- being sent to war should probably not be the result of being young and gullible
  - if we need to send anyone to war, should we send the dumbest people we can find?

I think it’s a beautiful and fascinating piece of tech, I doubt I’ll be an early purchaser, but I’d sure like one. It does feel like they are grasping at straws for mainstream use cases.

Excuse me?!

Let’s not pretend the CIA is particularly good at anything other than overthrowing Latin American democracies.

Apple only takes a cut of virtual goods. This is why you cannot buy Kindle books on iOS without going to the website, but you can buy a television.

If this isn’t going to the driver, it’s absolutely unacceptable. DoorDash does not have to do more work because you would have had to drive further, but the actual driver does have to drive further, and is working for a flat fee.

To hear people on HN say things like this explains exactly why these companies do this. This is absolutely not a reasonable way to think.

FIRST, obviously, there are probably fewer dark patterns in anything than the intuit / us tax situation. there are so many problems with our tax system and the way it eats away at working people while barely touching the wealthiest folks.

i’ve had some unfortunate interactions with the CA Franchise Tax Board in recent years that have made me question whether the IRS will choose to be transparent and treat us fairly if this passes.

I’m certainly no tax expert, so the notion that I may have made a small mistake in past tax years that needed to be corrected is not unreasonable. that i was not provided with any detailed information, or really any communication at all, and the money was siezed from my paycheck without notice. The first time this happened was the second paycheck in the month of december. This sucked, but I was probably wrong, maybe I failed to update my contact address somewhere, and I always want to pay what I owe.

Fast forward to 2021/2022, somewhere in there, IIRC, the CA FTB, during a budget crisis, found that I was short a couple thousand over multiple years from several years back. I had never heard anything about this before, and they came at me for 2-3 years all at the same time. No information on what was incorrect.

CA has an, “Office of the Taxpayer Advocate”, because of course at some point we legislated that there should be someone paid by the state whose job is to help taxpayers who feel they have been wronged. Obviously there’s a weird conflict of interest here, but it’s better than nothing.

My interaction with the taxpayer advocate many years ago involved them trying to tax me for work I performed in an office in San Antonio, Texas, over a year before moving to California.

certainly part of this is about the fact that CA is a bit grabby at the entire lifetime income of anyone who relocates here, which is absolutely the fucking truth, but I also found these situations to give me pause on whether I want to trust the government to tell me whether or not I have correctly paid my taxes.

Even though I am single, live alone, no dependents, and claim 0, somehow I am always off.

If we want to simplify this, get out from under Intuit’s thumb, and have like 95% of the country or whatever not even have to worry about taxes, we have to fundamentally rethink how they are calculated.

Why isn’t my employer liable for not calculating the appropriate deduction? Why is this something I have to worry about? On balance, at this point in my career, a thousand bucks a year isn’t a big deal, the problem is asking me for it all at once, when there’s no great way for me to know to expect it.

I have, for the first time in my life, a small amount of savings, but I still don’t consider it a nest egg. That is my insurance for when I somehow manage to owe taxes even though I have done every single thing that I should do, correctly.

another knock on TurboTax is that they often end up calculating that you owe more tax than you do, and I think it backs up my concern that in those cases, the IRS does not say, “Hello, kind person, you gave us an extra $3,000, we would like to return it to you.”

It’s basically just fucking all bad.

Adventurous is adding things. Why remove things that work if some people are using them? Debian is less prescriptive than RHEL, and is widely used as the basis for a vast array of different targets. If there are still reasons for people to use Xorg, there are still reasons to have it in Debian, IMO. That doesn’t mean it will be installed and/or used by default.

RHEL is a specific type of target, particularly for things that need some sort of vendor certification, or for fleets who want to depend on RH for LTS and/or use their professional services, use it as part of a larger IBM contract, etc..

The problem is the individual sites aren’t making these highly technical decisions, people are using what seems to them an innocuous security product.

Not visiting a random website places no pressure on CloudFlare to change, since there’s no way to correlate your choice with the decision to use CloudFlare.

when i last interviewed at apple, the office i interviewed in was so far from the spaceship, it was almost in another city. apple seems to be occupying just about every office park built since the 1970s in cupertino.

also - those non-spaceship offices are awful, unreachable by transit, no access to food without driving, basically an Office Space type environment. gross.

Have you ever made friends with a homeless person? Do you know anyone who has been homeless in the past?

In my ~20y in SF, I have seen the exact same issues and political divides repeat over and over. There are certainly issues which need to be addressed, but the constant insistence that there is some short-term degeneration constantly leads to the reimplementation of solutions that do not work, particularly homeless sweeps and policing of nonviolent property crime.

Real solutions take time, commitment, dedication, and engagement from and with the community, not just shouting at a handful of politicians. That isn’t gratifying enough for most people, who want to see some overnight transformation, which is what leads to homeless people being shifted around from block to block based on who most loudly demands that seeing the poor on a daily basis makes them unsafe.

Further, this strategy prolongs and ingrains people being stuck on the street. Having access to the resources that help people get off the street, heal from addiction, and not be so desperate as to engage in petty property crime for survival makes everyone safer, including the folks currently living on the street. Being able to establish semi-stable communities (“encampments”) where they can rely on each other to watch their property, often including medications, identifying paperwork, treasured possessions like family photo albums which keep them tethered to reality, is key to seeing them improve.

This is the strategy upon which navigation centers are built, and while not perfect, it works for a lot of people.

The, “tough on crime, I don’t want to see the homeless”, strategy which has continually failed for decades actually, counterintuitively to many people - esp newcomers’ - perception, makes us all less safe. If there has been a decline in SF since you’ve moved here, it is almost certainly because of these wasteful, costly, and dangerous approaches to public safety and health.

It doesn’t matter how many condo towers are built, SF is never going to be a gated community. If you want to live in a gated community, I suggest you move to one.

There are some good contributors to the Chronicle, but they skew fairly conservative for SF and have for a long time.

The previous DA was doing a fantastic job, he had finally started focusing on violent crime instead of, “quality of life” crime like shoplifting and vandalism. Doing this is difficult because people will (as they did!) post videos online of petty theft or “unruly” people in the streets and people who do not understand how safety is actually created are never going to listen to people who are actually informed.

> he had picked a fight with the police chief.

This is not true. He prosecuted a police officer for murder and put pressure on the police, which have a long history of corruption and rampant racism, human trafficking, etc.. But police unions have a lot of power and influence, the average person thinks that police create safety (they do not! if they respond at all to anything, they respond after the fact with a pencil and paper, and their behavior is often very dangerous - e.g. speeding around the city running red lights when they clearly are not headed anywhere).

The police in SF do not have a tough job, and police everywhere, always slack off. The SFPD famously went on strike some decades ago and were basically shooting out streetlights and holding the entire city hostage, eventually culminating in a bombing on the mayor’s front lawn.

SFPD do not live in SF, almost any of them, they aren’t members of the community, they do not have the community’s best interest at heart. They are bullies who come from the suburbs and basically view all residents of SF as dirty miscreants. If you ask them for help in a violent situation, they will likely threaten you with violence or arrest yourself.

I’ve lived in SF almost 20 years, and Walgreens basically exists as a large corner store for people who want gatorade or doritos, and every single in-person pharmacy experience I have had in SF has been awful, sometimes an hour plus wait with 2-3 people in line. Often there are pharmacists behind the counter who simply refuse to talk to anyone.

These days I use Alto, and most people I know who don’t use some sort of online delivery service. In-person pharmacies suck unless you need a prescription with absolutely zero notice, and then they still suck at doing that.

As for the whole foods, anyone could have told folks that was a really stupid location for any sort of retail. That area has been struggling for a long time and the attempted solution was basically, “Bring a bunch of rich people to the area and hope all of the ‘problem’ people get locked up as a result.”

Shocking that did not work.

also: how are they going to determine that you did? what if you have malware on one of your devices and it accesses something banned?