from income taxes and capital gains taxes instead, the results would be more equitable. This would likely increase my own tax burden, but I can afford it a lot better than my elderly neighbors. They can pay when they sell their house, which is when they have the money.

We may have just gotten lucky. I also had a great time in Venice once by wandering off randomly and ending up somewhere I can only assume tourists don’t normally go. We bought some fruit off a boat which was both delicious and very affordable, so I assume the target demographic was not tourists. I’m pretty sure that’s not the universal experience of Venice either.

We were in the mood for a chill day, so it was nice to just chill in a park and walk through some random old neighborhoods until we stumbled across a restaurant. There’s nothing chill about Milan, though, at least not where a clueless tourist would find it.

As a European from elsewhere in Europe, I’m never going back to Milan. Maybe it’s fine if you’re into fashion, but if you’re not there’s not much to look at except a cathedral which resembles every other cathedral, and it’s impossible to get a photo of it without also having a friendship bracelet scammer in the frame, actively harassing you.

All tourist locations in Italy and France have people trying to scam you (and some non-scammers just trying to sell you cheap toys), but Milan is the only place I’ve been to where they’re straight up harassing you non-stop. Go to Pisa instead, it’s super relaxing there and you can marvel at their past mistakes in structural engineering. A far better deal.

Yeah, that would probably be ideal, or perhaps take the kid on vacation somewhere they’ll get immersed. Watching media in your native language could also help, especially if you’re in a country where dubbing is the norm and they don’t get exposed to it organically.

In the meantime, you should probably take some pressure off. As you noted, your kids will learn English regardless, and if you keep speaking it they’ll probably learn it faster than their peers and with less accents. If you push too hard they might start fighting it, which won’t help their motivation at all.

One more data point: I have a friend whose parents are Chinese, but she was born in an English speaking country. She never speaks Chinese when addressing her sister who speaks both languages well, but always speaks Chinese with her mother, whose English is quite limited.

So I guess the solution is to expose them to people who don’t speak the local language, so they’ll need to speak English to be understood. How feasible that is depends on your situation.

I exclusively speak my native language with the kids, no matter what language they address me with. Whether the kids speak it back depends on the kids, and a lot of the time kids will optimize and speak the language everyone knows. I find that after my parents visit, the kids speak my native language more, because they pick up the conversations.

As long as the kids understand fine and say enough words that they know how to pronounce every word in your language without an accent, I wouldn’t try to push it on them. They’ll probably know enough that they can pick it up easily without any accent when they feel like they need it.

They’re referring to point 60. They want to rename the Moorgate line when it’s converted back into a tube line.

Outlaws. Where are ya, marshall?

Haven’t several open source projects already remastered Quake?

Definitely needs to still launch you to the stratosphere if you land at the edge of a jump.

That’s unlikely to perform well enough to be usable at all. You’d at the very least need some sync method which just updates the blocks you wrote to, and that rules out a lot of cheap storage.

You’d be better off with either cloud storage a la Google Drive or Dropbox, either mounted from the remote location or used as storage for a sync-based backup solution. You could have it upload things instantly if it listens for save events in inotify.

If you want really good answers, you will need to be more specific about your requirements.

The absolute cheapest as the question is stated is to go dumpster diving for a free hard drive and host it at a friend’s house, but this is likely not what you had in mind.

• Do you need backups?
• Does it need to be encrypted at rest?
• What bandwidth do you need up and down?
• Is it okay with a monthly bandwidth cap?
• what latency is okay? Is cold storage where it takes a day or more to fetch the data okay?