u/thetortelini

I understand that voters in several counties will be asked to vote to raise sales tax to fund Bart. First off, I fully support these initiatives, because I love riding Bart and think it's a totally essential service for Bay Area. I think we need to do whatever it takes to keep it running smoothly!

As a reminder: You benefit from public transit, even if you never ride it, because it reduces traffic congestion and improves air quality.

All that said, I am wondering why the mechanism for closing the funding shortfall is a sales tax, which is considered regressive, rather than through property or income taxes, or some other reallocation of government funds that doesn't disproportionately affect poorer people?

Thanks in advance for your insights transit / economics / government nerds of Reddit!

Edit: First comment by r/oakseaer provides some great insight on this. Sales taxes appear to be the best option due to reasons they explain below.

Has anyone tried to use the North America version of the Mudita Kompakt while visiting the UK, with T-mobile as your US carrier?

I'm wondering whether or not I should expect the phone to work there. Any way to tell?

Thanks in advance!

1 month in and I am absolutely blown away by how good the Mudita Kompakt is as a primary device. In this post I will describe how this device stacks up compared to other smartphone alternatives that I have tried, then I will describe how I specifically set up the device for my needs.

The result is truly life changing and I am super grateful to the team at Mudita for making this happen! ✌️ Love the e-paper screen!

Alternatives that I have tried in order:

1. Kyocera Dura XV - this was a great dumb phone, but to use Maps, Whatsapp, etc I still needed to have an android phone. What was nice was that I didn't need service and used this vice to to tether wifi to said android phone. It was effectively an on/off switch for everything on my smart phone. Main problem: T9 style texting really sucked and there was no text to speech.
2. Lightphone 2 - this is a great device, and I used it in a similar way to the Dura XV, except that the texting was better and there was voice to speech. Maps was still basically unusable and the lack of Whatsapp / Signal meant that I still needed a regular android phone for these things. Ultimately texting was still a pain in spite of it being better than on the Dura XV.
3. Google Pixel Phone with Olauncher - I used this setup for a while and installed all sorts of tools to prevent myself from getting sucked into the email and browser, but alas I succumbed to the temptation and found workarounds that resulted in wasting a lot of time on Youtube, reading news, email, etc. I tried this because I was sick of carrying two devices and wanted texting to just work.

In my setup of the Mudita Kompakt my goals were:

• No:
  • Browser
  • Email
  • Youtube
  • Social Media
• Yes:
  • Texting (with voice-to-text)
  • Maps (not perfect, but works in a pinch)
  • Whatsapp
  • Signal
  • Syncing Calendar

To achieve this I made the following customizations installed through a sideloaded F-droid and / or Aurora Store:

1. Proton Calendar, Signal, and Tidal. These all work very well out of the box! Amazing!!!
2. FUTO Keyboard works well and the text-to-speech is quite good.
3. Whatsapp was a bit more involved and still not perfect, but it is functional. The main issue here is that it was backing up to Google Drive and since there is no Google services I was having issues with history, contacts, and syncing with other devices. My workaround is to leave my old Android phone as the primary Whatsapp device, plugged in at home and use the Mudita as a "Linked Device". There are still issues with battery usage alerts and occasionally dropped calls. Contact syncing is still not perfect; basically for a contact to show up correctly I would need to add it to my Google Contacts and wait for the devices to sync.

I hope this helps other who are considering this more digitally minimalist lifestyle and again THANK YOU to the Mudita Team!!!

I'll try to answer any questions at some point, even if I don't get back to you immediately.