Horsey

I got within an extremely close distance to getting a Model Y this year during the price cuts; I secured the loan and was looking into the insurance costs which is what ultimately killed my decision.

My car is paid off and I only pay for gas (I have the Prius Aqua 2016, ~53mpg, 4.44L/100km)

When I looked into the Y, first of all they don’t allow you to get an insurance quote without first putting a down payment. If I had gone through with the purchase, I’d be looking at almost 570$/month on the car loan alone with the trade-in, plus another 140/month (I currently pay 80$/month, roughly) for insurance through my current company (this is only a ballpark figure based on me pulling a VIN number online and feeding it into a quote; that number could possibly be significantly higher). That puts my excess car expenses conservatively at 650$/month just for a new car. The literal only problems I have with my current car is that it can’t tow my horse trailer and that it’s a “dumb” petrol car with no infotainment and a physical key. I’m probably going to put a 12" iPad in the center console for infotainment and call it a day and keep that around for another 4 years until Apple CarPlay 2 trickles down to affordable EVs.

In summation, I really don’t think EVs are worth it unless you absolutely must buy a new car. There are new infotainment options on the horizon like Apple CarPlay 2 and Android Automotive with Android Auto as standard… right now is the literal worst time to buy a car. Not to mention that NACS is going to replace CCS in the USA in the 2026 model cars. Your resale value in the mid 2030s will be absolute dogshit if you don’t wait for the NACS port in next year’s cars.

designers are absolutely worth their degrees, the only problem is that they’re only really “useful” for the early UI design; they’re less important over time

I’ll just straight up say that the problem is with Microsoft more than anything else. Their UI design is abysmal. Nothing is consistent, nothing is smoothly animated, nothing is easily identifiable by its icon, nothing is glassy and good looking like Win7/macOS. Even in their peak design of Windows 7, they still had those awful legacy UI elements in system settings and the registry settings.

Even with multitouch trackpads being a thing on Windows now, there’s STILL not linear trackpad gestures as of 6 months ago when I played with the display units in the store.

Yeah, I’ve only worked in the US.

That’s what my employer offered I guess 🤷🏽‍♂️ when I was a university teacher I paid zero for deductibles but they took out like 100$ pre tax every month IIRC. Right before I quit they started charging for copays and I was pretty pissed.

I pay 9.79$/month for medical only, pre-tax, myself only on the plan, working for a mental healthcare nonprofit. My medical copays have been free lately for routine office visits. I have to get labs done 4 times a year for the meds I take and those have all been free so far. Because they’re classed as “preventative” to make sure nothing goes wrong with the meds, it’s free 🤷🏽‍♂️. Non preventative things have a 2000$ deductible, so I have to pay that much before medical care for the calendar year becomes free to me. That means that if I get sick in December, I have to pay 2000$to cover for December and again in January to cover for the next year.

Dental coverage is free. I pay 40$/visit as a copay for cleanings and all else (if I’m not in perfect health) I pay 30% of that bill. Recently I had periodontitis and my bill after treatment was 600$.