I think if I were a random Google employee submitting Kubernetes patches at my day job-- i.e. not a project maintainer, but just someone in the K8s org chart-- I'd be kind of annoyed if I got cold-emailed asking me to help merge their patches. I'd probably trash that email and assume it was some kind of scam.
I get that the current system isn't working, but I don't think you should just go emailing random committers, that seems likely to just piss people off to no benefit.
Github suggests reviewers to PR authors based on who's been modifying nearby code recently (ok, I don't know whether that's a general policy, but it happens to me all of the time). And for the past year or so I have been getting tagged to review more and more AI slop from newcomers to the project that we chose to maintain in public. I just immediately nope out of all reviews now if I don't recognize the submitter, because I don't scale enough to be the only actual human involved with understanding the code coming at me. This sucks for the newcomers who actually wrote the patch themselves, but I can't always tell. Put some misspellings in your comments and I'm actually more likely to review it!
You can do regular maintenance on concrete to keep it looking nice, but nobody wants to spend the money. Everyone understands that a wooden house exterior has to be repainted now and then, but thinks "concrete = no upkeep costs". Architects have complained bitterly about this for a while; I don't love brutalism but I can sort of see their point.
The "politician's fallacy" (we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this) is at its strongest when it comes to massacres in other countries. Nobody wants to sit around and just watch it continue, and it's really hard to put yourself in the frame to accurately analyze "is there actually anything I can do about this which won't make the problem worse?"
It's a hard problem and I don't know what to do about it, especially since (as a sibling comment mentions), sometimes you can improve the situation. Other times you will make it much worse. And I haven't seen a trustworthy way to distinguish the two (lots of interventionist-minded folks claim they have one; I think they're kidding themselves).
The something in question is bombing. Didn't Israel and the US try that last year?
Maybe the objective wasn't regime, but I doubt more bombs will do that? Not after so many years of sanctions.
Sadly, I don't see any positive outcome, short of the regime gracefully collapsing on itself.
Hardening sanctions won't do Iranians any good, but it will make the country poorer and less able to inflict violence on other countries. Which is guess is the logic.
And following the export of drones to Russia, I doubt Europe, which has previously been in favor of fewer sanctions, will oppose more sanctions on Iran.
If only the US administration had friends, they could do something with sanctions. But I guess useless bombing it is, or maybe just nothing -- this is Trump after all.
Sadly, I doubt it matters either way.
The regime sponsors terrorism, not reason they wouldn't do it at home.
> when it comes to massacres in other countries. Nobody wants to sit around and just watch it continue
Oh really? I was under the impression that the US actually armed and funded for two years a genocidal war on Gaza. (Btw in that case Scott Aaronson, far for being concerned, actually argued that Israelis can and should kill as many people as they need to feel safe).
In the last decade, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that bribery is de facto legal and impossible to prosecute (Kelly v. United States, McDonnell v. United States, FEC vs. Ted Cruz). And those were against relative nobodies, they certainly aren't going to permit charges against anyone in this administration.
None of those three cases have to do with bribery, at least not receiving bribes for official action. Here's some nuance: Kelly concerns retaliation, McDonnell concerns whether hosting meetings and events amounts to official action, and FEC concern the limit (was $250,000) on the amount of post-election contributions which may be used to repay campaign debts.
It's also worth noting that Kelly was unanimous and FEC upheld the ruling of the district court which the FEC had appealed.
Yeah I have to wonder if any of the "humans would do it better" people actually have children and have dropped them off in a school zone. Drivers are on their phones rolling through school zones at 25-30 during pickup/dropoff hours all the fucking time.
I have a 2022 Model 3, and the hilariously tragic part is that the voice assistant was great and basically never gave me any problems until they shoved Grok into it, whereupon it broke completely. I never use it anymore, they effectively removed a feature from my car.
Whoa, did Tesla pull an Apple? Siri used to work okay on the iPhone, but once it got LLMed it frequently sits there indefinitely while failing to make any progress on even the simplest commands.
Counterpoint: I like my Tesla, and I find the AI assistant diverting and useful. I have very little doubt the functionality of the limited on-board voice assistant will be merged into Grok (it's literally on the coming features).
Whether you like this or not, who cares? The pace of improvement in Tesla software compared to any other manufacturer is astonishing, and astonishingly good.
I have no love for the CEO, but my Model Y is a very interesting (and intuitive) car.
Do a quick press of the voice button and the old voice control activate; if you hold it down or press too long, it uses the grok AI which can't do anything (and I never use).
I have an older X, and I'm kind of happy that the AP and Infotainment hardware in it is largely deprecated, and they are unlikely to be able to shove Grok crap into it. It will stay largely the same for the life of the car.
This is part of the reason why I believe cars should delegate as much software functionality to your phone as possible. Phones have good voice assistants and they will get better, same with GPS and music. Just let the phone do it. Plus, when the software is out of support you don't have to buy a new car.
These are niche enough use cases I don't think they're worth bothering about.
I wouldn't dump millions into a custom GPS solution for that 1 time out of 1 million someone drives a car without a smartphone. Especially when that GPS system is guaranteed to be worse than Google maps and not as well supported.
If someone else drives your car they can connect their phone. Which is an improvement, because now they have THEIR music and navigation. See, it comes with personalization out of the box and automatically!
No it should definitely be possible, I just don't think it's worth while creating a subpar and poorly-supported GPS system when phones exist. Especially when said system is forced over phones, which often happens because companies want to promote their own shit. As if their shit don't stink, when really it's the smelliest.
We don't need 1 million different applications that we have to try to integrate together. Just let me connect my messages, my GPS, my music player, even my calendar. Personally, I could give a rat's ass how fancy Tesla's interface is or GM's. It will always, always be second best to what's available on modern smartphones.
11% revenue decline during a year where the global EV market grew 20% [0]. That's just abysmal, especially for a company which was once the only game in town if you wanted a "serious" EV.
I guess in this case it’s the Apple that dominated an emerging market, then fumbled it and completely lost the market to the IBM PC and ended up as a bit player for the next two decades.
> I have a credit card with HSBC: you know, the bank with virtue-signalling multiculturalism in their ads.
Was this opening sentence necessary? It is not germane at all to the rest of the article. Ironically, it is itself virtue-signalling (for some definition of virtue), just to a different audience.
It doesn't even link to an ad, it links to a weird parody attempt of the ad on the same site as the article. Which makes little sense for people unfamiliar with the original ad it parodies.
If that's true it only makes the opening sentence worse: of all the things you could have accused HSBC of in your opener (laundering money for dictators and violent drug cartels, manipulating markets to fleece people out of billions, and on and on), you decided their most noteworthy sin was multicultural ads?
My first instinct was to close the article as I didn't want to read a Republican virtue signaling to his audience. I wonder if they were trying to sound Republican?
The article itself is a nice, well interesting, dive into the topic; kinda unfortunate.
"Republican"?! US defaultism strikes again. He's in the UK, and he states his pronouns here https://danq.me/about/ so doesn't sound very "Republican" to me.
I didn't find anything from a short keyword search and a read through some of his other blogposts, but I would not be surprised if he were a republican in the "prefers a republic as a form of government" sense. (I'm one, and am very much not a fan of the US political party by that name)
Surprisingly neutral on topics regarding monarchy/monarchs, in favour of the AV referendum to get rid of plurality voting, and very annoyed at the electoral system for unilaterally changing his name on the voter rolls. (His surname is Q)
I think this kind of virtue signalling has become known as "vice signalling".
Putting diverse races in an ad, while not doing anything else about diversity, is virtue signalling. Complaining there are other races in the ad is vice signalling.
Funny, the tone sounded UK/Australian to me. Just be aware, beyond a surface level awareness there are very few people who know what a specific ideology in your country sounds like, or care enough to learn.
I've seen this sentiment on the left. I think the author just phrased it a little oddly.
Sometimes called "pink capitalism" or "rainbow capitalism", where a company will show the rainbow pride flag for Pride Month, but not put any more substantial effort towards diversity, plurality, LGBTQ rights, etc.
I expect nothing from companies, and it's nice to see that virtue signal. If they're signalling, it means they think we haven't been exterminated yet. But I don't expect good works from anything for-profit. It's just business.
Edit: The author using the phrase "surveillance capitalism" is generally a left wing thing. I don't hear right-wingers rallying against capitalism (let's not even get into the weeds of defining "capitalism" the word) even when they happen to oppose surveillance
And apparently not targeted all that well, since half the comments here think it is a right-wing (anti-multiculturalism) sentiment, and the other half a left-wing (anti-corporate-reputation-laundering) sentiment.
You could use this exact argument to say nobody should ever have children-- children also raise inflation, home prices, etc. And the majority of your property taxes go specifically towards programs which would be unneeded if nobody had any children.
The fact that naive anti-immigration arguments can be copy-pasted unchanged into arguments against having children is a sign that maybe those arguments are stupid. To understand why, you might start with the fact that immigrants also purchase goods and services, and hence pay the salaries of the ~70% of people in this country employed in some way or another by consumer spending.
Children are future taxpayers the majority with parents who were not a tax burden --net positive tax contribution. People without Children benefit from the taxes paid by the children of people who rear children -i.e. people without children aren't "cashing out" their tax contributed retirement --that contribution went to other retirees.
And citizens benefit from the taxes paid by non-citizen immigrants, whether documented or undocumented. Not just income and payroll taxes that might be dodged by under-the-table arrangements, but sales taxes, property taxes (perhaps paid indirectly via rent to a taxpaying landlord), the consumer share (nearly 100%) of tariffs, etc. And much of that tax base is spent on benefits and services that are not accessible to taxpaying non-citizens.
So from that standpoint, immigrants are a /better/ economic deal for the public than children are. At the end of the day, though, it shouldn't matter where people were born if they're contributing to society, and the grandparent post is 100% correct that the whole debate is stupid.
Oh, in that case no w-2 employee pays income taxes, their employer does. I guess we’re all just mooches on society and only the company owners do anything.
No, they just pay sales tax and other taxes on use. I was being sarcastic because you are fundamentally incorrect and as the other comment said, engaging in sophistry.
Grade school math. Look at income tax receipts: the top 5% pay >61% of all income taxes.
You can try and split hairs with "sales taxes" and "payroll taxes" and try to shimmy things into some anti-capitalist stance ("but the companies benefit from their labor!!!," "renters pay property taxes indirectly!"), but the overwhelming majority of all tax payments come from a small percentage of individuals.
Why does this matter? The government spends X dollars each fiscal year, divided by the number (N) of people. Most people aren't paying X/N.
The government would not be able to fund every social program or services if it weren't for these receipts, which, most people cannot afford to pay. Even 100% of the majority of salaries can't cover this amount.
> Why does this matter? The government spends X dollars each fiscal year, divided by the number (N) of people. Most people aren't paying X/N.
It matters because we don't know if these people are being taxed more proportionately or less. Like, Elon Musk pays more tax than you or I, but he probably pays at a much lower rate.
What you don't want (from an equity and fairness perspective) is for people with more money to pay a lower rate of tax. That will cause problems.
From a total population perspective, given some amount of money S it doesn't really matter who pays it (except for downstream impacts around fairness and elections).
However, your original point was:
> The vast majority of adults and their children will never pay their tax burden proportionately.
I would argue that this is incorrect, everyone pays some proportion of their income in income/sales/property/estate taxes. And really, your point about who pays the majority of US federal taxes doesn't actually support your point.
Finally, I would note that I mostly replied because I really hate those top x% comparisons as they're deceptive without looking at the proportion of income earned.
> Government could not afford to provide the services they provide if these taxes weren't paid, full stop.
Of course they could. Taxation is not necessary in the short term for a government to provide services (especially if we're talking about the US which both issues its own currency and benefits from massive foreign demand for its debt).
Over the long term, taxation needs to at least pay back the debt but that long-term appears to be much longer than I would have expected (when was the last time the US government ran a surplus?).
Immigrants pay social security taxes, unemployment taxes, ... that they also will never be able to benefit from. Those are purely for the benefit of US citizens
There is a good case for vetted legal immigration (there is need and they fill that unmet need), no question; however, that should not be at the expense of the local population, regardless of country. In other words, the locals should not suffer a depressed job market because of immigration. The whole reason for a state to exist is to first and foremost look after the wellbeing of its citizens that elect the bodies of government.
I'm not sure where you're getting that from in my comment. I never said US citizens should want H1Bs for everyone with zero vetting, only that they are a net tax positive.
It's not a dichotomy of maintaining the status quo or getting rid of H1b completely. At least in big tech companies, they do follow labor market tests and prevailing wage tests and so on that are designed to vet that there is an unmet need and that visa holders aren't underpaid. I won't deny there are visa mills and consultancies that game the system and pretty much explicitly just hire cheap foreign labor, but this is a thread about H1B in the context of Amazon layoffs, not InfoSys layoffs.
It depends if the immigrant is hired because the native worker is deemed too expensive. In this case, it contributes to reducing contributions through wage suppression.
If you have access to data that shows big tech is preferentially hiring visa holders over US citizens you should get on that class action lawsuit right away. That's probably hundreds of thousands or even millions per person in lost wages, and even after lawyers take their 30% cut, that's still a sizable chunk.
It's anecdata, but a college friend who now works at as a manager in an IT/Data consultancy in my birth country in the EU told me bluntly that they prioritized hiring foreigners as they were 20% cheaper.
Given that the company sponsors them and come from lower incomes countries, they are ready to accept lower wages. If they do it I don't see why everyone wouldn't be doing the same.
It's of course hard to prove formally as those companies will comply with regs to make it look like they aren't discriminating (fake job ads, etc...). By the way in the US Indian consultancies got busted for this.
I get that the current system isn't working, but I don't think you should just go emailing random committers, that seems likely to just piss people off to no benefit.
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