pkaeding

Right. In my opinion, the 'fair' and 'simple' thing to do would be to eliminate the estate tax, and the step-up basis. Then there would be no loop hole to borrow against unrealized gains (and no real point to do so), while still allowing wealth to be enjoyed by the family that generated it, requiring them to pay taxes in the same way everyone else does (simplifying the tax code).

The actual loophole is the step-up basis for inheritance. This allows you to never realize gains, living off loans against them. Then, when you die, your heirs inherit the appeciated assets, and the liabilities. But, their cost basis for the assets is stepped up to the then-current fair value. So, they can sell off assets to pay the loans off, but have no realized gains.

Developed independently? Or were both visited by aliens sharing the ideas?

If you were a teacher, you would also have received mandatory-reporter training, so there would be even less gray area as to what to do next.

But your intuition is pretty much spot-on with the training I have received.

The teacher is absolutely going to be reporting it to the police, no matter what else they do. Teachers are mandatory repirters-- if they see anything that could indicate a child is being abused they must report it.

The police and social services, along with school district policy, will advise the next steps, including how parents are informed.

There are definitely a good number of small businesses around me (cafes, and similar places) that offer a cash discount. They don't have a sign offering it, but when I pull out cash, they revise the price down.

Right, I remember (as an outsider to google) the push for https coming after Firesheep [1] and the google research on the actual CPU cost of https [2], both in 2010. Snowden's revelations came in 2013.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep [2] https://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.h...

And the gangs that manufacture the patentable alternative pharmaceuticals.

And off-by-one errors

For getting files off my android phone, I like "Share via HTTP". https://f-droid.org/packages/com.MarcosDiez.shareviahttp/ it is easy to use, and leaves nothing behind (it also doesn't use up space on the phone to stage the files to be transferred, like proton drive apparently does, which can matter if your storage is almost full)

Grocery stores still accept $100s. It is the places where the average purchase is much smaller (or robberies are more common), like coffee shops or convenience stores. Gas stations might accept the bill but only if the change needed is under $20. And then they drop the bill in the safe, rather than put it in the till.

My 2 yo son and I walked into a playground in SF once and I remember these two moms (or nannies) giving me the nastiest look. I started to wonder if they could even see my son (I had recently re-watched The Sixth Sense).

Yeah, I've had issues with firstname@lastname.name, but only with terrible regex validation logic that thinks a TLD can't be 4 characters long. And some quizzical replies from people: "dot name? Is that new?" Yeah, I say. Its pretty new.

SEO from that era involved putting a bunch of "keywords" in the same color text as the background at the bottom of the page.

Good times...

If you have nothing to hide?

As a consumer, I also usually prefer an email address, because then I have a record of what I sent, when. This is helpful if I am sending similar messages to a few companies, seeking a quote (eg for some work on my home). I can look back and be sure that I haven't gotten a reply from a company because they never responded, rather than because I never contacted them.

The US almost did, in 2020, bit there was a public uproar: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-08-06/trump-sign...

It may have been a monitoring/smoke test type of thing, that performs some customer-like interaction with the deployed service, and makes sure the expected result comes out the other side, rather than a build-time test.

This is great. Having the engineers who built the thing be the same people who respond to pages is a great way to incentivize robust systems. If you built it, you likely know how to fix it better than anyone else, and if you don't want to be disturbed in the evening, you will think about how to better deal with faults during the early stages of development.

yeah, this is definitely a risk. I agree that the PR needs to be tracked as a post-launch task.

The advantage to this approach is that you do the hard part of removing the flag (ie, thinking through all the parts of the code that need to be cleaned up) while everything is fresh in your mind. Otherwise, you end up spending more time regaining all of the context, and are more likely to leave some vestigial dead code because you aren't sure it isn't needed any more (this is probably less of a risk with languages that lend themselves well to static analysis that can identify dead code, but these tools are never perfect).

I have found it can be good to 'remove' the flag at the same time you create it, but just don't merge the removal until later. I wrote up this idea in a blog post a while ago, if anyone finds it interesting: https://launchdarkly.com/blog/how-to-use-feature-flags-witho...

Years ago, I worked for a regional discount retail chain, in the Loss Prevention department (my job was installing cameras and other low-voltage systems). The focus of LP there (and probably at most retail places) was internal theft. They would try to discourage shoplifting, but employees stealing represented much bigger losses.

I remember hearing one of the guys reviewing video tape saying that they were tallying up a bunch of thefts (in this case, the subject was a cashier, and he was pretending to ring up items for his friends and family, but not really scanning it). The kid was 17, going to turn 18 in a couple weeks. The guy reviewing the tape joked about how the tally would be $1000 shortly after his birthday, when he would be an adult: "Happy birthday, you're under arrest for grand larceny".

It was sickening. I enjoyed my job, and I didn't mind if criminals were caught and prosecuted, but the attitude that led to jokes like that didn't sit well with me.

We've been using Sleuth for a while now, and I can say it really helps to track what was deployed, when. This is one of those tools that all software teams need, and most don't have, or just have bits and pieces in disparate systems.

This page has some resources that should get you started: http://featureflags.io/resources/

There are lots of open-source feature flag options. Most are probably better thought of as 'libraries' than 'services', but they can definitely get you going with feature flags.

There are some listed on http://featureflags.io/resources/ that might be helpful. That site is maintained by LaunchDarkly, as a general-purpose resource to promote the practice of feature flagging.

(nb: I work at LaunchDarkly)

This site has a pretty good survey of the open-source options in various languages: http://featureflags.io/feature-flags/ (you have to pick a language from the menu to get to the page specific to that language, as the page I linked to is more of an overview of the concept, and there doesn't seem to be one page that lists them all).

I think you just need A, B, C, and D, right? hint: the answer is C.

> That's not always true. Most people seem to think they "need" a car, yet the price of cars isn't astronomical.

Cars are not subsidized in the same way that healthcare or education are subsidized, though. There are fancy, expensive cars for people who want/can afford them, and there are more modest cars for the rest of us. There are lots of manufacturers of cars from around the world (and those cars from foreign manufacturers are available locally).

Of course, there are fancy expensive schools, and cheaper schools, but the subsidies (or maybe some other force I'm unaware of) seem to make the 'cheaper' schools still get more expensive every year.

I'm not the GP, but we went through a similar journey here, and after ditching Asana, we went to Todoist, which is nice in its simplicity (and fast). Sooner or later, the simplicity became too simple, so we switched to Clubhouse, where we are now. It is serving us well.

Presumably, one day, we will outgrow that, and need to go to JIRA (with all of its power and complexity), but it would be nice to delay that inevitable as long as possible.

The editable link is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZP8FNlL0a-SvSpZFflxO...