So when might I prefer this over YAML or TOML?
2,000 karma · joined August 9, 2012
No, but I am :-D.
Pretty obviously the motive for these cost savings is _cost savings_. But that extra profit has to go somewhere.
Sometimes it'll go into lining the pockets of whoever owns the store, which kinda sucks. Go advocate for higher capital gains taxes. I'll be happy to help. Past a certain point, though, stores that just pocket the extra profit won't be around for long. Someone who's willing to make less money as a grocer will come along and start a cheaper store across the street.
Most of that savings has to go to somewhere. Either there's more checkout lines or a better selection or cheaper goods across the board or whatever. Sometimes a store will be profitable where it otherwise wouldn't be. At this point, the savings are mostly priced in. We are already benefiting massively from this automation.
Everyone hates these automated checkout terminals, but I doubt many people really want to have their neighborhood grocery store close and all the rest in their town get more expensive.
As a society, we spent the last few centuries having the problem of providing a comfortable standard of living to ourselves and our peers and the problem of getting shitty drudgework done be two problems that largely solved each other. We are well on our way to actually solving the shitty drudgework problem. That means we badly need to find a new solution to the comfortable standard of living problem, but deciding not to fix the other, fixable problem doesn't sound like a viable long-term strategy.
Probably almost none of it, at least not directly.
> How many new stores in any case are going to food deserts rather than places more profitable for the retailer?
Probably a lot of them.
Places where it's profitable to run a grocery store already have grocery stores. Food deserts exist in the first place because they're not profitable places to put grocery services for one reason or another. Lowering the fixed cost of running a grocery store means that some places that previously could only support N grocers can now support N+1, so that's where the opportunity is. This is no less true when N=0.
First, allowing grocery stores to operate with smaller staffs means we get more grocery stores. The small, cramped grocery store that recently opened within walking distance of my apartment probably wouldn't be able to operate if it had to provide not just pay, but parking and work space for another dozen full-time employees. That's a food desert in a dense urban core that doesn't exist anymore and a smaller, but still substantial, group of available jobs that otherwise wouldn't be there.
Second, if I were to approach you and tell you I had two plans for a machine. Both are about evenly efficient, but one requires two people to stand at the machine doing boring, repetitive, mindless drudge work for hours on end. I, for one, definitely prefer the one that doesn't require human suffering to operate. Automated checkouts eliminate jobs, but specifically they eliminate shitty jobs that we should probably feel bad about asking anyone to do in the first place.
You just lost a nontrivial percentage of PHP developers. Far and away the most compelling feature of PHP for a lot of their target audience is that the deploy model is "unzip this file in that folder". If I want to host my own web site but I don't want to "learn to program" there is no alternative.
Because of the way your ears function, the vast majority of people who have hearing impairments have them at specific frequency ranges. Hearing aids do amplify sound somewhat, but they mostly work by pitch shifting voices away from your personal weak spots to wherever your hearing is still strongest. They also do some signal processing to differentiate voice-like noises from other sounds, amplify the voice, and actually mute the non-voice sounds.
For people who have some hearing loss, blanket amplification can be counterproductive and dangerous. Turning up the volume across the board doesn't help at all with differentiating signal from background noise, and can cause what hearing you do have left to degrade much faster than it otherwise might due to the increased stress placed on the ear.
It's the same sort of difficult argument as globalization and free trade. It hits you somewhere very easy to notice, so you feel like you're worse off even while you're sitting on your brand new couch watching whatever you want on demand on your 60" TV and eating your steak dinner. Making the link that all those other good things are a result of the same policy requires a small but not automatic intellectual leap that a lot of people clearly aren't prepared to make if they feel like the initial assertion doesn't pass the smell test.
That's not actually true, though. Every immigrant who comes here and becomes employed is, of course, filling a slot that is no longer available to a native-born citizen. However, he or she will also be one more person who needs to be fed, clothed, housed, entertained, protected, and supported. All of those create demand that adds up to substantially more than one job (about 1.2, to be exact [1]).
If there's one thing I'm taking away from this campaign and election, it's that people have big problems reasoning about systems where costs are acute and centralized and benefits are diffuse, even if on the whole they personally benefit substantially from those systems. This seems true for immigration, for climate change, for free trade, for healthcare reform.
Actually being trustworthy is certainly the easiest way to do this, at least up to a point. But it tends to push people toward public, visible security measures over private, invisible ones, regardless of their relative effectiveness.
It cuts both ways, too. Even if you do everything right, if you do get hacked that trust is gone and no insurance payout can buy it back. And I'm not sure any customer is going to react well to "Yeah we lost your data, but Goldman Sachs claims it's not our fault".
Consider the alternatives:
1. Plain text only interfaces aren't feasible in a lot of contexts. Rich text formatting and/or hyperlinking is far too useful, if not actually mandatory, in most contexts.
2. Raw HTML isn't feasible either. Even ignoring the cognitive load it imposes on non-developers, it's too easy for malicious users to exploit unless you validate and whitelist aggressively, and that invites human error in even the most technical users.
3. WYSIWYG editors aren't great. They're slow and cumbersome and frequently have major variations in behavior between different libraries, or even between the same library on different platforms. Most of the implementations I've used are buggy. And they actively fight against the reality that an HTML snippet can and does appear very different in different page contexts or on different screen sizes. What you see in an editor is almost never actually what you get on the final rendered page, and unless the site designer is extremely careful that can easily cause more confusion than it prevents.
So we're left with simplified domain-specific markup languages as the least bad option. Of those, Markdown is probably the best. Its pave-the-cowpaths approach to how people pseudoformatted text in old plain-text forums and emails means it's probably as close to intuitive as a markup language could ever get. Which is, admittedly, still not very intuitive; but in my experience it can be learned quickly by an intelligent but not technical user, provided they have some motivation to do so.
And the fact that it's becoming a de-facto standard on much of the internet means that the percentage of users who have some experience with it is only going to go up over time. That, combined with the relative ease of implementation, makes it a very attractive option for developers.
Second, just because some people do this doesn't mean it's a good idea. If you're writing a full application and just want to distribute it, do whatever you want with your versioning (although using a dependency management tool to distribute your webapp or CLI tool is probably not a great idea in the first place), but if you are writing something to be included in another project please use a sane versioning system. Anything else is selfish and disrespectful of your users.
The "tyranny of the majority" can be as harsh as the tyranny of any single strongman, but it's important to note how closely that process is tied to systematically de-legitimizing other voices and perspectives.
Plus the Bill of Rights aren't quite Natural rights as I understand them. Half the Bill of Rights (plus the 13th and 14th amendments) are about setting up a Legal Right to a somewhat complex and specific trial by jury system. But you don't actually have a Natural Right to participation in that exact system. You do have a Natural Right to just and fair treatment from your government, even when accused of a crime, and a jury trial is a very good way (though not necessarily the only good way, nor the absolute best way) to formalize that right.
On the other hand, I believe I have a Natural Right to bodily autonomy. If I want to surgically change my gender, or have sex with another consenting adult, or ingest a mind-altering substance with full knowledge of the side effects, then that's my right and the Government should have an extremely high bar to clear in order to prevent me from doing so. However, the fact that these rights are not enumerated in the Constitution has historically been a huge barrier to having them respected, which indicates to me that the framers fears were well founded.
Our constitution is extremely useful. It's among the best systems for protecting our rights that we as humans seem to have devised, and we disregard the wisdom it encodes at our own peril. But that doesn't mean it's either perfect or sacred. If a law is actively harming (or negligently failing to protect) the inherent worth and dignity of every human being, then that law is wrong by definition, and I've yet to hear an argument that the Bill of Rights is exempt from that analysis.
This is one of the main reasons why a lot of central Africa is a shit show politically. Most of the modern borders were drawn during the colonial era without much consideration as to which tribes and city-states ended up in which countries, so there's not a strong relationship between "nations" (i.e. culturally similar groups of people) and "countries" (i.e. demarcated stretches of land) like there is in most of the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, we also have a very real racism problem, and I don't think it's helpful to say "the real problem is classism". The very real problems include both racism and classism. It's too hard to get into tech as a poor white man. It's too hard to get into tech as a middle class black man. For that matter, it's too hard to get into tech as a middle class white woman. And it's way, way too hard as any combination of those.
In general, responding to "we have a huge racism issue" with "we actually have a huge classism issue" isn't wrong, but it isn't helpful either. It derails the conversation from a very real problem into arguing about who has it worse. And the worst part is that most of the changes that would help the racism issue would also help most of the other -isms. Blind hiring, more support for remote work, and less dependence on specific universities in hiring pipelines helps everybody. And even very targeted interventions help indirectly to the extent they erode the stereotype that only upper-middle-class 20-something white guys need apply.
Over the very long run, this _will_ self-correct. That fact is cold comfort to someone trying to get hired today.
It's not an either/or proposition; it's both/and. According to the article, Google, Facebook, and Twitter are all ~2% black. The population of Silicon valley is just shy of 8% black. The national number is about 18%. Silicon valley is an unusally white area, and the staff demographics are skewed even relative to that baseline.
For what it's worth, I am originally from a small industrial town in rural Arkansas, and I am white. Getting hired in a tech firm was actually quite easy for me, given that I was willing to move away from where I grew up to an urban area with a thriving tech sector. I'd like to think that would still have been true even if I were black, but...
The libertarian variant is a relatively small guaranteed income (usually roughly the current minimum wage), is usually paid for with a VAT or sales tax, and replaces most or all of the current welfare programs. The main objectives are to provide a safety net for the poorest citizens in a fairer and less bureaucratic manner and to somewhat equalize the bargaining power between low-wage workers and their employers, usually as an alternative to unionization.
The socialist variant is significantly larger (living wage), is usually paid for with graduated income or capital gains taxes, and supplements rather than replaces the existing welfare programs. Its main goals are to provide a direct mechanism for income redistribution and to facilitate non-profitable professions (artist, full-time volunteer, professional student, stay at home caretaker, etc.) for those that want or need them.
There's obviously a lot of overlap between the two, and most proponents support both sets of objectives to some degree. That said, most of the contentious arguments seem to derive from critics either not understanding the difference between the two proposals or strawmanning their interlocutors into one extreme or the other.
Even if it were possible, blocking remittances is probably illegal under our free trade agreements with Mexico. Any attempt short of pulling out of NAFTA is all but guaranteed to be tied up in courts for years before it could possibly go into effect.
And even if it were legal, a huge disruption to trade is all but guaranteed to cost the economy vastly more than the cost of just doing it ourselves (even assuming we actually wanted to).
All of which is before you even consider the internal politics of getting the US congress to pass a bill in the first place, or of convincing the Mexican government to roll over and accept a huge insult without requiring anything in return.
There is essentially no realistic model under which "it could certainly work". It's a feel-good idea that falls apart with the smallest amount of critical analysis. It's a childish conception of international relations, and any attempt to actually implement it is all but guaranteed to both fail miserably and make absolutely everybody worse off in the process.
Sadly, yes. https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/pay-for-the-wall
First, the legislature often decides that raising or lowering specific taxes is a good way to encourage some behavior or other (i.e. mortgage tax deductions or extra taxes on cigarettes). Most of these are actually pretty justifiable individually, but eventually you end up with too many exceptions and special cases for any nonspecialist to keep them all in their head.
Second, there's a huge body of caselaw and regulatory rulings that crop up around the actual tax code. Dozens of courts somewhat haphazardly decide that this weird edge case counts as income, but that weird case doesn't. Again, almost all of these are pretty reasonable taken in isolation, but you end up with a swiss cheese of arbitrary and contradictory rules.
Finally, wealthy entities will inevitably try to game the system. They will try to find a few well-intentioned but poorly thought out edge cases and alter their finances to try and intentionally fit a huge percentage of their income into them. By the time this happens, it's often very difficult to fix without hurting the innocent bystanders that the edge cases were put in place for in the first place.
Wealthy individuals and companies do lobby for favorable tax provisions, and politicians do sometimes pass laws specifically to benefit those entities. But the reality isn't that simple. International tax law is an emergent phenomenon, and it's really only going to bend to systemic incentive changes.
That doesn't make it, y'know, actually feasible, or a remotely good idea even if it were.