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My alma mater moved from self-hosting email to Microsoft after a major data breach. Keeping high-value internet-connected things secure is indeed hard.

Semi-related:

"Passports please! British paratroopers met by French customs after D-Day airdrop

British paratroopers recreating an airdrop behind German defences to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day were met by French customs officials at a makeshift border checkpost.

Moments after the paratroopers had hit the ground and gathered up their chutes, they formed an orderly queue and handed over their passports for inspection by waiting French customs officials in a Normandy field."

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/passports-please-britis...

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ZY4rlAQus

Wish we had done that with Pizza Hut locations.

The post is a true web-log. Someone logged something they learned and put it on the web.

It was never called carbon tax, but carbon pricing. It being knows as carbon tax was the result of of opposition efforts. The same efforts and results would have happened had it been called dividend or anything else.

Pure Python was a huge selling point back when using a compiled library involved downloading and running random .exe files from someone's personal page on a university website. It is much less of a selling point now that we have binary wheels and uv/Poetry/etc. that create cross-platform lock files.

I feel nostalgic seeing (a mirror of) that download page again, but that era was such a pain.

Mirror: http://qiniucdn.star-lai.cn/portal/2016/09/05/tu3p2vd4znn

Thank you for your work on this topic and for answering questions here. I have a question: is there a way to avoid the security issues with string formatting described here? It seems like all (most?) string formatting options suffer from the same issue.

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2016/12/29/careful-with-str-format/

It seems more descriptive than prescriptive. I am sure it is true, but it seems hardly useful.

It's like saying "we finally found the success sequence for breaking into upper middle class in three easy steps: 1) get a high paying job, 2) get raises every year matching or exceeding inflation , 3) avoid layoffs". Or the good old-fashioned advice for becoming rich: "buy low, sell high".

These are all 100% true, but also 100% useless.

In addition to being a job board, Indeed is a job aggregator. It scoops up listings from job boards and company websites and allows searching through them, with links to the original listing.

It is not perfect—it misses many postings across the web. But as long as its miss rate hasn't gotten much worse over the past few years, the data presented above is still valid.

The article disagrees:

> One study found that most high-achieving, low-income students chose not to apply to highly selective colleges with steep sticker prices. They opted instead for schools with lower sticker prices that ended up offering much less financial aid and thus costing more.

- There is a horrifying 512-ounce version that they call Child size. How is this a Child-sized soda?

- Well, it's roughly the size of a two-year old child, if the child were liquefied.

I have never seen any article saying tariffs will "only" hurt American consumers. They hurt both sides and every article I have seen acknowledges this. However, American news sites tend to focus on the effects in the US, while Canadian news sites focus on the effects in Canada.

I don't think the total assets under management is the correct indicator. Vanguard, Big 5 Canadian banks, and even Power Corp cater not only to consumers but also to institutional investors and ultra high net worth individuals. Wealthsimple, to the best of my knowledge, is purely consumer-facing. It is not competing for the same markets as the other ones. Its parent company Power Corp, which is competing in the same area, has an AUM that is comparable to the Big 5 banks. I wonder if there is enough public data to compare consumer products in isolation.

Wealthsimple is a subsidiary of Power Corporation, a gigantic financial services company that has existed for 100 years. Its success is more an example of insider innovation rather than outsider disruption.

> If there's only 10 cents worth of sugar in a 2L bottle of coke, switching to sugar is unlikely to change the consumers buying habits.

It matters enough that it determines where things get manufactured though.

> There are two prices for sugar: the price you pay in the U.S., and the price you pay almost everywhere else in the world.

> The price in the U.S. is about 15 cents a pound higher than the price in the rest of the world. That costs Spangler Candy an additional $3 million a year.

> The higher U.S. sugar price is spelled out in U.S. law. You can find it right here, in the latest version of the farm bill, which says the U.S. government shall guarantee a minimum price for sugar that is not to drop below 22.9 cents per pound.

> Because of the higher price here, lots of candies that used to be made in the U.S. — Life Savers, candy canes — are now made overseas.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/04/26/179087542/the-...

"Disposable income" means income after taxes. The word you are looking for is "discretionary income", which means income after taxes and necessities.

I don't know how your comment is related to the article under discussion. If innovation could solve homelessness, San Francisco wouldn't have had the crisis it currently does. I don't know how changing Toronto to be more like SF in terms of tech companies is supposed to solve homelessness. At best, these are orthogonal issues.

Wealthier European countries seem to be moving towards clamping down on this kind of consulting. See IR35 in the UK as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IR35

This is still possible in many European countries, especially less wealthy ones.

It's never used that way in practice. No one calls Mexican seasonal agriculture workers in the US and Canada expats. No one calls Filipino maids and nannies in Singapore expats. No one calls Indian construction workers in Saudi Arabia expats. Regardless of the dictionary definition, expat is only used to refer to people coming from rich countries (US/UK/Singapore/etc.). Terms such as "migrant worker" are used for people coming from poor countries.

Meanwhile the governing party in my home province in Canada is doing this:

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2024/11/06/UCP-Members-More-CO2-H...

What I could never understand is why government funding is needed for residency spots in the first place. From the outside, it seems like residents are cheap labour for hospitals. Even without getting any money from the government, the value of residents' labour should exceed their relatively small salary—so hospitals should be incentivized to hire many more residents. What are the economics (or regulations) of residency that make this not work?

You might be thinking of UPS. USPS doesn't operate outside of the US.

Do the people whose cars get towed have to pay for it? Towing and storage can get really really expensive really fast. After a short while, it would make sense to walk away from the car, as the fees would exceed the value of the car. Is this what happens to the Tesla owners who don't voluntarily hand over the video to the police when asked?

Nice. Reminds me of PyFlow: https://github.com/Bycelium/PyFlow

> It's probably because more applications are written in C++ than anything else

I imagine Java is as popular as C++ if not more. And C# is (or at least was) huge in Europe too.

I am more worried about the potential for draconian anti-fraud measures, like the childcare benefits scandal in Netherlands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...

What is the name of the story?

Like Google and customer support?

These sorts of actions are usually of the "pour encourager les autres" variety.

> Just make car theft / break-ins a bad play game-theory wise: a few cars on the street are left with the police ready to pounce. You break in to a bait car, you get 2 years in jail.

I think car theft situation is not bad enough for this to work.

There are ~9 million registered cars in Ontario [0]. Population of Toronto is about 20% of the population of Ontario [1][2], so we should expect there to be about 1.8 million cars in Toronto. Last year, there were 12,000 car thefts in Toronto [3], which is way worse than the national average.

It doesn't make sense for the police to use bait cars, because given the above statistics, they can expect to catch 6 or 7 people per year if they deploy 1000 bait cars and have officers around each one year-round ready to pounce. That would be a very expensive way to catch only 6 criminals. The cost per conviction would be astronomical.

It wouldn't change the criminals' behaviour either because if the police deploy 1000 bait vehicles in a city with 1.8 million vehicles, the chances of the one car the criminal is stealing being a bait would be just 0.05%. The chances of getting caught for other reasons would sure overshadow this slight increase, so I don't expect it to have much effect on overall risk and thus behaviour.

There are some simplifying assumptions I made to do the above calculations, for example that the odds of theft are the same across neighbourhoods and parking situations. That means the results are not very accurate. However, they should be within an order of magnitude. We cannot expect to change the theft situation with a small number of cars and a reasonable budget. Now, if we could deploy 100,000 bait vehicles in Toronto alone, that would be a different story. But at that point, we would be way past the point where this could be called a trivial solution.

[0] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2022023...

[1] https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/data-research-maps/to...

[2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=171000...

[3] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/car-thefts-2023-toron...

Please let me know if I made a mistake in the math.