Reminds me of how financial newspapers often use a small "m" when describing millions of something. "$500m", or even worse "500m USD"... The engineer in me says that's 50 cents!
Great work and as a product guy, I find the preview environments feature explained on your website to be a potential game changer. Being able to spin up and seed environments on demand via pull requests keeps things very clean as I could just look at a particular branch in isolation without the need for fixed dev -> stage environments. By seeding the data, it also means I can "replay" the same scenario again if the developers deploy a change while in the review process.
We needed a tool that gave us the same experience as Heroku but on AWS, so we went with Nullstone (https://nullstone.io). Everything is nicely managed in a style you'll be familiar with and takes advantage of open source Terraform modules they publish.
I believe he was using the source article. One example was a leap in public polling around how our government functions (33% jump in being able to identify the three branches of the US federal government).
Similar numbers can be found about faith in democracy, views toward fellow citizens, etc. It's not just lack of knowledge, it's the embracing and polarizing extremes.
Have you read the article? He talks specifically about this very subject, and why this narrative is wrong.
> When I asked Twitter followers to suggest the best evidence they had that misinformation has become worse than it was 30 years ago, a lot of people expressed their frustration with the people who won’t get Covid-19 vaccines. I also find this extremely frustrating.
> That said, vaccination rates for kids have actually risen since the mid-1990s [...]
> A lot of people know that the licensing of the polio vaccine in the 1950s was widely greeted with celebratory headlines and the ringing of church bells. [...] Eighteen months after authorization, vaccine uptake was still slow, and that was after a much longer development process.
The COVID vaccine is not the same as other vaccines. One can have hesitancy towards the COVID and other mRNA vaccines and go get the flu shot the same day. If you want to solve the hesitancy problem you must recognize this first, otherwise you’ll be stuck in a loop like you are now, demanding they’re safe just like every other vaccine in history.
mRNA isn't new (it was discovered in the 90s), and has been arguably studied far more than other types of vaccines. Also, there are non-mRNA COVID19 vaccines available as well, if that is your issue.
Accounting for both these facts, how is vaccine hesitancy justified ?
Actually the 1960s, and yet I’m still not wrong as the first mRNA vaccine approved for use was Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. So an actual large scale usage of an mRNA vaccine just happened.
> and has been arguably studied far more than other types of vaccines
Gonna need a source for that.
> Also, there are non-mRNA COVID19 vaccines available as well, if that is your issue.
> Accounting for both these facts, how is vaccine hesitancy justified ?
And this is covered by a lack of fear of the virus. Many people have caught it and recovered, substantially more than have died. So therefore the vaccine is not needed.
Also highly recommend the book “The Phoenix Project”. It highlights common pitfalls and solutions through a narrative of a character thrown into their first time leading a team.
This would also affect most home owners. They purchase a home, it goes up in value, and they refinance or take a second loan rather than sell the property. The wealthy do this as well with property, art, and securities. Trying to tax unrealized gains (like a home that has appreciated in value) would be a new mess of tax legislation with holes you could drive a semi-truck through.
The special treatment is at the time of sale. My comments were in response to taxing the appreciation at the time of a new loan (such as taking a second mortgage).
The idea is to treat a loan against an asset with capital gains as a sale. So one would have to pay taxes out of the loan and then you get a stepped up basis.
The exact rules could be tweaked to keep it from being a burden on families taking a second mortgage, e.g. if you borrow less than a certain amount in the tax year perhaps the rule doesn't apply. Use your imagination.
This sort of wealth tax probably would be targeted at amounts over a $5-50M threshold so it would never hit the primary residence of anyone except billionaires, who could surely pay cash.
So we’ve created one loophole. What if I buy multiple properties below the threshold? Is the limit per household? If so, does this apply to people heavily leveraged with little net worth who own many rental properties? The rent is income, but they often make improvements to the homes and take a cash-out refinance to pay for the cash down payment on a new property. If we do this to homes, and the wealthy move their money to a new place, such as venture capital, do we try and re-price those illiquid assets each year? If one IPO’s and they take a loan against the stock to buy a home, do you give them their previous year’s mark-to-market payment back to them if the stock goes down the following year and they get a margin call? I’m just going through a few scenarios but this would quickly inflate the tax code to an almost unmanageable state without creating just as many more new loopholes. Imagine trying to grow a startup and being worth X on paper with no actual gains or money in the bank. If you don’t include it, it suddenly becomes a tool for someone else to use within the assets you’ve excluded. If you don’t exclude it, you may force an early sale of promising new businesses to their competitors to cover a tax bill on the unrealized gains.
> The rent is income, but they often make improvements to the homes and take a cash-out refinance to pay for the cash down payment on a new property.
This is pretty much the situation that the tax is designed to combat - people using their assets to increase their wealth without paying taxes. So yes, if you did that, you would need to pay taxes on the new money in the refinance. I don't see an issue if that makes this business model unprofitable or untenable.
> If we do this to homes, and the wealthy move their money to a new place, such as venture capital, do we try and re-price those illiquid assets each year?
There's no need to price anything. You value the assets put up as collateral as the amount of the loan they are securing.
> If one IPO’s and they take a loan against the stock to buy a home, do you give them their previous year’s mark-to-market payment back to them if the stock goes down the following year and they get a margin call?
Nope. It's just like selling and immediately re-purchasing.
> Imagine trying to grow a startup and being worth X on paper with no actual gains or money in the bank.
Ok, but nothing happens unless you borrow against it. I'm not sure what scenario you are imagining here.
> There's no need to price anything. You value the assets put up as collateral as the amount of the loan they are securing.
People take out loans for much more or less than the value of the collateral. Do we ban that, or do we open up another tax/laundering loophole by letting the official value of a property diverge arbitrarily from a hypothetical sale value?
The taxable amount would be the loan amount, not the value of the property. The loan is trivial to value. If the property later sells for less than the loan amount then it would be a capital loss that could be carried forward from there.
Yes, but the idea is to set controlled fires to prevent these larger uncontrolled ones. It not only requires regular controlled fires, but when they are performed, for how long, and where are all critical. The remaining factor is you have to ensure the controlled fires do not burn too hot. This is knowledge that was passed down from the indigenous people of Australia, but apparently has not been well understood (it’s not easy, especially the part about hot enough versus too hot).
I remember a friend talking about how he didn't take Youtube options for some consulting work he did for them in their very early days. This was almost exactly 10 years ago and his comment was that he could have wallpapered his entire house in all the worthless equity he had been paid over the years. It was always hard, it was always rare, but only the winners get press attention.
Markets will factor in all known information ahead of a fine such as this — the possibility that it’s coming and some guess at the size and impact. In doing so, this would depress the price of the stock leading up to any news.
Let’s assume that the estimate for the fine was exactly on the money — $5B. In this case, you’d still expect to see a jump in stock price due to the removal of uncertainty. Uncertainty can pull down prices just as much as bad news.
Throwing out any opinions of what Facebook did, the size of the fine, etc. this is the type of simplistic reporting that gives the news media a black eye. It also happens quite a lot with science reporting such as an article last week on tube that could isolate sound based on its shape. The author made many leaps that were ripped apart on HN.
Any particular instance won’t get noticed by the majority, but eventually an article will get published to an area of your expertise and it’s just glaring. When this happens enough times, you begin seeing the news in a much more nuanced and different light.
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