I was expecting `pg_dumpall` to get the `--format` option in v18,[0] but at the moment the docs say it's still only available in the development branch.[1]
Is anyone familiar with Postgres development able to give an update on the state of the feature? Is it planned for a future (18 or 19) release?
Ah my mistake, I linked to the docs for `pg_dump` (which has long had the `format` option) rather than `pg_dumpall` (which lacks it).
Before Postgres 18 was released, the docs listed `format` as an option for `pg_dumpall` in the upcoming version 18 (e.g. Wayback Machine from Jun 2025 https://web.archive.org/web/20250624230110/https://www.postg... ). The relevant commit is from Apr 2025 (see link #0 in my original comment). But now all mention has been scrubbed, even from the Devel branch docs.
Estonia's system was an area of some fascination for me years ago, so here's what I can remember:
After splitting from the Soviet Union, Estonia were basically starting from scratch with their telecoms system. Finland offered them their old stock to get started, but the Estonians decided to instead treat it as a greenfield project and deploy the most modern infrastructure available at the time. Compare to the UK, where most of our infrastructure is literally crumbling as it passes its 50-year predicted lifespan and we spent almost a decade of time and tens of billions of pounds on a vapourware railway line. So the technical inheritance (or lack thereof) favoured Estonia.
I don't know much about how the Estonian system was initially built, but I would imagine a post-Soviet state likely retained enough state capacity to do it mostly in-house (and perhaps they received outside funding too, as the '90s were a period of largesse). Compare to the UK, where state capacity is effectively nil and the project would invariably be outsourced to the same contractors and consulting firms that have taken on every other aspect of government, with concomitant price and time overruns (see also: train).
A crucial element of the Estonian system is that data is private by default (see https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-governance/e-services-regi... ) If I recall correctly, any government agency can request access to specified data for a state purpose, but each request must be reviewed and approved by the data subject. All access requests are logged so a subject can audit who has been accessing what (which suggests maybe it's possible to bulk approve access in advance, or grant persistent rights to someone like one's own doctor). In comparison, the Snoopers' Charter granted unfettered access to Brits' Internet connection records to a huge number of agencies, from the security services to the Food & Agriculture Agency (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#... ).
Estonia is also recognised as a global leader in IT security, following massive investment after Russia-attributed cyberattacks in 2007; they host the NATO Centre of Excellence and the eu-LISA HQ. As far as keeping one's data away from prying outside eyes, they're probably a pretty safe bet. As for the UK… (Eyes passim ad nauseam).
Lastly, I believe Estonians generally report greater levels of trust in their government than Brits. 2023 figures suggest the gap may have narrowed from when I last looked (I can't say I've been following Estonian politics, so I couldn't suggest why) but still some 37.8% of Estonians say they trust their national government as compared to 26.7% of Brits (see https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-trsic/tru... ). And there are certain sizeable constituencies in the UK where, in light of historic abuses, they are even less likely to ever trust the government: Scousers; northerners; women & ethnic minorities (specifically for the police, doubly specifically for the Met); environmental activists (see the spycops scandal); and people of Irish descent. I'm sure there's some skeletons in the Estonian government's closets, but there's a limit to how much damage you can do when your state is 35 years old rather than a centuries-old former world-spanning imperial hegemon.
Those stated trust figures also predate the UK government's support for the genocide in Gaza, which has doubtless had a significant impact on that figure; even people who wouldn't have considered themselves particularly political a couple years earlier are appalled at the regular arrests of protesting pensioners outside Parliament (see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/09/palestine-acti... ). The incredibly unpopular incumbent government is only the latest in a long line of increasingly authoritarian regimes of both the political right and (allegedly) left (see https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/09/labour-needs-arrest-uks-... ), meaning everybody in the country of any political persuasion can think of recent examples of why they might not want to invite increased government surveillance. Plus, with the recent passage of the Online Safety Act, most people are now primed to associate a new digital ID with the government wanting to know their porn habits, and we're a famously prudish nation.
So, in short:
· the Estonian government had the ideal circumstances, made all the right choices, prioritised privacy and security and are reasonably trusted by their citizens
· the UK government has doddery old infrastructure to work with, no money left, an addiction to outsourcing in spite of repeat disasters, a track record of authoritarian disregard for privacy and have little to no legitimacy amongst the populace
And, as others have pointed out, there's just no obvious constituency in the country that would be interested in this sort of thing (outside of Tony Blair and his mates) and no obvious problems that it provides a solution for; it seems like a hard sell, whether on ideological or practical grounds.
Just the other day, someone saw a pile of textbooks in my room and commented incredulously that I ‘still learn things from books?’
It was one of the most jarringly alien things I’ve ever heard, like being told that everyone has moved on from toilet paper to just using their hands, but I missed the memo.
There are still many details yet to come out, and the future is as ever unwritten, but I think a better historical analogue for the killing of Charlie Kirk is Horst Wessel, who Goebbels turned into a martyr for the NSDAP.
> Over the past year, there have been a number of headline-grabbing legal changes in the US, such as the legalization of marijuana in CO and WA, as well as the legalization of same-sex marriage in a growing number of US states.
> As a majority of people in these states apparently favor these changes, advocates for the US democratic process cite these legal victories as examples of how the system can provide real freedoms to those who engage with it through lawful means. And it’s true, the bills did pass.
> What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.
Hannah Arendt considered this argument in her essay "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship":
> In the tumultuous discussion of moral issues which has been going on since the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the disclosure of the total complicity in crimes of all ranks of official society, that is, of the total collapse of normal moral standards, the following argument has been raised in endless variations: We who appear guilty today are in fact those who stayed on the job in order to prevent worse things from happening; only those who remained inside had a chance to mitigate things and to help at least some people; we gave the devil his due without selling our soul to him, whereas those who did nothing shirked all responsibilities and thought only of themselves, of the salvation of their precious souls… (p 34)
But, ultimately, she finds the excuse lacking:
> Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil. (p 36)
Oh absolutely! It's my hope that detailing the psychological mechanism at play is in some way an antidote to its acceptance. It feels if anything a bit naive when faced with the possibility that there exists a group who gleefully implements the most heinous practices so this line of thinking doesn't even enter the picture.
> One quirk to these model tables I want to note, because it sometimes confuses folks, is that they express ‘life expectancy’ not as a total expected age, but as average years of life expectancy from a given age, so a 25-year-old with 26.6 years of life expectancy is expecting to life to age 51, not just a year and a half.
> What we see in these models is that life expectancy (female:male) at birth is very low, 25:22.8, but after the first year rises dramatically to 34.9:34.1 (note the gender gap narrowing) and by age 5 to 40.1:39.0 (remember to add the five years they’ve already lived). So life expectancy goes up quite a lot over the first several years of life, which is not, intuitively, the pattern we expect: we normally assume the more you’ve lived, the less years you have left.
> I hate the term stealing identity, because it implies the victim made some mistake to allow it to happen. When what really happened is the company was lazy to verify that the person they're doing business with is actually who they say they are. The onus and liability should be on the company involved.
Okay, I'm inclined to agree here, but what I don't see addressed is: If you set up an account with a username and password, then write it down on a slip of paper, and then drop that in a cafe, and someone else logs in as you and drains your account, is the bank liable for that too? Are all services with logons? But that looks identical to identity theft in a lot of ways.
If bank mandated security controls are breached, or they don't provide adequate controls, I feel like that that's on them. But if they've done their part and you've been irresponsible then that's on you. But where's the dividing line? And saying the banks have more responsibility can also justify more biometrics and surveillance.
Is the differentiating factor here that the bank (or whatever) is allowing access with insecure credentials (name, date of birth, phone number) instead of the primary credentials?
In the case they gain access to my account, I agree with how you presented it. If someone emptied my account with info about me they could find in data breaches, that shouldn’t be on me.
If they gave a loan or a credit card to someone pretending to be me. That’s now on my credit rating and historically very difficult to undo.
I highly doubt it. If someone comes in and claims to be an account holder for a multi billioniare (even a non-famous one) i promise you the banks gonna go through alot more hoops to make sure its the right person. Its only woth the proles they just hand wave that away and blame you for it
> That doesn’t seem like a sensible reading as that would be tautological.
> By definition wealth and power enables those who have it to modify the status quo, otherwise we would call that having delusions of wealth and power.
Wealth and power do not obligate one to do the right thing, it’s true. That doesn’t mean that the onus doesn’t remain on the power structure whose decision making capabilities are enabled by technological means. There’s no one else whose hands last touched the apparatus from whence their technological power flows. We could ask the public collectively to respond, but their hands don’t rest upon the levers of power.
Should we raise taxes on the lower and middle classes to pay for it too? There’s no need, as the truly wealthy don’t need to touch their assets directly or even pay them any mind, as they have hired help for that. The devaluation of privacy hits the little people first, and hardest. Elites are not able to be bothered even performatively by these issues, as they are not subject to these particular failure modes of society.
> Cela consiste pour les pauvres à soutenir et à conserver les riches dans leur puissance et leur oisiveté. Ils y doivent travailler devant la majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.
> It is the duty of the poor to support and sustain the rich in their power and idleness. In doing so, they have to work before the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
It seemed like you were saying that those in power have a vested interest in solving this social problem because they have more to lose because they have more skin in the game. They actually have almost no exposure to this failure mode because they have lawyers and accountants. They have entire family office services. They don’t suffer due to identity theft even when it happens. Failure isn’t an option or even a distinct possibility, because losses due to identity theft have already been priced into their exposure to liquid markets, and they’re insured for illiquid assets.
It’s not the same for the little people. That was my point.
The only thing I said was it’s tautological… if they couldn’t affect the status quo to their desires, then they wouldn’t be considered to have wealth or power in the first place.
Your argument is that elites who wish to change the status quo, but can’t for whatever reason, aren’t really elites. I agree to a point.
I argue even if the above is true, they truly are elites if the word actually describes anyone accurately and not just aspirationally, and that there are too many cooks in the kitchen for one to rise above the din.
I believe your modernisation attempt misinterprets the dino reference and its connection to the the previous clause about the floods; should it not rather be something like Mud overflowed the streets, as though the waters had only just retired from the face of the earth and it would not be shocking to meet a dinosaur etc. etc.
Although, as the comments on the original post discuss, this does rely on background knowledge that when Dickens was writing, there were popular theories associating dinosaurs with the Biblical flood.
For my part, I confused 'Megalosaurus' with 'Megalodon' and pictured a large shark stranded writhing on Holborn Hill by the sudden loss of its waters; an error which, paradoxically, helped me get closer to the intended meaning (which was, we know now, itself incorrect).
Is anyone familiar with Postgres development able to give an update on the state of the feature? Is it planned for a future (18 or 19) release?
[0]: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit...
[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/app-pgdump.html#:~:tex...
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