we've all learned about things, not understood them, and thought "wow, these people must be idiots. why would they have made this complicated thing? makes no sense whatsoever. I can't believe these people, idiots, never thought this through like I have."
Most of us, fortunately, don't post these thoughts to the internet for anybody to read.
I worked for 20 years in an ecosystem that didn’t have lockfiles and had reproducible builds before the term was invented, and now you come and tell me that it couldn’t be?
Very cool! I recently wrote an XSLT 2 transpiler for js (https://github.com/egh/xjslt) - it's nice to see some options out there! Writing the xpath engine is probably the hard part (I relied on fontoxpath). I'm going to be looking into what you have done for inspiration!
I developed xjslt, an XSLT 2.0 (https://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/) compiler for JavaScript. XSLT is still the best way to transform XML content into other XML or HTML content, and there is only one generally available 2.0 or later version, Saxon. Saxon is an excellent piece of software, but SaxonJS is not open source and I thought it might be good to have another option.
There is a simple command line interface as well as the ability to compile to a standalone JavaScript file for loading in a browser and to a JavaScript file that can be used in NodeJS and other JavaScript runtimes. This means you can run your XSLT transforms on the server or in a cloud function.
The majority of functionality is in place and it has worked with many XSLT files I have tried. There are a number of incomplete and/or broken features. The speed is very reasonable.
Incoherent argument. Non-profits pay sales taxes, income taxes for employee salaries, and, in many cases, property taxes. The only thing they aren't ever paying taxes on is profits, because... they are non-profits. They don't pay out profits to owners.
Some non-profits are exempt from property taxes and other taxes (e.g. universities) and abuse this by becoming huge landowners. This should probably be reined in.
It may vary by state, but I used to work at a private, non-profit educational institution in Missouri, and I know we didn't have to pay sales tax for our purchases. I now work for an online retail business in Colorado, and our sales team routinely waives sales tax for non-profits (from various states) with the correct documentation (usually also educational institutions, fwiw).
You can pretty closely simulate a non-profit with a for-profit enterprise with a bit of "clever accounting" as long as you're not taking profits out.
Once they come out, they get taxed, as salary or distributions.
What the for-profit ALSO gets taxed on is "income" but if you manufacture expenses you can keep your income low or non-existent (this is what companies do when they transfer their IP to a tax haven and then charge themselves for it).
It’s ridiculous we are trying to find more ways the government can rent-seek. Corporations are taxed on profits, they are taxed when they pay employees, the employee is taxed on their income, and the employee’s post tax dollars go to pay sales tax, the remaining money goes to businesses that pay tax, and then the whole thing repeats again. The government is a literal parasite on the economy.
I am repeatedly surprised when people argue that lower taxes don’t improve the economy, it’s as obvious as water being wet or the sky being blue.
I think it’s because most people who declare “less taxes are good for the economy” don’t want to pay taxes at all and would be willing to let infrastructure and society rot in order to make a few more dollars. There has to be an optimal level, and surely it isn’t always “less”.
Meanwhile the infrastructure is not exactly doing great in many places, and it seems doubtful that it would be doing particularly better with more taxes collected. Anyway, there's been a pretty clear trend towards not-less, even in just the last few decades (really, compare quality of services and infrastructure at revenues and debts in the 90s to now), without a clear sign that it's actually worth it or that more would make anything better. A fruitless 20 year war didn't help either.
They have a high trust society where people follow rigid norms thereby lowering the cost for infrastructure. For example, they probably don't need to clean the streets as much because people don't shit on the sidewalk.
I’ll give you an example, I live in rural Utah and more than once walked into a store and bought something and left money on the counter when there were no employees in the store. Or, as a pilot I’ll fly into an airport and the keys to a courtesy car will be on a table in the lounge with a note to fill up the gas tank.
High trust society is one where people do the morally right thing even if they wouldn’t get caught. To do have that you need a set of common societal values.
"Mechanisms and institutions that are corrupted, dysfunctional, or absent in low-trust societies include respect for private property rights, a trusted civil court system, democratic voting and acceptance of electoral outcomes, and voluntary tax payment."
There isn't a clear trend to more taxes in the US (scaled to GDP). Federal tax receipts were higher in the 90s (17-20%) than the 00s/10s (14-18%). Local and state receipts have been basically flat at ~8.8%.
Has GDP gone up or down over time? It's gone way up, so even if the percentage was constant, the amount of money collected has increased significantly. This is what I mean by a clear trend towards "not-less". Despite this increase, I don't think we're seeing proportional returns, and I'm very doubtful that increasing it even further will help anything. If the root problem is mismanagement/corruption/inefficiencies/pointless wars, throwing more money at it isn't going to fix anything, while taking money away could.
Until you start looking at what those other places are.
Tax money is spent in all kinds of ways that touch so many lives that it's literally too much for any one person to comprehend. You can make arguments, but it will affect people in material ways that they'll have counterarguments for.
>>it’s because most people who declare “less taxes are good for the economy” don’t want to pay taxes at all and would be willing to let infrastructure and society rot in order to make a few more dollars.
Just because someone wants the government to spend less, doesn't mean they don't want to pay their taxes or want to see the infrastructure go to hell. That's a disingenuous argument. Also, “less taxes are good for the economy,” is unarguably true, so he's making two incorrect assumptions in once sentence.
> Also, “less taxes are good for the economy,” is unarguably true
This isn’t unarguably true. Right now we’re running a very large public debt because we spend more than we collect, so if you collected it in taxes you’d slow down inflation. That would be good for the economy. You also see a lot of strategic reallocation of funds through taxes, moving things from possibly inefficient places to places that generate far more growth. China has been doing this very well over the last decade (and sometimes not so well, but net positive) - lots of state back efforts which have tipped industries in China’s favor. This has been great for their economy and soft power. The US did that with Covid vaccines by assuming the risk— something the private market literally could not and would not do.
Taxes and government spending are complex subjects and do not follow universal rules.
>This isn’t unarguably true. Right now we’re running a very large public debt because we spend more than we collect, so if you collected it in taxes you’d slow down inflation.
We would also slow down the economy. Higher taxes = less spending = less GDP. The inverse is also true.
And then there are damning examples like Mozilla Corporation/Foundation.[1]
There are organizations that should be registered and handled as non-profits, but I also think a lot of the non-profits today are scams warranting a clean up.
It's my firm opinion, and that of many people who've looked at it, that flipping over the bars is caused by the rider not bracing themselves as they use the very powerful front brakes.
If most cyclists don't use the front brake, that is their loss. Most advanced cyclists, in my experience, rely heavily on the more powerful front brake.
I'm a hardcore cyclist too. If you're bombing down a San Francisco hill at top speed and lock the front tire, no amount of crouching behind your seat is going to leverage it from flipping. The point is physics is physics, monocycle and bicycle follow the same simple kinematic diagram of pivot point x torque vs pivot point x inertia. If you use 100% of your braking ability you'd better be tall and heavy enough to torque it the other way, else the free body diagram rotates.
There's a world of difference between locking up your front wheel and not using the front brake at all. A reasonably skilled cyclist is able to use the front brake effectively without locking it up.
We are in total agreement. I was illustrating my point that a unicycle rider avoids flipping because they never use the full braking power (lock up the wheel). The gyroscope controller won't let you - you can only brake as hard as you can counterforce (throw your entire body weight hard backwards). As soon as the gyroscope senses a change in angle, the P.I.D. motor controller compensates.
The angle of a very steep hill makes it easier to do a front flip, but such steep hills are an exceptional circumstance. Most of the time, experienced cyclists can safety use a great deal of front braking.
Bicycles are not a physics 101 problem. In practice this just doesn't happen. See the links I provided. You can also read more about this in the "Bicycling Science" book.
A unicycle or bicycle flipping is a Physics 101 problem. First you must lock up the wheel if you want to flip, meaning the complications of kinetic friction are irrelevant. There's a center of mass, a contact point, a velocity, and a force. You can make a free body diagram to accurately calculate if you have the speed and CG to rotate forward (flip). Newtonian physics isn't magic. Telling someone to "read a bicycle science book" just sounds like a flippant dismissive insult. You're safe to assume I'm already well studied. This is a conversation, not an insult battle. If you have a point in mind, then bring it to the conversation in plain english to be inspected under the light of day. What juicy morsel is contained in this book of yours - perhaps it will sell people on moving it to the top of their reading list. Until then it's meaningless.
This is indeed true -- I try to get my wife to use front brake more, and I sure will teach my children to.
But it remains the fact that many cyclists don't use the front brake -- or are even aware of its advantages.
(If you want to find out yourself, step off your bicycle and move it gently either forward or back. Try applying first the brake in the direction of travel, and then the trailing brake. You may be shocked at the difference!)
Heck, most people I know have the kind of rear brake that applies when you pedal backward. They find it more important to have hands firmly gripping the bars than pulling levers in situations where they want to stop. (Not saying it's sensible, but it is what they report. It's hard to convince them to use the front brake when their lives have stacked them against it.)
In a physics sense it would happen when the torque applied by the forward momentum is higher than the force applied by gravity - the higher you are above the contact point with the ground, the more torque you apply and the more likely you are to rotate around the wheel.
The lower and further back you can get your weight, the more force you should theoretically be able to apply (being wary of deweighting the front wheel too much such that a hard front brake causes a skid instead)
You'll find that in 2022 over half of new apartment units had 1 bedroom or less. I guess you live in a very different state that is not reflective of overall trends across the US.
> Have you looked at statistics for housing stock in the US in general?
I wasn't talking about the US in general, I was talking specifically about my state. Housing situations vary wildly across the nation, though, so I shouldn't have been surprised that things are very different in my part of the nation than in others. Still, it did confuse me.
Now I'm less confused. What the article is talking about isn't really that applicable to my corner of the nation.
It's a pretty simple design, and it's based on the ARC format (https://archive.org/web/researcher/ArcFileFormat.php) which is even simpler. In response to your questions, here's my take (as somebody who used to work on web archiving).
1. Two reasons: First, many files are harder to manage. WARC files might contain hundreds or thousands of files. It's easier to manage big groups of files that are roughly the same size. Both for humans, and, at least in the past, for the file systems themselves. Second, once you break them up into files, what do you name the files? If you give them a name unrelated to the URL that was fetched, what is the advantage? If you name them based on the URL, suddenly you have a problem of mapping a URL to a legal file name, which can vary based on the file system. This would be a huge headache.
2. Yes, it predates SQLite, but also, why would you use sqlite? That's adding a huge amount of complexity. Is SQLite even good at storing big binary blobs?
Additionally, because of the clever way that WARC files are gzipped, each piece of the WARC file is gzipped individually, which allows random access into the file for reading enclosed content in a compressed file without needing to read the entire WARC file.
Nope! SQLite is good for lots of small-ish blobs (kilobytes), but once you start getting into the megabyte range, less so. There's also currently a hard upper limit blob size of 2GiB.
To add to this, WARC.gz files are also concatenated gzip records, so you can read any record by starting a decompression at a known offset. This gives you the access time of a file with the efficiency of having many many records only taking up one file.
WACZ also extends this functionality to allow streaming archives off a server without having to request the whole file to get one page. https://replayweb.page/docs/wacz-format
Thanks for the insights, egh! It's clear now why SQLite wouldn't be ideal for this purpose. Also, the point about URLs not always being valid filenames really makes sense.
Most of us, fortunately, don't post these thoughts to the internet for anybody to read.