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jgowdy

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"but the company founder is some billionaire's daughter. I fear ever having a boss like that just because of the fundamental difference in perspective and life experiences. I'm sure I won't be able to communicate with them."

Imagine invalidating a person as a potential colleague and declaring your incompatibility with that person remotely based on a quarter inch deep evaluation of their background. I think this kind of take is in really bad taste.

The Dutch Innovation Box regime provides a lower effective tax rate (7% as of 2024) on profits derived from qualifying intellectual property, such as patents and software. For companies like Uber, which rely heavily on proprietary technology, this can significantly reduce their overall tax burden on profits derived from IP.

The participation exemption in the Netherlands allows companies to receive dividends and capital gains from qualifying foreign subsidiaries free from Dutch corporate tax. This is particularly beneficial for multinational corporations with substantial foreign operations, as it prevents profits from being taxed multiple times as they move up through the corporate structure.

The Netherlands is a popular location for holding companies due to its favorable tax regime for holding and managing subsidiaries. The combination of participation exemptions, tax treaties, and rulings makes it ideal for structuring complex international operations.

So... a nation like the Netherlands optimizes their tax laws such that it's advantageous for businesses that are otherwise completely unrelated to their nation to HQ in their nation to avoid their proper tax burdens in the country they were started in and operate in much more significantly, for the benefit of the Netherlands getting additional tax revenue and to the detriment of other nations who would otherwise be able to tax that business.

Some people might call that a "tax shelter." Since it you know, benefits Uber, benefits the Netherlands, at the detriment of the nation(s) that Uber operates in...

That's one way of saying "Europe is full of nations who provide unethical tax shelters for businesses (while criticizing any nation that doesn't provide their level of social programs), so they can regulate and fine and fill their coffers with money from businesses all over the world." But yeah, blame it on the companies that take advantage of the tax shelters EU nations choose to provide and the EU chooses to allow.

Respectfully, these vague states of support between “active” and less active, “first class” and not first class, etc comes off as “we want to say we have that but shrug any time it’s deficient.”

Its similar to calling the port overall “linux/<cpu-arch>” rather than “linux/<libc>/<cpu-arch>” which wouldn’t normally be called for except when you’re going to embed a bunch of a particular libc specific behavior in your consumption of libc.

Listening to Go advocates talk about C interop like it’s not only a solved problem but quite literally a strength of Go, while Go project leaders represent that support quite differently isn’t it. Perhaps clarification of these level of support terms and how the project embraces glibc specific behaviors unapologetically would help.

Here are some citations since people seem to be just downvoting because they don't like the message:

Go requiring non-ELF standard parameters for initialization of supposedly "C ABI" libraries, open since 2015.

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/13492

The Go project specifically acknowledging the glibc-isms here:

"All Linux first class ports are for systems using glibc only. Linux systems using other C libraries are not fully supported and are not treated as first class."

https://go.dev/wiki/PortingPolicy

Go only supporting static-init thread local storage, and thus their "C ABI" libraries can only be dlopen()'ed if the libc pre-allocates memory to hack in libraries later.

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/54805

Is the new tech lead more likely to get rid of the glibc-isms that Golang won't let go of, like crashing if non-ELF standard parameters like env aren't passed in ELF library initialization, or maybe supporting global-dynamic thread local storage so we can dlopen() shared objects made in Go on platforms that don't hack like glibc?

Go's obsession with glibc-isms is really unfortunate, and it's been many years. If you're using Go with containers on Alpine/musl, keep your code very vanilla, because they won't support you.

Oh, is it a "crisis"? Sounds like we need a "war on" it then.

I think food waste is horrible and I literally donate money monthly(1) to multiple charities to fight hunger, but I'm sick of this framing language that exists to tell simpletons how they're supposed to feel about a topic. Thanks for "raising awareness" though. Enough with this newspeak that carries framed thoughts in specially coded phrases.

(1) Just joined Feeding San Diego!

Yeah, the traffic isn't bad enough so let's just shoehorn in multifamily units into single family zoned neighborhoods that aren't remotely close enough to the jobs people work for bicycling to be a realistic option. Virtue signaling the housing crisis isn't useful. If you're going to talk about housing you can't just rail against "NIMBYs" and clamor for more housing. You have to actually explain how the infrastructure and transportation to/from jobs will work with your assertions. Otherwise you're just arguing for cramming everyone up each other's asses and let the chips fall where they may.

Most people are not going to ride a bicycle to work. Some of us have kids to drop off at school on the way to work. We have to buy enough groceries to feed a family, which don't fit on a bicycle. Let go of your hipster fantasies. We can't all be single people living in a flat, riding a bicycle to the farmer's market and the book store.

286 vs. 386SX 5 years ago

I had a 386SX 16mhz Packard Bell, so I was able to run Windows 3.1 in 386 Enhanced Mode like a boss.

Out of principle, I've wiped my iPhone and moved my primary SIM card to a Pixel 5 running https://calyxos.org

This CSAM scanning will do effectively zero to stop children from being abused. It will only serve to breach the client side of E2E across the industry. Apple's privacy credibility is shot. We need to push hard for true open source mobile.

Today's mobile duopoly (including the look don't touch that is Android), is the digital yoke of our times.

Support the Calyx Institute: https://calyxinstitute.org/

I often bring this up in HTTP vs HTTPS conversations. It's not about what CAs you trust, as that's a policy decision you can make on your own devices. It's about knowing (through whatever CAs you trust), what the origin of the code you're going to execute on your device is. It's about knowing that your ISP isn't injecting extra JavaScript into your page requests. This isn't hypothetical, it's literally happening right now.

When the people injecting JavaScript are interested in exploits rather than dumb ISP value added services and notifications, it becomes more obvious that running code from untrusted sources, even if it's sandboxed, is dangerous.

Yes, in today's age of liberal democracies, we can take lessons from the past, like the value of free speech, innocent until proven guilty, not being deprived freedom without due process of law / habeas corpus, abolishment of debtors prisons, private property / not being deprived of property without due process of law, etc.

It seems like we have a lot of infringements of basic and fundamental rights in which we are forgetting history and how we got here. However, I haven't seen a significant effort to revive colonialism. So perhaps this isn't the highest priority example of where we need to learn from history at the moment?

Even America's expeditionary wars don't have the intention of changing the lines on maps. The only nation that has done that recently that I'm aware of is Russia. Trying to fly today's wars and examples of exploitation of peoples under the flag of colonialism seems rather forced to me. Why not just say "bad stuff" and tie that to colonialism?

The British, European, and American atrocities were the only ones you consider "recent"? We only hold those to account who are open to being held accountable? Or only those who keep good records?

Sorry, but that's not a very convincing argument to excuse the extremely selective outrage and demands for reparations and accountability. Personally, I think the biases that drive this selective outrage are rather obvious. But draw your own conclusions.

Honestly, I've lost a bit of confidence in the Internet Archive project's judgement and long term stability, given the risk they took in distributing books during Covid-19. I feel that they risked the entire project with massive (almost certainly fatal) copyright violation fines in order to distribute extra copies of books. That lawsuit is still pending and we don't know what the outcome of that lawsuit will be.

If they're willing to risk everything they've accomplished to date in order to issue a few extra copies of books, I don't see them surviving long term, nor do I feel comfortable donating to the project.

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/868861704/publishers-sue-inte...

What other families have benefitted from colonialism and slavery? Is this family the worst example or simply the highest profile? It seems like there are a great number of people and even entire families living lives of luxury due in large part to historical wrongs. Would you like to pursue the quixotic quest of righting all of these wrongs through property seizure from their descendants, or are you simply concerned with the highest profile such family to make a point?

And if you believe the British Crown isn't a political entity that is part and parcel with the government of the United Kingdom but instead just a culpable family that needs to be stripped of their ill gotten assets, then perhaps the Commonwealth doesn't exist at all.

The topic is always British, European, or American. That's why it's valid to bring up other similar historical wrongs in this discussion without dismissing it as whataboutism. The "strange" focus on only the historical wrongs of a few particular groups of people impeaches the discussion of this sort of topic due to the obvious implicit bias that selects which groups should be held accountable.

You're absolutely right. There's a whole subset of people who have declared war on meat. They want to replace meat with a diet desperately low in B12 so you have to supplement to be healthy. They want to replace meat with ingredients most similar to the ingredients they use to make dog food. They want to replace meat with extremely processed vegetables made to taste like meat, just like they did with margarine replacing butter, and hydrogenated vegetable oils replacing lard (both of which have killed millions prematurely). They want to replace meat with something very high in phytoestrogens and then demand that you believe that the massive endocrine disruption we're seeing all across humanity isn't related to this push towards foods high in xenoestrogens. They won't even allow for the possibility because it doesn't fit their agenda.

There are issues with our industrial food production particularly around meat. They should be addressed. I would be perfectly happy with lab grown meat if it was proven to be safe over time. I would prefer real meat without massive pollution or cruelty. But I'm not going to shift my diet to something proven to require pills to be healthy.

Just watch, the next phase will be trying to shame people for eating meat. It's only a matter of time.

I think you'll find in the modern era / younger generation, running Ubuntu on the server is actually very common. Especially in the cloud. Most usage of CentOS I've seen in newer builds is strictly for hardware that requires vendor driver support, which is becoming more and more rare as vendors upstream their drivers.

CentOS was the server standard 10 years ago. And most of the downstream distros like Scientific Linux and Oracle Linux are dying.

80% of the world runs this, citation needed because I don't think that's remotely accurate and likely represents your personal bubble.

https://distrowatch.com/

I'm sorry, are you referring to the Kingdom of Great Britain, a country that doesn't exist anymore, or the United Kingdom, a wholly different structure of government and effectively a different nation?

Certainly, I'm pretty sure in my comment, I emphasized that it's the very selective seeking of historical justice, most commonly targeting Europe, England, and the United States which impeaches the credibility of the whole exercise as not just about righting and learning from historical wrongs, but instead advancing an agenda.

Of course if we were working to right or at least learn about all historical wrongs without being selective about it, then I would argue that attempting to undo the horrors of human history is quixotic and a fool's errand.

I want to know how much the Romans stole from Germania. If we're going to track down every historical wrong (as long as it's a European/British/American historical wrong), and see it made right, we need to know how much the Romans stole and what it's worth in current money. Then I expect Italy to make reparations to Germany.

I'm not unsympathetic or unaware of what India went through when it was occupied. Obviously imperialism is wholly unacceptable. But we seem to be revisiting historical wrongs with a particular selectiveness.