If it was where I lived, I'm not sure I would only like to have the richest tourists visiting. It would be nice to have some down-to-earth people as well.
Do the richest tourists contribute to the local economy the most anyway? Or is it more like they spend lots of money with multinational companies (e.g. big fashion brands) that ultimately pay tax/have suppliers elsewhere?
You can get/buy a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter. Annoying that there isn't a 3.5mm port on the phone itself but in the grand scheme of things not a huge inconvenience & life goes on.
Is Bing not viable? It looks pretty ok to me. DuckDuckGo and Ecosia also lean pretty heavily on Bing and they work fine. If you know how to change your default search engine (and want to), you can pretty easily be Google-search-free nowadays.
Of course the problem is that most people just use the default search engine on their device, and Google has paid big money for being the default. And if you're not interested in tech, why would you bother setting up an alternative one?
> The problem is Google having 90% dominance on the search, without credible competition.
In my experience it gives really bad results for anything remotely specific. If it's just general popular stuff it's fine. But when searching for a very narrowly scoped query, it just gives back generic popular results.
Arguably, F-Droid is a (Android-only, not possible to make such an app on iOS) super app that very much exists in the western world.
> Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.
To be fair to Apple, both Google and Meta have loads of apps for iOS that compare to the Apple suite of apps. Although there is definitely a pre-installed advantage for the Apple apps.
In Sweden washing a car at home is discouraged and depending on how you read the law can be illegal (it is not illegal per se to wash a car at home, but it is illegal to to let out untreated water into nature - and since waste water from car washing is not untreated and probably contains oil and metals, it is most likely illegal on this provision).
Enforcement is on a council-by-council basis, but of course in urban areas I imagine this is pretty hard to enforce. In rural settings it must be pretty much impossible. Having said that, I haven't really seen many people at all washing their car at home. Maybe it depends where you live, if you have neighbours who do it a lot it probably feels like everyone does it.
In the last few years, there have been a load of "wash your own car" car wash stations opening up. They're cheap (you can do the car for <100kr - $10 or so), way less than the drive in station, and have things you wouldn't have at home (e.g. cleaning underneath the car, handy for washing off the salt that has come off the road in winter). Not really enforcement but a pretty effective way of nudging people to doing the "right thing".
> - The entire log package is a barnacle. Thankfully we now have log/slog but log existed for so long that lots of third-party libraries use it. Even if the library authors knew to avoid the footguns that are Fatal/Fatalf/Fatalln and Panic/Panicf/Panicln, context and level support are spotty at best.
Heh. I wrote some code that called log.Fatalf with an error message, and then later added a verbose switch when running the program (kind of an `if !verbose { log.SetOutput(os.DevNull) }` type of thing).
Sure enough, when I ran it with some input that led to run into the log.Fatalf, the program exited, but no error message was written out. Cue quite some head-scratching!
- it is quite common to sub-let ("andrahandsuthyring"/"renting in second-hand") where you rent from another renter (who in turn has the "first hand" contract with the landlord). This is legal and is quite different from other countries where it is common to see "no sub-letting" on every single rental contract you will ever see. So you do not have to sit in this queue (the queue is for first hand contracts) to live in Stockholm as a renter; but you may end up moving fairly often as second hand contracts are very often time limited.
- the quote "93% of swedes live in municipalities with a housing shortage" sounds bad, but what does this exactly mean - how bad are the shortages in each municipality, why is there a shortage, what is the divide of rural vs city municipality shortages. Also, a sizeable chunk of the population lives in Stockholm/Gothenburg/Malmö that are likely some of the key municipalities in this number, so it's likely that much less than 93% of municipalities suffer from a housing shortage.
- the rent that a landlord can ask for depends on many things, including the "modernness" of the apartment (both in terms of e.g. putting in a new floor, and in terms of appliances). This has the downside that the landlord may decide to modernise the apartment and now you have to pay (a bit) more rent without having a say in the matter. On the other hand it means that landlords have an incentive to keep the apartments in decent condition and not just let things get old and not bother replacing them. You could see this as a positive or negative, depending on your point of view and financial situation.
The article says that the rental market in "Sweden is a big mess", but this of course is quite a generalisation and simplification; and how to tackle housing supply and demand in many (all?) countries is a complex and difficult issue. Regarding demand for accommodation outstripping supply in Stockholm & Gothenburg, this is pretty common to other major cities, pretty much everywhere around the globe. Does rent control help or hinder? The article doesn't compare to other countries going through similar conditions that tried other methods, so it's hard to tell.
Some ideas for improving housing supply/demand situation:
- Building more (duh!). For individuals with some spare land there is a class of house called an "Attefallshus" you can build up to 30m2 and rent out if you wish.
- Better public transport late into the night out into suburbs and to nearby towns. Bike paths and affordable electric bikes/scooters to make living not in the centre and still enjoying the amenities possible.
- Investment in/encouraging private sector investment in smaller towns and cities, so the spread of demand for housing due to work is more spread across the country.
- Encouraging working remote or hybrid schedules, so employees feel they can live further out.
Sounds great... as long as you are the one doing the building or are living in an area not so densely populated that there is decent distance between houses. Hard to imagine people living in houses in a typical urban area would be happy with such a system, given that neighbours could just build whatever they want near to your house, without any consideration to your wishes.
As always, there is a compromise to be found, and so we have planning systems.
Not sure why either why the article just gives Rust as an example. Whilst there are some performance demanding use cases where Rust/C/C++ are really the appropriate choices, >99% of applications that have been written and are out there are not really worried about shaving the nanoseconds off or GC-pauses and are working just fine and memory-safe on Java/C#/Go/Python/Javascript/Ruby/PHP etc...
Do the richest tourists contribute to the local economy the most anyway? Or is it more like they spend lots of money with multinational companies (e.g. big fashion brands) that ultimately pay tax/have suppliers elsewhere?