sjwright

I agree with you in the case where a union was already in place when you joined. I'm talking about the situation where a new union is proposed in your current workplace.

> Work somewhere else.

You could equally say to any workers at Tesla who want to establish a union. Work somewhere else.

It’s not an argument, just an observation that you can’t eat Tesla shares.

You seem to be replying as though I’m saying he’s not wealthy? Obviously he’s extremely wealthy by any definition. But most ultra-wealthy people are a LOT more diversified in their portfolio than Musk is. Someone with a diverse portfolio stands more chance of being able to functionally realise their wealth—if, say, they wanted to donate a large chunk of it to some charitable cause.

An argument could be made that Buffet is far and away the richest person (in terms of realisable wealth) due to his highly diverse holdings.

He’s only the near-richest man in theory. If he tried to convert all of his company ownership into cash, the company value would crash so fast that he would probably be lucky to actually recover one fifth of his theoretical wealth.

Is that sufficient reason to coerce others to participate? Why should people who want to collectively bargain have a veto over the people who don’t want that?

I have no problem with unions so long as membership is entirely voluntary for every employee. The problem I have is coercive collectivism.

Also, is there any evidence that collective action returns a sustainably larger slice of corporate revenues?

Her biological parents died. The evidence is overwhelming that she shares the trait of old age mortality with (so far) all the other humans that have ever existed.

Pretty sure she’s mortal.

That's very cool. And especially thanks for surfacing the Wikipedia article.

I have exactly the same feeling about the form factor but even with the maxxed-out spec (2017 with i7 and 16GB of RAM) it feels underpowered even when doing fairly basic tasks. And though I'm sure it's mostly psychological, the keyboard feels delicate.

The M1 Air is a bit bigger, but that two centimetres of width does go to good use with a bigger screen (with more pixels), a bigger trackpad, and a bigger battery.

It's possible—nay likely—that I don't understand the true value of generics. It's something that I've looked into on occasion and it never seemed all that useful to me. Most examples I've come across in the past were C++ and seemed like formalised workarounds for deficiencies in the C++ type system rather than being actually useful. I'm sure I've failed to grok them—or based on the code I write I'm not the target audience for them.

I have no problem when a language allows the programmer to explicitly opt for a variable to be an undefined/dynamic type, whether as part of generics or as part of a defensive ingest of untrusted data. I admit this is previously unspecified nuance but in my mind this doesn't break my rule: "this variable is always going to be a dynamic type, never not a dynamic type." This means you know when to interact with it defensively.

The thing I'd like in a hybrid static-dynamic language is type assertion blocks which restore some benefits of static typing while dealing with dynamic typed variables. E.g.:

  declare x as dynamic;
  x = untrusted_source();
  if (x IS_A string) {
    // Inside here, x behaves as a statically typed string.
    // The compiler knows it and checks types appropriately.
    // Passing x elsewhere will send a static typed string.
    function_that_demands_a_string(x);
  }
  else if (x CAN_SAFELY_BECOME_A uint) {
    // True for any non-negative integer regardless of data type.
    // Inside here, x is always a statically typed uint.
    // If it was some other type, it was converted for me.
  }

(This probably already exists in some language somewhere but my familiarity with languages is narrow.)

I am genuinely unsure whether your RFC was intended to be serious or not.

Browsers have the benefit of massive interest in their beta releases. This substantially reduces the number of breaking changes which make it into auto-updated versions.

Perhaps Docker could learn from this and only auto-update to versions which have been used by a large audience for N weeks with no regression reports.

I haven’t ever understood the argument against static typing. I’ve never declared a variable and not simultaneously thought “this is going to be a float, always a float, never not a float.”

The only exception to this is untrusted input, but for that an string is usually always fine.

The vehicle shell is sheets of structural steel. It’s not likely to deform usefully when it strikes a wayward meat sack. Combine that with the plethora of small-radius bends that can concentrate the damage quite effectively.

I’ve no doubt that Tesla can make it score well on crash tests though. Crumple zones don’t have to involve literal crumpling of a metal body—it could be achieved with other forms of deformation.

Actually English does have a perfectly serviceable word, but for some reason no one is interested in calling at freedom software. yes it is grammatically awkward, but that’s a less worse problem than being semantically awkward, IMHO.

You wouldn’t replace mail trucks individually, you would fully transition each location as a unit.

Also, you overestimate the complexity of installing charging points. In many cases the parking will be directly against the post office building. In many cases you would only have to dig a small trench. In some cases you would string up a new overhead wire. When you’re doing 10 at a time, this isn’t complicated or expensive on a per vehicle basis.

The use cases of vehicles are much wider than the use cases of TVs.

I was talking about the proportion of the worldwide fleet, not proportion of new sales. Remember, not all vehicles are passenger cars. And not all vehicles always near electric infrastructure.

My point is that there's a long tail of vehicles out there. Whether the fleet transition from ICE to EV is fast or slow, getting the long tail fully transitioned in a similar timeframe is implausible.

Heck, we haven't even transitioned 100.000% away from horses yet.

Even if we get to 99% EV within fifty years, it’s going to be a long while after that before EV takes over 100.000% of ICE.

I still don't understand your point. For your argument to be valid, you'd have to assert that a factory can build new mail trucks faster than you could add charging points.

There will be one factory pumping out cars on a specialised, serial production line. It will be competing with 30 thousand locations operating in parallel.

There are always some number of reserved seats on a large, long haul flight. If your wife wasn’t found an alternative seat, that’s on the airline or it’s staff.

Also it’s unlikely to have been upper deck gray water. More likely it was condensate.

I wonder how that would compare to the Fourier transform?

The only difference is that your identity could be disambiguated with one data point instead of three or four. I don’t see how that has any bearing on the functional aspect of any such hypothetical dystopia.

Is there any issue with minorities receiving birth certificates now?

Dense cities make the problems more visible and makes decentralised solutions less effective, but the problems aren’t inherent. There are plenty of well functioning cities with high population density. And there are plenty of low density urban environments that suck hard.

I think you underestimate just how many MacBooks Apple sells. There’s only so many affluent early adopters out there. And the M1 MacBooks are especially ideal for mainstream customers.

Coding for obsolete platforms is analogous to black-and-white film photography with lenses of fixed focal length. Restriction breeds creativity by denying you access to the full gamut of easy, low effort solutions.

I was speaking in absolute terms.

When speaking in relative terms to a newly built fossil fuel plant you are most likely correct. You'd be hard pressed to find a plausible source of energy that's worse for the environment (immediate AND long term) than burning dirty sequestered carbon sources like coal and oil.

When speaking in relative terms to a newly built nuclear plant—the context of my response—batteries would be significantly worse per KWh of baseload energy supplied.

Unless there’s a massive breakthrough in battery tech, the manufacturing of sufficient batteries would be a guaranteed environmental disaster.