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unlinked_dll commented on Gavin Newsom Declares California a ‘Nation-State’   bloomberg.com/opinion/art... · Posted by u/Elof
WalterBright · 6 years ago
> frankly I don't see any argument for less than proportional representation that isn't predicated on the notion that some people are more equal than others

Consider two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. That's why the Senate exists.

unlinked_dll · 6 years ago
Good thing we're not sheep or wolves. That's why I alluded to Orwell. The pigs from Animal Farm are a better metaphor.

The senate doesn't exist to protect the will of sheep at the hands of wolves. It exists because 250 years ago, the edit: New Jersey delegation wasn't willing to relinquish its equal power at the Constitutional Convention to a state like Virginia. Its never been about sheep and wolves, it's been about the political power of a political class that sought to concentrate as much of it as possible for themselves at the expense of others.

If you want a better way to look at it, it's a dozen wolves convincing a dozen sheep that the wolves should have twice the voting power on dinner because they have a bigger grazing area.

unlinked_dll commented on Gavin Newsom Declares California a ‘Nation-State’   bloomberg.com/opinion/art... · Posted by u/Elof
angryasian · 6 years ago
this isn't true. Since the house has been capped, it hasn't grown or hasn't been redistributed based on population changes. A person in Wymoing has more representation than a person in California.
unlinked_dll · 6 years ago
No, they're right. We have 53/435 (12.18%) of the House, which is roughly equal to our proportion of the total population (40mm/330mm, 12.12%, numbers will change with the census).

The "at least one" rep has a bigger impact on some of the medium/small size states. My point was more on the senate/electoral college.

unlinked_dll commented on Gavin Newsom Declares California a ‘Nation-State’   bloomberg.com/opinion/art... · Posted by u/Elof
jackfoxy · 6 years ago
California has proportional representation in the House of Representatives.

California used to have proportional and geographic representation internally in a bicameral state legislature. Then came the Supreme Court's one man one vote ruling. Now southern California has pure proportional representation and gets all the fresh water it demands from northern California, environmental concerns be damned.

Be careful what you wish for.

unlinked_dll · 6 years ago
I don't agree with that categorization of water issues in CA, but that's off topic.

And having proportional seating in the House isn't particularly meaningful, when it takes both the Senate and the Presidency to drive policy. Dirt doesn't vote, and frankly I don't see any argument for less than proportional representation that isn't predicated on the notion that some people are more equal than others. Any weighting of the voices can be done in the debate forum, but at the ballot box the only fair way to distribute power is equally. That goes for all levels of our representative democracy.

No system is perfect, it's just about making one that's more perfect. And I would strongly argue that our bicameral government designed by slave owners 250 years ago has both been continuously eroded (they never planned for the Executive and Congress to be in cahoots!), and could be drastically improved by expanding on the 9th/10th amendments and being reformed into a unicameral legislature and abolishing the electoral college.

unlinked_dll commented on Gavin Newsom Declares California a ‘Nation-State’   bloomberg.com/opinion/art... · Posted by u/Elof
unlinked_dll · 6 years ago
Governor Newsom refers to California as a "nation state" about once a week, in case the author was wondering. He's used that language quite often.

I'm totally ok with it, so long as the Federal government remains impotent and balks at California's efforts to manage itself, while simultaneously being run by the party of "states rights." Purely in spite of the lack of leadership and outright derision for our needs as a state, regardless of being home to over a tenth of the population and being our breadbasket and technological power house.

I know not all Californians agree on everything, but I think we can all come together and recognize that we do have to look out for our state as if it was an independent nation these days. Because the Feds aren't going to help us when we need it, just tax us and tell us we can't have proportional representation.

unlinked_dll commented on Ask HN: What Happened to ICOs?    · Posted by u/ushakov
Mattasher · 6 years ago
I worked for a company that was on the vanguard of trying to make ICOs legal and mainstream. Among other problems, there were tensions between trying to achieve regulatory compliance, transparency, and privacy of trades. I worked on a potential solution involving ring signatures, but it never made it into production.

There were some other important tensions too, happy to discuss if anyone wants to get into the weeds. FWIW I still would love to see a highly fluid market for shares in small businesses and pre-IPO startups.

unlinked_dll · 6 years ago
How do you create such a market without crazy volatility, rampant manipulation and low liquidity, like penny stocks?
unlinked_dll commented on I can't keep up with idiomatic Rust   timidger.github.io/posts/... · Posted by u/ddevault
mseepgood · 6 years ago
> I don't get this perspective, are there only three good features invented every decade?

To be honest, programming language design has been a solved problem since the 1950s when LISP came out.

unlinked_dll · 6 years ago
If this were true we wouldn't have done so much research into programming languages over the last 50 years.

PL design is not a problem to solve, it's the study of the way to express problems and their solutions. As long as their are new problems and ways to solve them, we'll find new ways to improve PL designs.

unlinked_dll commented on I can't keep up with idiomatic Rust   timidger.github.io/posts/... · Posted by u/ddevault
Animats · 6 years ago
They're still fussing with the preferred error handling syntax?

Most of the hacks for not having exceptions seem to end up being worse than exceptions.

unlinked_dll · 6 years ago
No, it's just that a prolific rust contributor made a blog post and then a follow up and things have been heated in the community a bit (I lurk a bit).

The fuss isn't over what the syntax should be, but whether it should be changed at all. The proposal isn't even an RFC, just a blog post and some discussion threads. I think the proposal made good points about the ergonomics of error handling. I think the community might just be a little stir crazy with the quarantine, and talking about a syntax change that upends the much loved Result idiom rustled some feathers.

FWIW it is a purely syntactical change that adds sugar, the underlying mechanism does not change. The "hacks" for not having exceptions are strictly superior to having exceptions, at least in my opinion because the error monad is both opt-in on the caller side and opt-out on the callee, it does not include non local returns (errors don't cause the program to jump up the stack, like C++ exceptions, or any need to pass down the exception handler or pass up a continuation), they support all sorts of wonderful combinators that exceptions don't play nicely with, and unless explicitly disabled by a binary author the stack will always unwind and RAII patterns observed. The issues with exceptions are well documented.

unlinked_dll commented on Zoom sued for overstating, not disclosing privacy, security flaws   uk.reuters.com/article/us... · Posted by u/laurex
arbitrage · 6 years ago
From a purely functional standpoint, that is -- does this software do what I need it to do?, I have had absolutely no problems with zoom.

What issues have come up for you?

unlinked_dll · 6 years ago
I don't really want to go through the laundry list of issues I have because none are critical, just the software is very rough around the edges on Linux. It just feels less than flushed out, and I've had a million little problems and bugs that I've reported and never heard anything back (as a paying user!).
unlinked_dll commented on Zoom sued for overstating, not disclosing privacy, security flaws   uk.reuters.com/article/us... · Posted by u/laurex
unlinked_dll · 6 years ago
How many of Zoom's recent issues can be explained by just bad engineering?

Because my personal gripes with Zoom are mostly about its quality as a software product, which I find to be abysmal for my use cases.

unlinked_dll commented on Airbnb Paying More Than 10% Interest on $1B Financing Announced Monday   wsj.com/articles/airbnb-p... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
ardit33 · 6 years ago
AirBnb is in an existential crisis right now... it might take years before their market recovers...

It makes absolutely sense to have enough money to weather this storm....

Even firing people costs money... even just keeping their lights on, and service at bay, (with no new features) costs money....

People that usually comment like the above are either: Young and inexperienced, or just not don't have real life experience on running a business. I used to think like that when I was young, but after some years of experience your view on things changes and becomes more nuanced.

unlinked_dll · 6 years ago
And comments like this usually come from people with a warped concept of money and funding. But it doesn't help to comment on the nature of a poster because you don't know much about them.

The comment is not on the necessity of money but the amount. I legitimately can not fathom why AirBnb needs that much money to run a service business on top of a custom app and website when the fundamental complexity of the business (the particular nuances of local markets, their regulatory/compliance needs, etc) has always been a second thought to their management and trawling for articles, it does not seem like they need that much money to continue. Particularly since regulatory bodies and courts have closed worldwide.

u/unlinked_dll

KarmaCake day2533October 13, 2019View Original