> what I came to call “the Law of Conservation of Ugly”. In many software problems, there’s a part that just is never going to feel elegant
This may be an instance of the Waterbed Principle: in any sufficiently-complex system, suppressing or refactoring some undesirable characteristic in one area inevitably causes an undesirability to pop up somewhere else. Like there is some minimum amount of complexity/ugliness/etc that it is possible for the entire system to contain while still carrying out its essential functions, and it must leak out somewhere.
I think OP is engaging with a remark (possibly[1]) from the futurist and writer William Gibson: "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed".
Equally was my mistake, I should have used the word evenly. Trying to tease out some new information so I understand the world better. Being more careful with my own wording is just one lesson
Are labour unions generally done one-off like this in the US? I keep reading stories where individual branches/locations make efforts to unionise, which the company fights off whack-a-mole style.
In my country the unions are fairly well-established and tend to sit across an entire sector, covering all businesses operating in it (workers individually choose whether or not to join, but the company isn't allowed to discriminate either way). Like there will be a Nurses union, a Teachers union, a Public Sector union, a Warehousing and Logistics union, a Port & Dockworkers union, a Retail Workers union... the list goes on. One US example I've heard of like this is in trucking (Teamsters union?), but I know little about the history of US labour relations generally. Could there be an Amazon Workers union that covers an entire state?
Employers of a certain size here are also obliged to provide registered unions with access to business premises, ability to hold certain (non-mandatory) union meetings during work hours, etc. Some industries have upwards of 20-30% of all employees joined to the union, a few even higher.
Unions in the United States are adversarial and corporate. They are institutions and powers in and off themselves, which makes them far different from their generally much less militant European cousins. The adversarial part means much more willingness to engaged in scorched earth outcomes (by both companies and unions). Unions have taken over corporations (United Airlines for example), destroyed corporations (Eastern / National). Unions compete with each other as well.
That's the same as in europe, except perhaps that in europe often specific unions are associated with specific political parties and act in conjunction.
I'm sure this does happen sometimes, but I print plenty and can't find any such files on my Monterey-running M1. Neither is it true on my Catalina-running Intel Mac.
Also, I keep seeing this claim repeated during the last week or so... what gives?
>A tax on revenues would kill a lot of high growth businesses
And also low-margin businesses. If you tax a business on its total sales rather than profits, a low-margin and high-volume operation cannot survive as easily.
Example. A supermarket chain makes many sales, collecting average 5% margins on a sale. A seller of high-end automobiles moves fewer units, but can take a 15% margin. Assume both businesses make the same $1m sales in a year.
If you're taxing profits at 20% the supermarket pays $10k on $50k profit while the car dealer pays $30k on $150k profit, for a total tax take of $40k.
If you're instead taxing total sales at 2%, each will pay $20k on their $1m sales. The same total taxes were raised, but the tax burden (at least in terms of retained earnings that are now available for reinvestment) has fallen differently. The supermarket is paying 40% of their profits in taxes, the car dealer is paying 13.3% of their profits in taxes.
And if a business makes only 1% average margin on their sales, they are underwater by this scheme. ($1m sales, $10k profit, $20k tax).
A VAT isn’t a sales tax though. I think you can subtract the cost of goods since they were already taxed? Compared with income tax, there are fewer expenses you can subtract from revenue, but there still are some.
But since prices will adjust, the question is really one of tax incidence. Who gets to raise prices to cover their taxes? And that’s complicated.
I think you can subtract R&D costs somewhere else. At least I remember the accounting department being really picky about having accurate details on R&D hours.
Not out of VAT though. They are deductible from your income, which is how you come up with how much profit you made (which is taxed).
With VAT, you can deduct from it all the other VAT that you paid. E.g. you bill someone 100 + 10% VAT for a total bill of 110. You receive 110. You are now supposed to pay that 10 VAT to the government. But before you pay it, you can subtract the VAT that you paid in the last month, so if you bought, say, scissors, that had a VAT of 2, and a pencil, with a VAT of 1, you have to pay a total VAT of 7 back to the government.
That’s assuming there is competition from companies that can avoid the tax, otherwise their margins stay the same and the industry ends up with higher prices. In effect it’s roughly equivalent to sales tax, though one that also applies to suppliers and therefore promotes vertical integration.
Which is the real reason countries tax profits, it can’t be passed on to consumers. Aka a company that maximized profits at some price point can’t raise prices without lowering profits.
> Citation needed that this was a knowing conspiracy as opposed to bad intelligence
Within hours of the planes hitting the towers on 9/11, before any information was in, Rumsfeld's aides were drawing up plans for striking Iraq, despite zero evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks. The number one priority for the White House, above finding out who the real culprits were, was to figure out how to use it as a rationale to invade Iraq. This is not really a controversial viewpoint, it is documented fact [1].
When the 9/11 rationale for invading Iraq became untenable, it was replaced by the idea that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction, that he'd definitely been procuring uranium from Niger. Except these were lies too (and the WH knew it, because they'd sent Joe Wilson to investigate and he'd reported back as such). When Wilson heard them saying it despite knowing it was false, he contradicted them in public [2]. In an act of retribution, the WH leaked his wife's position as a CIA agent, burning valuable contacts and networks, and endangering friendly lives.
Then they moved onto the argument that regardless of WMDs, the Iraqi people actually wanted the invasion anyway, US forces would be welcomed as liberators by gift-bearing citizens, etc. When that didn't pan out either, a final argument became that Saddam was a tyrant and that fact alone provided sufficient moral and legal justification for preemptive war (i.e. The Bush Doctrine) [3].
There is no evidence that the media was part of the conspiracy, they just parroted the talking points and a few media outlets did heavily question the rationale.. the fact is both wars were hugely popular when they started so few listened.
This is not even close to a comparable situation to the social medial platforms, these platforms and democratized and weaponized mis-information. But it not just them, the ad-funded internet creates perverse incentives for views not truth, FB et al don’t care about truth they care about engagement, they know emotional touch points particularly angry drive engagement so their feeds optimize for that.
Our fractured society is just an emergent behavior from several complex systems with poor incentives, as such we need to find out a way to realign the incentives
there were protests, and quite large ones but they were almost exclusively from the left and were generally categorized as just being people that didn't like Bush.
Gallup polling shows 50-60% of Americans supported going in just to remove Hussein, in the first half of 2003 only 23-27% of Americans thought it was a mistake to go in to Iraq. see here for tons of polls done https://news.gallup.com/poll/1633/iraq.aspx
Despite seemingly everyone's revisionist histories, the country was scared and generally whipped into a frenzy, the right wanted it, the centrists wanted it, some of the left wanted it.
I stumbled upon an unusual policy when trying to order from B&H the first time. They are not open for business on Shabbat (NYC local time), and this includes their online checkout!
I could fill up my cart, but had to come back later to do my purchase.
It's a bit strange because if you go to actual Israel, there are ways around Shabbat rules that align with the Torah/Talmud. For example, on Shabbat, there is an elevator that stops at every floor (so no one has to push the button).
It's also my understanding that it's kosher for gentiles to perform actions outside of the constraints of the rules of Judaism, like turning on/off fans on behalf of those respecting the rules of the sabbath.
> there are ways around Shabbat rules that align with the Torah/Talmud
As with any religious practices, there’s a wide spectrum of how people follow or don’t follow the doctrine. There’s no shortage of Rabbis who have haggled over the fine details of how they apply to modern society, like your elevator example.
Personally, I like the idea of aligning and adapting the general intent as opposed to rule hacking, and it’s neat to leave that cultural stamp on the business (at some cost, I’m sure).
It’s an amazing retail space. They have this awesome overhead rail system for delivering goods, and their checkout resembles customs at an airport (a bit disconcerting).
Fwiw there has been some history of B&H workers being treated fairly not-well. I encourage reading past the first few paragraphs of this article as it's not all "union stuff"--there are lawsuits, DOL complaints, and OSHA fines as well:
Thank you for pointing this out. I live in the area and showed up for the pickets when they fired all of their warehouse employees for complaining about unsafe working conditions.
Could you please clarify what do you think is horrible? Anyone can sue anyone in the US, for any reason, and allege a lot of bad things. It also true that cost of litigation is often much, much higher than a settlement - e.g. the 3 employee suing asked for $200k in damages, which I assume is just an opening offer. A reasonable lawyer can easily cost upwards of $500/hr, and require many, many hours of work even if the process never gets to the court.
My close friend is been sued for ridiculous reasons by ex-partners. It already costed him $750k in legal fees,and although he is very likely to win the case, it’s expected to take another 2 years before the case is resolved, at which point he will be allowed to file for recovering his costs (easily anothe couple of years).
You may well think so, but I was asking an honest question. I don’t think it’s distasteful to doubt any allegations, esp. when missing some context, in this case, 10 years old judgement against B&H.
As I tried to point out, a mere fact that someone is suing someone is not enough to conclude anything about which side is right; that’s why I was asking someone who seemed to have more context.
I’m not sure why people are reading too much into my honest question.
A friend of mine worked with some Plymouth Brethren who wouldn't use computers, but had a stationery company. They employed someone else to build them a website and run it, then print out the orders and hand them over. I've not heard of a religious order that didn't even want to allow people outside the order to "break" the rules. Although perhaps it's something about money ending up in their bank account?
IIUC, it's a religious/cultural observance that's very important to them, I think a kind of reminder. I'd say respecting that means respecting that.
Also, I loved B&H when I was seriously into photography, and even if the closed days had been a practical inconvenience (they weren't, IME), it would've still been worthwhile.
Speculating... Maybe something in the culture of dutiful adherence also helped them to provide such well-respected service at great prices? Diversity is good.
They used to do transactions on Shabbat, then they stopped, presumably the Satmar Hasidic rabbi must have issued a ruling that it wasn’t allowed.
Sure, it’s a minor annoyance, but compare that with the nontheistic amorality of Amazon and their everything-goes train wreck of a marketplace (worse than eBay at its worst) and you’ll understand why I only buy my computers, electronics and photo gear from B&H.
Let's take this to extreme. Commandment "Thou shalt not kill", would it be ok to let automatons kill instead of you and this would not be considered sin? (playing devils advocate)
Building (and activating) a machine that's designed to kill, obviously violates the "thou shalt not kill" and makes you an attempted murderer the moment you activate it. But the actual moment of killing? You're literally not doing that (you could be sleeping or have forgotten about the machine, at the moment it first kills).
Similarly, building the e-commerce machine obviously can't be done on the sabbath, but if it's already running then you're not actually working.
For example, suppose you push a rock off a huge cliff. If the rock tumbles for a full week after you push it, were you pushing it off a cliff for the full week (including the sabbath)? Or did you only push it the one time on a tuesday?
I think respect is for people, not religions. I don’t even know what it means to respect a religion, unless you adhere to it. Respect for people includes respecting their right to practice their religion, even if you think it is silly. That respect also means you don’t go out of your way to point fingers and laugh at every opportunity, but not the obligation to keep your opinion secret either. Due respect can be a difficult balancing act sometimes.
The differences between a professional situation/drinking with friends/talking with grandmother are way too big compared to the differences between HN and Reddit. The latter two are actually extremely similar in how content gets posted and discussed.
In other words, there appears to be no reason why HN and Reddit folks should behave differently when on the opposite platform. These behavior differences are artificial and ad hoc (i.e. 'we want to keep HN free from obtuse memes.. because we said so!')
You don't accept that different online communities can have sufficiently different cultures that "memes" are more acceptable in one than the other, even if said communities have somewhat of an overlap in audiences?
I'll give you an unrelated example - I watch lots of developer conference presentations and read articles on developer blogs. My pet peeve is when writers include reaction GIFs in between some code example or one-sentence epiphany. I'm here to learn, not to waste bandwidth on some dumb five frame 80MB file. GIFs are for casual "throw-away" conversations, not learning resources.
I like that HN is a learning resource. I like that I can read perspectives from people in many different fields and across the various economic classes. I also like reddit - I like the memes, the in-group culture (when it's funny), the bots, the one-liners, what have you. But I don't want humor and generalizations to dominate HN comments; I want educational content to float to the top so that authors are rewarded for sharing their perspective. I can find funny takes on HN headlines on reddit already.
The point is that HN and Reddit are not extremely similar. This is more like a work place (more rules, more interesting), reddit is more like 8th grade recess (less rules, more fun)
This may be an instance of the Waterbed Principle: in any sufficiently-complex system, suppressing or refactoring some undesirable characteristic in one area inevitably causes an undesirability to pop up somewhere else. Like there is some minimum amount of complexity/ugliness/etc that it is possible for the entire system to contain while still carrying out its essential functions, and it must leak out somewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory