Emotionally, I agree that the current system sucks. But how exactly do you "[put] median housing titles in the hands of median people"? Government seizure and redistribution of property titles? That's where I always get stuck: criticizing society ills is much easier than proposing concrete, pass-able policy.
"No mainstream economists touch this problem" because it's a damn hard problem without painless solutions.
I mean the problem will solve itself eventually. As wealth continues to centralize and urbanization continues unchecked, the “renter” voting block will eventually be state-level majorities in places like New York and California.
There are plenty of ways for people to “vote themselves” property, whether it happens peacefully or not is a decision of those in power. The spectrum runs from land value tax to punitive landlord taxes, improving tenant rights, squatter rights, and outright seizure.
I don’t know which path we’ll go down, but some step in that direction feels inevitable within the next 60 years.
I'd agree that China is preparing to be cut off, but it's not because of Taiwan. Dan specifically mentions this:
"In vain do I protest that there are historical and geopolitical reasons motivating the desire, that chip fabs cannot be violently seized, and anyway that Beijing has coveted Taiwan for approximately seven decades before people were talking about AI."
Consider the historical timeline: "Fortress China" policies coincide with the rise of American protectionism on both sides of the aisle and the introduction of chip restrictions and punishing tariffs. Taiwan is an emotional/nationalist issue for China, but it's only one part of their policy, not the lynchpin as your comment suggests.
Early Google search only provided web links. Google Images, News, Video, Shopping, Maps, Finance used to be their own search boxes. Only later did Google start unifying their search experiences.
Yelp suffered greatly in the early 2010s when Google started putting Google Maps listings (and their accompanying reviews) in their search results.
OpenAI will eventually unify their products as well.
I disagree with your "natural" person qualification. "Non-natural persons" includes anyone with a work visa or green card. It's hard enough for most people to get these, much less become fully naturalized citizens. Plus, the waiting time isn't guaranteed in length: it's variable based on the political climate. It's hard enough for immigrants today. Making the viability of home ownership based on political whims only worsens it. Shouldn't we prefer these immigrants become homeowners, increasing their "investment" in their local communities?
"Natural" and "naturalized" do not refer to the same concept. "Natural person" includes those with work visas or green cards.
>A natural person is a living human being. Legal systems can attach rights and duties to natural persons without their express consent.
>The concept of a natural person appears in business law and bankruptcy law, where it provides a contrast with an artificial person or a legal person which is an entity that is treated as a person for legal purposes. While natural person describes an actual human being, artificial person describes a partnership, corporation, or some other entity that has been provided with legal personhood by statute.
You misunderstand why I brought up him being from Xamarin.
The initial conversation was about how Nat was likely leaving because his contract ran out. The counterpoint was that he was from the Microsoft side and therefore he didn't have a retention contract. I brought up Xamarin because he was likely under a retention contract from that acquisition.
That being said, these contracts probably had little to no effect on his decision though, as I'm sure he would have made more money than he could spend in a lifetime regardless of whether he had stayed or not.
> I brought up Xamarin because he was likely under a retention contract from that acquisition.
Microsoft bought Xamarin in February 2016. I'm sure five-year retention contracts are possible, but that seems extraordinarily long; I've rarely seen longer than two years.
The name 'main' feels overloaded, just like naming the default branch 'default' or 'development', with the risk of "Who's on first?" confusion, especially when branching off branches.
"What branch are you on?"
"I branched off the main development branch for this fix."
"Like...the `main` main branch or the main branch for the feature?"
I like redis' rename of their default branch to `unstable`. Just like commits are tagged with the release numbers, the latest code that isn't yet versioned is by default 'unstable'. If the industry as a whole is going to make this change, I would prefer we choose a name that can be unambiguously referenced in conversation.
May I suggest a name for that branch which does not conflict with other uses and is generally understood by most developers?
master
Merriam-Webster gives several definitions for this word, one of which seems to fit this purpose very well indeed: (noun) an original from which copies can be made, especially: a master recording (such as a magnetic tape), (adjective) being or relating to a master from which duplicates are made, (verb) to produce a master recording of (something, such as a musical rendition)
You can use this one-liner to rename your confusingly-named default branch:
$ git branch -m main master
$ git status
On branch master
We use "mainline" instead. Same meaning, but it's a sufficiently uncommon word that there's little chance of ambiguity; it's very clear you're referring to a git branch.
> If the industry as a whole is going to make this change, I would prefer we choose a name that can be unambiguously referenced in conversation.
It that case, though, we would name our default branch "stable". We don't allow pushes to master unless everything has passed our full test suite. I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing to have the development model hardcoded into the name of the default branch - I've certainly worked in long-lived repositories where we've changed the model over time.
Sure. I don't know if 'unstable' is the best name for everyone, but if the industry decides to spend the engineering time to rename default branches, we shouldn't be just be switching to the first synonym in the thesaurus, but a word that's actually more fitting than 'master'.
'mastering' is an artifact of vinyl and boxed software. Now that a lot of software is continuously tested and shipped, 'master' is not the right word for those processes. Even if you're shipping on-premise software, there rarely is a single 'master' copy anymore.
As a side note, I've seen people try this, but there is no amount of testing that can guarantee stability. So, 'stable' feels like a false promise. Also, in the event of a bug causing downtime, _someone_ always has the ability to push directly to master and it's always possible that a fix might break a new commit's tests, even if it fixes the downtime.
> As a side note, I've seen people try this, but there is no amount of testing that can guarantee stability. So, 'stable' feels like a false promise.
Which, by the same argument, makes all branches unstable. Why would you want to name, arguably the least unstable branch in the mentioned scenario - unstable?
"No mainstream economists touch this problem" because it's a damn hard problem without painless solutions.