efaref

> I pay so little in tax based on what I earn from capital gains, that I never even think about it.

This is really interesting. Contrast this to how, say, a middle-income self-employed tradesperson feels when they do the following calculation. I'm using the UK tax system because that's what I know, but I expect it's similar elsewhere.

Say a customer pays them £1000 for some work. First VAT is assessed on this, which is ~£167, leaving them with ~£833. Then they pay for materials. Let's pick £400 as an arbitrary figure, which I don't think is unreasonable. This leaves a profit of £433. Then they pay class 4 national insurance contributions on this profit, which has a marginal rate of 9% assuming you make a normal amount of profit, so £39. You also pay income tax on this, which once you're over the 0%-rate threshold comes to ~£87. All told, your £1000 you took from the customer has resulted in £400 going to your supplier, ~£292 going to the tax man, and ~£308 for yourself. That's a marginal tax rate of ~49%, which, to me, feels like a lot.

Yes, I really like Rust and the way its Option<Box<T>> decays to a nullable pointer.

Not sure I like the sound of that. It sounds like the floating point wat of "NaN != NaN".

I've been coding for decades and I still find them jarring.

They're also a false sense of security as they won't catch:

    if $(value = $someOthervalue) ...

Even then I would prefer an explicit comparison:

    if ((a = b) != NULL) ...

I think Rust has a happy medium, where assignment evaluates to (), not the variable (important as this means you don't have an implicit borrow), but the idiom expressed here is usually replaced by:

    if let Some(thing) = fn_that_returns_option_thing() ...

The reason for Apple removing the headphone jack is finally revealed!

I think most of these are just a transfer of wealth from the high-tax-paying consumer to the low-tax-paying rich industry owners. Just business as usual.

> Why is that an important distinction here? Both direct subsidies and tax credits/rebates/write-offs have the same net effect on the government's coffers.

It has a different effect on the entity being taxed. A tax write-off increases the rewards for an already profitable proposition, but tax write-off don't normally incentivise someone to do something that is a loss (unless the write-off is transferrable to other profits, but that's a separate question). Subsidies, however, can make a loss into a profit, incentivising people to do it. That's exactly the point of the original solar subsidies.

Now that the solar industry appears to be relatively well bootstrapped, it's not unreasonable to remove the straight subsidies. I think solar still enjoys many if not all of the same tax write-offs as other energy sources.

That's fine until you get an asshole supervisor that micromanages your work and never uses it as technically authoritative, even though it clearly is.

I can't quite put my finger exactly on what it is, but it feels like there's a difference between the kind of assistance that a senior developer asks for and the kind that a junior developer requires.

I mgiht guess that a senior developer asks for assistance when it will save them time - they could work it out, but it'll be more efficient for everyone involved if they get some assistance - whereas a junior developer would be lost without it.

> Physical violence is not a cure for any known disease.

Setting bones? Fixing dislocated shoulders?

I quite often use Lynx[1], which does not support JS.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

It's not really hidden. I mean, it's right there on his website: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/policies/an-americas-infrastruc...

I don't know how he plans to pay for it, though. I assume Mexico will be occupied paying for his wall.

If the DNC hadn't rigged the primary, Bernie would have beaten Trump in a landslide.

Call centers aren't really offices, though. They look like this:

http://www.savalinews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Call-Ce...

Which look very similar to this:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/d4/84/2b/d484...

The main difference is the machine is a calling machine instead of a sewing machine.

Call centers are more like call mills, and those people are definitely wearing shirts with blue collars.

Except the English, where our national flag has acquired connotations of racism.

Hence the quote, "I never let my schooling get in the way of my education."

Greenspun's tenth rule meets Atwood's law?

In terms of net assets, no it's not. It's going from $0 to, say, -$50,000 as now you owe interest.

The really poor also don't have the rope.

Well, there is https://fuckadblock.sitexw.fr/

And, of course, https://github.com/Mechazawa/FuckFuckAdblock

Well that's encouraging.

It was certainly true when I was at university. I encountered CVS through a friend (which was sadly the best free VCS at the time), but pretty much nobody else used VCS. A few students worked out themselves that they needed something like that, and ended up with the chaotic system of renaming their files with a version number at the end.

It's sad that git (or equivalents) doesn't feature more prominently these day. It's as important a tool as compilers, debuggers and editors (although I don't remember being taught how to use them properly, either).

We both experienced inflation, but sure, let's work it out:

£50 when I was 14 was worth £90 in today's money. Buffett's $5k was $68k.

Buffett's age-35 7M was worth 53M in today's money. So I'd need £70k in today's money to match his net worth growth.

That's exactly the same. I'm actually surprised by this, as it suggests both Buffett and I experienced the same level of compound inflation over the 20 years of our lives from age 14, despite being at different times and on different continents.

(This is all tongue-in-cheek, of course).

Buffett's net worth at 14 was $5k. I just checked my old childhood savings account, and after my 14th birthday it had around £50 in it.

At 34, his net worth was $7M, so relatively speaking, I only need £70k to be doing about as well as he was.

I think I'm actually doing better. :-)

You know things are crazy when "civilization" becomes a dirty word.

> How is the feeling called that you feel when you read and understand beautiful mathematical proofs?

I would call that "awe".

Having decent chairs, keyboards and monitors is also important for health. Yes, I could work on a kitchen chair hunched over a crappy keyboard and illegible monitor for 10 hours a day, but after not very long I'd have headaches, RSI and back pain so bad I wouldn't be able to work at all.

There are other things holding people back. I would buy one, except that I live in a rented apartment and park my car in the residential car park, which has no facilities for charging the car overnight, and no capacity for me to add one.

This sort of limitation applies to pretty much anyone who doesn't live in a house with a driveway or garage. Many people park their cars on the street, and would have the same problem I do.

FizzBuzz should take 5 minutes for a senior dev (where the python example in the article is essentially the "correct" answer).

If it takes a candidate an hour, something is wrong.