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cranky908canuck

170 karma · joined September 9, 2021

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cranky908canuck··on California closed the Montana license plate loophole
At least in some jurisdictions, arrangements solely for the purpose of avoiding taxes (barring explicit carve-outs) are not permitted.

https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/programs/about-canad...

TLDR: if the only reason for a transaction is tax avoidance, it may not be "illegal", but it may be disallowed (and presumably incorporated in subsequent legislation).

Similar is "wash sale" legislation: for example, selling a security for a tax loss and

- buying it back within 30 days

- buying a call option on that security.

I will guess that the former might get you just a reassessment (the first time). The latter... well, you're smart enough to know about options and tax-loss sale, now you need to demonstrate that you didn't do it for tax avoidance.

Not sure what US law (federal and gazillion states) has on this.

cranky908canuck··on California closed the Montana license plate loophole
For trucks: interstate commercial vehicles have a scheme for this: "apportioned" plates.

Record-keeping required to support the proration of fees.

cranky908canuck··on Plain text is still one of the best technologies we have
This misunderstands what I was trying to get across. The string is the file content, not a string in a file (so: a short snippet of source code), in text format; what followed was (an attempt at) a plausible binary tokenization.

I agree that the string "no" is ambiguous (though infamous as a somewhat pathological case), but at least it can be seen in context without having to spelunk a binary definition.

is_bright_and_shiny: "no"

vs

curt_negative_response: "no"

vs

country_code: "no"

cranky908canuck··on Plain text is still one of the best technologies we have
It's not about writing a parser, it's about figuring out what the content is supposed to be in the first place. With plain text you can see what's a number, what's a string, what's an expression, etc... I'd rather try to figure out how to parse "2 7 + 3 -" than see a file with

0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x2 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x7 0x1 0x1 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x3 0x1 0x2

and try to figure out what that is all about.

cranky908canuck··on Why house prices may be in trouble
"cakeistocracy". Wish I had thought of that.
cranky908canuck··on Waymo in Singapore
RHD vs LHD is the issue. Waymo has "300+ million kilometres of experience" that will all be on the wrong side of the road.

I would not be confident of human driving with a lifetime of experience with one not screwing up the other; more confident of one with regularly maintained experience of both (IOW, aware of switching back and forth).

cranky908canuck··on Waymo in Singapore
Must be early in the process, most if not all the photos and graphics where the driving side is visible show North American side driving.
cranky908canuck··on What If You Could Do It All Over?
https://archive.is/1Zm26
cranky908canuck··on $900M paid out to end wind farm project going to firm run by Mar-a-Lago neighbor
I saw what you did there...
cranky908canuck··on Canada Hires 48 Scholars Away from Top U.S. Universities
TFH:

> Their hiring is paid for through a Canadian government investment of more than > 500 million Canadian dollars (about $364 million) in research fields that are > strategically important, from global warming to artificial intelligence.

Agree it's not clear from the article, but I'd expect that a lot of that is research funding, not necessarily salary. IOW, this is money that might have been spent on this anyhow, getting access to additional scholars is icing on the cake.

cranky908canuck··on A California Program Is Bringing Down the Cost of Heat Pumps by Buying Bulk
Can't speak to the rest, but lumber has had significant import tariffs to the US for decades. So it doesn't seem as if relative affordability of that commodity is an issue (at least for the last four decades).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_s...

cranky908canuck··on The Best Parenting Hack Is Being Rich
https://archive.is/MY41u
cranky908canuck··on The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49115814
cranky908canuck··on Person Opposing Data Center Arrested for Clapping at City Meeting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claque
cranky908canuck··on Drive onto a Runway and the Charges Get Complicated
I see a lot of posts to this site being 'dead'. I'm not even sure what 'dead' means (I assume it's more than "voted not interesting", which I find in itself interesting since I find a lot of the posts interesting).

I would agree that at least some of the posts are (a mild form of) self-promotion, but this one does not seem to meet that bar. Looks to me like an entertaining analysis of what someone who did something spectacularly stupid ought to expect.

cranky908canuck··on Km/h and only traffic tickets? What gives?
Hmm.

From the footer of the post:

>>> I'm Kyla Lee, a DUI lawyer in Vancouver. I spend my days fighting impaired driving charges, roadside prohibitions, and the ever-expanding powers police have at traffic stops. <<<

Advertising?

cranky908canuck··on A Farmer Arrested for Going 5 Seconds over His Time Limit at Data Center Meeting
If you google "farmer name activist" the results light up like a christmas tree. (Where the actual name is substituted in, of course.)

Regardless of the merits of the actual issue being protested, presenting this as "poor innocent farmer arrested for going five seconds over" doesn't seem accurate.

I previously observed that of course getting arrested wasn't something he would have planned...

OTOH, given that this is the second time the "five seconds over" story has been posted to HN, seems like somebody is leveraging the 'Streisand Effect'.

cranky908canuck··on A Farmer Arrested for Going 5 Seconds over His Time Limit at Data Center Meeting
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784061

Not his first rodeo, it seems.

cranky908canuck··on Technical debt is dead, the metaphor is broken
This popped up on a casual search:

https://medium.com/@antonellosemeraro/technical-debt-is-not-...

(paywalled, looks like a decent and recent writeup from what I can see of it, and the essence is above the fold).

Not sure why Ward Cunningham missed this, I expect in corporate finance (not stock trading) options trading (for profit, not hedging) isn't common.

cranky908canuck··on Farmer arrested for speaking too long at datacenter town hall vows to fight
If you google "Darren Blanchard activist", the screen lights up, TV, newspapers, etc. So, not his first time on the dance floor.

I'm not going to address whether what happened was completely right, or the merits of the underlying discussion. But this is not a case of a poor dirt farmer shocked at being arrested. I'd be very surprised myself if he didn't at least think that was a possible outcome (and would not presume to suggest that it was intended in any way whatsoever, obviously being arrested would be detrimental to his cause!).

cranky908canuck··on States Are Learning the Wrong Lesson from the 'Mississippi Miracle'
https://archive.is/clyik
cranky908canuck··on A tail-call interpreter in (nightly) Rust
See my prior comment: IMO it's the caller's issue that (guaranteed) TCE is needed. The callee should not have to do anything.

One of the things I forget to give thanks to the Rust designers for is the default of immutability. I remember my days in a Java environment where policy was "everything needs to be declared final" (so "final" got spattered all over the place) with zero nostalgia. Requiring TCE callees to explicitly represent themselves as TCE-friendly would be the same sort of abomination.

cranky908canuck··on A tail-call interpreter in (nightly) Rust
As a user of the feature, it's the caller that needs the guaranteed elimination (and, presumably, is willing to pay for it, in syntax / compile time / run time / cognitive load). The 'zero cost feature' (only pay if used) principle seems broken if the callee has to indicate something special.

The compiler is free to do something clever (eg., two versions of fn Foo(...), one guaranteeing TCE), but as a developer merely using Foo, I don't want to have to decorate it (or, in a library, have it already decorated) to make TCE (not just TCO) possible. That requirement would constitute delving into the internals.

cranky908canuck··on A tail-call interpreter in (nightly) Rust
I won't argue with wikipedia, but assuming it's correct the 'standard nomenclature' seems sloppy to me. The whole point of the original post was taking advantage of the guarantee of TCE (elimination), vs TCO ("give it a try but oops, oh well, whatever...").

I suppose maybe TCE (as distinct from TCO) should be expanded to include any mechanism that doesn't expand the stack / heap / whatever for things that rhyme with recursion (in which case the existing sloppiness may as well stand, but we need a new TLA).

cranky908canuck··on A tail-call interpreter in (nightly) Rust
Recent enough... also, since it's not yet in stable, it'll be 'recent'/'new' for a lot of people once it does get there.
cranky908canuck··on Airlines surprise passengers with 'flights' that are buses
Interesting....

Article does not seem to mention whether the bus pulls into the secured area (so that you don't have to go through the security stuff again). The smaller airport is a nice option (same security, but smaller so less congestion and lineup).

cranky908canuck··on Put the zip code first
Agreed, but:

JRandomCustomer enters street-number, apt-number, city, state, code ... in that order.

Also, many websites seem to have a negotiation with the browser, where, given: a street address, -> they can populate the other fields.

Definitely not perfect

cranky908canuck··on Stop the Interviews
Seems like the answer is:

What will you pay me for a day of my time?

At this point, they've already invested their resources (and also you, yours).

If employed, then it's easy to point out that that's your cost in a vacation/PTO/"sick" day.

If not, point out that you are not currently working at mickydee so your time is worth more than minimum wage. If they stick at that, make out a reasonable guess at their cost of this process and point out that a day of your time is not a massive additional fraction. If they stick at that, ask if this means you are on the "short list", and how many others are on it. If they stick at that, then you have useful information about what they think you are worth and are likely to offer.

This does assume some flexibility, and leverage.

cranky908canuck··on Canada's armed forces are planning for threats from America
https://archive.is/IZcMy
cranky908canuck··on The gift card accountability sink
I'm really disappointed in patio11 over this one (and I reckon he has a lot of good things to say).

This is going back on other posts (in particular, this one: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-long-shadow-of-ch...), where he (correctly, I think) suggests that today's payment systems move risk to the parties most capable of assessing and (if necessary) absorbing it.

This post seems to throw seniors with cognitive issues under the bus ("That decision has a cost. Grandma sometimes pays it.").

Now it does seem that he is being careful in some phrasings. I see it as possible (but only with multiple readings) that he is in fact critical of the current regulatory regime.

For instance, the paragraph beginning "It is the ordinary and appropriate..." suggests that it's not 'we the people' but 'we the corporates', but that can't be said upfront.

Maybe that phrase that rankles is a call to action...?

Question for this community: am I misreading this?

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