This is bang on. I am shocked by how poor UX really is these days in most modern applications.
I worked at an old grocery store running the front office as a teenager through college maaaany years ago, and everything was a keyboard shortcut, non-touchscreen driven interface from probably the early 90’s. It took some time to get used to and train others on, but I could fly through those interfaces in a way a modern UX simply does not allow by focusing on the lowest common denominator for usability instead of any attempt to cater to ‘experts’: aka the people who have to use those interfaces day in and day out.
Sure, the modern interfaces look great (usually) and in the ideal state anyone can pick it up and use it without much instruction. But there’s no attempt to focus on the poor soul who has to use it in their day to day and just wants to get it done as quickly as possible.
Hardware, too. I worked in broadcast television in the 1990s and we used these very large Sony three-quarter inch videotape decks for editing. Two of them paired together and a monitor.
Once I learned how to edit using the buttons and the scroll wheels, I could fly through putting together a news segment with all kinds of cuts, fades and overdubs. I remember thinking, I couldn’t believe how fast my fingers were flying.
The closest thing I can compare it to is learning how to play a guitar; after a certain point muscle memory takes over.
I agree, that’s probably what will happen. It’s the natural progression of things and the boom/bust credit cycle speeds the process- a new field of technology, full of hungry competitors, eventually winnows down to a small number of large firms, who then usually proceed to fix prices to ensure permanent profits. Then you have to get government involved to make sure they don’t abuse their monopoly power, and the whole thing ends up being a government/private industry hybrid operation. At that point it’s a power struggle between popular power/democracy and private power/capital, which lately capital has been dominating, but that may reverse.
Libertarian supporters of capitalism look backward to the earlier phase of a lot of competing small firms innovating rapidly, in which government is more an impediment than anything else, and while that’s a great time to be in, it’s just a phase, and eventually the board clears and you end up with a small number or just one large firm that controls a whole industry, and popular movements or government is really the only check on their power.
Looking backwards (90s/early 00s), it's curious we didn't see hyperscale cloud concentration earlier. The tech was there, at least relative to state of the art of the day.
I guess it was a demand problem.
There needed to be one huge customer to dictate a single set of needs, and that didn't exist until Amazon bootstrapped via its own demand and internal interoperability mandates.
It'll be curious if Google bows out. You'd think Android would have taught them that sometimes throwing money on a bonfire is a good investment in aggregate.
No disagreements there: I was just lamenting the short term negative impacts it will have.
Further concentration of capital’s power in the tech space is a significant issue, IMO, and painful in its own right to back out of. It will be interesting to see how we deal with this problem in the future… if we address it at all.
> Progressive taxation benefits society at large...
... claim the poor and the people who make their money off capital gains.
Who gets to decide what "good for society" means in context of taxation is possibly the most political question out there. It is not at all obvious that making the most productive people pay most of the burden gets to the best outcome.
Being highly paid or at the top of a management structure does not equal being more productive.
It is one philosophy that there exists some line, some fuzzy DMZ that gets crossed between being merely "wealthy and more prosperous than others" and obscene. Colloquially that seems to be "billionaire" but I bet a lot of people on the farther-left would define is somewhere north of $10 million.
Especially in a country so far behind the rest of the developed world with regards to access to health-care and housing for so many millions of people.
As OSS dev this very often not true for instance: there is a lot of OSS having a positive effect on a huge amount of people and yet the authors scraping by. Paying for OSS should be a tax write off aka charity. Would stimulate more people to just open source it all.
You assume that the value in this case is created merely by its existence but software in a vacuum is worthless. The value in software is also created by orgs that choose to use the software, by distribution networks. It must be reduced to practice.
As a software dev that can be a hard pill to swallow.
This is alleviated with a probate and has been studied in depth ala the FairTax. It's FUD and is holding us back.
Not to mention there are many efficiencies that come with this system which would likely cause prices to even out over time near their current levels or just slightly higher.
Sales taxes can be done in a progressive way if you calculate total purchases for the year as (reported income minus reported money added to savings).
Though, of course, you then need even more reporting than we already have, but it would have the upside of no longer disincentivizing work like the current system does, and rewarding savings over spending too.
Not sure why I got downvoted; while it's not super well-known, this is a real and potentially feasible idea that has been studied by economists and has had papers written about it. You can absolutely apply tax brackets to sales tax to avoid making it a regressive tax, it's just a little bit more administratively complex.
There are a number of reasons for your downvotes. For starters, income taxes don't disincentive work and are in fact lower now than they were during our greatest periods of economic growth.
And from the perspective of someone who actually works in tax: the "FairTax" simply pushes all the complexity to everyday transactions, instead of minimizing it to periodic transactions occurring 1-2 times a month (with reporting once a year). It would hugely disincentive paying for actual things, and artificially incentivize (untaxed) services over (heavily taxed) goods.
Moreover, the "FairTax" rate would be 30% or more on all purchases. Not only would the FairTax would obscenely regressive in effect, but a tax rate that large would push a substantial portion of the economy underground!
There's so much wrong with "FairTax" that it should be called "Ridiculous Tax."
While I agree with much of your post, current taxes on income (featuring reduced taxes on capital income, exclusion of most income from gifts/inheritances, and supplemental taxes on labor income [“payroll tax”]) absolutely disincentivize working for income if you have choices of how to get income. Now, lots of people don't have choices and are stuck with work, but that doesn't mean there is no disincentive effect.
(Of course, “treat income as income” makes this much fairer than the status quo, much less the laughably misnamed “FairTax”.)
All of those alternative sources of money require an individual to already be quite wealthy: capital income means capital assets; gifts/inheritances means wealthy family. At that point...it honestly doesn't matter how you get your money. Over my career I have provided tax consulting and compliance services to many HNW individuals, and income taxes were never once a disincentive to working. A person rich enough to choose how they earn their income works because they choose to.
(Note: payroll taxes such as FICA, etc., actually phase out pretty quickly after $100k in earnings, so they're regressive in nature. There is the high-wage supplemental tax, but this is offset by the cap on income subject to SSI tax, so workers earnings more than $140k actually pay less in payroll tax.)
That being said, I agree that capital gains should be treated as regular income (as it was historically, pre-Reagan) and that income received via gift/inheritance should not receive a FMV cost basis.
That is probably different than the incorrect argument I've often heard, that "if I get paid more and move into a new tax bracket, I'll net less money" which shows up when someone doesn't understand the concept of taxation on marginal dollars.
I think the people who argue for higher taxes on wealthier brackets also argue for capital gains to be taxed at a similar/equal rate to income.
Right, exactly. And besides the examples you mentioned, the differing income tax brackets on married couples is also a big example of this. If only one spouse is working, and the second spouse is deciding whether to get a job, then having all of the second spouse's income taxed at a higher marginal rate from the get go can easily influence people's decisions.
Note: for married couples, the tax bracket thresholds are doubled, except for the highest (37%) bracket, which kicks in for couples making more than roughly $625k but for singles at roughly $520k.
The actual effect is that you need to actually have a huge wealth disparity between partners' earnings for the so-called marriage penalty to kick-in. Fox News notwithstanding, the overwhelming majority of married couples will not see a marriage penalty.
All true, and good points. However the marriage bonus for single earners is much greater than the bonus for double earners, so if you look at it from a certain angle there is sort of a penalty for dual earners vs sole breadwinner marriages.
I think you're making some incorrect political assumptions about my views. I have no idea what this "FairTax" thing is that you're referring to, but that sounds like something pretty different from what I'm talking about.
Your parent comment described one of the proposed ways for implementing the FairTax system, in which a national sales tax would replace the national income tax.
Even if you did not mean to suggest FairTax and you mean something very different, your proposal still ends up being significantly more complicated than an income tax, since now taxpayers must track all purchases made over the year rather than the relatively limited sources of income they have. Your proposal would increase the compliance burden on buyers, sellers, and the government.
No, my comment said calculate total purchases for the year as (reported income minus reported money added to savings) which specifically does not require tracking any purchases, only income and contributions to bank/investment/retirement accounts and such.
By not tracking purchases individually, and only inferring the total amount of money spent by subtracting savings from income, you can also apply brackets to purchases, and thus avoid the regressive nature of a "simple" flat sales tax.
Probably a stupid question, but are the version #'s mentioned here ( "From version 2.4.17 (Oct 9, 2015) to version 2.4.38 (Apr 1, 2019), Apache HTTP suffers from a local root privilege escalation vulnerability due to an out-of-bounds array access leading to an arbitrary function call." ) the only ones affected, or is it possible earlier versions are affected as well?
Also, I just want to throw out there that the name of this one is great:
"Why the name ?
CARPE: stands for CVE-2019-0211 Apache Root Privilege Escalation
DIEM: the exploit triggers once a day
> but are the version #'s mentioned here ... the only ones affected
Usually when a range like that is given, yes.
> From version 2.4.17 (Oct 9, 2015) to version 2.4.38 (Apr 1, 2019)
This case implies that they know the bug was introduced in a particular change, which went public with version 2.4.17 and was either fixed or otherwise mitigated in 2.4.38.
The only earlier or other versions that I would expect to see affected are dev/alpha/beta branches.
Unfortunately I think these types of restrictions are fairly common in large organizations, even non-financial.
Speaking as someone in a Fortune 500, sometimes the bureaucratic hoops one must jump through to develop in a VM or with docker on ones own machine isn't even worth it.
At a company I interned at, even getting Linux on a laptop was a multi-week process. I ended up running a Linux VM on virtualbox on Windows, used cmder to ssh into it, and used a shared folder to edit code natively while running it on Linux.
To be fair, it makes no sense for the company to allow any desktop on Linux. The desktop wouldn't have the centralized authentication, the system updates, office or the drivers for the printer that are well integrated only on their windows machines.
So take a major financial insititue you probably have an account with - 300,000 employees each of whom has at least one PC age ranged upto a decade. Including servers and routers they probably have as many machines as AWS, but in several thousand "data centres" some of which get unplugged by the cleaners vacuum.
The management headaches for this kind of distributed computing is off the scale, and banning Linux and locking down senior devs workstations is just table stakes. Everyone is heading to a thin client running citrix to a data centre for pretty much this reason
None of it has to be complicated, it is because people want to make it complicated, and make computers some magical box.
Lets firs talk about removing root privileges on personal workstations or laptops. This is pointless. Anything that might be bad for root to do on a single user system is going to be just as bad running as a user. The second you allow any custom code to run as a user on any system you should treat it as potentially compromised -- adding root in to the mix really does not change things -- on a single user system. Worried about root user getting access to some customer data on the system? To bad, if the data was on the system it is more than likely the user level account (windows or linux for that matter) had access to the data therefor any intruder will also have access, just at the user level. The same goes for just about any other issue you can run in to. Am I suggesting running things as root? No, because there really is no need for most things -- at the same time if your developer needs to have root level access so they can test or work with technologies that require it when deployed to production then it really should be a non issue for sysadmins. The problem is sysadmins are mostly scared to be outed for doing nothing for most organizations these days. These sort of power sweeps are often used to justify big budgets and teams of people who tell you to "reboot" when it does not work right. There is also a bit if power hungry attitude associated with it too.
You state that Linux makes it harder, I can't see how and you did not show me anything convincing. Bold statements without any details into facts can just be tossed into the trash can as far as I am concerned.
Now lets talk about citrix. How does that help? All that does is move any real or perceived problem to a different system. If any of these VMs get accessed by bad actors they will still be able to own any of the information on them that the user had access too.
In any case I did not really come here to argue any of this, your comment is just sort of out of place with relation to what I said.
If you can't trust your employees don't hire them, or just pay them and tell them to sit in a dark room so they can't hurt anything.
Your first comment was on point. It's a massive hassle to manage the many environments that come with a hundred thousand computers.
The last poster has zero argument and is just ignoring the problem. Go setup a thousand printers for ten thousand employees in a hundred locations. They all have to work flawlessly and on all OS.
I've been looking for something like this--podcast discovery is severely lacking right now(or I don't know where to look!). Excited to try this out--thanks!
I'll be sure to get to send you some feedback once I've used it for a while. :)
I'm pretty surprised by the long wait times between "updates" from support... that's pretty rough. I understand it can be hard to get a good signal to noise ratio with support, but when so many other people are reporting issues, perhaps it's time to take it a bit more seriously?
This thread is a great example of why support is so hard.
not really. I wish I could get away with providing such crap support as the big players do.
If my customers don't get a reply within a few hours, then all hell breaks loose. Even if, there request comes in at 3am / 0300 on a Sunday morning my time.
To be fair, when I point this out to them they do apologise, didn't realise time difference, are in a different part of the world where Sunday is not a day off etc. I then ask what they expect from some billion dollar companies support wise and they say they are happy with a reply within a week. Asking them why a one man shop doing quite a bit less than billions of dollars is expected to provide so much more.
Anyway, rant over. Support isn't hard. You hire enough competent people as your customers require. The end. Happy customers
I worked at an old grocery store running the front office as a teenager through college maaaany years ago, and everything was a keyboard shortcut, non-touchscreen driven interface from probably the early 90’s. It took some time to get used to and train others on, but I could fly through those interfaces in a way a modern UX simply does not allow by focusing on the lowest common denominator for usability instead of any attempt to cater to ‘experts’: aka the people who have to use those interfaces day in and day out.
Sure, the modern interfaces look great (usually) and in the ideal state anyone can pick it up and use it without much instruction. But there’s no attempt to focus on the poor soul who has to use it in their day to day and just wants to get it done as quickly as possible.