nrook

Run a fake version of the API server, and then connect the real client to it. It is usually a mistake to make the "unit" of your unit test too small.

There's a third choice, though. It's bad when speed limits are much lower than the natural speed of the road, for the reason you describe. And it's good when the natural speed of the road is the safe speed of the road. But in addition to those two, it's also possible to introduce fast, automated enforcement— speed cameras.

This, of course, applies just as much to the actual topic of the Economist article; new inheritance taxes are just and good, but they should be written to be enforceable, and then they should actually be enforced.

Honestly in most genres you're hosed, but if you're into Japanese nerd stuff, j-novel club sells light novels (and a few manga) with no DRM.

The old meaning of the word "deprecate" meant to "pray against," or "to pray for deliverance from". As a software developer, I have always found this fact amusing. Software becomes deprecated not when it is actually limited or removed, but when the developers and maintainers begin to pray that God will deliver them from it.

From what I can tell, the polls were just really bad. Less than 1% response rates. This provided hope for various sides at various times but at the end of the day they basically aren't that useful.

When you see really goofy progressive taxes, if you look behind them, you'll usually see a strong legal or political barrier behind more sensible ones. This is why you are always hearing about ridiculous Amazon taxes coming out of the state of Washington; the place has no income tax, and progressive income taxes have been held to be unconstitutional there. So they have to get creative if they want a progressive tax.

Of course, the barrier in California is the infamous Proposition 13. You're right that charging people different rates for energy based on their income is silly; if they want to let the poor off the hook they should just tax them less, or even give them money. But the state's lawmakers are operating in a constrained environment.

(It's also the case that subsidies and means-tested benefits are trendy in Democratic policy-making circles, despite being dumb and inefficient compared to simpler and less directed benefits.)

I think you're holding some of these to too high of a bar. This is a one-page article intended to be posted in company bathrooms. Of course it's less comprehensive than a longer blog post.

Universal broadband access is a governmental program supported by Democrats to give Internet access to Republicans. Hard-nosed politics would suggest the program should not have a bright future. States can deal with this problem, or not, as they choose.

I do think insurance is probably the right tool if you want people with more dangerous vehicles to have to pay more. However, the limits are too low. I live in New York, which requires insurance of up to $50,000[1] for the death of a person involved in an incident. However, most lives are worth more than $50k. If the requirement was insurance up to $10 million here instead, you would find the safety of cars constraining the market a lot more, and people wouldn't be able to get away with the kinds of externalities they do now.

[1] https://dmv.ny.gov/insurance/insurance-requirements

This is a non sequitur. "Investors might buy senior debt in a defunct crypto marketplace" is not actually a problem facing labor as a class.

Indeed, moral dimensions in board games go back to ancient times. The Egyptian game "Senet", which is over four thousand years old, seems to have religious significance, reenacting the voyage of a soul after death into the afterlife. Since religious rituals commonly replicate a large, sacred concept on a small scale, it makes sense that a board game could get involved.

Doing some light Googling, this seemed to be a good writeup by an academic on the subject: https://piccionep.people.cofc.edu/senet_web.html

This is Georgism, of course. There's a lot to recommend it; I was convinced by Henry George that land ownership is uniquely difficult to defend ethically compared to other forms of property, since it all comes from conquest in the end. I'm not sold on it as a panacea, but big land taxes do seem like a good idea.

As an amateur who does have it, yes, it's super awesome for transcription. However, I don't think it's very useful for anything else.

Er, what exactly do you think "freely pooling together with other employees" looks like? A group of employees that negotiates together is a union.

You can negotiate alone, but you have much less bargaining power that way. There's a reason the big tech companies all work together on their side of this negotiation (colluding with other employers to lower salaries, all doing layoffs at the same time, etc.): it works.

When workers don't negotiate together, it's trivial for employers to reset compensation expectations like this.

If you work for a company like Amazon, and you don't want to be laid off, the only thing you can do to move the needle is join a union. (You can also be a top performer, but it's not clear how big of a difference that makes; top performers with big salaries make big targets for layoffs as well.)

There's a funny passage in one of Al Franken's books about this. Franken was a comedian who ran for the U.S. Senate and was successfully elected. (He later escaped in celestial disgrace, but that's unrelated.) He talks about how he was trained to do this by his PR folks, thought it was stupid, tried it out in a few interviews to get them off his back, and then was amazed that it worked every time.

The tide is turning; tech owners are attempting to curtail the high costs of labor in the software industry.

The only way for labor to fight back is to stand together and form a union.

The AGPL is not a non-commercial license, but it essentially functions as one, as most companies aren't willing to comply with it. There are some projects that make their code available under the AGPL, and also let users pay to get access under a different license. Grafana is an example.

I was expecting this post, asking the best ways to match HTML tags with regular expressions.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...

Sadly the page is currently locked, likely as a conspiracy to avoid it overtaking the OP.

My position is that Cloudflare's hosting of websites and forums where attackers coordinate and organize (what you refer to as "websites [I] do not like") contributes to an Internet environment in which Cloudflare's own tools are more necessary. I am not saying that the attacks themselves are sent from servers controlled by Cloudflare.

There is a lot of "work-to-rule" in the NYPD; when they resent the mayor or the people of the city, even things like murder clearance rates plummet, much less crimes like these.

As mentioned in the article, this technique is used in New York City's subways, too. I have a lot of problems with the MTA, but they're still stellar by American standards.

It's not a red herring. If I think my taxes are too high, and I hear "California has the highest taxes in the country!", I will think, "Oh, California should spend less money so my taxes go down." But if I hear "California has extremely high taxes for people like me, but very low taxes for certain other rich people," I will think, "California should reform its tax policies so that it gets more money from those people and less from me."

My experience differs. I once had a legal dispute in which I was asked to sign away some additional rights in order to receive some money that I was owed anyway. My lawyer said, essentially, "you are in the right, but you aren't planning on using those rights anyway, so just sign the paper and get this over with."

There are scrupulous and unscrupulous lawyers, much as in any profession.

I've seen socialists advocate for a "public Spotify" that offers free streaming for all music and pays artists itself, likely with significant subsidies; lots of governments want to subsidize the arts, and such a service would be an excellent way to do so.

It doesn't seem like that bad of an idea, if we take as given that a government service could actually provide as a good of a product as the modern streaming platforms do.

Even if it's explicit policy at a company that employees can expense a text editor or IDE, a large proportion of people will still never bother. I saw the "Please buy Sublime Text!" pop-up all the time at my last job, and that was at a small startup where everyone knew the company was happy to pay for it.

A neat thing about the job is you probably get to exercise early and save taxes on your equity if it actually pays off.

But yes, it's not worth that much more than joining a startup later, and it'd be foolish to evaluate it differently. It's fun, but if you don't have real founder equity don't trick yourself into working longer hours than you would at a regular job.

This is a convenient ethical construction for Cloudflare: "Sure, our customers did terrible things, but really, the real lapse would be if we didn't accept money from them!" But it doesn't hold up. While everyone needs food and water, nobody needs a CDN.

Cloudflare really is impressive. Who can forget when they disrupted the retro emulation scene, by protecting the website that drove a prominent emulation developer to suicide? Or when they disrupted Isla Vista by serving the sites where Elliot Rodger was radicalized?

I had a mathematics teacher in high school who had a line about the Romans: "The biggest impact the Romans had on mathematics was killing Archimedes."

The biggest impact Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, had on the technology community is killing Near and so many others by standing behind these sites. This is the principle for which he stands.