I don’t know how this transaction went down, but it’s very likely they didn’t purchase the organization itself, but rather its assets. The surviving organization would then dispose of the resulting cash in a mission-oriented fashion and shutdown thereafter.
Even better - compile Emacs as a kernel module, and run it in ring 0. ELisp would give it memory safety, so memory protection would not even be necessary. System calls have never been so cheap!
What if their house straddles the border, and they work from home? Are they not allowed to have their computer in one side of the house? Who monitors this?
Technically they would probably have to be dual citizens, or a citizen of one country and permanent resident of the other, to not break laws. And then they'd have to file taxes in both countries.
No idea if it's enforced, but if it were, it would probably be such a pain that people would just stop buying/building houses that straddle the border. Why complicate things unnecessarily with a house split between two countries when you can just buy a house that is (like most houses) entirely in one country?
Not at all true, it sounds like you're just guessing about what how you think things should work?
> And then they'd have to file taxes in both countries.
Not at all true again, regardless of where your house is, even if you're a dual citizen. The US is the only country that claims to be able to tax the earnings of its citizens outside of its borders.
There was a building in the outer Washington, DC, suburbs that straddled a county line. Somehow or another its status became subject to a vote twenty-five or thirty years ago--though the electorate eligible to vote on this must have been tiny.
And I did once meet a programmer who lived or had live in a house straddling the New York/New Jersey line NW of New York City. I didn't ask about the tax status.
> James Tanner, the Gaston County tax director, said the state will have to refer to old laws regarding residency for houses the border now divides.
> "What is going to be that main decision is they go back to the old voter guidelines or rules," Tanner said. "And that's where the head of household lays down to sleep. So basically where the master bedroom is located in that property, whichever side that's on is going be dependent on where the residence is."
> The border legislation passed in both states said that residents who moved from North Carolina to South Carolina will remain eligible for North Carolina in-state tuition for 10 years after the change, provided that they remain on the same property that was formerly in North Carolina. Residents whose homes moved from South Carolina to North Carolina are eligible for South Carolina in-state tuition for two years after the change.
> ...
> Dee and Glenn Martin, age 88 and 90, live just a few houses away from the Ingold family, and their property was moved entirely from South Carolina to North Carolina. Glenn has a number of significant health issues, including pulmonary fibrosis. He spends most days at home, seated in his favorite armchair and attached to a tank of oxygen while Dee serves as his primary caretaker.
> Under South Carolina's healthcare provisions, he was allowed at-home visits from a primary care physician. Although the Martins have found a North Carolina doctor to serve as Glenn's primary care physician, they remain unsure what kind of access they will have to at-home care.
> People like Kemp need to take some time to describe precisely where they live. He walks in his front door in Rhode Island, but his kitchen is in Connecticut. He votes in Rhode Island, which is also where his car is registered, but he sleeps in Connecticut.
> Of course, he pays taxes to both towns.
> ...
> Several people approached for this story living on the border said they’d rather not be quoted in an article about how they were following the requirements because, generally speaking, they were not.
> ...
> Even before COVID, there were complications on state borders. What school do your kids go to? What cable service do you get? To whom do you pay taxes, and in what amount? Who plows your road? When you need to get your property fixed, do you need a contractor licensed in both states?
> For Father D. Timothy O’Mara, pastor of St. Paul’s Church in Blackstone, Massachusetts, and also North Smithfield, Rhode Island, there are also advantages: Because the border between Massachusetts and Rhode Island cuts right through church property, he can offer weddings in either state.
> “We definitely straddle the line,” O’Mara said.
> He’s never had to do that, but according to church folklore, it’s happened before. A couple arrived on their wedding day with a marriage license issued in Rhode Island. But the church is part of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Worcester. The astute priest took them to the back of the church, the part of it that is in Rhode Island, where they did the civil part of the ceremony, before heading back to Massachusetts for the ceremony and nuptial Mass.
> “Thus was the legality of the marriage ensured,” the church’s official history proclaims.
Are there two separate parcel IDs? One for each authority in the respective state? Do you pay property tax on the full acreage to each state or only on the partial acreage in each state?
I grew up in a poor, rural area of the US and can attest that it's true... if you didn't pay the fee (and affix the requisite metal sign below your mailbox) you were on your own in the event of a fire.
At that time and place, fire protection wasn't considered a public service unless you lived in town. I never heard anyone question the arrangement and there was little appetite in that era for the tax increase that would've been required to provide universal protection.
That depends on which rural area. I've lived in several rural areas, and we always had automatic fire service provided by the township, it was just another required tax line item. Normally they contracted with the nearest town (I know in one case the township legally owned half the town fire department and paid half the costs, the others I don't know what the details were, just that there was service from the nearest town). I know of townships that don't contract with a nearby town - but then they go in with other rural townships to form a fire department (generally volunteer - farmers sometimes got a call to leave the tractor and fight a fire)
Townships only exist in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; most of the rest have counties. As you say, it varies from place to place; any of them could start a fire service if the residents vote for it and fund it via local taxes.
Ohio has townships within its counties; they serve as a catch-all for areas that aren't otherwise incorporated as cities/villages, and that can make a big difference for local property tax and services.
Townships exist in most states - only the original 13 colonies don't have them. they are a federal thing, and how land was surveyed (IIRC is dates back to the Louisiana Purchase, but I can't find verification in a quick search. How each state use them differs, but the concept of a 6 mile by 6 mile section of land comes from the federal government. Originally one section (1 square mile) of land was set aside for the local school to own - some would be sold to build the school and rent from the rest would provide for the school teacher's salary.
Most states also have a county, but this is different from a township. New Jersey and Pennsylvania (as part of the original 13 colonies) don't take part in the federal township system and have their own system with the same name that is otherwise not related.
This is a problem SaaS can solve, scapegoat as a service.
When needed, get a professional scapegoat to fire, less chance to see him again. And you can get the performance you want. Do you want an asshole who deserves it, or maybe you prefer a clueless bootlicker.
Of course, bosses will also be available to do the firing if you can't supply your own.
And while I am imagining things, I am sure that something like that exists in some form.
This is sounding like a Frankenstein's Monster built from a performance art troup and a reputation management company, maybe with a sprinkling of a staffing agency. It...sounds like something that might even have a proper niche if someone wanted to pursue it.
Sound like I should finally do something useful with my scapegoat-consulting.com domain I purchased years ago. I intended to put up a prank site offering basically just that :)
I had that happen at a car dealer. I complained when a salesman told me I owed him an apology for not believing his numbers (this was after I’d caught him lying). The general manager told me they had fired him over it. The next time I was in the dealer, probably six months later, the same salesman came over and started to chat me up. He obviously remembered me but not why he did. I just laughed, I wasn’t surprised in the least. I’d only complained in the first place so I could get a different sales person.
OT but my favorite car dealer story was when I was in for routine maintenance. Some salesman was going around the service area talking to people trying to drum up interest.
So he came to talk to me. Asked if I had looked at the new cars and told me how reliable they were, and I should consider one.
So I asked (not loudly but not quiet conversation volume), “Is my new $model I bought from $this_manufacturer last year not reliable?”
Boy did he backpedal and move on to find something else to do real quick.
Atom was developed before the acquisition. Which brings us to the second proud tradition of the tech titans, acquiring companies to end the products the acquirer doesn't like.
Well yeah, if you have two very similar products (editors/IDEs based on web technology), one of them much more successful than the other, putting a lot of effort into the less-used product sounds a bit hard to justify...
If you look at the contribution activity it dropped off after acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft and it seems that development was redirected to VSCode.
The writing was on the wall for a long while now, and was one of the reasons why the JuliaCommunity stopped advocating Juno/Atom as a platform and instead switched to VSCode
Probably a bit of both if I was to hazard a guess. MS has VS Code, which is definitely the elephant in the room as far as go to IDEs in the environments I’ve been in lately. So right now they’re spending engineering time on both VS Code and Atom, so they may as well focus their resources on the more popular one.
Look at the Atom repo, very few commits in the last year, and it's not like there are loads of open pull requests (serious PRs do get merged), and it's been strongly dropping off for a long time. It's the programming community that abandoned Atom, not Microsoft.
it was dead already, or at least, shown inferior to vscode in feature set. If anything you can accuse MS, it's using its market position and the VS brand name to "steal" adoption, but that completed before the aquisition too.
But Atom isn't, is it? It was started prior to Microsoft, to which Microsoft bought Github, and are now "sunsetting". While i don't think Atom was enough competition to actually warrant any real discussion here, the timeline seems quite fitting to EEE no?
Microsoft doesn't make money from VS Code. Atom was retired due to a lack of activity with the project. I've never even seen anyone use Atom, since the time it was released 8 years ago.
> We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on VS Code "Pro".
I don't think it would serve their interests, so I'm not worried about it, but who knows? This cynicism is directed towards Microsoft because they've earned it.
Had two coworkers at my last job use it when they needed to edit some of our legacy PHP stuff (we were mostly a .NET shop) but even they switched to VS Code eventually because the writing was on the wall for support.
