They do if they want to refinance, sell the house, or demonstrate favorable asset:debt ratios for other purposes.

> And taxes are mainly affected if your property value rises higher relative to the rest of the community.

Property taxes are usually % of value, so dependent on absolute value changes, not changes relative to the rest of the community.

I may be completely wrong, but this is what I've been told by people I've known in the past that held some local public office (such as a coworker in one case, and a neighbor in another, they were both local aldermen). I've also google searched it, and came up with similar answers.

Typically, a city / county budget is set, and they then need to collect it from the pool of property owners by taking the assessed value and using a multiplier to reach their budget target. Now the budget may increase due to inflation or other factors, but I'm not aware of any local government that suddenly finds itself flush in cash due to doubling of property values. If your elected officials do things differently and look at rising property values as their own windfall, well then you and your neighbors need to vote them out of office real fast.

I've verified this with my own house (both the last one and current one, about 30 years of home ownership). The 2008 - 2009 crash had negative affects on property values, but my property taxes didn't go down, and insurance quadrupled (because the insurance companies lost a lot on investments and had to make up for it). And plotting property tax increases over the last 10 years where my property doubled in value, the taxes were just under 5k when I bought and now are just barely over 5k.

One thing that can happen, is as budgets go up with inflation or new initiatives, absolute dollar amount taxes rise accordingly. And people don't like to pay more taxes, so a lot of people will appeal their tax assessment. And a good attorney can get it lowered to some degree. That means that everyone who hasn't fought (and won) against their tax assessment (the assessed value of their home), will see their taxes increase more as their assessed value is now higher relative to the neighbors who fought their assessment.

I have a bike with an automatic transmission and it handles steep hills just fine.

But generally speaking, I would expect the bike at this price point to have an automatic transmission.

As for biases, in the past when you could actually have political engagement discussions, I had often recommended my non-preferred candidate to other people based on what they felt was important to them, and I would spend my energy on presenting what was important to me, and understand their priorities too.

So which personality worked out better in the end?

(Rhetorical question, not a disagreement with anyone)

It's absolutely not a fact that his cancer could have been cured. That is wildly incorrect. It's more than likely he would have died in any case.

Yes, of course his odds would have been improved had he treated it as early as possible but each cancer is extremely specific and no one in the world knows if he could have survived it.

Dealing with a diagnoses like pancreatic cancer, and taking a few months to gather the courage for surgery is a very human reaction and not atypical.

And it wasn't a lack of courage it was a misguided belief that he knew more than his doctors.

I'm also not blaming my beloved grandfather either when I mention that smoking likely killed him in the end and he knew that years before.

Jobs was a very smart guy with all the means to improve his situation but decided against it. For me it's a lesson to consider where my closely held beliefs could be wrong.

You don't know anything about human psychology if you think searching for alternatives means he thought he was smarter than his doctors.

Here's the most relevant quote from Steve Jobs: "I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way,"

This is the language of fear not arrogance.

Genentech CEO (and PhD in Biochemistry) Art Levinson: he "pleaded every day" with Jobs and found it "enormously frustrating that [he] just couldn't connect with him"

Andy Grove: "Steve talked to me when he was trying to cure himself by eating horseshit and horseshit roots, and I told him he was crazy"

--

Marc Andreessen: "Steve Jobs was 'one of the most disagreeable people in the history of humankind,' and that was part of his genius."

He was an obstinate man who thought he knew better than everyone else. Sometimes he did. This time he didn't.

My take is that he was scared and acting out of fear. Hoping against hope that his bullshit alternatives would work because he was so terrified of having his body "opened" and "violated" by a major surgery. Maybe that fear sometimes masqueraded as arrogance but that's still just fear.

Like many others, you seem excited to be able to judge Steve Jobs on this point. To judge and laugh at him for his arrogance killing him. When in reality you're judging and laughing at a pancreatic cancer patient for procrastinating on their surgery out of fear.

In this way Elon Musk is very similar. That gets you EVs where none existed and it gets you crappy self driving by eschewing LIDAR for cameras only. It gets you rockets that land themselves and it gets a flat concrete launchpad obliterated by the first Starship launch as others warned.

If you'd said merely "I think it was fear, more than arrogance" that could have been an interesting discussion, but instead you've been making it strangely personal throughout.

Frankly I dont care enough about Jobs to be "excited" or "laugh" or whatever accusations you are throwing around the thread -- they reflect more on you than on me.

Jobs was a flawed man, as are we all.

We are all flawed. I think Steve Jobs was less flawed than most of his critics. Maybe less flawed than myself. The difference is we know everything he did wrong in his entirely life because it's so well documented.

I said his personality--the one that led him to rip off Wozniak along with his other actions (positive and negative)--likely led him to die [earlier]. But in your view the true moral failing was not in these acts which actually harmed other people, but in merely making an observation about how the man's personality likely ended up harming himself too.

Make of that what you will.

From ChatGPT:

"it’s widely believed by medical experts that Steve Jobs might have had a better chance of survival if he had pursued standard medical treatment sooner.

Jobs was diagnosed in 2003 with a rare type of pancreatic cancer — a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (pNET) — which typically grows much more slowly than the common and far more lethal pancreatic adenocarcinoma. When caught early, pNETs can often be treated successfully with surgery and other conventional therapies.

Instead, Jobs initially delayed surgery for about nine months while trying alternative diets and other non-standard approaches. By the time he agreed to surgery in 2004, the disease had progressed, and although he lived for several more years, the delay may have reduced his overall odds."

Rubbish.

> Even ChatGPT is making the same point I am "it’s widely believed by medical experts that Steve Jobs might have had a better chance

> See the keyword "might" in there? No one knows if he could have been saved, not even his own doctors can be sure.

Dishonest rubbish.

"it’s widely believed by medical experts that Steve Jobs might have had a better chance

See the keyword "might" in there? No one knows if he could have been saved, not even his own doctors can be sure.

"He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it....I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner."

He never uttered this sentence. You're making it up (lying).

Supposedly, he did say "I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way,"

Which shows a man struggling to come to terms with his diagnoses, desperate for alternatives, and eventually gathering the courage to undergo a major surgical operation.

Which suggests he came around to the fact he should have had the surgery in the fist place?

No, it's rude and weird to chastise someone for rightfully advocating treatment. He didn't state that he didn't want to risk the horrors of treatment with the end result being the same -- he spread disinformation. It is good he died, because when others repeat his disinformation, we can point back at his death as evidence against his beliefs.

You weigh the feelings of a dead billionaire higher than the lives of young people with hopes and dreams.

That is morally repugnant. He was a pancreatic cancer patient coping with his diagnoses the best he could manage. The fact that he was a "billionaire" has nothing to do with it. He was a human and all sentient life is sacred in my view.

You also do not actually know the facts of the case. He did not spread disinformation to anyone. He was intensely private during this entire period and very little information is known for a fact.

But by all means enjoy your mocking, judging, and condemnation of cancer patients. I'll continue to find it morally repugnant.

You continue to generalize criticism of Jobs as an attack on cancer patients as a whole, despite people citing specific behaviors and actions unique to jobs.

I can't interpret this as anything but emotionally manipulative sophistry that reads to the viewer as you shielding Jobs behind a vulnerable group, and that isn't ever going to be received well.

If there's another way to read this in light of the facts, I'd appreciate an explanation.

That could have been an interesting position to discuss were it not infused with so much judgment (ironic) for the commenters--making it personal and putting everyone on the defensive.

Because I think the fundamental disagreement is whether anyone considers themselves to be "judging someone [Jobs] for their reaction/choices in the face of cancer." I can see that point, but as you say, I disagree that's what is happening.

I might counter with, "does having cancer make a person immune to criticism? If not, then where is that line?" Indeed I think the other issue is treating criticism as equivalent to judgment (something maladaptive but all too common).

But I think you have the general idea: the tricky part (as you allude to) is that people are making criticisms/observations about Jobs (as a whole) and the story of his cancer is, well, part of his story too.

This thread was borne of the story of Steves Woz and Jobs. One takeaway was Woz was "naive", Jobs was shrewd, Jobs took advantage of Woz: don't be like Woz and get taken advantage of. What I was pointing out was, well that may be so, but who was better off in the end? Often one's strengths and one's weaknesses are two sides of the same coin (like with Musk).

Steve's friends pleaded with him and said what he was doing was bullshit. Were they morally repugnant too?

And yet it's basic human instinct to do what's possible to survive. I admit that I would have done the same and I wouldn't believe most people who would claim otherwise.

Edit: Unless the one time pad is a well known relative document, such as the Declaration of Independence.

Starting with the n-char plaintext, make it a loop. Now move the second letter two places to its right, the third three places, and so on ... until arriving at the original nth letter (painted red?) Or, starting with the digits of pi, move the second letter 3 to the right, the third 1, the fourth 4, und so weiter.

Doing a frequency on 97 weird letters wouldn't help much.

Wikipedia has a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad

In their example, "HELLO" is the plain text, "XMCKL" is the key, and the ciphertext is "EQNVZ". However, with a one time pad, an equally plausible plain text is "later" with the key "TQURI". Thus, without anymore data, it is simply impossible to know what the original message is.

Reasonable puzzles can be worked out (albeit maybe with a lot of work) with information provided by the puzzle or available somewhere in the environment.

Unreasonable puzzles (like some old Sierra games cough) are impossible without secret inside knowledge by the puzzle maker and/or brute force. And sometimes not even with brute force.

The hash/video example might just be an Easter egg hunt requiring looking across a wide set of videos (somewhat reasonable but boring), or completely unreasonable depending on circumstances.

I know if I leet code ground myself into the dirt, I’d get better, and more importantly: faster.

But there’s never been any payoff to me full-time coding.. not when the pay is close to coding, and my role wants me to address test tech debt or Nice To Haves tooling, and (until Go) I had to do my 9-5 work in a scripting language…

There’s now more days behind me than ahead, and I no longer want to understand low level details and theories about the kernel or TTY.

All progress is built on abstraction. It has to be.

Amazon used to offer this as a service!