thrmsforbfast

>> But it has the net effect of pushing the tax burden down onto smaller companies who are competing with the Amazons of the world.

I.e., even if we need a solution to "sclerotic tax increases", this is not a good one, because the solution only works for massive companies.

I've known this information about my friends and neighbors for the better part of the last decade. In most states this is public info and you can even look it up from a web form using name, zip, and dob.

But now it's in an app so the world is ending.

I'm actually OK with that. We're always complaining that companies don't take security/privacy seriously because there's no incentive to do so. See e.g. the Equifax HN threads. Having a person in the C suite who'll end up in jail if the company seriously fucks up is, IMO, a net positive for the world.

I'm sure startups/consultants will step in to provide regulator compliance as a service as well, so maybe not even that.

It's not like people will be thrown in prison because their DB wasn't patched quickly enough. They have to knowingly and intentionally lie to the federal government in an annual report.

The bill defines covered entities in Sec. 2.(5)(A) and 2.(5)(B). In particular, companies with less than $50,000,000 in gross receipts and information on fewer than 1,000,000 customers are not covered by this legislation.

And even if those apply to your local coffee shop or whatever, Sec. 2(5)(B)(iii) further limits the definition of covered entity so that businesses that do not provide 3rd party access to information are not covered.

So Starbucks and other huge coffee chains/retail shops are the only organizations that would have to re-evaluate data collection from their public Wifi hotspots, and even then might be exempt depending on what they are collecting and how they are using that information. And, I should point out, these companies will need privacy experts on staff anyways, so this provision is highly unlikely to cause them to shutter their in-store Wifi networks...

Additionally, some of the more onerous requirements only apply to a subset of covered entities with yet larger gross receipts and yet larger numbers of tracked consumers.

But, unequivocally, your locally owned mom & pop coffee shop is excluded from consideration under this provision multiple times over.

Ideally the code would be part of the peer review process, but code review is really expensive, so who knows how that would play out.

It'd be cool/useful if you could provide news on the important issues of the day that's simply "not-depressing". I.e., factual and detached and doesn't elicit emotion, but not explicitly feed-good.

(e: forgot to say: nice work!)

My very first interviewer (intentionally) didn't spec fizzbuzz correctly. The real test was whether the candidate listened to the customer's/lead engineer's spec instead of jumping to conclusions.

Fortunately, I was just entering college and hadn't heard of fizzbuzz before. I passed the "test" but for the wrong reason.

There's a whole field of law about bankruptcy. In particular, questions about how to value assets are obviously a big component of bankruptcy law.

I imagine "it's complicated" when it comes to intangible/intellectual property like patents, brands, etc.

In fact, just last weekend I let 20+ people into my house for a party. The notion of privately owned property didn't suddenly become absurd at the beginning of that party...

"Exclusive right to use" is not unique to intellectual property, nor is the ability to scale a piece of private property from 1 user to N concurrent users.

For a very specific definition of monopoly (in particular, monopoly over use of a specific resource, not monopoly in the market sense).

In that same sense of the word "monopoly", private property == monopoly.

Jones developed this into a service called BusCall, which had some modest success.

I think the actual solution is simply improved patent review. The patent system is broken because there are so many bad patents; if only truly innovative stuff was patented, I think a lot of the reasonable criticism would become a lot less reasonable.

But without additional funding, improved scrutiny at filing time would also dramatically increase the cost of acquiring a patent, which is already expensive for individual inventors.

Knowing the difference between "file" and "directory" and being able to touch type won't get you a $200K engineering position at Google...

Furthermore, if the goal is to generate as many $200K-comp-caliber engineers as possible, parent's point is the right one. A kid who shows up at college with the ability to write well and a bit of mathematical maturity has a much brighter future than a kid who is "good with computers" but struggles with basic math.

> Most tradies here have their own business

Maybe this really is true in Australia. IDK. People say this a lot in the USA, but both statistics and personal anecdata indicate it's complete bullshit. Starting a business is hard. Getting the money to start up is hard. Handling cash flow is hard. Handling everything from deadbeat clients to litigious clients is hard.

> + the cash jobs that they don't declare on tax.

Software engineers can also make $$$ by committing tax fraud and other crimes.

I don't think this is true. There are lots of things that developers throw money at, and each developer can easily think of multiple processes that would happily through hundreds or thousands of dollars at if those processes could be automated.

However, it is hard to build software that developers will pay for.

I.e., the demand is there and it is strong, but the products that meet that demand are generally Real Engineering Problems.

I always get called elitist/out-of-touch when I point this out, but it's really true that most people working in trades do $50k with mediocre benefits.

Everyone always lashes out at this with anecdata, but both the hard data from Labor and the 15+ datapoints I have personally all seem to agree that $60k is "really good", and that's with overtime. Statistically, for every wealthy plumber/small business owner pulling down 100k+, there are a lot of folks pulling down $50k or less working for the man.

Other downsides: The trades are extremely sensitive to certain types of recessions. And most trades are hard on your body. Plumber is actually one of the better trades from that perspective. Even stuff like welding and machining, which outsides think of as less hard on your body, are usually brutal. If the setup was such that they don't need you carrying stuff, going up and down stairs, etc. all day -- ie. if you could just stand in one place and weld/cnc without doing back-breaking labor -- then they'd have automated the work already.

This might all be specific to the two labor markets I know most well, but... sigh for smart kids, going to college for an in-demand STEM degree is still a great life choice and probably much higher ROI than a trade. And saying so isn't elitist.

Driving truck also seems to do better over the past two decades than most trades. Still sensitive to recessions, but much less so. None of my trucker relatives/friends have had bouts of unemployment since 2008, but all the construction and manufacturing trades have been in and out of work pretty much continually since 2009 (maybe things got better around late 2015)

If college isn't for your kids, have them also consider healthcare. Might be more stable during recessions and less hard on their body. The only downside is that there are fewer options for entrepreneurial endeavors than in the trades. Also, outside of large cities, there's only one or two dominant employers and that holds down wages. But the same is true in tech and trades.

We can probably expect the current SCOTUS to either introduce stricter tests or strengthen the current test. My own prediction is that, absent any sort of legislative action [1], SCOTUS will strengthen of the second prong of the Weber test ("not unnecessarily trammeled") to include the entire recruitment/hiring process. And probably also reaffirmations/broadening in scope of the "no quotas" rule.

From what I can tell, this is also a fairly recent phenomenon in tech. This guy's career goes back to 2000, back when tech jobs didn't have the appeal (or paychecks) they do today and diversity wasn't front-and-center. So even if you and GP are 100% correct about today [2], that doesn't really say anything about the world 20 years ago.

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[1] which appears to be unlikely at the moment, but I'd be more confident saying so if Nov 7 fell within the edit window for this comment ;-)

[2] I'm intentionally stating this is a hypothetical and reserving my own opinion on it, because I think arguments are especially constructive when we can identify ways in which conclusions might fail even when accepting premises from which the conclusion is claimed to follow. Otherwise, especially on issues like this one, we end up with an intractable duel between contradictory axioms and no one benefits/learns anything.

Oh, I misinterpreted the parent post's comment. Yeah, that's not true.

2016 was strange across the ballot in Wisconsin. Clinton was not a Wisconsin-friendly Democrat. The 2018 and 2020 elections will be interesting to watch. In general, it's a good rule of of thumb that getting things just right in WOW is one path to victory. There are other paths, of course, depressed turnouts being one of them.

Go take a look in the marinas in the counties between Milwaukee and Chicago. A lot of Big City money floating in those communities (and in condos/houses along the lakeside).

This is particularly true of software, but I'd argue it's also true of basically every branch of mathematics outside of a few particular sub-fields of algebra (which are either extremely simple or extremely abstract, and often both).

> ADTs don't hide mutable state. That much is something OO has a special claim to.

How so? Abstract datatypes certainly hide mutable state. Just because a language doesn't have the "private" keyword doesn't mean that internal data can't be excluded from the interface... this was done all the time in e.g. C without the message passing semantics that characterize OO languages.

Parent's observation that the WOW counties determine the statewide offices and electoral college vote allocation is absolutely accurate.

And don't overthink it. You've probably seen this a million times in your work life. The description is indeed not great.

It's not always about not having to recompile, but can be (see eg dependency injection)

More importantly, Foxconn's agreement with WI states that up to 93% of workers can be paid $15/hour. That's barely enough to live on even in Wisconsin.

If Foxconn were legally required to pay 50k+ with benefits for factory work, I would happily agree with you. But that's not what the contracts say. The contracts say basically everyone except management and engineering can be paid $15/hr.

Also, the Amazon fulfillment center just a few miles from the site of Foxconn's new plant pays $15/hour and is constantly hiring. So we're basically paying 4.1 billion for... a bunch of jobs that are roughly equivalent to openings that already go unfilled just down the street.

Finally, remember that we're talking about 4.1 billion dollars. That's a lot of healthcare/education/infra/small business development/etc. opportunity cost.

2. If you're not from Wisconsin, why would you move to Wisconsin? There's nothing wrong with Milwaukee, BTW. Nice city. But there are dozens of other nice low-CoL cities in the USA, many with nicer weather and many still in the Midwest.