PurpleBoxDragon

>The US cannot force those companies to lie.

But they can. Maybe only in cases where silence is a canary, but that still sets a precedence for them being able to force you to lie.

>This leads to things like junior programmers losing their minds when 0.1 + 0.2 doesn't equal 0.3

Junior programmers lose their mind when 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3.

Senior programmers lose their mind trying to explain this to the business side.

If he stuck to just China I would agree. But by trying to change up numerous different agreements, he lost the goodwill needed to have a collective crackdown on China. Even if he is the first to be willing to pick these sort of battles in a long while, he has a new issue of picking too many battles. Seems like a Goldilocks problem.

There is an underlying assumption that a given image has a certain property. I don't think it does. I think the property is based on the user viewing it. That's why an innocent silly image proud parents may send to grandparents is at the same time an image that you don't want to be in the possession of someone with less innocent thoughts. It isn't that the image is right or wrong. It is that different people will see different things in the image, some good and others bad.

Just imagine for a second if someone was advocating on HN for the use of a web framework that has knowingly allowed itself to be compromised to steal passwords because it was cheaper to use.

How about a compromise? If any of your customers are a victim of a crime because you continued to use a shady but cheap vendor after seeing them trying to slip past tampered hardware, your company is held fiscally and criminally responsible.

Business lesson to include a 'no China' if the hardware handles anything sensitive, with a large fee for violating it for the middle man servicing the contract.

>The fact is, doing any kind of hardware production in China, you have to be aware Chineese have different value system and you would not be suited doing any business if you throw tantrum at any sign of apparent dishonesty

Sounds like the solution is not doing business with them and pushing for a ban on others doing business with them (since this largely has a socialized cost when things go wrong, such as individual people having their credit cards stolen).

Eventually you'll learn what errors can be ignored, what are useless information, and which ones are sending you down a path that will waste time. But only start skipping and skimming once you've learned what to look for, and always be prepared to toss out the old knowledge when working on a new system.

Also, when you have far too many logs, reading in reverse chronological order works most of the time, but not all the time. Generally the last error you are looking at is the error you want to find and fix, but always consider that sometimes an earlier error that seems unrelated can be the reason a later error is even possible.

>conservative "charity" crackdown

I wasn't speaking about that case. I was talking about how the tax law is currently written to favor some groups at the expense of other groups. And to be honest, this doesn't even have to be true. Only the appearance of it has to be seen by enough of the population for the reaction I describe to happen. Even if you think the tax law is completely fair, you would have to admit that significant portions of the population are not in agreement, and their views of the IRS will be driven by their views of the tax law.

>IRS can't ever be in a position of moral authority

You are right, which is part of the reason why there is a non insignificant part of the population that wants to disable the IRS and sees them as a threat.

Same as a police officer who is sent as set of drug laws to enforce that are crafted specifically to target minorities. The only winning move is to not play, and those who don't quit begin to be seen as opponents regardless of how much the individual doesn't like the laws they are enforcing. Regardless of if you think this is a correct or incorrect way to view things, one has to accept that this does happen and it explains why entire communities turn away from the police and engage in self enforcement of their own rules and begin to craft policies such as 'snitches get stitches'.

You are right in that they aren't equal. The things I need to survive I'm taxed on the money I make to spend on them and then I'm taxed when I spend on it. The things a business needs to make more money, it isn't taxed on at all. If anything, the system is the opposite of what it should be. This is a way that the tax code insanely favors the wealthy, and it is so drilled into our subconscious that many see it idiotic to even question the way things currently work.

The business doesn't have to have the crane, but a person dies without eating. If we only have to tax one, tax the crane.

>breaking the law

When the IRS is enforcing a corrupt law, it makes people who fear the corrupt law being enforced against them view the IRS as the bad guys. That it is the law only hurts the IRS's position in this. Until the IRS makes the truly wealthy pay their fair share, not their legal share, they will find themselves in a position lacking moral authority.

Put another way, yes those loopholes are legal, but so is reducing the IRS's budget until they aren't able to operate at all.

If I have expenses that cost me $150K this year but I only make $100K I often have to pay taxes. Some expenses are deductible in certain cases, but even then it isn't equivalent.

All I'm saying is that both should be treated equally, which ever option that ends up being.

The thing is, that difference between outright tax fraud and loopholes is having enough money to lobby and for lobbying to be worthwhile.

On some level it feels like punishing the poor for trying to emulate the wealthy, and the merely very wealthy (an interesting way of putting it) like lawyers and doctors often fall into the poor when you break it down to those who are truly rich or not.

The core problem is that businesses have to pay taxes on net while you and I have to pay taxes on gross. We need to equalize this. Either both should pay taxes on all money that goes through them (and have to change market prices accordingly) or people should only pay taxes on money they don't use in pursuit of living.

>Don't kid yourself; these people are stealing from you.

This seems like language specifically crafted to encourage an us vs. them view of taxation. Also, I notice the examples given are upper middle class/lower upper class, and not the top of top that evade the most taxes. Often legally, since there are so many massive tax loopholes that the richest get to legally avoid paying a share in proportion to the government goods and services they consume.

A great deal of older science was done by explaining what was already invented. We seem to have reached a point where rarely does a new invention throw off previous science without it being based on new science that was already in disagreement with old science. Part of it is because over the last century we had so many people with the freedom to invent that the easy inventions have already been invented, at least where the inventions don't pose significant moral/legal implications (such as someone inventing a new drug and getting people to try it without going through the proper channels).

What about the way the information is often presented to the average person as a justification for policy change. How often does the average person encounter information about global warming devoid of an attempt to change policy in relation to the information? That alone would cause reason for a person doubt the authenticity of the information since the source is seen as biased. Add in how badly news organizations butcher the actual science, and there is plenty of room for doubt that then can be exploited by those who specifically seek to do so.

The problem is that the lab isn't isolated, and so facts produced by the lab can have strong political bias. A 'wrongthink' produced by a lab would have a far stronger criticism applied to it than a 'rightthink' using the same methodology. Combined with issues like competing for funding, publish or perish, and the extreme lack of reproduction, it casts a level of doubt on any facts coming from science, especially when they have strong tie in to political areas.

And to specify, the 'rightthink' and 'wrongthink' examples I've studied in the past were cases that didn't breakdown by any common political stance like left or right, but were findings that either agreed or disagreed with positions held strongly by people regardless of political standing. I do think the results would apply as expected when considering a political issue that broken down per party lines, but the reaction is much stronger when there there is more uniform agreement for or against something.

The only stats similar to this that I've seen was based on number of partners before marriage other than the one you married, in which case 0 had the lowest divorce rate. Waiting for marriage with the person you married was not measured nor reflected in the stats.

So in a way divorce rates are going up if you don't stick to the technical definition of a divorce as the end of a legal status and instead look at the breakup of family unit instead?

It seems part a word game because I doubt those looking at the statistics ever really cared much about marriages or divorces for what they represent on a purely legal level, but for their approximation of cohabitation and family status.

The 48% is about federal prisons, the 16% is about state prisons. Generally the 'bad' crimes we think of (murder and the like) are state offenses, not federal offenses, which is why you see so many more in the state level for something worse than drugs. Drugs is one of the few crimes punished consistently on both a state and federal level. You could go to federal prison for murder, but it generally requires something special about the case for the state to not handle it.

>So I'd say the parent is right that 16% are in for drugs and would be set free if drugs were legal. The others in that 48% wouldn't be.

Both would be set free. 16% from state prisons, 48% from federal prisons. These are two separate prison populations.

>They probably were in dire straits at the time and saw no other solution.

So what happens if they get in dire straits while working at the bank with far greater levels of access to all sorts of financial information?

When the government begins acting on behalf of the corporations, or they give the power of violence to the corporation (such as happens in private prisons), it does become a major problem. In those cases the corporations should be considered an extension of the government and treat as such.

>Try telling people who have only Comcast to not get off the Internet, or people with only one nearby grocery store to boycott it.

Regardless of the personal cost to not doing business with them, they won't send an armed force after you that will kidnap you. But with the government, if you want to grow a plant on your own property that they don't agree with, they will. That makes a massive difference.

If my friend take my picture in a private space and decides to share that with Google, my friend is the one doing business with them, not me. The problem is, this still does impact me, because my friend just gave information about me to Google. This hints at the problems around privacy in a world where everyone is recording things and also on the social expectations that it is fine for my friend to just upload my picture online. In the past, that was less acceptable (and in some of my social circles it was considered very anti-social to upload pictures of another's kids). Cultural norms have changed, and I risk isolating myself if I make demands of my friends to not give my information to Google. It would be akin to my avoiding Starbucks but my friends choosing to still meet there. At some point, if the corporations have the trust and engagement of my friends, I might have to choose if my stance of not doing business is more important than my friends.

But despite how bad all of this is, it is still an easier thing to accomplish than deciding to avoid your government. In the end, if I'm willing to isolate myself enough, Google won't have my information. But even if I go totally off the grid, the government will still make demands of my and if I refuse them they will seek me out, using agents who are armed and who have far more leniency to use violence to make me comply.

I'm not trying to say that one can easily avoid large corporations. In some cases it would require significant changes. But for as hard as it is, it is still easier than trying to avoid the government who wants to do something with/to you that you don't want done.

It does become more difficult than just not shopping at a local business, but it remains easier than deciding I don't want to be under my current government.

Are startups more likely to have successes writing these applications in modern architects than large corporations, and if so, is it perhaps because they are startup and thus don't have corporate culture and all that it entails?

>Companies dont have our interests in mind any more than the government, but we can vote the government out.

Companies are easier to not do business with. Governments only get voted out if enough people agreed to vote with you. Also, only one of these groups generally has the ability to use violence against you, and if the other group has that ability, it is only because the first allowed it to be delegated.