It harmonizes the schema and process across States. Sharing it with the Federal government is optional since the Federal government doesn’t have the authority to force compliance. Many States opted out of sharing their databases with the Federal government last I checked.

A complication is that iMessage supports a ton of collaboration features that don't (and largely can't) exist across other messaging apps. The messaging bits will have the same nerfed interface as SMS/RCS because of missing capabilities.

Despite having the appearance of a messaging app, iMessage operates as a backbone for a lot of OS capability that is surprisingly deep.

I think it is useful to point out that the conditions under which those loans make any sense are incredibly narrow. It is far from the norm because it doesn’t pencil out in pure financial math. Wealthy people are not stupid, and the notion that this is being widely used as a tax avoidance measure tacitly makes that assumption. Studies seem to indicate that the prevalence is so low as to round to zero. There are many practical reasons to do it at the margin as a cashflow management exercise but not as a way of generating tax-free income.

The interest on those loans is taxed as income which feeds back into the model.

If it doesn't happen that often, then it shouldn't be a big deal to change the law.

I have thrown away (in hindsight) amazing lottery tickets a hilarious number of times. Despite that poor track record, I have been able to grind out an enviable life sans lottery ticket. Showing up and being hungry is a huge part of the game. I’ve also had to reboot my career relatively late, which isn’t a place you want to be but it isn’t a death sentence if you don’t want it to be.

While there is an element of survivor bias to my story, people always underestimate the role of stamina and willingness to grind when no one else would. It is a very long game but so is life. I was never looking for the easiest way, and in hindsight I think that produced more satisfying results even if the path had much lower lows.

The key ingredient is the courage to try, not the safety net. Countries lauded for their strong safety nets are not overflowing with people taking ambitious risks. Often quite the opposite; the strong safety net reflects a cultural aversion to risk.

People with the courage to try don’t need a safety net to do it. In practice they seem to be almost inversely correlated.

An important aspect not mentioned is feeling like you will be adequately rewarded if your calculated risks pay off. This seems to be more pertinent than safety nets in practice.

Look at the founders of the top 100 most valuable companies in the US. How many of them came from poverty?

That is insightful. Courage to take risks means higher standard deviation in outcomes, more visible successes, but also more hard failures. Risk averse cultures have more stable outcomes, no big successes, but also less financially crippling failures. A personal or social safety net may or may not make you risk averse. Taking semi-calculated risks seems like a skill that needs to be learned for successful entrepreneurship.

Because the valuation of equity is notional only. It may not be remotely realizable now or ever. Furthermore, it may not be possible to use it as collateral for a loan for both legal and practical reasons. Some notionally high value assets have no liquid market. It make take a decade to find a real buyer. The large majority of assets held by wealthy people are non-liquid, in the US most studies put it in the 60-70% range.

Your paycheck is denominated in cash money. It can’t go to zero or be non-liquid for years like an investable asset. That’s a rather important distinction.

The vast majority of this is ordinary theft, not desperation.

I've been acquainted in the past with many people who engaged in this type of crime. Perception is that it is relatively low-risk. It was mostly just a side hustle to pay for beer or drugs, people weren't doing it to put food on the table. There has been a strong underground market for stolen "scrap" metal for as long as I've been alive.

It isn't just copper or catalytic converters. Theft of agricultural irrigation piping is sporadically fashionable, for example.

I struggle to understand where I stated people in the US need to steal for food.

C++20 inverts the traditional relationship between the core language and metaprogramming, which arguably makes it new language in some ways. Instead of being a quirky afterthought, it has become the preferred way to interact with code. There is a point of friction in that the standard library doesn’t (and can’t) fully reflect this change.

Metaprogramming style in C++20 only has a loose relationship to previous versions. It is now concise and highly maintainable. You can do metaprogramming in the old painful and verbose way and it will work but you can largely dispense with that.

It took me a bit to develop the intuitions for idiomatic C++20 because it is significantly different as a language, but once I did there is no way I could go back. The degree of expressiveness and safety it provides is a large leap forward.

Most C++ programmers should probably approach it like a new language with familiar syntax rather than as an incremental update to the standard. You really do need to hold it differently.

As someone that has only dabbled in C++ over the past 10 years or so, it feels like each new release has this messaging of “you have to think of it as a totally new language”. It makes C++ very unapproachable.

It isn’t each release but there are three distinct “generations” of C++ spanning several decades where the style of idiomatic code fundamentally changed to qualitatively improve expressiveness and safety. You have legacy, modern (starting with C++11), and then whatever C++20 is (postmodern?).

This is happening to many older languages because modern software has more intrinsic complexity and requires more rigor than when those languages were first designed. The languages need to evolve to effectively address those needs or they risk being replaced by languages that do.

I’ve been writing roughly the same type of software for decades. What would have been considered state-of-the-art in the 1990s would be a trivial toy implementation today. The languages have to keep pace with the increasing expectations for software to make it easier to deliver reliably.

As someone that has been using C++ extensively for the last 25 years, each release has felt as an incremental improvement. Yes, there are big chunks in each release that are harder to learn, but usually a team can introduce them at their own pace.

The fact that C++ is a very large and complex language and that makes it unapproachable is undeniable though, but I don't think the new releases make it significantly worse. If anything, I think that a some of the new stuff does ease the on-ramp a bit.

C++ can be written as the optimal industrial language it is. Simple core concepts year after year. Minimal adaptation.

The key thing to understand you are still using C with sugar on top. So you need to understand how the language concepts map to the hardware concepts. So it’s much more relevant to understand pointer arithmetic, the difference between stack and heap allocations and so on, rather what the most recent language standard changes.

You can write the same type of C++ for decades. It’s not going to stop compiling. As long as it compiles on your language standard (C++17 is fine I think unless you miss something specific) you are off to the races. And you can write C++17 for the next two decades if you want.

> Metaprogramming style in C++20 only has a loose relationship to previous versions. It is now concise and highly maintainable. You can do metaprogramming in the old painful and verbose way and it will work but you can largely dispense with that.

This was my takeaway as well when I revisited it a few years ago. It's a very different, and IMO vastly improved, language compared to when I first used it decades ago.

If you're going to go through the effort of learning a new language, it makes sense to consider another language altogether, one without 30 years of accumulated cruft.

An advantage is that if you already know the older language then you don’t have to learn the new idioms up front to use it. You can take your time and still be productive. It isn’t why I would use it but it is a valid reason.

I have used many languages other than C++20 in production for the kind of software I write. I don’t have any legacy code to worry about and rarely use the standard library. The main thing that still makes it an excellent default choice, despite the fact that I dislike many things about the language, is that nothing else can match the combination of performance and expressiveness yet. Languages that can match the performance still require much more code, sometimes inelegant, to achieve an identical outcome. The metaprogramming ergonomics of C++20 are really good and allow you to avoid writing a lot of code, which is a major benefit.

I only which concepts were easier, those of use that don't use C++ daily have to look the expression syntax all the time, much better than the old ways I guess.

Wait until people see how reflection on c++26 further pushes the metaprogramming paradigm. I'm more hopeful for reflection than I have been for any other c++ feature which has landed in the last decade (concepts, modules, coroutines, etc).

The large ships are well-protected. A “small unmanned underwater ship” has been a primary threat model for a century e.g. heavy torpedoes. These already have very long range and sophisticated sensors that allow them to hunt targets autonomously.

The other side of this is that modern large military ships are almost literally unsinkable. It is very difficult to get enough explosive on target due to their extreme damage resistance.

When the military does live fire exercises where they attack obsolete military vessels with no active defenses using torpedos, missiles, bombs, etc, they usually don’t manage to sink it. They have to send a specialized demolition crew afterward to actually scuttle the damaged ship and turn it into an artificial reef.

An operational large military vessel will have layers of substantial active defenses that make this even more difficult.

A better example is the EUV lithography light sources used by ASML. They are manufactured in the US by a US company ASML acquired with technology licensed from US government labs. That critical part of the business is American in all but name.

It is possible that the EU could develop their own state-of-the-art lithography light sources but for now ASML is dependent on the US for it.