To put it bluntly, FEMA should have exceptions to their responses based on positive federal contributions at the state level even if you individually are a net contributor? That is what you are arguing Puerto Rico, not paying federal income tax, therefore should not receive help because they are a net loser of federal taxes?
What I was talking about are coastal states. For example, Florida takes in lots of FEMA money, and its coastal properties are in the millions of dollars just like California, albeit not quite as extreme. I think that the cost of hurricane damage should be considered part of the cost of living in an area that is prone to hurricane damage, and should be covered by insurance and property taxes that are high enough to cover the average damage. And yes, the poor in those states are disproportionately affected by storms, and the wealthy in those states would have to make up that difference, but at some point, those folks chose to live in an area prone to bad weather conditions, and that risk should come with a price tag attached. And the state's tourism industry (e.g. Di$ney) can easily afford to help with that.
Puerto Rico is very different because it isn't a state, and thus isn't forced to have a balanced budget and can't declare bankruptcy. As a result, it is exceptionally poor compared with any actual state. I would make an exception for Puerto Rico, precisely because it is an entirely different ballgame. It is essentially a destitute foreign country that just happens to be under the control and protection of the U.S. government. If Puerto Rico became a state, most of its problems should work themselves out over time.
In the short term, though, the country needs to get a huge temporary influx of cash to rebuild infrastructure in ways that won't fail when the next storm hits, with strict building codes, etc., to put that territory more on par with coastal states in the continental U.S. As long as they're starting out so far behind, they can never be expected to cover their losses, because the losses are too huge. That said, in the long term, the goal should be for Puerto Rico to become self-sufficient, too. Hotels along the coast should have to slowly ratchet up their bed taxes to help provide funds that cover the cost of repairs after storms, etc.
The sad thing is, many in those small states would want less federal spending as well but whenever they propose smaller federal government or spending it is seen as regressive. Instead of shrinking the government you think it's better to use state metrics to judge individual benefits... I am honestly dumbfounded.
The problem is, when folks propose smaller federal government, they invariably do so by cutting programs that help the poor and elderly, while continuing to pump money into military equipment like dollars grow on trees (but never into paying actual soldiers a reasonable wage, because after all, that would help the poor). That is regressive—not because cutting the federal government must be regressive, but rather because the people who want cuts to federal spending are largely either people who are extremely rich and just want to pay less in taxes or people who have been fooled into thinking that the first group will actually lower taxes on the poor and middle class instead of merely lowering their own.
I am not sure how you can argue that you are being cheated when you are literally paying less federal taxes individually.
Because for every $1 I pay in federal taxes, I get 80 cents back into my state year after year, and for every $1 that most red states pay in taxes, they get back up to $1.80 year after year. I'm not sure how you can fail to understand something that simple. This isn't about emergencies. This is about conservative states leeching off of liberal states consistently and reliably year after year. Those of us in blue states are tired of i
How is it fair when two citizens of different states making the same amount of money pay different levels of federal tax?
How is it fair when two people in different states who pay the same amount of tax get different amounts of services in return?
Both problems are unfair, but one helps balance out the other, and changing one without the other just causes the other to become even more unfair proportionally.
Again, which of the two people in your example pays higher federal taxes out of pocket making $100k?
You keep myopically focusing on federal taxes. What matters is how much we get back for each dollar paid in taxes, and we get lower taxes because the federal government is cheating us. The fact that we individually pay less in federal taxes is irrelevant. If we paid the same in federal taxes, the federal government would be cheating us even more.
Because equality under the law. In your example, the person in TN making $100k may not take in any federal aid should not be burdened by higher taxes than a person in CA making $100k.
You keep talking about individuals taking in federal aid, as though you think people who don't directly receive federal aid are not somehow benefitting from it. Everyone in states that get more federal aid benefit from it, because that's money that the state doesn't have to spend on those programs, and can instead spend on other things, like better roads, better schools, etc. If you've seen the amount of road construction around Nashville, it is staggering. Compare that with here in northern Cali where despite having higher fuel taxes, we're barely able to patch the seasonal damage, much less actually repave the roads end-to-end, much less build new superhighways. Now I realize that part of the difference is the cost of buying land, but part of it is the federal spending imbalance.
Because you even state as much that because of federal spending imbalance. Federal taxes i.e. spending is the issue not collection.
This is technically true. But we can't force the federal government to spend proportionally. As I said elsewhere, I'd be perfectly happy with removing the deductibility of income tax, so long as it is accompanied by a constitutional amendment that requires the federal government to spend money in states proportional to the taxes paid by the citizens of those states. Then we could lower our state taxes in California without having to cut services. Short of that, though, deductibility of state taxes is a lifeboat that helps make up for the imbalance. You can't take that away without leveling out the spending. Note again, that leveling the spending is not the same as reducing spending.
Property is more expensive in CA, why is that the fault of people in TN? Ignoring charity because that is not mandatory like tax.
That's completely irrelevant to my point, which is that the amount of services that people get from every dollar paid in taxes in California is lower than in TN because of the federal spending imbalance, and that the imbalance becomes inherently worse if we can't deduct our state taxes.
Yes, TN may take in more federal dollars but that is an argument for lower federal spending not changing how each state citizen pays different federal taxes.
How is that an argument for lowering federal spending? It's an argument for making federal spending more fair, by decreasing federal spending in states that get back more than they pay in taxes, and increasing it in states that get back significantly less than they pay. I mean, I suppose that in theory, if you cut federal spending to near zero, the imbalance would nearly disappear, but that would also be kind of nuts.
If TN want lower state taxes that is their choice just as it is CA choice to have higher tax.
The problem is, because they chose to have artificially low state taxes, the federal government has to give them a larger percentage of federal income to bail them out. California didn't choose to have such high state taxes. It is forced to have high state taxes because its return on taxes paid to the federal government is so poor that it has to make up the difference at the state level.
I'm okay with the income tax deduction going away, but only if that change is accompanied by a constitutional amendment that says that federal money spent on each state must be proportional to the amount paid in by that state to within +/- 0.5% averaged over any given five-year period. That would, of course, mean that Tennessee would have to either crank up its sales tax to about 20% or add an income tax to maintain its standard of living, and California could lower its state taxes by several percent without losing services (or dramatically raise its standard of living, or somewhere in between), and taxes would actually be fair. It also would mean that states prone to hurricanes and tornadoes would have to raise their property taxes to cover the disproportionate cost of all their disaster relief, and California would get more money for CalFire than it currently does, allowing for more proactive control over wildfires.
As long as the federal outflow is massively disproportionate from state to state, those of us who have to pay high state taxes to make up for the federal government shorting us year after year should d**n well be able to deduct those make-up taxes.
Well, that's not entirely unwarranted. Corn and soybeans are staple crops. Walnuts and almonds are basically "nice to haves". And fruits are indirectly subsidized by the feds looking the other way at all the illegal immigrant farm labor that picks them.:-D
If that isn't the case then I don't see the point in bringing it up when the proposed tax plan makes it more fair in how everyone across the nation pays federal taxes.
No, it makes it less fair. Consider two hypothetical people that both make $100,000 per year. One lives in CA (~10% income tax), and one lives in TN (no income tax; in theory, you can deduct sales tax, but it isn't practical to do unless you're buying a car or something similarly big-ticket). They each donate $5,000 a year to charities, and have comparably nice homes for the area ($200k in TN, $2M in the Bay Area).
The person in CA pays $10k in state income tax, $20k in property tax, plus the $5k donation, for a taxable income of $65k, resulting in $14,270 in federal taxes. They get back something like 80% of that, or about $11,470. Add that to the state taxes, and they spent $44,270 and got back $41,470 in benefits, or 93.7% of their tax spending.
The person in TN pays $1,670 in property tax, $0 in income tax, and pays taxes on $93,330. They pay $23,520 in taxes, and get back about 1.1x as much in services, or $28,572 in benefits. Total that up, and they spent $25190 to get $30242 in benefits, or ~120% of their tax spending.
Now drop the deductibility on the income tax. The person in Tennessee's numbers don't change, but the Californian now pays $17,535 in federal taxes and gets back $14,028 in benefits. Total it up, and they spent $47,535 for $44,028 in benefits, or 92.7% of what they paid.
In other words, this means that people in high-tax states that are already supporting the low-tax states disproportionately are going to do so even more. That's the exact opposite of fair, in my book.
Why should your burden of federal support be passed onto everyone else who does not live in that state?
Let's turn that around. Even with those deductions, most of the states with the highest state tax rates give more money to the federal government than they get back in grants and services. By contrast, most of the states with the lowest state tax rates take considerably more money from the feds than they give. So even now, the states with the highest state tax rates are taking on the "burden of federal support" for the states with the lowest tax rates. Without deductibility of income tax, that disparity will become even larger. Why should we have to shoulder even more of the burden of federal support than we already do, merely because some other states aren't willing to charge their citizens enough taxes to cover their costs?
Pretty much the entire Republican plan consists of ways of giving the middle finger to Californians — removing the EV tax credit, removing the deductibility of income tax, etc. If you look at it from that perspective, it all makes sense. Basically, they're trying to shift California from blue to deep blue.
The thing is, we already have most of the information that this gathers, and cars can't realistically sort through the volume of data required to make things like traffic data via V2V even slightly useful. That works much better when cars report their speed periodically to a centralized system that can filter signal from noise and determine whether it is just one car slowing down or an actual problem. When you're talking about data from potentially millions of cars on the roads at any given moment, there isn't any prayer of even being able to get that much data propagated to all the cars, much less for them to process it.
The only thing it could possibly do better than other solutions is reporting of unexpected hazards, such as road ice, water flows, etc., and even then, only if there are enough cars close enough together for the signals to actually reach you AND there isn't enough time for it to go to a central server and back before you reach the unexpected hazard. In other words, it has very, very, very limited utility compared with cellular-based or radio-based mechanisms. It really seems like a solution in search of a problem to me.
Worse than useless. If your car has sufficient self-driving capabilities, it can see that the car in front of you is braking, and it can react accordingly. Adding car-to-car communication provides no benefit beyond that, and worse, opens up a vector for some jerk to hang a transmitter from a highway overpass that causes every car to think there's a car in front of it that is stopping, bringing the freeway to an even bigger standstill.
And if your car lacks self-driving capabilities, this still won't do any benefits beyond what basic collision-avoidance LIDAR gives you. So if the government really wants to help, they should mandate that instead.
What short-range car-to-car mesh networking can help with is detection of problems a few miles ahead, e.g. if five different cars note a loss of traction in a particular spot, there's a good chance the bridge is icy. But again,
that's only useful if you have a self-driving car to begin with, and it is important that any standard they come up with be extensible enough to handle future types of information. It's really kind of premature to mandate it, though the various car manufacturers should start a standards body to come up with a plan.
Sensible people know that letting their kids take videos of unreleased products and put them up on Youtube without permission is... not something you do. Ever.
Why not? The product has been announced, which means that it is no longer secret. Journalists have used it, written about it, published videos of them using it, etc. Sensible people would assume that letting their kids do the same thing is okay, so long as the build of the OS on that device doesn't have any features that haven't been publicly announced yet. There's no plausible way that the company could be harmed by it, so a sane, rational employee would assume that it falls within reasonable behavior. Feel free to disagree, but you're going to need a better reason than "the product was unreleased".
He probably assumed that since it had already been announced (I assume), and members of the press had already gotten to play with them in person, there was nothing still secret. The question I have is this: did the video actually contain any meaningful secrets? If not (and nothing in the articles implies that it did), then while Apple might technically be within their rights to do what they did, I seriously question the wisdom of doing so. After all, employees learn from mistakes, so he almost certainly wouldn't make a similar mistake in the future even without firing him. Thus:
The punishment seems grossly disproportionate to the crime.
The punishment appears to be purely about vengeance rather than preventing future harm or gaining justice.
To the extent that the firing "serves as an example to others", it also creates a hostile work environment that encourages nearby employees who can get work elsewhere to do so.
Their competition is likely to hire this guy immediately and without hesitation, so they've hurt themselves and helped their competitors.
Unless he was a high-level employee, he probably wasn't under any non-solicitation agreement, and I'd expect a lot of his former coworkers to jump ship. Thus, they've created the perfect conditions for brain drain.
Just because you can fire someone for something, it does not follow that you should. And I think somewhere along the lines, perhaps Apple management forgot that. As Saint Thomas Aquinas put it, justice without mercy is cruelty. Food for thought.
I'm not typically working on the web side, so maybe this comparison isn't accurate, but expecting the web developers to know about HTTP headers seems...similar to expecting backend developers to know about assembly.
Not at all. Expecting front-end developers to know about HTTP headers is more like expecting back-end developers to know about... well, HTTP headers. HTTP headers are a fundamental part of the way that front-end JS code communicates with back-end code in whatever language. Admittedly, back-end devs have to use headers more frequently than front-end devs, who usually only need to use it when creating an API client from scratch, when figuring out why what they're sending to the back end isn't generating the right results (oh, the content type is wrong) or when doing OAuth. That said, if a web developer hasn't at least set the Content-Type header once or twice, I would almost wonder if that person really is a web developer at all.
The laugh moment was. "We are a Agile shop. We will get to that change by the end of 2018 ". Can you say they do not know what AGILE MEANS?
Not at all. Agile means they *can* turn on a dime and work on that feature quickly. The long timeframe means that your priorities are not their priorities.
Yes, it's basically a U.S. thing at this point. The signature requirement is one reason that U.S. travelers have a hard time buying gasoline while traveling in Europe; none of the pumps will take their cards because they're either magstripe/signature-required or chip-without-pin, rather than chip-and-pin as used in most of the rest of the world.
The irony is that they don't actually look at the signatures, as far as I can tell, which makes it almost useless.
While financial penalties could work - making any fine at a level that demonstrably removes the company's ability to invest in more effective security causes more long term security exposures.
Not necessarily. If the fine is high enough that the company goes out of business, the other companies remaining in that field will likely take security more seriously.
This. Distracted driving laws make driving significantly less safe. They're exactly backwards, and those of us with common sense have been saying this since the first distracted driving laws were first proposed. But states keep passing them anyway, and they keep proving us right by producing statistically significant increases in accident rates despite the appearance of a reduction in use (Trempel et al). And it isn't just the anti-handheld talking laws. Anti-texting laws had the same effect.
You want a cell phone law that will reduce accidents? Make it legal to use a cell phone, but only if you hold it in a way that you can use your peripheral vision to see the road. Make it illegal to use it in your lap and legal to hold it up in front of your face for brief interactions. Encourage app developers to add low-distraction modes for their mobile apps so that you can interact with the basic controls at a glance.
Of course, the problem is compounded by car companies that keep switching to non-tactile touchscreen interfaces on their high-end cars, thus guaranteeing that drivers get used to taking their eyes off the road for extended periods of time. And make it illegal for new cars to be sold with touchscreens on the front of the dashboard while you're at it. Require the screens to pop up from the top of the dashboard instead.
Not to mention that in the absence of a functioning bullet manufacturing company (or at least a large supply of black powder, primer caps, and material to make new bullets), a gun is a very short-term tool for survival. It's smarter in the long run to buy a crossbow, materials to repair it when it breaks, and lots of reusable arrows. With that combination, you'll still be hunting decades after the guy with the gun ran out of bullets and died of starvation (unless he used the gun to steal your crossbow, of course).
But the better strategy, really, is to have a group of people who trust and help one another. That way, one of you has the gun just in case people with a gun come to try to steal your crossbows, and the rest of you have crossbows and can be out getting food. There's strength in diversity.
Why pick a 30 year old programmer with 10 years of experience when you can get a 25 year old who spent twice as much time programming because he also did it in his spare time.
Because even if the 25-year-old spent twice as much time since college, that's still only six years' experience versus the 30-year-old's eight.
Also, because the 25-year-old likely spent that extra time writing bad code. When hiring a classical pianist, you don't choose the younger, less classically trained pianist simply because he spends an extra two hours each evening practicing with a rock band. Yet that's exactly what you're advocating....
If a programmer can't provide code they've written on their own, I would tend to doubt their skills in exactly the same way I would doubt the skills of a musician that couldn't provide proof that they practiced their instrument on their own time but wanted to be hired based on the recorded work done with other musicians.
I haven't kept a practice log since I was in elementary school, and I don't know very many musicians that do. That doesn't mean we don't practice. That said, I'm assuming your intended point was that programmers should practice their craft while off the clock. Unfortunately, using that outside practice as a way to measure ability is a very bad idea.
First, programmers writing significant amounts of software outside of work is relatively rare, both because of invention assignment agreement headaches and because programmers usually have other interests besides programming. For me, my main outside interests are music and photography, both of which are huge time sinks. If I'm spending 40 hours a week writing software, the last thing I want to do in the remaining ~60 hours of usable time is to write software unless there's some pressing problem that I can't solve in simpler ways. I occasionally write software for my own personal needs, but I spend orders of magnitude more time writing software at work than I do writing software at home.
And even ignoring that problem, evaluating a programmer based on spare-time code will usually give you a highly inaccurate impression of that person's ability. I would never want to show anyone the code that I write for myself. I don't write unit tests. I don't refactor. I just hack it until it works. Half of it is a glued-together pile of shell scripts and Perl, and the rest is not much better. I'm the only one who will ever maintain my personal code, and if it breaks, it impacts only me, so the need to polish the code just isn't there.
For example, the last piece of software I wrote was a tool to make printing of wind band sheet music less unholy. It's a PDF filter for OS X that takes an input PDF file consisting of 8.5"x11" pages and reformats it on 11"x17" pages, with a center 8.5"x11" half sheet if (num_pages modulo 4) == [1, 2], then prints those pages in up to two passes per input file (because the double sheets need short edge binding and the single sheets need long edge binding so that they flip in the right direction). Under the hood, it is a colossal hack of deprecated APIs (in part because some of the required functionality isn't exposed in the current APIs), and it is buggy as heck because it started out as a somewhat buggy sample code project, and I never bothered to debug it or convert it to ARC. It still meets my minimal needs even though it crashes every so often, so why spend the extra effort to polish a tool that I use to print fifty or sixty parts every couple of years and then don't use again for a couple of years?
At work, the programming languages and available tools are different, I write tests (probably way more than average), and I frequently do major refactoring work to reduce the code footprint and make code easier to understand and maintain. The reasons for this difference are twofold: A. someone other than me will eventually have to maintain my work code, and B. when my work code breaks, it impacts everybody who uses it, not just me.
So evaluating a programmer based on spare-time coding is like evaluating a musician with hidden microphone in the warm-up room and ignoring the actual audition. It might be an interesting approach to experiment with for laughs, but it is unlikely to get you the best players/singers.
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What I was talking about are coastal states. For example, Florida takes in lots of FEMA money, and its coastal properties are in the millions of dollars just like California, albeit not quite as extreme. I think that the cost of hurricane damage should be considered part of the cost of living in an area that is prone to hurricane damage, and should be covered by insurance and property taxes that are high enough to cover the average damage. And yes, the poor in those states are disproportionately affected by storms, and the wealthy in those states would have to make up that difference, but at some point, those folks chose to live in an area prone to bad weather conditions, and that risk should come with a price tag attached. And the state's tourism industry (e.g. Di$ney) can easily afford to help with that.
Puerto Rico is very different because it isn't a state, and thus isn't forced to have a balanced budget and can't declare bankruptcy. As a result, it is exceptionally poor compared with any actual state. I would make an exception for Puerto Rico, precisely because it is an entirely different ballgame. It is essentially a destitute foreign country that just happens to be under the control and protection of the U.S. government. If Puerto Rico became a state, most of its problems should work themselves out over time.
In the short term, though, the country needs to get a huge temporary influx of cash to rebuild infrastructure in ways that won't fail when the next storm hits, with strict building codes, etc., to put that territory more on par with coastal states in the continental U.S. As long as they're starting out so far behind, they can never be expected to cover their losses, because the losses are too huge. That said, in the long term, the goal should be for Puerto Rico to become self-sufficient, too. Hotels along the coast should have to slowly ratchet up their bed taxes to help provide funds that cover the cost of repairs after storms, etc.
The problem is, when folks propose smaller federal government, they invariably do so by cutting programs that help the poor and elderly, while continuing to pump money into military equipment like dollars grow on trees (but never into paying actual soldiers a reasonable wage, because after all, that would help the poor). That is regressive—not because cutting the federal government must be regressive, but rather because the people who want cuts to federal spending are largely either people who are extremely rich and just want to pay less in taxes or people who have been fooled into thinking that the first group will actually lower taxes on the poor and middle class instead of merely lowering their own.
Because for every $1 I pay in federal taxes, I get 80 cents back into my state year after year, and for every $1 that most red states pay in taxes, they get back up to $1.80 year after year. I'm not sure how you can fail to understand something that simple. This isn't about emergencies. This is about conservative states leeching off of liberal states consistently and reliably year after year. Those of us in blue states are tired of i
How is it fair when two people in different states who pay the same amount of tax get different amounts of services in return?
Both problems are unfair, but one helps balance out the other, and changing one without the other just causes the other to become even more unfair proportionally.
You keep myopically focusing on federal taxes. What matters is how much we get back for each dollar paid in taxes, and we get lower taxes because the federal government is cheating us. The fact that we individually pay less in federal taxes is irrelevant. If we paid the same in federal taxes, the federal government would be cheating us even more.
You keep talking about individuals taking in federal aid, as though you think people who don't directly receive federal aid are not somehow benefitting from it. Everyone in states that get more federal aid benefit from it, because that's money that the state doesn't have to spend on those programs, and can instead spend on other things, like better roads, better schools, etc. If you've seen the amount of road construction around Nashville, it is staggering. Compare that with here in northern Cali where despite having higher fuel taxes, we're barely able to patch the seasonal damage, much less actually repave the roads end-to-end, much less build new superhighways. Now I realize that part of the difference is the cost of buying land, but part of it is the federal spending imbalance.
This is technically true. But we can't force the federal government to spend proportionally. As I said elsewhere, I'd be perfectly happy with removing the deductibility of income tax, so long as it is accompanied by a constitutional amendment that requires the federal government to spend money in states proportional to the taxes paid by the citizens of those states. Then we could lower our state taxes in California without having to cut services. Short of that, though, deductibility of state taxes is a lifeboat that helps make up for the imbalance. You can't take that away without leveling out the spending. Note again, that leveling the spending is not the same as reducing spending.
That's completely irrelevant to my point, which is that the amount of services that people get from every dollar paid in taxes in California is lower than in TN because of the federal spending imbalance, and that the imbalance becomes inherently worse if we can't deduct our state taxes.
How is that an argument for lowering federal spending? It's an argument for making federal spending more fair, by decreasing federal spending in states that get back more than they pay in taxes, and increasing it in states that get back significantly less than they pay. I mean, I suppose that in theory, if you cut federal spending to near zero, the imbalance would nearly disappear, but that would also be kind of nuts.
The problem is, because they chose to have artificially low state taxes, the federal government has to give them a larger percentage of federal income to bail them out. California didn't choose to have such high state taxes. It is forced to have high state taxes because its return on taxes paid to the federal government is so poor that it has to make up the difference at the state level.
I'm okay with the income tax deduction going away, but only if that change is accompanied by a constitutional amendment that says that federal money spent on each state must be proportional to the amount paid in by that state to within +/- 0.5% averaged over any given five-year period. That would, of course, mean that Tennessee would have to either crank up its sales tax to about 20% or add an income tax to maintain its standard of living, and California could lower its state taxes by several percent without losing services (or dramatically raise its standard of living, or somewhere in between), and taxes would actually be fair. It also would mean that states prone to hurricanes and tornadoes would have to raise their property taxes to cover the disproportionate cost of all their disaster relief, and California would get more money for CalFire than it currently does, allowing for more proactive control over wildfires.
As long as the federal outflow is massively disproportionate from state to state, those of us who have to pay high state taxes to make up for the federal government shorting us year after year should d**n well be able to deduct those make-up taxes.
Well, that's not entirely unwarranted. Corn and soybeans are staple crops. Walnuts and almonds are basically "nice to haves". And fruits are indirectly subsidized by the feds looking the other way at all the illegal immigrant farm labor that picks them. :-D
No, it makes it less fair. Consider two hypothetical people that both make $100,000 per year. One lives in CA (~10% income tax), and one lives in TN (no income tax; in theory, you can deduct sales tax, but it isn't practical to do unless you're buying a car or something similarly big-ticket). They each donate $5,000 a year to charities, and have comparably nice homes for the area ($200k in TN, $2M in the Bay Area).
The person in CA pays $10k in state income tax, $20k in property tax, plus the $5k donation, for a taxable income of $65k, resulting in $14,270 in federal taxes. They get back something like 80% of that, or about $11,470. Add that to the state taxes, and they spent $44,270 and got back $41,470 in benefits, or 93.7% of their tax spending.
The person in TN pays $1,670 in property tax, $0 in income tax, and pays taxes on $93,330. They pay $23,520 in taxes, and get back about 1.1x as much in services, or $28,572 in benefits. Total that up, and they spent $25190 to get $30242 in benefits, or ~120% of their tax spending.
Now drop the deductibility on the income tax. The person in Tennessee's numbers don't change, but the Californian now pays $17,535 in federal taxes and gets back $14,028 in benefits. Total it up, and they spent $47,535 for $44,028 in benefits, or 92.7% of what they paid.
In other words, this means that people in high-tax states that are already supporting the low-tax states disproportionately are going to do so even more. That's the exact opposite of fair, in my book.
Let's turn that around. Even with those deductions, most of the states with the highest state tax rates give more money to the federal government than they get back in grants and services. By contrast, most of the states with the lowest state tax rates take considerably more money from the feds than they give. So even now, the states with the highest state tax rates are taking on the "burden of federal support" for the states with the lowest tax rates. Without deductibility of income tax, that disparity will become even larger. Why should we have to shoulder even more of the burden of federal support than we already do, merely because some other states aren't willing to charge their citizens enough taxes to cover their costs?
Pretty much the entire Republican plan consists of ways of giving the middle finger to Californians — removing the EV tax credit, removing the deductibility of income tax, etc. If you look at it from that perspective, it all makes sense. Basically, they're trying to shift California from blue to deep blue.
194 proof, to be exact.
The thing is, we already have most of the information that this gathers, and cars can't realistically sort through the volume of data required to make things like traffic data via V2V even slightly useful. That works much better when cars report their speed periodically to a centralized system that can filter signal from noise and determine whether it is just one car slowing down or an actual problem. When you're talking about data from potentially millions of cars on the roads at any given moment, there isn't any prayer of even being able to get that much data propagated to all the cars, much less for them to process it.
The only thing it could possibly do better than other solutions is reporting of unexpected hazards, such as road ice, water flows, etc., and even then, only if there are enough cars close enough together for the signals to actually reach you AND there isn't enough time for it to go to a central server and back before you reach the unexpected hazard. In other words, it has very, very, very limited utility compared with cellular-based or radio-based mechanisms. It really seems like a solution in search of a problem to me.
Worse than useless. If your car has sufficient self-driving capabilities, it can see that the car in front of you is braking, and it can react accordingly. Adding car-to-car communication provides no benefit beyond that, and worse, opens up a vector for some jerk to hang a transmitter from a highway overpass that causes every car to think there's a car in front of it that is stopping, bringing the freeway to an even bigger standstill.
And if your car lacks self-driving capabilities, this still won't do any benefits beyond what basic collision-avoidance LIDAR gives you. So if the government really wants to help, they should mandate that instead.
What short-range car-to-car mesh networking can help with is detection of problems a few miles ahead, e.g. if five different cars note a loss of traction in a particular spot, there's a good chance the bridge is icy. But again, that's only useful if you have a self-driving car to begin with, and it is important that any standard they come up with be extensible enough to handle future types of information. It's really kind of premature to mandate it, though the various car manufacturers should start a standards body to come up with a plan.
Why not? The product has been announced, which means that it is no longer secret. Journalists have used it, written about it, published videos of them using it, etc. Sensible people would assume that letting their kids do the same thing is okay, so long as the build of the OS on that device doesn't have any features that haven't been publicly announced yet. There's no plausible way that the company could be harmed by it, so a sane, rational employee would assume that it falls within reasonable behavior. Feel free to disagree, but you're going to need a better reason than "the product was unreleased".
He probably assumed that since it had already been announced (I assume), and members of the press had already gotten to play with them in person, there was nothing still secret. The question I have is this: did the video actually contain any meaningful secrets? If not (and nothing in the articles implies that it did), then while Apple might technically be within their rights to do what they did, I seriously question the wisdom of doing so. After all, employees learn from mistakes, so he almost certainly wouldn't make a similar mistake in the future even without firing him. Thus:
Just because you can fire someone for something, it does not follow that you should. And I think somewhere along the lines, perhaps Apple management forgot that. As Saint Thomas Aquinas put it, justice without mercy is cruelty. Food for thought.
Not at all. Expecting front-end developers to know about HTTP headers is more like expecting back-end developers to know about... well, HTTP headers. HTTP headers are a fundamental part of the way that front-end JS code communicates with back-end code in whatever language. Admittedly, back-end devs have to use headers more frequently than front-end devs, who usually only need to use it when creating an API client from scratch, when figuring out why what they're sending to the back end isn't generating the right results (oh, the content type is wrong) or when doing OAuth. That said, if a web developer hasn't at least set the Content-Type header once or twice, I would almost wonder if that person really is a web developer at all.
The laugh moment was. "We are a Agile shop. We will get to that change by the end of 2018 ". Can you say they do not know what AGILE MEANS?
Not at all. Agile means they *can* turn on a dime and work on that feature quickly. The long timeframe means that your priorities are not their priorities.
Since when does a Home Theater PC only cost $8?
When they are bought in bulk.
You forgot the Raspberry Pi link....
Me, too. But it failed outdoors at every gas station. I always had to go inside.
Yes, it's basically a U.S. thing at this point. The signature requirement is one reason that U.S. travelers have a hard time buying gasoline while traveling in Europe; none of the pumps will take their cards because they're either magstripe/signature-required or chip-without-pin, rather than chip-and-pin as used in most of the rest of the world.
The irony is that they don't actually look at the signatures, as far as I can tell, which makes it almost useless.
Not necessarily. If the fine is high enough that the company goes out of business, the other companies remaining in that field will likely take security more seriously.
This. Distracted driving laws make driving significantly less safe. They're exactly backwards, and those of us with common sense have been saying this since the first distracted driving laws were first proposed. But states keep passing them anyway, and they keep proving us right by producing statistically significant increases in accident rates despite the appearance of a reduction in use (Trempel et al). And it isn't just the anti-handheld talking laws. Anti-texting laws had the same effect.
You want a cell phone law that will reduce accidents? Make it legal to use a cell phone, but only if you hold it in a way that you can use your peripheral vision to see the road. Make it illegal to use it in your lap and legal to hold it up in front of your face for brief interactions. Encourage app developers to add low-distraction modes for their mobile apps so that you can interact with the basic controls at a glance.
Of course, the problem is compounded by car companies that keep switching to non-tactile touchscreen interfaces on their high-end cars, thus guaranteeing that drivers get used to taking their eyes off the road for extended periods of time. And make it illegal for new cars to be sold with touchscreens on the front of the dashboard while you're at it. Require the screens to pop up from the top of the dashboard instead.
Not to mention that in the absence of a functioning bullet manufacturing company (or at least a large supply of black powder, primer caps, and material to make new bullets), a gun is a very short-term tool for survival. It's smarter in the long run to buy a crossbow, materials to repair it when it breaks, and lots of reusable arrows. With that combination, you'll still be hunting decades after the guy with the gun ran out of bullets and died of starvation (unless he used the gun to steal your crossbow, of course).
But the better strategy, really, is to have a group of people who trust and help one another. That way, one of you has the gun just in case people with a gun come to try to steal your crossbows, and the rest of you have crossbows and can be out getting food. There's strength in diversity.
Well, there are always steel shotgun shells.
Wait, this isn't like the matrix sequels is it?
Because even if the 25-year-old spent twice as much time since college, that's still only six years' experience versus the 30-year-old's eight.
Also, because the 25-year-old likely spent that extra time writing bad code. When hiring a classical pianist, you don't choose the younger, less classically trained pianist simply because he spends an extra two hours each evening practicing with a rock band. Yet that's exactly what you're advocating....
I haven't kept a practice log since I was in elementary school, and I don't know very many musicians that do. That doesn't mean we don't practice. That said, I'm assuming your intended point was that programmers should practice their craft while off the clock. Unfortunately, using that outside practice as a way to measure ability is a very bad idea.
First, programmers writing significant amounts of software outside of work is relatively rare, both because of invention assignment agreement headaches and because programmers usually have other interests besides programming. For me, my main outside interests are music and photography, both of which are huge time sinks. If I'm spending 40 hours a week writing software, the last thing I want to do in the remaining ~60 hours of usable time is to write software unless there's some pressing problem that I can't solve in simpler ways. I occasionally write software for my own personal needs, but I spend orders of magnitude more time writing software at work than I do writing software at home.
And even ignoring that problem, evaluating a programmer based on spare-time code will usually give you a highly inaccurate impression of that person's ability. I would never want to show anyone the code that I write for myself. I don't write unit tests. I don't refactor. I just hack it until it works. Half of it is a glued-together pile of shell scripts and Perl, and the rest is not much better. I'm the only one who will ever maintain my personal code, and if it breaks, it impacts only me, so the need to polish the code just isn't there.
For example, the last piece of software I wrote was a tool to make printing of wind band sheet music less unholy. It's a PDF filter for OS X that takes an input PDF file consisting of 8.5"x11" pages and reformats it on 11"x17" pages, with a center 8.5"x11" half sheet if (num_pages modulo 4) == [1, 2], then prints those pages in up to two passes per input file (because the double sheets need short edge binding and the single sheets need long edge binding so that they flip in the right direction). Under the hood, it is a colossal hack of deprecated APIs (in part because some of the required functionality isn't exposed in the current APIs), and it is buggy as heck because it started out as a somewhat buggy sample code project, and I never bothered to debug it or convert it to ARC. It still meets my minimal needs even though it crashes every so often, so why spend the extra effort to polish a tool that I use to print fifty or sixty parts every couple of years and then don't use again for a couple of years?
At work, the programming languages and available tools are different, I write tests (probably way more than average), and I frequently do major refactoring work to reduce the code footprint and make code easier to understand and maintain. The reasons for this difference are twofold: A. someone other than me will eventually have to maintain my work code, and B. when my work code breaks, it impacts everybody who uses it, not just me.
So evaluating a programmer based on spare-time coding is like evaluating a musician with hidden microphone in the warm-up room and ignoring the actual audition. It might be an interesting approach to experiment with for laughs, but it is unlikely to get you the best players/singers.