I've been using XFCE for the better part of two decades now (I still run into people upset about the changes XFCE made in 2003, i.e. 4.0), and I am perfectly satisfied. Though as the saying goes: what I don't know I don't know; so I may be missing out on a better experience, but at least I am content enough that I don't bother seeking it out.
Though, my monitors are also from 2010, so a lot of the visual problems people have with XFCE, I don't.
> Tall buildings are banned in Denmark so its actually surprisingly imposing.
False. Buildings higher than 5 stories require municipal council approval (whereas normally it's a functional approval, not a political one), but that's only in Copenhagen. Other municipal councils do not have the same restrictions, and there are plenty of examples of tall buildings in Denmark.
The restriction in Copenhagen is historical, due to the fires that consumed the city; so to increase fire safety, buildings were height restricted. That most of Denmark otherwise don't have a lot of tall buildings is primarily due to a lack of demand.
I see the point very easily? It's about directing government funds to improving the work lives of the officials (the ones who decide where the money goes) instead of towards the education of their children, which most people would agree should be a much higher priority. It's an example of government working for themselves, not working for the people, as is their remit.
You believe that because you don't understand budgeting in danish municipalities. There are several bins of funds, and dictates from the state on how much can be used on what. Money from a construction budget cannot be used on schools, and so on. Its a much more complicated piece of bureaucracy, and not something that is relatable to a minister of justice going off in the deep end.
Why was everyone upset then? Why was it in the press? Why are you talking as if you know anything about it? Why are you so upset about it? I literally have no idea why you are upset that someone brought up something that bothered them on a public forum. Are you working for the Danish gov in some capacity and terrified of any criticism. Like wtf man., its just a comment , soon this thread will go away and you can get back to your gov funded cupcakes or whatever it is ur protecting. You just attract attention by being so touchy.
EDIT > I removed the bit that said where it was ok? relax
You seem be the one that needs to calm down. I'm just straightening things out. You shared an anecdote about governance in Denmark, that is not related to the current discussion. Don't get riled up about something you clearly isn't that clever at.
A few details to note: The quote is from August 2024 (last year), and the question (from an MP) to the minister is from September 2024 and so is the response, which can be read here:
For those less familiar with Danish: the minister's answer is basically the same spiel about needing to protect children; and how people will still be protected by the legal system (you know, which is little consultation after you've been beaten up, swindled across borders or worse). So this quote is from a year before Denmark had the presidency in the EU and pushed Chat Control forward. (Though clearly they haven't changed their views on this.)
A compose key is very useful if you’re a typography snob — as many of us who studied mathematics and ended up learning TeX probably are… I haven’t been paying attention to exactly what I’ve typed with it lately, but I habitually use symbols like these on autopilot and they seem to render OK on any device that someone reading my writing is likely to be using:
≤ ≥ ≠ × — – “ ” ’ ° … ¹ ² ³ ™ • ♣ ♢ ♡ ♠
If you work in languages other than English but have a standard English keyboard layout, a compose key is handy for typing accents and non-English letters/ligatures too.
I primarily work in Danish; but I use a US Intl AltGrDead[0] keymap, so I can access most needed symbols without the compose key, such as æ (altgr+z), ø (altgr+l) and å (altgr+w). But I still wanted to write ⅚ more easily, so I also added the compose key for even more symbols.
[0] The AltGrDead variant just means that the regular dead keys on the US Intl are flipped; e.g. ' is now no longer dead per default: I have to hit altgr+' to make it dead (i.e. an acute accent (´)).
This article[0], which covers the same but in Danish has more details. It mentions Sweden lowering their book VAT in 2001 to 6%. The takeaway was that more books were sold, but to people who were already buying books. Getting new readers thus requires an additional effort than merely lowering the cost.
Back then there were only linear tv and no social media. I know in my social circles back then in Sweden it was even trendy to read and lots of discussions between friends and even during family events between the teenagers about books.
So yes it was a totally different landscape back then.
The way this article is worded makes it sound like Denmark has a 'book tax'. Denmark has a VAT on goods (and services), which is 25%. But Denmark doesn't have split VAT values, so it's either 25% or nothing; no in-between. So they are just proposing removing the VAT from books. (Some goods and services are already exempt from VAT.)
And if you wonder why Denmark doesn't simply lower their VAT or introduce a split VAT system like in most other countries; the answer is technical inertia (or technical debt, if you will). Most Danish accounting and banking systems are hardcoded to assume 25% (or nothing). So if a politician want immediate change to VAT, removing it from a category of goods/services is their only option.
Edit: I realise I was careless in my wording, when I wrote "hardcoded to assume 25% (or nothing)"; I meant that the systems only assume one rate (or nothing), not that the value of 25% was hardcoded (though it is in a few (lesser) systems I've encountered). I apologise for the confusion.
> the answer is technical inertia (or technical debt, if you will)
One of the issues. There are number of others. For example, VAT is a value-based tax. A VAT cut gives the biggest savings to people who spend the most. Since wealthier people typically spend more, they would save more money in absolute terms. For example, a family with a food budget of 3,000 kr. would save 300 kr., while a family with a food budget of 8,000 kr. would save 800 kr. Politically, some parties might prefer tax breaks that focused on lower-income groups.
Another issue, will the cost savings actually be passed on to the consumer?
VAT can be considered a regressive tax because the poorer I am, the more of my money I spend on goods and services, and the less on savings and investments. As a proportion of income, poor people spend more on VAT than rich people. I think it’s about double, in the UK.
So you’re right that cutting VAT helps richer people more in absolute terms. But in terms of of quality of life it helps poorer people more.
[edit] assuming we’re talking about VAT on things that everyone buys. Which is why tax codes often exempt essential items from VAT.
Give people as a whole more money and they can spend it on housing. Given the decades long supply problem with housing it simply means rents increase to fill the void.
I was under the impression that VAT taxes are considered to impact mostly the poor. While in absolute terms the rich are impacted most, in percentage terms VAT is considered a much smaller portion of expenses for the rich than the poor. I quote:
"VAT is a regressive tax, putting more burden to the poor than to the rich. Indeed, VAT applies the same rate to everyone regardless of their level of wealth – but the richer you are, the lower the proportion of your revenue goes to consumption."
In the U.K. most living expenses are don’t get charged vat, or get charged at a low rate - food, rent, public transport are vat free, electric, gas are low rated.
Hmm. You say "tax break" but I could argue split VAT results in the opposite: a hike in consumption tax. The base VAT rate can be set higher if the VAT on desirable consumption is lower. I.e. it's not that rich people pay less tax for books -- it's that rich people pay more tax for non-books!
Denmark already has one of the largest VAT rates in the EU (25%) - only surpassed by Finland (25.5%) and Hungary (27%). (I guess you may also argue that those two countries have reduced rates and that proves your point!)
I find this logic extremely flawed. If you save half, you save half. If someone saves a lot more than you as a result, it mains they paid a lot more before, and is still paying a lot more than you now. As fair as it gets. Those that complain are usually imagining a robin-hood esque system where the tax progresses towards 100% as income goes up.
Trying to heavily tax billionaires is one thing, but the issue with them is tax avoidance by virtue of these complicated systems, and a lot of the incremental taxes land on people just plain working their ass off, getting no sleep, high stress and high blood pressure as a result. If someone has more because they worked more, they're entitled to exactly that.
Incremental tax also means that if you have a good year and a bad year you pay way more tax than if you just had two average years. Not to mention that such complicated tax is what enables tax optimization whereby those higher up can end up paying less tax. It's stupid.
Worth noting that controlling consumption via extra/less tax on specific products is debated a lot in Denmark. Namely cigarettes have a high added tax (about 2kr/0.3 usd PER cigarette). Increasing the tax and thus the price of cigarettes had a fairly large effect on consumption (0.13-0.82% less cigarettes consumed for every 1% price increase) [1].
Recently it has been debated to remove the VAT from vegetables and fruit to increase consumption of those.
The same logic is used for this book VAT exemption (which is good in my opinion) - I doubt we'll see the same effect though. Young people not reading is a complex problem to solve but books are really expensive to buy, so it's a good place to start.
Note that while you have 25% VAT on things, actual VAT accounting is fully dynamic and banking and accounting systems handle this just fine.
On the incoming side, bills can come from other countries with an entirely arbitrary VAT value, so there the VAT value is recorded from the bill.
On the VAT refund side, arbitrary values are used even for Danish VAT, as companies can get full, fixed fraction or even entirely variable fraction if VAT refunded. For example, a company dinner can only be partially VAT refunded as you had private benefit of food, and VAT refund of an asset like a van is the set by the ratio of intended company vs private usage.
On the outgoing side, most banking and accounting systems would be prepared for other EU countries.
There's definitely going to be something hardcoded somewhere (including over 9000 times in the tax systems themselves), but the point is that VAT is already a dynamic size.
That general incompetency you're referring to there can also be worded as
For years they didn't build unneeded complexity. And it sounds like for many more years to come. So they're just efficient. Any developer will have had to make things configurable afterwards, that's fine, just evolution of code.
Hard coding also means that it's less likely to break. No customer (in Denmark) can influence this, so why make it configurable?
Over time this does become a problem when source code is lost/companies go under.
Considering that's 25 year old code I'd expect at least a
#define VAT 0.25
and not hardcoded values all around the source code. However I don't expect a table (db table, array, etc) of product categories with their own VAT code or a user defined exception list. That extra code would inevitably add bugs that are not worth the trouble. Adding an exception for books probably requires an update of the apps.
Such a constant would be no better -- they don't want to change the VAT rate across all product types.
The code missing is that for per-product type variation in VAT rate, which sounds complicated enough that Iawould expect a good engineer to shrug and say YAGNI until it's actually necessary.
VAT rate can and does change. As such it can be different on different dates. And this change might not even correspond to change of year. So it really has no place in code.
So if the House introduced a 'fixed' VAT tomorrow, say $1, not proportional to the price of the product, would that not break most software used to compute VATs?
We have to make assumptions.
Good software doesn't account for every future possiblity, but it is easy to change when the requirements change.
What is the primary reason for hard-coding these kinds of things? Gotta imagine CScientists would have debated this during the design phase. I have some hypotheses, are any of these right?
* correctness/verifiability analyses
* security? in compiled tools (prevent malicious re-configuration)
The real problem is actually less the exact rate of 25%, but rather that most of the systems only assume one rate. Denmark was the first country to introduce a general VAT in 1967, and whilst the rate has changed (last in 1992 to 25%), the number of rates have not. So lowering the general VAT rate would likely be possible in a 1-3 year time frame (depending on unknown factors), but lowering the general VAT rate would be a significant loss on state finances (thus not interesting to politicians) (and as someone else pointed out, it mostly favours high spenders, which is also politically dicey).
However, introducing a split rate would definitely require a time frame of at least 4 years, and no politician are willing to wait that long for a politician win.
> The real problem is actually less the exact rate of 25%, but rather that most of the systems only assume one rate.
This can’t be the case.
You have to apply the VAT of their own country to customer from other part of the union and some services are exempt.
In all likelihood, most systems in Denmark already supports using different VAT for different products. Plus, most accounting systems won’t be Denmark specific anyway but simply configured for it.
Can someone explain to me why I do sit at -2 on a perfectly factually valid comment? Is VAT so foreign to American they are actually lost by how intra-community purchases work and how VAT is collected? Are the Danes here simply never exporting anything?
There's absolutely no reason to hard-code the value. That's just bad programming.
However you can't expect programmers to predict all possible future compatibility.
In my country VAT has a current rate. That rate can, and has, changed. But we have one rate. Some goods are exempt, but products have a VAT yes/no field.
Perhaps in the future the system will change. One possible change is that VAT attracts different % for different products. I'm not predicting that, or coding for it now. VAT rules could change to anything- I can't code against that.
Imagine the complexity of correctly accounting for a VAT when rates vary dependin on product type -- and doing it across an entire national economy! I'm glad they don't support that for as long as they don't have to.
Is it doable? Sure. Does it need resources that could be more fruitfully applied elsewhere? Probably.
Funnily enough only EU country with no reduced rates on some products is Denmark. So pretty much any system used in other countries already takes this in account.
It definitely seems to include a lot of questions that may be related to what a Go programmer might encounter, but are technically _unrelated_ to Go.
> 471.What does SQLite not support compared to PostgreSQL?
I mean, I definitely use both SQLite and PostgreSQL in relation to Go. (Although my first thought when I saw the question was "true numeric types!", until I noticed it was not an option.)
As someone else suggested, it feels like the questions may well have been generated by a LLM, and then not filtered.
Kind of wish Firefox allowed one to modify the common keyboard shortcuts in the browser. But considering the open issue on the matter, I won't keep my hopes up: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57805
The hacks about seems to be basically steal keyboard shortcuts the same way webpages already do; either through an extension[0] or modifying config-pref.js[1]. Neither of which seems very appealing to me. Though, funnily: I did hit Ctrl-W writing this message to delete a word; thank goodness for cache.
Though, my monitors are also from 2010, so a lot of the visual problems people have with XFCE, I don't.