shittyadmin

> As the actual person who receives these complaints... this isn't true. Once it's explained, though, the users still stick around and get angry because they made dumb, uninformed choices as a consumer and think it's our fault.

In terms of sheer bang for your buck, Nvidia's cards have been on top for a while now (there's a good reason cryptocurrency miners have been using them), on Linux their proprietary drivers are the most stable in games - unless your only goal is to run Wayland, it's not exactly a "dumb, uninformed choice".

This seems like a clear problem with Wayland developers mentality if they expect consumers to make purchasing decisions based on their platform alone.

I find those spotify generated playlists are really bad. I think they try to prefer music that's cheaper for them to play or something. Definitely not a great discovery tool for me.

Most music is freely available on YouTube now and there's even desktop clients that just grab the audio stream from YouTube videos. Spotify in my experience often has less content than YouTube so I'd say it's probably worth negative time, sound about right?

I didn't mean to suggest that no regulation was the superior option - just that the market isn't efficient because it can't be operated efficiently. The limitations on distribution of spectrum makes it an inherently inefficient market. Unlike with another natural resource like say, tree pulp or oil, I can't just import some cell service if I don't like your prices, that's why I call this a government enforced monopoly. If government decide to distribute an immovable resource in a way unfriendly to competition it results in a broken market.

Patents and copyrights are an intentional breaking of this market to encourage innovation - explicitly with the intention of creating a temporary monopoly. One can hope that government doesn't go out with the goal of creating a monopoly on cell service.

Governments are both creating and enforcing a monopoly here, that doesn't sound like any efficient market I've ever heard of. You wouldn't call it efficient if a government came in and decided that they're going to sell the rights to be the only company that can sell cars tomorrow. Yes, cars don't suffer from interference, but the basic point still stands - the way the current regulatory system works leads directly to government enforced monopolies.

There are alternative solutions - like opening up wide swaths of spectrum to smarter devices that are able to share that spectrum broadly.

Government enforced monopolies present the worst of both corporate and regulatory worlds - a disaster for the consumer. Shouldn't we care more about the market for services the consumers get than the market for spectrum that providers buy?

To be clear, this just means that PHP has libsodium as an official language extension. Most modern languages have better package management than PHP and make pulling it in as a library trivial.

This has nothing to do with homomorphic encryption, unless I'm missing something.

Sure, but it doesn't mean that the method of regulating it that's used is best - should spectrum be transfered on sale of a company? Is selling spectrum to the highest bidder the best thing for a competitive market? Perhaps larger portions of spectrum could be reserved for smaller players and bigger players could be left to make the existing spectrum used more efficiently?

Additionally, in any given location most of the spectrum is unused but reserved, smarter devices could take advantage of this, but current regulations prohibit this from becoming a reality. With certain portions of cellular spectrum in particular this could be hugely advantageous to consumers, at the cost of governments who wouldn't be able to make money selling that spectrum.

You missed step 0: Regulate RF spectrum such that setting up a new provider is almost impossible but spectrum is extremely valuable so big providers will have incentives to buy smaller ones to stop competition.

I hear what you're saying, but if someone's not paying for the services they're using in taxes, they're a burden being carried by other tax payers. No need to consider land or housing issues or view the whole thing as a zero-sum competition at all. You're bringing in a lot of things that don't really factor into the cost of property taxes at the end of the day.

> Every X number of poor people in a city, represents a subtraction of an equivalent number of rich people

No such logic like this is required - the more people who live in a city but don't contribute their share of taxes, the higher the taxes are for everyone who does. I'm talking strictly about people who are not net contributors - I think you'd be hard pressed to find people in low-income housing projects who are, the housing alone has significant cost and upkeep of it often falls on the city.

That's not to say it has no benefits of course, bringing people out of poverty can be powerful and useful economically, but if I were to state the opposite is true - that we should be decreasing taxes by building more low income housing, you'd look at me like I'm crazy unless I presented some seriously compelling evidence.

You're joking, right? Broken transit systems, barely maintained roads, large backlogs of intersections that need lights leading to safety incidents even deaths, planners that accept everything a developer or NIMBY can say... No, we don't optimize for shit except perhaps councilors pocketbooks and re-election.

We wish these systems were optimized, but they're not. If they were, we'd at least see pushes to get people to live closer to work, the rejection of NIMBYs in favor of multiunit developers in central areas while in distant areas we'd see rejection of developers in favor of improved transit.

Many areas in my city have terrible access by car or public transit because the city has kept pushing back road and transit improvements while allowing developers to keep going. It's gotten so bad a few developers were offering to do road widening for the city on an interest free loan as their property values were taking a hit due to a reputation for long commutes - unfortunately that fell through even, it's a mess, a completely unoptimized mess.

Perhaps "profit" isn't the best way to put it, but "wellbeing per dollar" in some way - ultimately a measurable optimization factor of some sort needs to be decided on and used.

Instead we see cities without any sort of optimization, repeatedly trying failed ideas, flushing tax dollars down the toilet. "This clearly isn't working, let's just keep doing it" ought to be the slogan for many midsize cities.

See - that seems like it has some validity - that's exactly the kind of data I'm talking about - why couldn't the author have brought this kind of thing up in the original post?

Instead they seemed to critique it with no data...

Those mainly follow from attracting underemployed people - I don't think it's particularly contentious to say that a low-income person paying less in property tax means that a higher income person must pay more in tax to offer the same level of services - this answers number 1. Number 3 I also feel is straightforward - the city could make more profit and charge lower taxes by having higher income people there, often on the same land. If you admit 2 is true then 4 is likely to be true at least within the bounds of the city - again, I don't feel it's particularly contentious to suggest that low income people are more likely to experience long term unemployment issues.

As for 5 and 6, yes, I agree those absolutely would demand more evidence, but it also seems like they're tertiary to the usefulness of the model here.

I'm not intending to defend it so much as I'd like to see why it should be struck down. As someone else pointed out here, some cities in higher tax areas attract more people than cities in lower tax areas - factors like that are what I'd like to have seen more of in the original post.

> This is not even getting to the question of the purpose of government - it is not a business trying to achieve maximum profit, so why should it be seeking to drive out low-income residents?

Can I move somewhere that is run like a business trying to maximize profit? I think I'd far prefer it to my wasteful city...

This is basic price curves - make more affordable housing for the underemployed, people come to you for it or stay for it. Just like most anyone I know prefers buying the cheapest tolerable toilet paper or dropping the price on a fast food meal attracts more customers or buying certain meats and veggies at the grocery store because they're cheaper that week.

I don't see why this wouldn't also apply to low-income housing demand in this case - it's a fairly well proven economic model and if you want to say it's false in this case, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect at least a semblance of evidence.

Given that this model demonstrates the issue as well as the lower tax contributions based on property taxes and higher demand for social services in low income areas, well, it seems like a reasonable model.

It's a bit like saying that math is wrong though - logically speaking, low-income housing has costs associated with it in more ways than one, not just housing but for law enforcement, education, etc, all of which will clearly have demand go up and income won't go up as much as if someone who had more money were to live in that city instead. Depressing, perhaps, but factual.

If that basic piece of math is wrong, it needs to be proven - how do low income households contribute more than their fair share of city revenue for example? Does homelessness cause law enforcement issues to increase to a greater amount than low-income housing? Do low-income households produce more future earners that add up better for the city?

We need some data here to show that the basic economics of this don't actually add up if that's the claim being made, because from a basic economics perspective the argument logically and mathematically follows.

While I think I'm somewhat in agreement with this, this post seems to be making some claims without backing them up at all:

> To Forrester, low-income housing was an especially egregious example of a “counterproductive” urban program. According to the model, these programs increased the local tax burden, attracted underemployed people into the city, and occupied land which might otherwise have been put to more economically healthy uses. Housing programs aimed at improving the condition of the underemployed, Forrester warned, “increased unemployment and reduced upward economic mobility” and would condemn the underemployed to lifelong poverty.

Where's the data to suggest this is false? In fact it seems to me like something that may hold true in data, even if deeper causes are at fault.

> but we have decades of real-world evidence that demonstrates the disastrous costs of the “counterintuitive” anti-welfare agenda

... with no evidence provided?

Overall they actually seem like pretty reasonable theories at face value and calling them crap without evidence doesn't seem like a good solution if there's a problem with them.

The people who designed their systems such that they could be easily transitioned off of IBM have done so long ago. Those systems now run exponentially cheaper and have access to more resources.

Vendor lock-in was just as much of a problem then as now.

I think you're missing the point - you may need to move to your own infrastructure for security, privacy, regulatory or accountability reasons. You may encounter new needs which AWS may no longer meet, cheap bandwidth for example (AWS bandwidth is both way overpriced and on some rather poor networks). Or Amazon may decide that the price of all their serivces is now going up by a factor of 5 and if you have your attitude, well, you're stuck paying for it.

Having relatively easy to spin up alternatives is a great thing. I can run my application entirely on a local kubernetes cluster or one on Amazon, DigitalOcean or Google's cloud services. That sort of flexibility is excellent and has allowed us to scale into situations where we otherwise couldn't have affordably done so (being able to buy some bandwidth from Joe Entrepreneur has it's benefits sometimes).

It means somethings fucked with the VC system and they're finding companies that should be worthless.

I was more just making the point that it's actually easier to do library organization for movies and TV as a pirate than it is as a legit owner of Blu-Rays for example.

Sad state for the industry, really.

There's actually great tools to help you build and organize that library... assuming you pirate everything.

I'm just hoping the movie/TV industry gets the picture soon and goes the way the music industry has with streaming.

I can comment on this - it's flawed. They encrypt locally and only send encrypted data to their servers, true, but they deduplicate that data between customers meaning they know file hashes or something similar and could remove pirated content if they so desired. Second, in order to get your data back their solution is to go ahead and type your "private" encryption passphrase into their site so their servers can then decrypt it and send you a zip or hard drive full of decrypted data.

I still suggest it for friends and family because it's cheap and damn sure that encryption is better than nothing, but if you have a lot of sensitive data I wouldn't recommend it. If you demand privacy, use Restic and Backblaze's B2 service, you're paying per GB then though.

At 315Mhz you might even be able to do it with a $10 RTL-SDR.

A 15 year old likely makes some of their own financial decisions, occasionally, or even often, buys their own food, entertainment, etc. 15 year olds buy game consoles, computers and games all the time.

A 15 year old could be working in many places - probably at least has a functional understanding of value for money based on past experiences, a 5 year old almost certainly doesn't.

It's most likely targeted only at relevant sites.

Sounds quite similar to the way TV ratings are done - is this really such an issue? It's very much an opt in service designed to measure audiences.

Unlike hidden terms in privacy policies it's made quite clear what's going on here.

Unless you're a European citizen interacting with a European company GDPR changed nothing, they can show you a different ToS and play entirely in your court system where GDPR is meaningless.

There've been similar issues in both iOS and Android before - iOS had one recently where a text would cause repeated app crashes. Back in 2009 there was a full exploit via SMS on iOS, and just a few years back the Android stagefright exploit was barely spared from turning into a giant worm due to exploit mitigations and the diversity of devices. It's quite possible to see these attacks come to light in a much scarier way. That exploit is solid gold and they probably paid a small fortune for it.