It’s definitely a use case for this and would’ve saved a lot of pain IMO but also seems like it would have added confusing technology to what was a VERY Python-heavy stack that would’ve benefitted from other elements.
Hardest part is always figuring out your company’s knowledge management has been dogsh!t for years so now you need to either throw most of it away or stick to the authoritative stuff somehow.
Elastic plus an agent with MCP may have worked as a prototype very quickly here, but hosting costs for 500GB worth of indexes sounds too expensive for this person’s use case if $185 is a lot.
The old joke Zawinski made about picking regex "and now you have two problems" applies here.
If you pick Elasticsearch, useful as it is, you now have more than two problems. You have Elastic the company; Elasticsearch the tool; and also the clay-footed colossus, Java, to contend with.
i rolled into tech because of archeology. started using GIS for site mapping and need for customization just got me going. ended up going to school again for compsci.
generally, students from other departments are writing the code, but current day most archaeologists can work with ready-made packages (model builders etc..) now too.
Agreed, unfortunately. The amount of people that actually care about the national debt is near zero in reality, despite many stating otherwise.
When their party of choice comes into power, it's always "spend, spend, spend" - how else do you do all the things you want to do while in power? Then the table turns and they pretend to care while the other party takes a turn.
Round and round we go, deeper and deeper in debt, spending like a there's no tomorrow.
This is only possible because the taxation is obfuscated through debt or inflation, both of which effectively are a tax but a less obvious one allowing duping of the populace.
We don't need a new party necessarily, just a constitutional amendment that the government can only spend money from direct tax proceeds, with no pre-emptive withholding.
You should tax behaviours you want to disincentivise.
Taxing smoking, cars and sugar are great (but not always popular) ideas.
Taxing second homes, property ownership for companies, foreign owned property, and so on is much more important than taxing unrealised wealth, inheritance or capital gains and income.
Wealthy people find loopholes, and so you end up taxing the middle class and limiting social mobility with those initiatives.
We should figure out what they do with their wealth that makes it worthwhile amassing so much, then tax that.
EDIT: sorry, I should have echo’d the chamber instead of thinking about a situation critically.
The wealthy find loopholes because they are often the people having the legislation drafted. It’s actually not hard to pass clear solid tax laws. It’s only hard to get it passed.
Anything you can think of to make wealthy people cease to exist is easily bypassed, so the best way is to find ways to tax behaviour instead.
The point of money is how you use it, if you have a 50,000x tax on super yacts and private aircraft, then the ultra rich are forced to pay your tax or try skirting around it by using smaller boats or coalescing their private jets into a private airline.
But if you tax stocks, then people will invest in other ways. If you tax individuals owning large property then they’ll move their property ownership into a company, if you tax inheritance then they’ll put the money into a fund instead which has debts that will be written off in time. All kinds of fancy tricky accounting.
The other solution is to tax everyone on unrealised gains, which makes every home owner (including pensioners) suddenly liable for huge ongoing bills.
Elon himself for example is pretty cash poor, but owns a lot of stock in a “high value” company meaning his wealth on paper is pretty extreme. He takes on debt (which has no income tax) and then pays it off with stocks, where it also avoids being taxed as its never realised.
I think its a harder problem than you give it credit.
How would it work if we treated money obtained by borrowing against stock holdings as "realized gains"? That seems like a loophole that could be closed.
Well nothing, I think what is being proposed is to trigger existing capital gains taxes when an asset is borrowed against, the same as if it were sold. Most places exempt personal homes from capital gains taxes already, so it wouldn’t affect them. It would affect
- someone who bought an investment property, which then appreciated, and then they wanted to take out a larger mortgage against the appreciated value to leverage it into buying another property.
- Someone borrowing against stock to avoid realising gains by selling it
Thank you. Yes, that's precisely what I mean. I've floated the same idea a few times on this forum and others. I've asked, but have yet to see someone point out a systemic downside. (I'm not any kind of financial sophisticate, so I'm well aware that I might be missing something!) In fact, it seems to me that having people finance their lifestyles by borrowing against assets adds a degree of leverage risk to the system, and ought to be discouraged just on that basis.
Tax the rich all you want, you won't raise enough money to balance the budget, let alone pay for all the additional spending that Sanders et al. wants.
how so? Alupis explains the mechanism why not. In two party system, new electives are incentivized to achieve their program. Reducing spending hinders that, and loss of those voters who care about that betrayal doesn't really matter because they're a tiny group anyway, and realistically, where are they going to go, the other party? They have the same incentive, just for different program. That's the cycle.
Sure but the bigger debt gets, and the more negative impact it has on the population, the bigger that group gets. It’s not big enough yet but that doesn't mean it can’t be. We’ve seen such tipping points with other issues.
A lot of developers get enamored by fetishes. Just one example, because it's one i always struggle to vanquish in any of my teams.
Devs are obsessed with introducing functional-style constructs everywhere, just for the sake of it. FP is great for some classes of software, but baseline crufty for anything that requires responsiveness (front-ends basically), let alone anything at real interactive speeds (games, geo-software, ...)
The "premature optimization" quote is then always used as a way to ignore that entire code paths will be spamming the heap with hundreds of thousands of temporary junk, useless lexical scopes, and so forth. Writing it lean the first time is never considered, because of adherence to these fetishes (mutability is bad, oo is bad, loops lead to off-by-one errors, ...). It's absolutely exhausting to have these conversations, it's always starting from the ground up and these quotes like "premature optimization is the root of all evil" are only used as invocations to ward of criticism.
boomers didnt want to let go of the welfare state their parents and grandparents had introduced, at the same time they live longer, work less, not nearly had as many kids, and did not effectuate the required productivity growth to offset that.
they will go down in history as the worst generation in modern history, 100% certain of that.
it's instinctive, people will readily be accept to be told they're wrong by an authority rather than a peer. people cant cast judgement without having earned to position to do so. similarly, people will not receive judgement when it doesnt come from a valid position of authority.
the answer is not to try and change human psychology, it's to reintroduce the hierarchies and structures where correction and judgement flows through the correct channels.
i dont think the inflationary seventies and eighties are great lodestar
low interest rates are historically a sign of a stable polity and economy. so if anything, we want the conditions for prolonged low interest rates, rather than prolonged high interest rate.
reply