ehfeng

Stating truisms ahead of straw manning me avoids the actual discussion. "Everything has real negative consequences." "Land is not cheap to repurpose." I never said otherwise.

You're right about my estimate being off though and it was a disservice to the discussion. An equivalent revenue from sales tax would require ~2.1%. In SF, that would move the total sales tax from 8.6% to 10.7%; in Oakland, 13.8%. A large increase would likely bend some consumer behavior (chasing sales that have feet, aka move to the informal/grey market).

> Again, the optimal answer from an economist is not necessarily desirable from an emotional perspective of the people being governed.

This is the real difference between us imo. I believe the optimal answer is based on realistic projections on revenue collected and what prevents bankruptcy. The compromise answer is what passes a vote and in fact, the bankrupt answer.

I would prefer we didn't raise taxes and instead reduce spending. But given the complexity of reducing spending and the scale of our deficit, we will have to do both. On the side of raising revenue, a land tax offers a way of taxing a wealth that cannot flee.

You shouldn't strawman the other side. Us "people who fancy" actually understand that there are real negative side effects. But the money has to come from somewhere.

If not from land taxes, where? Would you like to double sales tax? Or increase income taxes? Every solution costs something, what does yours cost?

have you tried simultaneously vertically and horizontally scaling?

(copy paste hedged definition of success)

i wonder if it's just an unappealing business to compete with. it's like walmart: no one likes walmart, but it's unappealing to compete with them in small-town america.

plus, it's a huge headache to run and not very profitable. github mostly makes money on ci/cd, but a github alternative wouldn't benefit from that: anyone migrating would inherently evaluate other ci/cd vendors. plus, github eats a ton of network egress, which is very expensive. the only people who could eat the cost are the other clouds: gcp, aws, cloudflare, etc. but it feels dubiously beneficial for them.

Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong are simply in a class of their own. imo, Shanghai and Guangzhou have decent systems.

Compare China's urban areas to Asia's other major developing nations: Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila. China can do much better, but there's also much, much worse urban planning out there.

Yeah, I also own a dumb Prius and love it nostalgically.

I've been using Autopilot for years, but recently subscribed to FSD for a long weekend roadtrip. It changed my mind on the value of FSD.

While unfortunate for consumers, it cleans up the offerings. For four years, I didn't buy FSD because Autopilot was good enough to cover highway driving and I couldn't justify $99/month for the "last mile". If you strip out Autopilot and given the latest FSD, I would 100% buy the FSD subscription.

Removing the lifetime purchase option also simplified my mental model. Before, I was always stressed that if I bought a few months, loved FSD, and then bought the lifetime, I would have "wasted" those few months. Plus, every month I owned the car yet didn't buy lifetime FSD made it worth "less" to me: I'd eventually sell the car, so I'd missed out on those few months of usage.

I do wish Tesla offered a price lock: so long as you maintain your FSD subscription, your price is guaranteed for 5 years. Otherwise, it does feel scary: I spend 50k on a car for its FSD and over time, they jack the price to $200 or $500/month. Also, if they jack up FSD prices and then lower base car prices, your Tesla's value decreases effectively, which feels even worse.

Emotionally, I agree that the current system sucks. But how exactly do you "[put] median housing titles in the hands of median people"? Government seizure and redistribution of property titles? That's where I always get stuck: criticizing society ills is much easier than proposing concrete, pass-able policy.

"No mainstream economists touch this problem" because it's a damn hard problem without painless solutions.

I'd agree that China is preparing to be cut off, but it's not because of Taiwan. Dan specifically mentions this:

"In vain do I protest that there are historical and geopolitical reasons motivating the desire, that chip fabs cannot be violently seized, and anyway that Beijing has coveted Taiwan for approximately seven decades before people were talking about AI."

Consider the historical timeline: "Fortress China" policies coincide with the rise of American protectionism on both sides of the aisle and the introduction of chip restrictions and punishing tariffs. Taiwan is an emotional/nationalist issue for China, but it's only one part of their policy, not the lynchpin as your comment suggests.

No, WhatsApp charged a $1 annual subscription fee prior to 2016.

You should include state taxes, which in CA's case tops at 13.3% and 3.8% NII, bringing the total to 37.1%.

He addressed this. Elon "doesn’t deliver everything he talks about".

His point is that Elon may promise more than he delivers, but he has still delivered on quite a lot.

Early Google search only provided web links. Google Images, News, Video, Shopping, Maps, Finance used to be their own search boxes. Only later did Google start unifying their search experiences.

Yelp suffered greatly in the early 2010s when Google started putting Google Maps listings (and their accompanying reviews) in their search results.

OpenAI will eventually unify their products as well.

Got it thanks

I disagree with your "natural" person qualification. "Non-natural persons" includes anyone with a work visa or green card. It's hard enough for most people to get these, much less become fully naturalized citizens. Plus, the waiting time isn't guaranteed in length: it's variable based on the political climate. It's hard enough for immigrants today. Making the viability of home ownership based on political whims only worsens it. Shouldn't we prefer these immigrants become homeowners, increasing their "investment" in their local communities?

Hanlon's razor except s/stupidity/corporate policy/g.

You misunderstand why I brought up him being from Xamarin.

The initial conversation was about how Nat was likely leaving because his contract ran out. The counterpoint was that he was from the Microsoft side and therefore he didn't have a retention contract. I brought up Xamarin because he was likely under a retention contract from that acquisition.

That being said, these contracts probably had little to no effect on his decision though, as I'm sure he would have made more money than he could spend in a lifetime regardless of whether he had stayed or not.

You are technically right, but Nat comes from Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin. He definitely is not a lifelong Microsoft employee.

Sure. I don't know if 'unstable' is the best name for everyone, but if the industry decides to spend the engineering time to rename default branches, we shouldn't be just be switching to the first synonym in the thesaurus, but a word that's actually more fitting than 'master'.

'mastering' is an artifact of vinyl and boxed software. Now that a lot of software is continuously tested and shipped, 'master' is not the right word for those processes. Even if you're shipping on-premise software, there rarely is a single 'master' copy anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastering_(audio)

As a side note, I've seen people try this, but there is no amount of testing that can guarantee stability. So, 'stable' feels like a false promise. Also, in the event of a bug causing downtime, _someone_ always has the ability to push directly to master and it's always possible that a fix might break a new commit's tests, even if it fixes the downtime.

The name 'main' feels overloaded, just like naming the default branch 'default' or 'development', with the risk of "Who's on first?" confusion, especially when branching off branches.

"What branch are you on?" "I branched off the main development branch for this fix." "Like...the `main` main branch or the main branch for the feature?"

I like redis' rename of their default branch to `unstable`. Just like commits are tagged with the release numbers, the latest code that isn't yet versioned is by default 'unstable'. If the industry as a whole is going to make this change, I would prefer we choose a name that can be unambiguously referenced in conversation.

Spending engineering time to save sales time is only viable at very sales-oriented but lower ACV products and even in that case, onboarding is generally focused on very core product functionality. Because sales deals have to be >$10,000 ACV to be worth it for the business, sales generally spends it time on C-suite focused features (SSO integration, security controls, auditing).

Not to negate your point: having a good onboarding helps sales, in the same way it helps customer support. But in practice, I wouldn't use that argument to measure whether or not the onboarding flow was doing it job. Nor should the sales team be able to blame the onboarding flow for low quality leads. Money invested in a good onboarding flow should pay off in onboarding/engagement.

> These are good values. But the way progressive culture enforces those values socially is pretty intense.

I hadn't drawn this delineation before, but I find it apt. I grew up Asian in the Midwest and while I like progressive values here, I do miss how people there tried to be _neighborly_, even if they held opposing values. I was a kid in the suburbs, so maybe I only saw the softer side, but that doesn't stop me from admiring it and hoping to emulate that particular virtue.

Assuming you pulled it straight from the sea, it'd probably be salty and slimy.

The internals of cells are mostly water, protein, and DNA, which don't really taste like anything to our tongues. Most sugars are stored as glycogen, so you wouldn't get much sweetness. There also wouldn't be much texture, as it's lacking any sort of bone or shell.

Hi author here. I actually just learned this from you. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/sql-prepare.html will be my lunchtime reading. Thanks!

They actually link to another blog post (https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2018/06/14/scalable-increment...) that solves this with pg_sequence_last_value().

I personally couldn't find this function, but I believe they might be talking about lastval (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/functions-sequence.h...).

Agreed. Short questionnaires are always a pleasant surprise.

Hi Brett

I wouldn't call Redshift "excellent", nor would I call ClickHouse "way behind". ClickHouse was the best choice for my last employer's use case (https://twitter.com/zeeg/status/987009550501928960), after many other solutions were tested and benchmarked.

Just because a tool doesn't have a specific feature checklist doesn't mean you should categorically rule it out, particularly if you don't have experience using/running/deploying it.