That pricing sheet is for Posit Workbench; RStudio Server[0] can host as many people as you have the compute for, and it's free and open source. It does only support one session per user, but might meet the needs of a small research group.
I'm a happy Fastmail customer, but I would not recommend them on the basis of their spam filter. It's competent but makes at least a few mistakes a week. Google's was better for me.
I had the opposite experience. Gmail's filter was useless, letting in tons of spam, and then putting normal emails from family members, also using gmail, and who I have emailed many times in the past, into spam. Fastmail's is drastically better for me.
For me Gmail takes way too much legitimate email and sends it to spam. Fastmail strikes a better balance by sending little ham into the spam box, but letting a little bit of spam into the inbox.
for me both are far better than o365, which even marked legit business mail (o365 invoices :)) from microsoft itsef as spam!
I'm generally content with fastmail, but the webmail would need some polish. (and by polish I do not mean the user hostile react rewrites MS and Google are pushing)
- Hungarian translation is not the best (they provide it, thus I use it). It has missing parts, and sometimes problematic mistranslations. Localization (date format and date conventions) is sometimes incorrect in the calendar.
- Some calendar workflows are clunky and unintuitive.
- some other similar UX papercuts (don't get me wrong, others have theirs too, but it would be nice if fastmail would be better).
- The most annoying: if I'm logged in I need to open a private browser session to see their main site, as it instantly redirects me to the app, and I cannot access resource from within.
If you have Netflix, check out one of Kaufman's more recent films, "I'm Thinking of Ending Things". It's an (increasingly loose) adaptation of Ian Reid's book of the same name. The book is deliberately disorienting and unsettling which makes Kaufman's style really shine.
I'm a huge fan of Kaufman, I think I've seen almost everything he's done. In my opinion, "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" is not his best work. But I have to admit, I think of the themes in this movie more than almost any other film of his.
I read a few interpretations of the film before I watched it and I would actually recommend people to do the same. I think it is worth spoiling the premise behind the movie to understand what is going on. The film is purposefully obtuse which is off-putting to some. In fact, the "twist" of it wouldn't be obvious to most people who watch it. But to appreciate the depth of the story you have to get passed the surreality of the presentation.
Like "Synecdoche, New York", what remains once you strip away the fantasy is pretty bleak in an existential angst kind of way. But that is pretty much what you get with Kaufman: a bleak existential crisis.
I live in the Seattle area, which is struggling with public drug use just like Portland.
Like Portland, we've lived for decades with very progressive politicians who have lead successful decriminalization efforts and spent huge sums of public funds on treatment and harm reduction programs.
Is there a measure for how this compares to places without social programs for drug addicts? This is a legitimate question, I don't know if they've done better or worse in the context of the failed war on drugs.
Because the country as a whole has been completely ravaged by opiate addiction. It's not just Portland and Seattle. West Virginia doesn't have anything like this, and it's just as badly afflicted. It may be less visible because it doesn't have the same population density.
I presently live in New York but I lived in Seattle in 2020. Open air drug use and homelessness in general is unquestionably a bigger problem in Seattle, despite NYC lacking some of the more progressive policies west coast cities have become so famous for. Anyone who's lived in both the east and west coast can attest to the difference, it's so stark that I find it funny people are still asking if broad coastal politics _might_ have something to do with it.
My question isn't about how visible drug addiction is but any actual metrics that can compare actual drug addiction rates and prevalence between places with decriminalization and those without.
Because just some cursory googling suggests that these cities do have less incidence of drug addiction/use per capita. But I don't really know how accurate that info is, and anecdata doesn't count.
I live in Seattle and recently visited NYC. It was shocking how much cleaner it was, at least the neighborhoods I spent time in. I expected at least similar levels but I saw nothing like Seattle's public drug use and mental health crises on the streets.
I think it's less a question of the amount of social programs and more about how aggressive the police are about public drug use and assaults by the homeless. Walk around cities in southwest Florida for example (Tampa, Naples etc.) and you'll feel pretty safe.
This is a curve that goes up but do the other curves go up more or less? Did places with different strategies perform better or worse, relatively speaking? I can sort of imagine that all the curves go up, given that we added a drug that is 50X stronger than heroin to the mix
Edit: to clarify, not trying to be an asshole, I have no idea what the answer is here, would be very interested to find out
The problems with acute fentanyl poisoning are somewhat separate from chronic methamphetamine addiction. Mexican drug cartels have been manufacturing counterfeit prescription drugs such as Oxycodone and Xanax but substituting fentanyl for the active ingredient. They simply have bad quality control, so sometimes people who buy street drugs randomly end up with a fatal overdose. Especially if they haven't built up a tolerance.
Can always look at places that don't have drug problems like Singapore, Qatar or UAE. decriminalization. look at china who also had a crippling opiate problem with opium and it wasn't solve with decriminalization. Opoids have no place in society and there's no such thing as harm reduction when it comes to opioid use besides complete prohibition. I know 4 people who have died from opioid over doses, and just recently lost a former coworker last week. Fentantyl is a society destroyer and it's just getting worse.
Are those really good comparison countries though? To me, it seems like some of their basic views on rights are antithetical to those in the US, going way beyond how to deal with drug problems.
Japan,Taiwan and south Korea as more examples. Japan has life sentences for opioid distribution/sale. Taiwan has mandatory 3 year sentencing simple possession of class 1 drugs (Opioids). South Korea also has very strict sentencing laws for opioid possession and usage ranging from 1 to 3 years. Most of laws were influenced by the Opium wars 100 years ago.
"punishing crime" is a frankly insulting understatement of the way countries like Singapore or the UAE treat accused criminals. Not to mention the list of things that count as crimes there. I mean if you're that angry about shoplifters or homeless people doing drugs on the street, okay, but don't be dishonest about what these role model countries actually do
Harm reduction and rehab still only treats the symptom, not the cause. The cause is financial instability brought on by insecurity in housing, food access, etc. It's an issue of human dignity in the economic sphere that drives people to such depths, not recreation.
Unfortunately we still have a large portion of the population who believe that one must deserve to live a dignified life, and then apply all sorts of caveats on who is deserving. So we can't reshape the economy to support everyone because the people at the top need to feel like the work they did to get there somehow speaks to their character rather than merely their circumstances. They can't accept that they're not actually that special and so have some pathological need to draw lines between "us" and "them" (e.g. "taxpayer" vs "freeloader").
Undoubtedly that can be the cause in some cases, but there are counterexamples. Like West Virginia which has a bad opioid addiction problem yet relatively low homeless rate. What does appear highly correlated is homeless rates vs. cost of housing to income ratios. Find a city with a real estate bubble, and you'll likely find a large tent city too.
"We have to fix every single problem to prevent people from smoking meth in public."
No we don't. This wasn't a problem 10 years ago. This isn't a problem in much, much poorer countries. This isn't a problem in fucking Houston or Tampa or NYC or Boston.
I get that you want to overthrow Capitalism, but the rest of us want to live a normal life without junkies shitting on our stairs
I'm not really a revolutionary about it, but those living "normal" lives are far from normal if they aren't stressed about the day-to-day.
It would be nice if life wasn't so stressful all the time for so many people. Look at all the wild drivers, the lack of camaraderie in basic everyday life interactions, you can point to all manner of social ills and if you empathize with those who are struggling to get by -- which is most people according to every statistic released in the last 6 years about it -- you would easily make the connection between worrying about not having a bed and enough food and the kinds of shitty behavior people end up enacting.
Those cities don't have a problem with homelessness because their cities either suck to live outside in the winter or suck to live outside in the summer.
You'll also note the high proportions allocated to police in every city budget (NYC cops get something like $5 billion per year!). The difference between some cities and others is primarily the level of controls they put on police re: homeless people because of progressive policies. The cities with hardline positions look better because the homeless are pushed out, not because the homeless find homes there.
I wonder if it attracted a 'type'. Because I know many people who have since moved to portland and they all have a type.
It could be that portland is taking a huge number of people that would otherwise be a drain elsewhere. Maybe we shouldnt consider this an outright failure, but look at some federal support.
Where I live (central Oregon), this is not the case. More than 80% of our homeless population are people that were born and raised here, and were priced out of housing and onto the streets due to housing prices skyrocketing to eyewatering levels. It has tripled in the last ten years, with a 1-br apartment going for under $600 in 2013 now going for $1700. The homelessness here is homegrown, not imported.
Portland is better housing-wise, but not by much. Considering how most people who are both homeless and on drugs were homeless first, then turned to drugs, I think this is a strong confounding factor. It's hard to saw what effect decriminalization has had on drug use when it's adjacent to a housing crisis that is manufacturing more homelessness and drug use all on its own.
Not sure if they still do, but Eugene used to buy you a one-way bus ticket to Portland or Salem and some food vouchers if you claimed to have family there. They didn’t really verify.
Agreed. This suggests to me that homelessness and drug use may be orthogonal problems.
If you triple my rent over the next 10 years, without raising my income, then I'm gonna be homeless. No drug use necessary, batteries included, no assembly required.
Do you know that the person raising your rent isn't the same person that pays your salary, right? And raising it is mostly up to you. Doing drugs because you are incapable of matching society's dynamics isn't an excuse
Maybe raising it is "up to you", but it's up to you within the context of an existing economy, not a vacuum. "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already..."
Seattle's 2019 point in time counts says 84% local, 11% in-state, 4% came from out of state. San Francisco has similar numbers. Seattle excluded this data from their most recent report. Possibly because they out of state numbers have been going up, and it is harder to raise money and sympathy for non-local homeless? But even if you allow for that, it is huge majority local.
That is an oft repeated myth. A recent study by UCSF of California homelessness found that 90% of homeless Californians became homeless while already living in California, and 75% still live in the same county as they did when they became homeless [0]. Locals are approximately 90% of the problem.
I don’t think this is it. A lot of the unhoused in Seattle are locals or in state, and many of the out of state are from neighboring states such as Idaho or other West Coast states.
Rather I think the problem is that half assed decriminalization efforts simply aren’t enough and that drug overdose has become a much more severe issue because of the opioid epidemic and the proliferation of fentanyl. What needs to happen for decriminalization to work is much better social support for addicts, including safe use sites staffed with nurses, free health care for addicts including detox hospitalization and substance abuse treatments, social housing including housing specifically for recovering addicts and active addicts. In addition full legalization and regulated drug markets (preferably via pharmacies with a strict non-profit motive) wouldn’t hurt either.
What Seattle has done is basically just decriminalization without any of the support needed to go with it. Yes we support addicts and spend a lot of money on their care, however these are all suffering from austerity and are often just post-hoc measures (which often cost more in the long run).
Yes, for Seattle a key issue is there is hardly any supporting services available for the mass of people who need it. There are just a lot of people needing services. Seattle also has a huge shortage of mental health treatment professionals. You can't just start working with one of them, you have to wait for months on a waiting list. There's not nearly housing at night.
So you have fentanyl, not much housing, not much treatment, not enough hospital space. People get addicted, at least some move here when addicted and then they are stuck.
> What needs to happen for decriminalization to work is much better social support for addicts, including safe use sites staffed with nurses, free health care for addicts including detox hospitalization and substance abuse treatments, social housing including housing specifically for recovering addicts and active addicts
How many productive members of society does it take to support each drug addict? Should there be any calculation, or should we say "whatever it takes"?
Yes, whatever it takes. A society which doesn’t take care of their sick is a failed society. Seattle is the richest city in one of the richest state of the richest country in the world. If we wanted to we could easily take care of anyone that needed it.
At some point we have to say it takes too much. If it takes 20 college-educated social workers, medical professionals, etc. just to enable one junkie to eek out a miserable existence doing drugs and sleeping on the street, it's too much. Their lifestyle is untenable. On some level, we have to accept that one can fuck up one's own life, and fuck it up so badly that others can't fix or maintain it for you.
More realistically smaller total staff than 20 dealt with 3,800 addicts in an 18 month trial a decade and a half ago with benefits to the community (reduced expenses from deaths, overdoses, central record keeping, etc) that were considered worthwhile to keep such centres going until the present day.
Sadly they never fixed the supporting issues, low wages, inability of affordable housing at pace to keep up with growth. It’s like they just thought giving an aspirin was going to cure the flu.
This is basically just a moving the goalposts argument. The public was told that the policies would fix/help/address the problem. The public was conned into throwing literally billions of dollars at these policies and programs. And then after the programs fail, you can't just say "well of course it failed, we didn't do X and Y". If that's the case, we should never have spent billions of dollars on programs and policies that we knew would fail without X and Y.
Cities primarily need affordable and low income housing. If you're trying to deal with your demons sleeping under a bridge, you're going to get warped. The social safety nets in this country are so inadequate, so when people fall, they fall hard.
How do you define “low wages”? Current minimum wage in Seattle is $18.69/hr, which is higher than the median wage in several US States and almost all of Europe. Cost of living is high but not that much higher than the more expensive parts of Europe.
There are legitimate causes for the blight in Seattle but lack of jobs and low wages aren’t one of them.
Americans have no idea how high the cost of living is in Europe relative to wages.
Median sale price in Seattle is $560/square foot, which is almost exactly $6000/square meter. With minimum wage at $18.69/hr, that's 320 hours of minimum wage work per square meter.
For comparison, average price per square meter in Paris is over 10 000 EUR ($10 700), whereas the minimum wage is 11.50 EUR, giving you a ratio of 870 hours of min wage work per square meter, almost 3 times more expensive.
When you compare them by median household income, Seattle is around $110k/year, which is $55/hour, giving 110 hours/square meter for median family. In Paris, for comparison, median household income is 44k EUR/year, which is 22 EUR/hour, resulting in 454 hours/square meter, which is 4 times more expensive than in Seattle for median family, even worse than for minimum wage.
These were before-tax figures, and doing after tax makes the situation even more lopsided: US tax system is much more progressive than European, and so taxes for median and below are extremely low compared to Europe. At Seattle minimum wage, the effective tax rate is around 15%, whereas in France, at minimum wage you're still paying 25% in income tax. To top it off, in France, the VAT is 20%, compared to 10% in Seattle.
You can do the same calculation for most of Europe, and you'll find the same: pretty much all large metros in Europe are almost universally less affordable than most expensive metros in US, including NYC and SF.
Not sure if Paris vs. Seattle is a good comparison. The former is the crown jewel of France and a historic world-class city. The latter is one of the smaller cities on America's West Coast and is fairly unremarkable.
If anything, I'm stunned that the price for square foot in Paris is only 180% of that in Seattle.
Not to take anything away from your post but Seattle has roughly half the GDP of Paris with less than a third of the population. The past is the past, if you wanted to place a bet on the future, I wouldn’t take Paris over Seattle. Seattle isn’t just tech, it is one of the major deepwater ports on the Pacific Rim and with a famously diversified industry. It is still on the upward part of its trajectory.
Seattle is not a cosmopolitan global city, this is true, but Paris wishes it had Seattle’s economic dynamism by almost any measure. Like many European cities, its status is the accumulated capital of a prior era that is not being replenished at replacement rate. I have my qualms about Seattle but European cities are largely worse when looking forward.
> The former is the crown jewel of France and a historic world-class city.
How is this relevant to my point, which is that in Paris (and most of major European metros), the prices-to-incomes ratio is much worse than in Seattle, and pretty much anywhere in US? In what way it is a crown jewel, if, by US standards, 3/4th of the population barely makes the ends meet?
These are all major, but not the biggest, cities in their respective country. I'm not saying they are representative (for what, anyway). You'll find major cities that are much more expensive (eg Munich) or cheaper.
As for income tax, at first glance, PWC disagrees:
OK, let's do some of them, say Poznan (because I'm most familiar with it). It's hard to find median household income figures in Poznan, but you can find that average individual income in it is 22000 EUR/year, and average household income typically is something like 150% of average individual income, so let's take average household income in Poznan to be 33k EUR/year, or 16.5 EUR/hour. This gives us 120 hours/square meter, which is comparable to Seattle.
However, this becomes much worse if you look at after-tax situation. In Poland, at this pay range, your effective tax rate is 27%, whereas in Seattle it's 16%, and you have to then apply 23% VAT to your purchases, compared to 10% sales tax in Seattle.
> As for income tax, at first glance, PWC disagrees:
What specifically does it disagree about? It is well known that the effective tax rate on lower half of the population is much lower in US than in almost all of Europe, as my example comparison between US and Poland or France shows. In Europe, the middle class pays the bulk of the tax burden, whereas in US, taxation is much more progressive, and it is the wealthy who pay most of the tax.
Having read a few accounts of what it takes to summit Everest, I would guess that the number of people who could achieve it is less than half of 80%. The excellent book Into Thin Air[0] has a lot more on this (and some thoughts on the increased tourism/commercialization of the mountain).
There's a wonderful series of books by Carlos Ruiz Zafón with this as a plot device; in the series, the "Cemetery of Forgotten Books" exists as place where forgotten books are treasured, adopted, and remembered.
Oh wow I read “The Shadow of the Wind” and enjoyed it. I didn’t know that there was a series. Thank you for the comment. I now have a few more books to search for in my local used book store.
I've seen this so many times in my career. It happens because interviews (especially at the junior level) focus almost exclusively on line-by-line programming acumen. People who excel at those interviews don't always make great software engineers, and sometimes they make terrible ones.
suppose you need to either be in the top percentile of handsome and the top percentile of emotionally aware to get a job as a hollywood actor, but these attributes are uncorrelated in the general population, so 99% of top-percentile-of-handsome people will be top-percentile-of-sensitive and vice versa
then the pool of hollywood actors you observe will contain, out of every 199 people, 99 who are top-percentile-of-handsome but not of sensitivity, 99 who are top-percentile-of-sensitive but not of handsomeness, and 1 who is both
someone observing this result but not understanding the process that led up to it might think that emotional sensitivity makes you ugly or that being handsome makes you emotionally oblivious, even though (by hypothesis) the traits are uncorrelated. in fact, this negative correlation in the selected group can survive even a fair bit of positive correlation between the traits in the general population
similarly, it's easier to get a programming job if you have a history of delivering successful products, or if you have a lot of line-by-line coding acumen
Yesterday I had lunch at a Shake Shack. Humans don't take orders there any more; you place your order at a self-serve touchscreen kiosk. As I finished placing my order, I was prompted to leave a tip; 10% was the default and you had to press a button to change it.
Who am I tipping, exactly? The kiosk? Myself? No one had even made eye contact with me up to this point. I have ordered fast food from a computer. When I have eaten it, I'm expected to bus my own table.
And yet, I felt bad for removing the tip before placing my order, and kind of slunk away from the kiosk hoping the kitchen in the back doesn't know whether or not I tipped, so they can't spit on my burger.
1. Not tipping in the aforementioned scenario is so far away from qualifying as "fucking with" anyone
2. Not only would spitting in food get you fired but it's also a crime. Do you really think it's common for people to be this reckless with their livelihood?
It's a restaurant. If high flying executives with great careers can commit crimes to make a extra buck, the person flipping your burger isn't going to be much more pragmatic.
Jesus, fuck this—it's all too complicated. I'll just cook at home, thanks. Costs less, way healthier, tastes better and guaranteed to contain no bodily fluids. The enshittification of the food service industry is complete.
This is what I've done. There are a few restaurants that I've come across that have mandatory tipping, and I'll never go back. I don't think it's insensitive to believe that it is not the customers responsibility to pay for the employees.
Raise the prices, get rid of tipping, it will make everyone happier.
This is the way. I recently got an oil change, and at the end I was prompted to tip with the default 20%. I changed it to zero - the person doing the work is certainly being paid market rates and well above minimum wage (even now, why do I feel the need to explain myself?!) and I’ll never go back to this chain.
The guys likely to spit in the food are the same people who don't care the slightest bit about the business and are probably going to end up fired after a couple of months for not showing up getting in a fight with a coworker or manager. And this isn't me trying to bad mouth service industry folks, it's just that people who are working in fast food are usually are not in that situation because they're making life decisions that lead to financial success (again generally not specifically). The point being the person spitting in your food isn't going to care if you come back.
I worked in food service, mostly FOH as a bartender/server, and at no point was I angry enough at a customer to spit in their food, pee in their drink, etc. It just wasn't worth the risk or effort.
The most we would do is serve you slower if you're being a jerk.
I can't speak for every food service worker, but most FOH are too busy/indifferent to really care.
That's especially ridiculous because Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer made a big stink about eliminating tipping from his numerous restaurants back in 2015!
In theory tips are shared with back-of-the-house staff (which probably also depresses their salaries). So if you usually tip 10%, tipping 5% sounds fair!
(thankfully I'm in Europe and don't have to deal with this bullshit)
I had the lady at PetChain ask me if I wanted to donate to starving dogs (as I hold a bag of food, to feed MY starving dog). I ignored her, anyway, then i go to pay and theres another question on some digital pad asking if I want to donate to X shelter. I just ignored it and played dumb. It was enjoyable to watch her say 'its asking you a questsion' and me just tapping my card repetitively like a boomer.
The staff who make pretty crap money to do a pretty thankless job who opened the restaurant, kept it clean + stocked, kept the bathrooms cleaned, make the order, serve the order, help you if something is wrong, help keep condiments/drink machines working, etc.
I agree with this logic we should always tip everybody we interact with $1 and that isn't the standard. It's a weird thing. Tipping in the food service industry is just "accepted" the same way a 6% real estate facilitation commission is.
I don’t want to tip. Ever. Charge me more money and pay your damn employees. Don’t make employee compensation your customer’s problem. Tipping is rarely ever enjoyable for the customer, so why put that on them?? I know why… greed. You can get away with paying them less because “tips”.
I don't agree with this way of looking at things. It isn't a thankless job; they're getting paid. It's a different argument if they're not getting paid enough, but it seems backwards to pass on the responsibility of properly compensating them to the customer.
The customer should pay for the product. The employees should be paid by the employer. This whole tipping nonsense has been exacerbated by the move to POS systems nationwide. Tipping should be seen as a reward for doing something excellent or extraordinary.
What experience do you have working this kind of job / interfacing with people who work these kinds of jobs?
More often than not in my experience, they are extremely miserable/unhappy (probably as a result of making less than $40k/yr). They don't have the skillsets/education/opportunities to get ahead. Customers constantly yell at them.
Telling them "be happy for what you have/how much you make" is sort of kind of like... not well received?
> It's a different argument if they're not getting paid enough
There's no easy solution. Most businesses run on like a 10-30% net margin if not lower. Payroll is a fixed portion of that.
We already have an "inflation" problem and giving everybody $5/hr raises isn't going to fix anything.
