You're not looking for it but datagrip seems to be able to do exactly what table plus does while also being a full fledged SQL IDE (for the same price).
And yet you have to wonder, on an alternative timeline, what if Ukraine says it won't join NATO and stays under Russia's sphere of influence? It would suck for national pride but maybe under that alternative timeline they won't get invaded now and possibly wouldn't even lose Crimea earlier?
Practically speaking, perhaps you should avoid poking the aggressive neighbor next door, especially when you can't have definitive assurance from the police station three blocks over?
There was little support for joining NATO before Crimea was annexed. Ukraine wanted to join NATO precisely because it realized that it will be devoured piece by piece by its imperialist neighbor unless it does.
Privacy and anonymity are not the same. We do not claim anonymity although if you read our privacy policy you will see that it is very close to it (as we do not log searches at all, so it it not possible to tie them to a user).
I get so frustrated with the idiotic thumbnails on youtube video these days. I am sure it's all optimized for the maximum number of clicks/views but if I see a still that looks the way it does at the bottom of this page I generally just don't watch it on principle.
Believe me, I had a nice discussion yesterday with my sister (who helped me take pictures for the thumbnail), and we both agreed it's one of the dumbest things about current YouTube...
The thing is, from all my own A/B testing, a face vs. no face will automatically get 20-30% more views (all else equal). And an exaggerated face, a bit more than that.
The question not being asked is how your audience changes A vs B in other ways than size.
You can easily A/B test yourself into mediocrity by constantly optimizing for a larger, dumber audience. They stop liking your old content (despite your dumb faces, etc) so you make new content they like more, keep that cycle up for a while.
And you end up making emotionally charged rage-porn political videos and have become the next Facebook/cable news/etc.
This is also why the second or third album for a band is usually the best; they get popular and start letting their audience design their music and become repetitive and mildly awful.
> The question not being asked is how your audience changes A vs B in other ways than size.
That's not how it works.
The most important factor to get views on YouTube is the recommendation algorithm. It makes a huge difference. YouTube will not even push your videos to people who are subscribed to you if the recommendation algorithm doesn't favor them.
As the click-through rate is an important part of how the algorithm decides what to recommend, you need a catchy thumbnail and a somewhat clickbaity title or you will be reduced to oblivion by people who use one regardless of the actual quality of your content. The story is the same with the length of video.
Veritasium made a couple of very good videos on the issue if you are interested.
Youtube algorithms are truly weird. I have a YT account with, I think, 3 or 4 subscribers and maybe a dozen or two views on the 10-20 videos I ever uploaded. I basically use YT to upload things that I want to share with some close friends.
Then, earlier this year, one of my videos suddenly skyrocketed[1]. It was an old video, 10 years or so, and it only consisted of one 10 second scene of a movie that I found funny at that time, and that I shared with a couple friends. It had about 50 views until march.
Then, it suddenly exploded, and now that video has just short of 1 million views, with a peak of ~60k or so per day.
I have absolutely no idea what crazy algorithm suddenly started recommending a 10-year-old video that is nothing more than a 10s snippet from a hollywood movie to millions and millions of people around the world.
The most interesting part (for me) was the psychological effect this had on me. First, my phone started sending notifications like crazy (I turned them off pretty quickly). That changed into a daily morning-routine of "let's see how many people watched the video this night"... Then, when the new followers came (I gained a couple hundred during that time) I had a feeling of guilt because I think they somehow "expect" similar clips from me from now on, and I would be letting them down (of course, totally irrational, I could care less of what some random people expect from me). Then I started researching how much revenue I could have gained from that if that were a "real" video with original content and ads thrown in.....
the only culture I like about Youtube is how the other commenters and viewers know that they all found each other due to the algorithm, because they watched anyway!
What the parent comment said still applies. Algorithm or not, you can become a top pop singer either by having a really good voice and being talented or by being singling about how you enjoy something controversial just to create outrage. The only difference is your audience.
It's going to be really hard to be a top YouTuber if the YouTube algorithm just doesn't show your videos in the same way the best singer in the world would never get any audience if no one could hear them sing.
More than that, they are probably training models to predict the click-through-rate based on the image thumbnail, automatically discounting your content if it doesn't look like this, even if it does end up attracting clicks in reality!
A/B testing attracts the bots in my experience. Peoples' tastes change quicker than the bots' decision models do. Given that's somewhat of a bold statement, then try this thought experiment: If A/B tests actually work, then wouldn't you expect there to be zero films and/or TV shows released that are flops?
I honestly wonder which came first, the viewer preference or the algorithm.
Like are there people out there that see a whacky face in the thumbnail and think "Oh that's a video I want to watch!" and the algorithm just got trained on that?
Or did whacky faces just resemble something (from the algorithm's perspective) that was briefly popular and then a positive feedback loop of algorithm recommends it -> gets popular -> algorithm updated to recommend it more often.
I've discussed this with my brother a bit (he's a neurologist, though not a specialist in vision), and he seems to think part of it goes back to our brain's instinct to react more to 'face' than other stimuli. Therefore thumbnails with a discernible face will do better.
And on top of that, an expression outside of "stock photo smile" will stand out more, and if you combine that, plus a catchy title that piques your interest, and have a video that can back it up, it will do a lot better than just having a video that has good content.
This explanation never really made sense to me. It's not like videos are hidden in a background and the thumbnail needs to stand out in our field of vision. Videos are presented front and center, and you're only looking at a few at a time. I presume everyone looks at all the video thumbnails; I just go left to right, top to bottom. Maybe if you were presented with hundreds of options at once and had to click on something quickly, something that draws the eye might get that sort of response, but that's not how Youtube works.
Instead you are presented with a small number of options and given unlimited time to choose, and the consequence of choosing a bad video is several minutes of wasted time. I presume most people are asking themselves "do I want to watch this" and deciding "yes, this video looks interesting/entertaining/etc." Maybe if the effect were small, like 1-2% I could believe its just a slight nudge due to psychological hacking, but the reported differences in the tens of percent and the extreme importance that seems to be placed by the algorithm indicates this is a major factor in peoples' decision making process.
I doubt this is how most people's eyes actually scan a visual field. I expect there's a lot more randomness going on subconsciously, and that face-like features cause a higher subconscious dwell time.
had to click on something quickly...but that's not how Youtube works.
I think for most people it is. Scroll scroll scroll tap, all within a few seconds.
It's how we scan text. I'm also reading the titles of the videos. Maybe there's a very quick scan of the page beforehand, but if I click on any of the options presented, it's only after I've done that main scan.
When you're only presented with a tiny bit of information, it doesn't take long to evaluate a decision. A few seconds is a long time. No one, at least to my knowledge, is opening youtube and clicking on the first thing they see in milliseconds. Hell, just variation in page loading time probably has a bigger effect on what we see first. Critically though, there's no deadline - even if you see something you want to watch quickly, you don't have to click on something if you don't see something you want to watch. Without time pressure, there's no need to make an impulsive click.
> he seems to think part of it goes back to our brain's instinct to react more to 'face' than other stimuli.
I've noticed this same thing with advertisements and dancing. Why are people always dancing and singing in advertisements? Seems like people just are wired to pay attention to certain human behaviors.
I also think the graphics, title, face; these are signaling some level of effort and focus. It might not be the individual face, graphics, or title, it could be just their presence.
I think people's eyes are just naturally drawn to faces, so more people end up seeing the thumbnail among the grid of other videos, and are more likely to watch the it as a result
That's the base narrative, but I find it difficult to believe without proper controlled testing. People are 25% more likely to click on a technical video when the creator is trying to look like a buffoon? It just doesn't sound correct.
People don't click on the video because of the dumb face. They watch the video if they think they'll be interested in it. But the dumb face makes it more likely that you will initially notice the thumbnail
Weirdly enough, the algorithm works wonders for me when I'm not logged in. It does what it is supposed to do. Give me more of what I might want while throwing in a heathly dash interesting things I might be interested in. YT to me, bon apetit.
But when I'm logged in, it shows me the exact videos I've been avoiding watching these past few weeks and when I do watch a video, instead of showing me similar vids or vids from the same creator - it just shows me videos I've watched or the video updates I've been avoiding. And the odd Taylor Swift MV, an artist whose works (is it even music) I've never even...not even in a mix.
He's explained it's pretty much for the same reason the OP did it. It's possible to prove it works, especially when you're releasing a video each day. Youtube at this point is about optimizing clicks. People like Mr.Beast generally know their video title and thumbnail before they even start production on the content.
Unconvinced. LTT has 1 or 2 good videos for every 30 videos they release. Maybe the face helps people click the bad videos, but the good videos stand for themselves and it's likely that he would be successful without playing the game. (His all time most popular video doesn't have a thumbnail of him making a weird face. It's his most popular video of all time because his guest was exceedingly entertaining.)
(Also, I don't mean for this to be an anti-Linus post. How he built LMG is a great story and he deserves the success he's achieved.)
Very offtopic but, at first I thought you said L1T and we almost had to take this outside. Level1Techs is awesome. Can't say much for LinusTechTips as it's targeting a different audience, though the young man does seem charismatic.
But why is view count the only metric you care about? How about getting fewer views but more engagement, with viewers that want to see the content but are turned off by the stupid thumbnails?
Getting fewer views (and likely much reduced watch time) means YouTube's algorithm quickly buries your video.
You and I might use subscriptions on YouTube (just like I prefer RSS), but 99% of viewers for some reason just go to the home page and click on things YouTube recommends (regardless of whether they subscribe to a channel).
If you don't get recommended, you don't get views, and it's even less likely that regular viewers (outside the few who actually check their subscriptions page) will engage with your videos.
Also, Bryan Lunduke also moved over to Locals and has generally expressed that it's a more pleasant community: https://lunduke.locals.com/
Of course, i don't doubt that it's akin to financial suicide for anyone who relies on YouTube as their main source of income, but if nothing else, it's nice to see people standing up for their principles, instead of selling out and trying to build their platform on another site that can end their presence at will.
I guess only time will show whether there ever will be any financially feasible alternatives to YouTube, though.
> Getting fewer views (and likely much reduced watch time) means YouTube's algorithm quickly buries your video.
Question remains: so what? Unless you are monetizing your videos and intend to make significant money from “engagement”, why would someone single-minded let optimize for views or algorithm-friendliness?
For this guy, I guess he’s trying to make a living from YouTube, so I guess… by all means growth hack your video thumbnail. But for the rest of the video uploaders, absent a desire to monetize, a video with 100 views is no worse for the uploader than a video with 100,000 views.
My guess is that everyone that uploads videos with catchy titles and thumbnails wants to monetize their videos eventually. Even if money isn't a motivation, getting more views probably has a value in itself for most content creators.
Because the video includes paid promotion and YouTube does not reward fewer views with more engagement.
(and if we're honest if you really do want to see the content then depriving yourself because of the contents of the thumbnail feels very self-defeating)
Maybe both your observation and HN is right: the distribution is multi-modal in the sense that (presumably) there is a large majority of people where the thumbnail works for and views the content, and then there is a small (and possibly vocal) minority of people who absolutely hate it and treat it as an anti-signal. I know I belong in the latter group and will lose all interest in the video once I see the weird face and the edited icon. I've seen a few of your videos and they're indeed very good. That said, I've noticed that I semi-consciously would avoid your video due to the icon which triggers an immediate reaction from me to stay away. It's a shame, because I know that the videos can be good, but the thumbnail is actively driving me away. In a way, I'm no different than the people who clicks on these videos, as I am also judging a book by its covers.
This kind of multi-modal behaviour can be very hard to capture with A/B test. You get a large influx of people that more than offsets the loss in the other audience pool. It's also anyone's guess on which group is better. From a pure business perspective, it's probably okay to lose me, as I use adblock and/or youtube-dl to watch the videos, which means I don't really drive revenue. That said, I've noticed some second order effects: as I'm more technical, I would recommend these type of content to others who will listen to my advice. I've noticed similar effects with others. If the more technical people are in the second group and are driven away, I wonder if this kind of stuff makes a difference with the long term health of a channel/content generator, which could be very difficult to quantify.
Like the sibling commenter here, reactions to this (as I've observed) are indeed very bimodal. If I see any video on YouTube with a face with a strong expression, I will not click it, no matter how interesting the title, because I hate how contrived the thumbnail is.
I think it might be more honest of you to phrase it not as: I have to do this because otherwise I don't get 20% more views. That feels a little bit disingenuous to me. You don't have to do anything. You could probably get a lot more views by colluding with another YouTuber to create drama or apparent "fights", like so many seem to. Aka, go full Kardashian. But you don't. You choose very explicitly what you do. Which does include goofy face thumbnails, but does not include staging YouTube drama.
A more honest phrasing to me might be something like: "Goofy faces get more views, and without them, my YouTube channel has much less income. I'm trying to support myself with YouTube, and so I am doing goofy faces even though I hate it and think it's completely asinine." You get really close to something like this phrasing, & the underlying message can be gathered by your other comments, but you don't outright own it. If you are going to do something asinine for exposure, you might as well own it imo.
So, with that out of the way: This project is really cool and thanks for doing a write-up & video on it :)
I just wanted to thank you for replying so candidly and I did not mean to turn this post in a discussion about youtube thumbnails, your post otherwise was quite interesting!
Having a face in the thumbnail helps me to identify channels that already of interest me. That is the positive.
While there is an element of entertainment to the channel, I usually view your channel for information (e.g. interesting project ideas). I expect the thumbnail to show me what the video is about. If an exaggerated facial expression draws my attention away from that, or leads me to believe there is more entertainment than substance to the video (e.g. it is for shock value), then I will simply skip over it.
Throwing in a face for a 20-30% increase in views is almost certainly worth it. The question is: are the exaggerated attention grabbing thumbnails worth a bit more than that? Each time I skip a video, the channel's relevance goes down in my mind. Each time the relevance goes down, I am less likely to assess future thumbnails positively.[1] My thoughts are that the "bit more" may be of short term value for gaining viewers, but counterproductive in retaining long term viewers.
[1] Yes, it is an unfair assessment since it is based upon unwatched videos. On the other hand, viewers are confronted with a deluge of videos each time they visit YouTube.
Could you please A/B test if it needs to be your exaggerated face or if stock photos would suffice? ;)
Also kudos to building your brand, I only saw the headline and already figured it might be you.. (or Linus, but it didn't say anything about /dropping/ 5k)
That's a good question, actually. I don't know what the inflection point would be, but at some point too, you get some face recognition with existing audience that might increase the CTR versus stock photos.
I think it would have a lot to do with whether the presenter is part of the video (I do 'talking head' a lot) versus off-camera (like, for example, ETA Prime, LPL, or AvE).
Exaggerated face with a PCB is basically your trademark. If you see it while scrolling you know it's you (and that it's going to be high quality content).
I'm not convinced that it's optimized in any way. Linus claims to have A/B tested it, but changing the thumbnails disturbs the experiment too much (different time of day, Youtube knows that you changed the thumbnail and probably uses that information for something, CDN lag, who knows what else), and the sample size is too small to be statistically meaningful.
I watch a ton of YouTube and exaggerated facial expressions in thumbnails are rare in the channels I watch. The channels don't seem to be suffering for it, many have subscriber counts in the millions. I even have a concrete head-to-head example. Every Saturday morning, two channels I watch (clough42 and blondihacks) both post videos. YouTube puts them at the top of recommended every Saturday without fail. clough42 uses his face in the thumbnails, blondihacks uses a picture of her project. Both get recommended. Both channels have grown dramatically over the last year. As far as I can tell, YouTube considers them equally good.
On the other hand, I might not be the target demographic for "I cobbled together a bunch of computer shit" videos (which is kind of LTT's and Jeff Geerling's shtick). So maybe it's the right optimization for that kind of channel. (But if you want revenue, then your sponsors probably want me watching the video and not 13 year old kids with no money. Just saying.)
I will conclude that I pretty much won't click videos like this. Seeing the inside of someone's mouth in a computing video basically says to me "look, the content isn't very good, but I know how to play the game". This is unfair (Jeff, your content is fine), but it's how I feel. It's like seeing the first Google result for "foo bar" being "Cheap Foo Bars Foo Bar Food Bar Foo Bar Compatible With Quuxgorch". I'm not going to click it. You may have won the algorithm, but you didn't win me.
I'd believe it works in an A/B test, but the end of the day the reason it's higher is young children click on anything with that stupid looking face on it.
So I bet it does result in higher views, just children viewing it.
Doesn't mean you should do it though, maybe try having some dignity.
I came into the comments just to say exactly that. What’s worse is that OP is aware and admits it’s stupid, yet continues to engage in this shady, annoying, and extremely stupid tactic.
I don’t click on crap videos and content like that on principle. Interesting or not.
I don't know what Jeff Geerling's income is, but I'm pretty sure he's a full time Youtuber at this point. He doesn't like the stupid thumbnails either, but generating Youtube views is pretty much his job. Maybe there's some kind of long term strategy where refraining from stupid thumbnails curates a more intelligent audience, but if your livelihood depends on audience size, that's a big risk to take. In fact I hope it works out that way, but until that's a proven strategy I can't fault geerlingguy for the stupid thumbnails.
Youtube is gamified. Jeff doesn't play the game, he doesn't get the views. If he doesn't get the views, he doesn't get the sponsorships. If he doesn't get the sponsorships, he goes back to being a just another devops engineer who doesn't make the thing no one else will ever make.
I get it, the face is the worst. But until youtube fixes its algorithm (i dunno, to de-prioritize videos with 'the face') the Jeff's have to do the face to get the views to get the algorithmic advantage to get the views to get the sponsors to make the making worth the making.
I understand where you're coming from, but you're talking as if this "Jeff" is a machine and not a person. He's a real human who can think and make decisions regardless of what this "algorithm" could potentially dictate. This prioritization of the "face" is all speculation at the end of the day, and until the "Jeff"s of Youtube stop acting like machines and start acting like thinking-individuals who don't think that the end justify the means, the stupid face will take over, and this is what I and others are criticizing.
Isn't it how YouTube works now? It's not 2005 anymore; Cringe thumbnail, Click-bait headline and more cringe in the Video is the standard operating procedure for someone who wants to make a YouTube career, eventually making enough revenue to do all that in a larger scale with Michael Bay movie budget.
There are very few left on YT who continue to make unedited video in the maker space[1][2] and obviously get punished by YT algorithms for that.
Cringe is part and parcel of YT, If we don't like it we should be watching videos on PeerTube, LBRY etc.
I'm glad I'm not the only one with this feeling. I get that it's producing more views and you need to play the youtube game, but I miss a lot of content just because I decide NOT to click out of principle.
It’s not just the thumbnail faces. Streamers constantly overreact to even the most mundane things.
My son and a friend of his were watching some pair of Minecraft streamers, and I couldn’t get follow what was happening. Both men were constantly yelling “WHAT? WHAT? OH MY GOD! AHHHHHHHHH!” As far as I could tell, they were both yelling independent things, and just walking around sheep.
As someone who constantly underreacts to everything, even when I receive a nice gift, I must confess that I am somewhat jealous of the streamer generation.
I think it's because the thumbnails are small, so if the faces aren't exaggerated you won't perceive any particular emotion at all. It's a bit like the difference between theatre and film acting.
This is probably why. Similarly, stage makeup on actors is typically very heavy to accentuate the facial features at a distance, making them easier to read.
But that starts from the premise that you even care about the "emotion" expressed in the video. While I'm sure that there are many genres of videos where the emotions expressed by the authors are relevant to the topic at hand, there are many topics in which an expression of emotion, let alone an exaggerated one, is completely out of place.
I don't think that's true. I'm sure a lot of youtubers want people to enjoy their videos and get something from them, but they're also monetizing eyeballs. That means clicks on videos, which means grabbing attention in the video thumbnails. All other things being equal, people will click on a thumbnail with someone with an exaggerated facial expression more often than a neutral one.
As to why that works, my theory is that we're wired to respond to more extreme emotional displays because we're socially oriented great apes and that kind of information is important for navigating the world.
In 2019 I filed my (Dutch) taxes on my phone, while I was on a bus somewhere in the north of Argentina after previously having traveled for 20 something hours. It took me about 15 minutes to check if the numbers from the government were correct (they were) and I was done. Americans are being duped by these predatory companies.
But I am going to play devil's advocate here, did you get the "best deal"?
It all comes down to deductibles. In France, the "one click taxes" option assumes 10% of your salary is deductible, which is often a good deal but sometimes, it may actually be more, especially if you have a long commute. The government app won't help you with that.
It may not help you with incentives too. For example, you may get some tax rebates if you did some work to improve the energy efficiency of your house, what exactly you can declare? And charities, loans, etc... A good accountant may help you save a significant amount with all these details.
Tax software are like a middle ground between simple, no brainer, government issued "one click" tax filling and hiring a professional accountant. Note that in France, most self-employed people hire an accountant, proper tax filling can be a minefield if you are not an employee.
And by the way, that's Intuit's argument. That it is used to justify its evil deeds is a thing, but the argument itself is not without merit.
I believe the way it works here (US), is most people with the standard deduction works for probably 80-90% of cases because their finances aren't complex enough or they're not doing enough where the deductions exceed the standard. So most would be fine with government just telling you what you owe/they owe and you just signing off or making a correction.
If you're doing a lot of charity donations, real estate, student loan debt, saving receipts for work related expenses, calculating depreciation on assets, etc, then its worth it, but by then you probably have a personal accountant doing it for you, not a program.
Also factor in the removal of the State and Local Tax deduction. Prior to that I ended up writing off my CA taxes instead of taking the standard deduction.
I’ll save my personal political ranting for a different space.
Addressing the GP, yeah our system has been messed with by the tax prep companies. One year I had a complicated (for me) tax situation and I hired a CPA. They managed to make a mistake that lead me to overpaying by thousands. The IRS was nice enough to mail me a check.
The IRS clearly has enough info to run a European style system. We (as a country) just underfund the IRS and have special interest vested in maintaining the status quo. Clearly those special interests are doing a great job if someone with a state certification and professional tax software can mess up the math. A friend had the same issue with this past tax year and owes a balance plus penalties. She has every intention of paying her taxes. Why does our system make it hard for her to do so?
There’s no good reason why we should have to chance these situations. We should just be able to pay our taxes correctly at time we are paid and move on.
It's not only Europe. I live in Uruguay and I got an SMS to check if my auto-filed taxes were correct, if I do I have the option to make changes right in the government website.
And the local IRS has the best paying software development jobs in the government, so they actually have decent software (although they could do with some more UX people).
Also the standard deduction was recently significantly increased (I think it was doubled in 2017, can't remember for sure the exact the time/amount though), so it's a better deal for even more people.
I'm Dutch as well. A couple of years ago my university fees were made tax deductible, I'm hazy on the details but basically I dropped out of my masters degree to work on a startup. Normally if you finish your degree some of your costs are relieved by the government with some loan forgiveness scheme. After 5 years or so they decided I definitely wasn't finishing that degree and all my university costs were suddenly tax deductible.
Obviously I had no idea of this scheme, I have no accountant and my university fees of 5 years ago were far from my mind.
Randomly got €6000 euros income tax back, very nice windfall courtesy of the Netherlands government.
That seems like a surprisingly large amount of money. I thought university wasn't that expensive there (enough that the deduction of the income saved 6000 euros on taxes). Did you mean it became a tax credit and you just got all the money you paid in fees back?
Yeah it was all of it for three years, education costs are 100% deductible, so if it was 3 years at 2000/yr (standard university rate back then) it would be 6000 total. I forgot the exact amount because in that same year I also bought a house and there's a bunch of tax deductibles there as well, I think I got back over 8000 in total that year.
Normally the final dues are a lot less, probably 0 for people who have no mutations and a regular job. I had to pay 300 euro this year because I did a single freelance gig on the side.
edit: Note that this is probably a very exceptional situation. Normally college students don't make enough money to be paying taxes in the first place, I had the perfect storm of having all the deductibles being applicable in a single year, and making a good wage that year. I'm just telling this story because it's an example of the system randomly giving me the sort of tax benefit even a dedicated accountant might have missed, just because it system applied its rules to all the information it has about me.
In the US that's called a "tax credit". A "deduction" is something that reduces the amount of income used for tax calculations.
So I thought you meant you got 6000 back because your university fees became deductable. At 25% tax rate, that would be 24,000 in fees. It sounds like you got a tax credit.
Hmm, you're right. So there's one thing I didn't mention and that is that my income was abnormally high that year because I was bought out of the company I resigned from. Pushing me into the 50% tax rate territory. This might have made the deductibles that much more significant. I would have to look up the exact numbers to know for sure.
> In the Netherlands, the average single worker faced a net average tax rate of 28.7% in 2020, compared with the OECD average of 24.8%. In other words, in the Netherlands the take-home pay of an average single worker, after tax and benefits, was 71.3% of their gross wage, compared with the OECD average of 75.2%.
The specific number wasn't as important as pointing out that NL doesn't have a magically fixed number (and certainly not a high one) for income taxation.
If this figure is true, do you see the symbolism of it as I do? It's not 49%, where the individual will still work mostly for themselves but 51%, where the state owns the majority of the labor for each individual. I find this number chilling.
The figure is not true, it used to be 51% for income above a certain amount (I think 60000?) but now it's 49,50% for income above 68000. Even when it was 51%, you would have to make more than 500,000 for the total taxes to be exceed 50%.
Anyway, what's chilling about it? You're phrasing it in a very weird way, the state doesn't own labor. It is due taxes for its services rendered.
The Netherlands is ridiculously rich and the government takes very good care of its citizens. I think it's hard to imagine for Americans how much value we get from our government. Traveling from The Netherlands to the states. Even your richest cities have poor people hungry, suffering and distressed just camping around everywhere. I'm not saying we've got it perfect, but I'm pretty happy with the deal we got.
The 500k figure is quite misleading. Sure that’s for 51%, but anything over 100k, it already exceeds 40%. That’s still a huge number.
There are tons of poor and hungry people in NL, and the gov is actively hostile to homelessness. There’s lots of municipal corruption, and central inefficiency. I know lots of Dutch citizens who are in student debt, and very few families who can afford to buy a home before 35.
It’s a fallacy that somehow this is the /the/ tax rate that can provide for citizens. There is no magic number, and we can always demand more efficiency.
To me it's simple. My tax as someone trying to get a startup to work is about 30%, it would be 22% in the US. That means I pay 8% extra to be largely abstracted from the harsh reality of the suffering of the unlucky and disadvantaged.
“An average loan of 700 euros per month means that study debts of 50,000 euros are no longer an exception.
(…)
It makes sense that students work more due to higher costs of room rent and tuition fees and less income thanks to the lack of the basic grant.”
I have a student debt of over 40,000 euro. Because I have a job I pay 250 euros per month on it. My partner has a similar debt, but because she does not have a job she doesn't make any payments. Does it suck, yeah. Does it make us poor or hurt us in any significant way? No.
It's a joke, because student debt is a sign of wealth, not of poverty. My government invested almost 50,000 euro into giving me plenty of time and space to study. I was able to live as a student for 7 years, usually working less than 12 hours per week to supplement the loan. I leveraged that loan into getting an education is super valuable, if I wanted to I could take a job double my current salary and live very comfortably in Amsterdam.
Different story for my partner perhaps, but if she never makes income, after a certain amount of time her loan will be forgiven even without her ever making payments.
I don't know how home ownership is correlated to poverty. It's tied to wealth, sure, and it's a very bad thing that it's so low. But the average renting person in The Netherlands lives very comfortably, so not owning a home is not a strong indicator for poverty.
Homelessness, that's the indicator you're looking for. But you are right, it seems I am living in a bubble, because there's a severe problem with homelessness in The Netherlands right now. https://nltimes.nl/2020/02/17/homelessness-netherlands-doubl...
According to wikipedia there's more registered homeless people in The Netherlands than there are in the states, I don't know how to make sense of that because the scenes I saw in SF, Portland and SLC were unlike anything I've seen in any wealthy European country. It made me think of Hungary and Romania.
The reason it seems so bad in those particular cities is because they actually attract and retain homeless. One due to weather and two, as poor as the services are for the homeless in those cities, they are better than many other cities.
You wouldn't last long living on the streets of Fargo North Dakota.
> abstracted from the harsh reality of the suffering of the unlucky and disadvantaged
> Dutch citizens with student debt.. that's a joke right?
To be brutally honest, both these statements lead me to believe that you live in a bubble within NL.
I personally know tons of Dutchies in both situations, and I have a feeling you might (unknowningly) as well. Might be worth expanding your social circle if not.
> very few families who can afford to buy a home before 35
So, imagine knowing very few families who can afford to buy a home. Like, at all. So long as we're still comparing the Netherlands and the US, I don't think there's much of a contest.
That said, the central thrust of your comment holds true; always room for improvement.
Now, this may surprise you, since you haven’t bothered to research it (1), but NL and USA differ in home ownership by ~4% (69 vs 65.3). That’s not statistically significant to be honest.
> where the state owns the majority of the labor for each individual
I guess that it all depends what do you get back. To live in a well functioning society is worth a kingdom.
In many places your landlord owns more than half of your income, that could be more worrisome. At least I can vote for my representants in the government.
Finally, I pay over 50% on part of my salary in Sweden, with what I have left I have an awesome live and extra to save, so I will not complain.
Meanwhile other markets were heavenly corrected around 2009-2015 after the housing crush Sweden came out quite unscratched. Low interest rates also have created an incentive to invest in housing for the average citizen. On the other side construction companies in Sweden are quite shy to build new housing as investment goes to other more profitable industries, Sweden is below EU average in construction. Finally Sweden population have grown more than the EU average.
So, the swedish housing availability is insufficient and prices reflect that. It is an imbalance that is difficult to solve short term. And probably also overpriced as the interest rates are low and predicted to be low.
I read your comment twice, but I still don’t see any agreement about the high rents going to landlords in Sweden. Perhaps you bought a house a while ago, and have been insulated from this crisis. Either way, you can’t deny reality…
The reason your taxes are simpler though is because the Dutch government doesn’t use the tax system to implement policy like the US does. The US Congress uses the tax system to influence social policy as well as to deliver benefits for specific groups and industries. And over time all of these legislative additions have turned a simple revenue raising system into a complex mess of deductions and credits.
Now I am not defending turbo tax’s predatory actions in the past but it’s not complicating the tax system just taking advantage of it being complicated.
In europe we just directly regulate behaviour either by directly taxing it or making it illegal.
In the US they set tax levels much higher and then offer breaks as incentives.
The latter has the philosophical virtue of making behaviour "expensive but not illegal" (ie., in europe you cannot legally avoid the tax).
However it dramatically complicates government and makes US citizens dramatically "overtaxed" absent these breaks. What we in europe often miss is that the US anti-tax lobby is reacting to a very different tax environment that is, on paper, very extreme.
Yeah if you work a W-2 job and the company is making tax deductions from your paycheck, your taxes are pretty simple. If you have a mortgage, you can deduct the interest. I think most people are in this category. Taxes just start getting complicated proportionate to the creative compensation some jobs offer - deferred stock purchase programs, etc., - or if you have some complicated deduction or third-party income sources.
> If you have a mortgage, you can deduct the interest. I think most people are in this category
That's true, but you need to have other deductions or a fairly large mortgage for it to be worth taking that deduction instead of the standard deduction. Most people are better off with the standard deduction.
Sweden uses tax policy to influence things and our taxes are just as easy. The state knows most stuff and then we just go in and adjust the default.
So, no, the reason is that they have all the information already and for most people just need you to verify it. In the US, the tax companies are lobbying the government to keep it difficult. The subject has been covered on HN every year during tax season.
You employer doesn't know your deductibles in the Netherlands due to privacy concerns (and other rules as well), which you definitely want to file in most cases since you pay less money or get some back. You are also responsible for your taxes, if the employer screws up you should check it. This is probably different from the UK. It is not a "can't do" but more or less a "won't do".
edit: so it's not that different, just a different method of doing so. Good to know.
You tell the tax office of any unusual deductibles, and they give your employers a 'tax code' which tells them how much allowance to give you (but critically not why, to better protect your privacy).
Even this isn't needed in most cases; things are either done employer side (paid from pre-tax income, like pensions) or directly by the government (basic rate tax is semi-automatically added to charitable donations, so only higher rate taxpayers need to declare it, and they all fill in a short return anyway).
Your employer doesn't need to know what your deductibles are (also the deductibles are much more limited here). If you, for example, make a large one off pension contribution, HMRC will adjust your tax code, which your employer will just apply to your payroll.
Most of the big ones can be done without a self assessment. If you make a pension contribution for example, you can call hmrc and tell them and they'll adjust your tax code
Not at all. The list of things you can claim for is very limited, and the majority of them are automatically applied. Having to actually contact HMRC is a rarity. If you are salaried employee with no extra cash coming in, you don't need to do anything.
Another example of how the system works - if you are working two jobs, both as a regular employee, HRMC will instruct your employer as to what your tax deduction should be for that paycheck to make sure that things are balanced. For <some large number>% of people, this will be correct, and if it's not, it will rectify itself over 2 or 3 pay periods. If that's _still_ not enough, a phone call to HMRC (usually taking less than 10 minuts for the two times in a decade I've had to do it) will resolve the issue in your next check.
If I want to give (say) £100 to a charity, I give £75 and sign something agreeing to allow the charity to get the rest from the income taxes I already paid.
Do I understand correctly that charities report contributions to the government, which then adjusts the taxes due from the donors? That seems like a good system.
The tax relief goes to the charity itself, rather than the donor. They can claim a top-up of up to 25% of your donation from the government, as long as the total amount claimed by all donation recipients does not exceed the total annual income tax paid by the donor. So if you donate £100 and fill out a declaration saying that you 'Gift Aid' that donation, the charity can claim an additional £25 from the government, as long as you paid at least £25 in income taxes that financial year.
Note that if you're paying in the 40% and/or 45% income tax brackets, the charity doesn't know about that, and still only gets the 25% topup (equivalent to the 20% income tax most people pay).
You can either:
* Gift that remaining amount to HMRC by doing nothing (it will not go to the charity)
* Claim it back (I don't know any other way to do this other than filing a self assessment)
I did not know until now that the other 20% could be reclaimed by the donor as well, if they paid 40% tax.
If the donor donates that amount as well and we loop infinitely, the final amount received by the charity would be exactly 1.5625x the originally-donated amount (assuming that the HMRC allows arbitrary small fractions of a penny to be claimed).
Explanation: if you donate an amount x, the final amount would be the infinite series x + sigma(0.25*0.2^(k-1) + 0.2^k, k=1, k=inf), which is the sum of two separate geometric series, so for each one, we can use the formula a/(1-r), where 'a' is the first term (0.25 for the first series, 0.2 for the second) and 'r' is the ratio between each term (0.2 in both cases).
In the UK, deductibles on mortgage interest payments (known as MIRAS[0]) was abolished for private home owners in 2000. As a renter this kind of always stuck in my craw that homeowners got this preferential treatment and was quite glad it was abolished (even after becoming a "homeowner").
Oddly, buy-to-let landlords do retain this deductible, though HMRC have fiddled around with how this works over recent times[1].
Yes, the BTL sort of makes sense though if you view the mortgage as a business expense, but BTL has had a distorting effect on the UK housing market for too long - changes are desperately needed here, but with so many Tory donors being housing firms, it's unlikely to happen.
That's likely true because like the majority of people, you don't make enough money, or wont see enough benefit from the effort involved. Anyone earning over £100k a year is required to file a self assessment, and if you've reached that point, you also likely have a bunch of tax deductible expenses, that even if the £-value is low, you're going to include in your filing since you're doing it anyway.
Worth noting that if someone is a contractor they'll need to file taxes, even if they pay themselves a lower wage (and thus wouldn't show up in the high earners stats). If they're an NHS doctor/nurse who also does some private work, same. Or anyone who has more than one employer, or is in the gig economy. It's not vast swathes of people, but I think it'd be more than 2 or 3%.
No. I don't like paperwork. So, I don't do paperwork.
It can be more tax efficient to file tax paperwork, but I don't want to do paperwork, so I just had an umbrella employ me when somebody insisted on hiring me as a "contractor" and the umbrella handled the paperwork for which of course they keep a fee. As far as the government is concerned I just had two PAYE employers, the umbrella and my "real" job.
Having multiple employers also does not require filing taxes. One of the employers gets given a zero tax code and they tax all your pay at full rate, the other one gets a normal tax code which reflects your personal allowance and other considerations. My tax code was oscillating all over the place - but that's not a problem it's all automated.
If you love paperwork you can choose to do all the paperwork. Or if you love money and don't hate paperwork maybe you can save a few hundred quid by filing and I hope it makes you happy. I hate paperwork, and I have plenty of money. So, no, despite earning a lot of money and having worked as a contractor I preferred to stick with PAYE.
Filling out paperwork for the accountant to look at is still paperwork.
The HMRC will take a fair cut of my gross income, which is fine, and then leave me alone whereas an accountant earns money by bothering me with more paperwork.
> most professionals in the UK will need to file taxes, but accountants are very cheap here
I'm guessing you're conflating professionals with contractors, as most high earning professionals I know do not need an accountant to file their taxes, as it's all just done on a self assessment, which is extremely straight forward, and there's little opportunity to game that system effectively.
Meanwhile contractors operating through Ltd entities (now may be hamstrung somewhat with IR35) absolutely should be leveraging an accountant to take advantage of the various ways to reduce their taxable earnings.
> most high earning professionals I know do not need an accountant to file their taxes
Yes you don't need an accountant (and I didn't say that you did) but if you want one instead of doing it yourself they just about £100 rather than I don't know how many thousand that would cost you in the US.
Likely hundreds rather than thousands through a tax preparation service (they’re not real accountants.) I just use one of the less expensive tax filing websites. It’s somewhat more complex than filing self assessment online in the U.K.
How complicated were your taxes? Did you work overseas for an extended period of time (outside of the EU)? Did you have special tax credits to claim, business profits to add, or anything else unusual? Simple taxes are relatively easy to file in America, too.
That's awesome! In 2006 I did the same thing with Turbotax for free at my PC at my desk in 15 minutes. I'm sure I could have started doing it on my phone once I got a smartphone but opted not to.
Pretty much yeah. I guess there are some deductions which need to be filed manually as the government would have no way of knowing about them. Like if you have a really long commute to work you get to deduct a certain amount per KM from your taxes.
But mostly these days, unless you run a company, you don't really have to change much about your pre-filled tax statement. Only once have I experienced that my housing association made addendums to the yearly tax report that needed to be changed in my tax statement.
I also lost some money on micro loans last year that apparently I had to file deductions for myself, but it amounted to so little money that I just let the state keep that money.
People always gloss over the massive scale differences when comparing the US to European countries, whether it’s prisons, taxes, healthcare, etc. It’s like, show me the system operating as well with 5x the population before even joking that it should work as efficiently at 10x, much less 20x. Call me when you’re filing EU taxes as individuals in addition to your nation-state taxes.
Its not the predatory companies that are the problem its the US tax system. If it was possible for people to "check the numbers from the government" on an app, it would happen here too.
It absolutely is a problem of predatory companies spending money on lobbying against simpler tax code. An equal share of the blame is on the politicians accepting these “legal” bribes against the interests of their constituents.
Lobbyists were supposed to be for promoting the interests of small groups that might not have the representation among a politicians constituents to warrant paying attention to. Instead we have rampant and excessive spending by corporations that lobby to keep their monopolies over segments of the market that harm American citizens.
> In 2016 alone, Intuit, the makers of TurboTax, spent $2 million on lobbying, ProPublica reports. H&R Block spent $3 million, some of it on the same efforts.
I'm not convinced $5m a year would make such a big impact.
I strongly suspect that it's not the $5m/yr these companies are spending that's doing it; there's basically three other camps who push (directly or indirectly) for this:
* Special-interest groups whose preferential tax treatment might be threatened if there's a push to simplify the tax code (as having the government do the taxes for you kind of requires the taxes be simpler to do so).
* Ideologues who hate government spending but don't think that tax cuts count as spending.
* Anti-tax crusaders who want to make filing taxes painful so there's more grassroots support for cutting taxes. (Think Grover Norquist here).
Of course it's possible. The government will charge you if you filled out the forms wrong, so they have a lot available - instead they could prefill a lot of the information.
With all the wrongs about Turbo Tax and monopolizing tax filing - criticisms are appropriate. That said, I much prefer the US system. The US IRS already knows what how much tax an indiviual owes just like the Dutch government. Having to manually file taxes is a feature, not a bug IMO. The only difference is that the US IRS assumes you'd want to itemize and customize your tax return by default whereas the Dutch government makes standard deductions the default. I wouldn't want the government to just send me a number of what I owe. Sure you can challenge it, but I prefer the default to be that the citizen files taxes and the government can tally up the proposed taxes against the data they have and either accept or challenge it.
However, this Turbo Tax monopoly needs to go. There should be a free (OSS) software that can file the taxes.
In Norway the system is similar to the Netherlands. I think you are missing the part where it is mind numbingly easy to go in and add your own deductions. Also, you aren't challenging the amount you owe, you are simply adjusting it.
Having filed taxes in America and Norway, the American system is designed to make you fail and to use paid for nonsense to do something that is incredibly easy.
I spent a year working in Norway and forgot to tell the tax authorities to give me my return in English. Made do by typing stuff into Google translate. Still took less time than filing my US taxes does now.
> Sure you can challenge it, but I prefer the default to be that the citizen files taxes and the government can tally up the proposed taxes against the data they have and either accept or challenge it.
But why? Both have the same outcome but one is more work and costs more as well as has a greater chance of you getting it wrong and being fined in the process.
Would you also prefer supermarkets to make you calculate the total amount you owe when you get to the cashier, making sure you applied all promotions and frequent shopper deductions manually?
You don’t seem to understand how things work. The government would send you a pre-filled tax return that contains everything they already know. You would check that and could then make amendments as needed. It doesn’t make sense to view it as a feature to have to put in the work to fill a tax return from scratch while the government already knows what should be there and will check it.
Like In every negotiation the advantage is on the side of the party who has the most information. The government first disclosing what they know gives you as taxpayer an advantage.
Have you ever been to a DMV in the USA and see how dysfunction it is?
So many reasons why I don't support this. Ease of filing is one of the aspects, rather small for me.
1) USA's government is far more incompetent than Dutch
2) If US IRS sends me a prefilled tax form with erroneous income, say off by 10%, sure I can correct it and file it but now the onus of proof is on the citizen to disprove the error. You might say 'Ok, it is just prefiling it, you can always correct it' - future laws will ask for proof.
3) For a small and nimble country like Netherlands it works very well. Voicing concerns in Netherlands is direct and easy. Not here, USA would mess this up big time.
4) Ideologically, I have issues. It would be extremely orweillian and big-brotherish to get a tax bill from the government - yes I know its just 'pre-filling the boxes' but it will creep up from there.
5) I hate paying for Turbo Tax but there is no denying - it works extremely well. USA's federal system with 100% gaurantee would not be as good. We need to go open source, not put more power in the hands of the massively incompetent IRS and more generally Federal Government.
6) Local and State taxes - this would mean absolutely a patch work of systems that are supplied by shitty software companies to local and state governments. Hard pass.
7) Laws would creep up and change to not just say pre-fill the tax forms but would require massive effort from the citizen to disprove the government. If the filing process initiates from the citizen, the government has to go out on a limb to prove that it's incorrect which is how it should be.
8) I would support ease of filing taxes. But hey! We have that. It is called 1040EZ which takes no more than 10 mins for simple taxes. No software required.
9) I prefer totally offline tax filing. I use Turbo Tax but always print out the tax forms. You might think this is old fashioned but I like doing things old fashioned way. I don't want to digitize anything especially when it comes to automated shitty SaaS hired by the government, I have zero confidence.
10) Even without OSS, I just think that $79 + $____ owed taxes is the marginal rate. $79 -> goes to private industry (Turbo Tax, which does a great job) and $_____ owed to the government. I don't want tax payer money to fund a massive national 'prefiling' tax program. I would support getting rid of $79 effective flat tax that only goes to Turbo Tax.
If the only advantage is the 'pre-filling' part, then I much prefer assembling the data (W2, 1099s, etc) myself and file taxes. Period.
“If the only advantage is the 'pre-filling' part, then I much prefer assembling the data (W2, 1099s, etc) myself and file taxes. Period.”
Why? The government gives you all they know and you can then accept, amend or totally rewrite the return. I don’t see the downside to this.
“2) If US IRS sends me a prefilled tax form with erroneous income, say off by 10%, sure I can correct it and file it but now the onus of proof is on the citizen to disprove the error. You might say 'Ok, it is just prefiling it, you can always correct it' - future laws will ask for proof.”
The burden of proof is on you already when you write your return from scratch. It gets compared to what they know already which is the data a prefilled return would contain.
It's more of an oligopoly than a monopoly as you can pay TaxAct or TaxSlayer or H&R Block, etc if you don't want to pay TurboTax. The issue is that the IRS could relatively easily provide online federal tax filing as a free service but they choose not to compete with the tax prep industry.
That the word challange is overly dramatic plus technically incorrect (adding a deduction that the government could not possibly know of is not a challenge). In actuality you just add any missing deductions, double check the numbers and then submit. His proposed system is just busy work.
The problem is that I am not a tax expert and but it rings a lot of alarm bells of expansion of government power.
We're effectively bandwagoning behind Netherland's system while ignoring the massive differences between levels of government, size of population and scale, and the overall law making process.
All for a stupendous reason = Ease of filing. Filing taxes on a bus while on vacation is such a outrageously insignificant 'feature'.
Probably? I don't really agree with gp, but up-voted, as it reads like a reasonable argument. Normally I'd probably neither up or down vote, but I generally browse with "show dead" - and it's sad to see comments down voted to oblivion when users offer an opinion that's just slightly against the consensus. Without dissenting opinions there's not much debate left. /meta
Yup. I have come to realize that not seeing any dissenting opinions is scary and terrifying. So thanks for being charitable in this pursuit. There are a lot of ideas on HN that get no pushback and mob mentality that I want to challenge and contest. I don't think tax filing process is that bad but it is magnetizing to say "I filed my taxes while on a bus on a vacation" than to dig into the deeper implications of what that means.
To be honest, I objectively like Dutch system for simple taxes similar to 1040EZ form in USA. I philosophically and ideologically oppose it. And, furthermore, I have no faith in our government and its ability to run efficiently.
> The US IRS already knows what how much tax an indiviual owes just like the Dutch government.
Citation very much needed; that’s not true for anyone running a business (even a side business), for anyone with shares of stock purchased before Jan 1, 2011 or mutual funds before Jan 1, 2012, and many other not uncommon situations.
Did the parent comment about the Netherlands also apply to business owners? I have dealt with business taxes in other countries besides the US (though not Netherlands) and you absolutely are expected to hire an accountant to do it. It may well be impossible to file them otherwise. In the US for the most common businesses you can do pass-through taxation and just add a schedule to your regular return.
Even in a pass-through business that can use schedule C or E, this part is still almost always false: “IRS already knows what how much tax an [individual] owes”. They almost never have enough information to correctly and completely fill out schedule C or E for you.
Sure but the point was the comparison to the Dutch system, hence the "...like the Dutch government" part of that sentence. So while its great to make sure people are clear about describing tax laws here on the internets, it may not be an aspect of the argument that is relevant.
I read that sentence most plainly as having two claims: The IRS has enough information to prepare returns for US individuals. This is similar to the Dutch ability claimed above.
Rather than as “the IRS has the same limitations in individual tax return preparation as the Dutch system”.
(GP then goes on to claim that while the IRS has this ability, they are philosophically opposed to this becoming the standard method of tax preparation, which further biases me to thinking that the first reading was their intent.)
Do you think you'll enjoy the office as much if (for simplicity sake) 50% of the people enjoy working from home so much they do not want to return? From my discussions with colleagues much more than 50% hopes to work from home 3+ days a week once this all is over.
Not the O.P., but speaking from experience, yes, a thousand times yes.
Here in Sydney, Australia, both office and WFH are available at my work. I'll have anywhere between 0% and 90% of my team in the office depending on the day or week.
In my experience, even being the only one in the office is a thousand times better than WFH.
Whether teammates are WFH affects me less than whether I'm WFH.
I exclusively cook with cocco, to me it's miles beyond the competition but also a lot more expensive than rummo or de cecco. Haven't don't any direct comparisons between rummo and cocco, would you say the quality is similar?
In my opinion Rummo is more commercial than Cocco, and despite being a very valid product, doesn't have the same quality.
Basically Cocco bought the old bronze machinery from De Cecco, when it still was a relatively small family business and not the huge company that it is today, and keeps using them... with an overhead that justifies the premium (if you like good pasta).
Anyhow, as I said, I mostly cook with De Cecco because it's easy to find in the supermarket, sometimes I go to an Italian shop that's close to where I live, and buy some artisanal pasta, and on rare occasions on holidays, I make home-made pasta (tagliatelle or pasta alla chitarra, and ragù as a sauce... it's really not that difficult, and it tastes much better than anything you can buy)
> it's really not that difficult, and it tastes much better than anything you can buy
I agree that it's not that difficult to make, but I would argue that it's not necessarily much better in every case.
As my chief witness I enter Marcella Hazan. The late doyenne of Italian Cuisine.
In "The Classic Italian Cook Book: The Art of Italian Cooking and the Italian Art of Eating" she has more to say on the subject, but in short and from [1]:
"Although some types of pasta, like tagliatelle, are best made fresh at home, others, like spaghetti, should be bought dried. Pasta should be matched carefully to sauce."
I think that's the key. It really depends on the type of pasta and the sauce used.
That said: There's no doubt that ragu with freshly made tagliatelle is something devine.
It used to be the case that if zooming was enabled, every normal tap would have a 300ms delay on iOS Safari. Iirc they fixed that since (not sure how, can anyone recall?). But basically most mobile web apps built a few years ago would disable zoom so they got snappy interaction.
Agreed at Calibre! Ihave the same qualms with EPUBReader in FF, it does not get close to what edge was capable of. I'll take a look at cover at home as I sadly cannot install it at work.
