slively

Cool, so this small group of people controls wealth roughly equivalent to 1/50th of what the entire USA government brings in. Still way too much.

I didn’t say anything about taxing them, just framing the amount of wealth they have by comparing it to federal revenue. It’s too much even if it isn’t “realized”.

Put another way, if you personally taxed all US income at the federal rate for 2 years you’d have less wealth then this handful of people (the federal government collected 4.5 trillion last year). They basically represent another tax on income that everybody pays.

I recently started a green field project with sprint boot and Kotlin and it’s a joy compared to the many other things I’ve experienced in the last decade. I’m hoping spring remains strong for a while.

Neither is abusing monopoly power. So there’s trade offs.

Exactly! I find myself writing out the same code with classes and functions to show this to folks. I still prefer using classes as it’s easier for me to see at a glance that constructor = DI/curry vs a function returning an object of functions or something. So a class is just a way to communicate a pattern.

So true, rarely is anything the “best” or “better”, but instead each thing is a bucket of trade offs we choose from. Maybe frustrating, but also what makes engineering genuinely interesting.

Great write up! After 13 years I find myself reflect on exactly the same points.

You can self host cockroach db which scales horizontally well. But I think going "fire and forget" while also having this much concern about "scaling up" on some level feels at odds with each other. Lots of DBs can just scale up vertically or horizontally pretty easily, but as it gets bigger you will want to know more and more about how to administer it properly. As you scale, risk gets bigger. So either "fire and forget", don't learn much, and cross your fingers. Or, plan for the future and plan on getting good at some database.

I think you answered your own question and it’s a fair response. Civil disobedience for a good cause is good, for a bad cause is bad. Just depends on what good means to you.

No, if you use Kotlin native you do not get access to Java libs.

I hear that, but also predatory marketing does work. We have to take responsibility for our actions, but I do see times when other are also culpable for bad decisions people make.

I’ve always thought there’s a tipping point of fault when such a large amount of people have a problem. Small % of folks with the issue? Maybe a personal responsibility thing. Half the population can’t come up with $1000? Large amount of credit card users carrying a balance? Large swaths of people over consuming? There’s something else at work here and I struggle to point to the individual as the source of the problem.

Agreed, of course so many reasoned conversations it seems like at some point have a moment of intuition because not everything can be known at the time. I think this is the stuff that makes engineering fun. That combination of well reasoned responses sprinkled with gut feeling and heuristics.

In my experience distributed database migrations tend to be two phase though so it can be compatible during the migration. The first migration to add something, release the apps to use it, then a second migration to cleanup.

As somebody with ADHD, let me tell you every person with ADHD works on this continuously, and the frustration of perpetually feeling like your failing at it is rough. I can tell you this app won't help that much, or at all for me at least.

In healthcare I think the EDI would be considered HL7 if I am reading this correctly. I worked with HL7 for a number of years and it is absolutely horrendous. It does work just well enough and is just fast enough though. So much of the issues of creating larger scale health exchanges in the USA I attribute to monopolies in the industry (Cerner/Epic) and things like HL7.

If it’s not common, maybe it’s not common sense?

Please keep going, it’s worth trying to compare all compensation and benefits, and we both might learn something.

I think a common reply to this would be that it’s hard to change laws when an oligarchy has so much power, and siphoning the money and power from the oligarchs has to come first. Unions are one approach to attempt to do this. Unions are the workers that join them, and one of the more positive developments lately is the push to have more democratic unions. The teamsters even just changed their leadership drastically in this direction.

I think they are referring the initial debate of whether or not to have a large union presence. In the USA that’s still a big debate, and the fact that there are large scale work stoppages in Europe only further proves the point that they decided having a large union pretense is good. After unions are established, then new debates will surely arise which seems to be what you are referring to.

In the Twitter thread folks mention it is after taxes. Looking at income alone and not other benefits is also pretty misleading. I’m not here to say I know how much better/worse it is in France, just that this doesn’t seem like a good argument.

Ford’s initiative was not widely copied overnight. In 1916, the federal government passed an act to require an eight-hour day and overtime pay for railroad workers, but most workers still didn’t have those protections, and working hours remained a hotly contested issue. "Demands for the five-day week began to proliferate in 1919, a year in which 4 million American workers went out on strike,"

Ford’s initiative was not widely copied overnight. In 1916, the federal government passed an act to require an eight-hour day and overtime pay for railroad workers, but most workers still didn’t have those protections, and working hours remained a hotly contested issue. "Demands for the five-day week began to proliferate in 1919, a year in which 4 million American workers went out on strike,"

Attributing the 5 day work week to Henry Ford is not placing the credit correctly. He may have been the first big CEO, but it was the work of labor rights activists and unions. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/sep/09/viral-imag...

Attributing the 5 day work week to Henry Ford is not placing the credit correctly. He may have been the first big CEO, but it was the work of labor rights activists and unions. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/sep/09/viral-imag...

The many worker co-operatives existing in the world today are working examples of socialism.

I appreciate you clarifying a bit on which types of regulations which does offer some nuance. The state of CA is having to step in and stop NIMBY laws in places to allow more housing. Houston also has some terrible regulations around parking minimums and is an egregious example of car culture gone wrong. Having no regulation would eliminate zoning and cause an untold amount of problems. It seems we can both agree it’s more about having the right regulations, which is nuanced and difficult as opposed to just thinking regulations are the problems and we need a fully free market.

This reasoning that regulation is the cause for the price is way too simplified and isn’t a serious argument. Also even if things are cheaper to purchase without regulation doesn’t mean it’s cheaper for society, hence the entire concept of externalities. Please stop.

If the military were socialist, it would be controlled by the workers, but instead it’s very authoritarian where the front line employees have no say. This seems to confuse welfare and benefits with socialism.