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This is terrible. I don't want to loose a priceless family heirloom (grandma's Sheraton-style rocking chair from 1890s) just because someone wants it and can write a check for $1 more than the assessed value. That discounts sentimental value. And if I now have to declare sentimental value and pay taxes on it, I'd rather burn it to the ground (grandma would approve).

A lot of people hate eminent domain too, for that exact reason. I think libertarians want to get rid of it entirely because it's an involuntary transaction.

Yeah eminently domain isn't great. But also it's better than the alternative which is having a country without roads.

Not being born to a grandma who could afford a life stable enough to preserve and pass down such a chair is also an involuntary transaction, but libertarians don’t seem to talk about that.

On the cantilevered terrace of the penthouse. The residents of the penthouse aren't going to give up living space for a pool!

We can't any more so than any other lander/prob/rover we've sent. And will it really matter when we eventually (probably not in our lives) send people there anyway. All their body-biome and other contaminants will come with them, too.

We are going to contaminate the solar system with humans eventually. A spore that may survive and MAY be viable is the least of the Europa's problem.


Human cells only account for half of the cells in your body. We are bioreactors.

Humans I'm not so sure, but fungi maybe.

Is that not what the ARIA standards are for?

I don’t think so, correct me if I’m wrong: an ARIA attribute that might fit here would be aria-labelledby (sic), but per MDN

> Note that while using aria-labelledby is similar in this situation to using an HTML <label> element with the for attribute, there are some very important differences. The aria-labelledby attribute only defines the accessible name. It doesn't provide any of <label>'s other functionality, such as making clicking on the labeling element activate the input it is associated with. That has to be added back in with JavaScript.

The best compromise would be to both wrap the input inside the label _and_ use the “for” attribute.

Typically, it’s best to use elements and controls that are already accessible, as ARIA is more intended to give additional accessibility to components that might not be traditionally accessible, or that require more robust accessibility control.


Having done a lot of accessibility consulting in the past (granted it was a long time ago now), we were instructed to use the aria-label attribute to provide the same text as the label.

Since I do mostly asp.net mvc, I created a bunch of "Accessible" extension methods off the HtmlHelper object.

    <%: Html.AccessibleCheckbox("MyCheckbox", label: "My Checkbox") %>
This would output something like:

    <label><input type="checkbox" name="MyCheckbox" aria-label="My Checkbox" /> My Checkbox</label>
This is a bad example since the primary reason for not giving IDs is because it is a dynamically created checkbox inside a loop or some other partial view that you might not know if it is a unique ID for the page or not.

Ah interesting, I figured that a properly set and identified label element would suffice - I haven’t noticed our sniffer complaining yet we also strictly use the for attribute and don’t wrap controls that I’m aware of. Thanks for the insight!

This is how I've been doing it for at least 15 years (maybe 20, by now?). It's also much cleaner syntax for the typical use case of checkboxes/radio buttons.

Put the label around the input, then put a span for the text if you want some styling for the text. You can even make the label display:flex and handle the positioning of the text that way.


The public is aware of the millions of Americans who have died from the FDA being so lax.


Yeah -- that's the problem. You can't make the right decision when you only look at the costs of a yes but never the costs of a no. Both matter!

Politicians can puff themselves up by only grandstanding about the former -- but that doesn't make for good policy!


Can you provide some examples?


Thalidomide

The therac-3

That one alzheimers drug a lot of people were pissed about cause it didn't work and was expensive.


That Thalidomide was not approved by the FDA, while it hurt thousands of babies around the the world is probably a big reason that FDA has been very restrictive in the 60 years since, and often bans drugs that are available in the rest of the world.


The FDA famously didn't approve Thalidomide, which meant only 17 people were affected in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide#History

(I don't think this affects your argument directionally, but worth noting.)


>(I don't think this affects your argument directionally, but worth noting.)

Aside, but this is high class discussion culture I haven't seen on the Internet in a while.


How could getting the facts not just wrong, but backwards, not affect the argument directionally? He got the direction wrong!


The Therac-25 (where did the -3 come from?) killed four and seriously injured 2.

I supposed 6 is kind of like 1 million, for large values of 6.


Thalidomide was not approved in the US until long after the birth defect scandal, FWIW.


Those killed millions of people?


If the goal is to shock people into thinking a certain way, 20,000 deformed infants has more or less the same shock-value as 1 million deaths.

(Obviously talking about Thalidomide here)


Thalidomide was used and approved around the world, not just in the US. It’s an interesting example of something but not millions of deaths.

But I get a sense that the original poster isn’t sincerely interested in talking about the complex question, how should the FDA regulate drugs?

One thing’s for sure: High drama personalities have always had a tenuous understanding of the facts behind their “shock” and outrages. Or maybe one of the commenters has learned a valuable lesson about copy and pasting from chatbots.


Speaking of factual drama, Thalidomide was not approved in the US during all the drama in the 60s.

It has since been approved for cancer where its benefits outweigh the side effects, but it doesn't negate that the FDA prevented harm to babies by blocking it in the 60s.


When I was commuting 2 hours a day on the bus, my daily driver was an 8-inch iPad that I used with a logitec keyboard case tethered to my iPhone for internet, and would connect to my VSCode on my $10/mo droplet using Code-Server.

If you offload the computer to the cloud, and don't need to do anything graphically intense, it makes daily driving an underpowered tablet very easy.


Side projects have always been the most exciting banes of my existence.

I LOVE the initial rush of building and launching something. Even maintaining it is SUPER exciting for the first few months. The first customers are a rush of endorphins.

Then the shine wears off. Life can't be kept on pause. Your partner wants a date night, but you have a backlog to work though. You got a frantic email from a customer that they accidentally deleted something and you currently have no way to recover that data. So now you have to add more resiliency to the application. In the middle of the night, your cron server dies, backups stop, emails stop, customers on the other side of the world can't log in.

All for a few dollars a day in revenue. Then after a year of that, you get burnt on the project. Then after another year, you stop working on it as much, the bug reports build up until you are scared to even look at your reports.

Your partner goes away for the weekend to visit their family, you get a renewed sense of pride in this project that has been limping alone. You fire up your code editor, you pull the last commit down. You start to re-familiarize yourself with the code base. Day 1 was wasted with remembering how you did things. Day 2 starts with a coffee after only sleeping a few hours. You begin to work through the small tasks on your list, because you feel the snowball will work. About 8 hours in, you've made a SERIOUS dent in the backlog. You are feeling good and decide you should eat something finally. Your partner comes home while you are eating your breakfast at 4pm. They start to tell you about their family drama. You start to fade. You walk back to your office and try to get back into the groove. You can't. The weekend is over. Work starts again in 10 hours. You now feel angry that you wasted your weekend, and have to do real work in the morning.

And the cycle repeats.


I recently read an HN post where a LOT of people reported having the same rather specific dream that I have had many times (about being enrolled in a class they forgot about only to remember on the day of the final exam). It literally rocked my world to see evidence of how similar all of our 'wetware' is. And now I'm reading you describing a scenario I have experienced so many times, right down to 4pm breakfast and distracting stories of family drama. I am now pretty much convinced we live in a simulation and we're all subclasses of each other.


I have done this loop dozens of times, sometimes for pleasure projects that are released for free, sometimes for projects that make $100/week. It's hard to maintain motivation when you are working for less nothing.

I've actually stopped launching software now. I devote my passion projects to things where the customer is a one-time interaction. No support, no emails, no late nights working out why there is a 500 that only happens on this ONE user at 1:16AM.

Now, I make rolling trays, refinish antique furniture, and garden. In the new year, I will be converting half of my workshop into a CBD/hemp farm to grow my own hemp to make my CBD tinctures and oils (currently I buy CBD flower from Oregon).

Software has stopped being my only source of joy and income. After 2 decades of programming almost every single day, my brain is tired, and I don't even know what it was all for.

My garden provides nectar for bees, vitamins and minerals, for myself and my family, sunshine for my body. My woodworking provides that sense of pride that I had with software without all the bugs (well sometimes there are grubs in the wood). My CBD is "medicine", and it helps my dad with his phantom limb pain, me with my Hashimoto's flareups, and other's with their anxiety and stress.

My software made people money...


Yes, yes, and yes. I feel this


And my ISP had to replace mine multiple times due to lawn maintenance guys running it over, neighbors (where the line was pulled from) cutting it, etc.

I don't think I'll ever do a fiber install again. If it has already been run to the house, great, but otherwise, I'd rather not.


In the early 90s, my primary school in "rural" Texas (45 minutes outside of Houston) got it's first computer lab. It had 30 Macs. Every class room had an ancient Apple (not sure what version at this point - IIe or III?).

Apple had BIG BIG discounts for education, that IBM did not. Even being a town outside of Houston, we never got Compaq PCs.

That said, once Win95 hit, EVERYTHING was swapped out for PC district wide. I remember my parents complaining that a new school tax was getting levied on our town to upgrade technology just a couple years after a previous one had already hit.


Education was the niche that kept Apple afloat back then -- they'd managed to make the Apple II the de facto standard for school computing, and when they wanted to transition schools to the Mac in the early '90s, they had to go so far as to design an Apple IIe on a card [1] to allow the Mac models they were offering to schools to remain compatible with the huge library of Apple II educational software.

They never succeeded in actually turning the Mac itself into the standard platform for school computing, and as you point out, once the Apple II platform was long in tooth, schools began migrating in droves to Wintel boxes, and Apple's finances took a major hit.

Apple barely made it out of the '90s intact. They had a massive turnaround after Jobs returned, and are a major powerhouse today, but people forget just how marginal the Mac was in its early years.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe_Card


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