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The fact that a single person is "in charge" of the government, with the other two branches largely deferring all power to that one person, is a recent aberration from the norm in the USA. I'm for a single-payer health system that is administered by a well-checked regulatory apparatus and institutions that are not subject to wild policy swings at the whim of a single king-like leader.

>I'm for a single-payer health system that is administered by a well-checked regulatory apparatus and institutions that are not subject to wild policy swings at the whim of a single king-like leader

And I want to win the lottery, marry a princess, and for my childhood dog to come back to life.

We all want things.

When we're advocating for government changes we need to be realistic and make good choices. Right now throwing an enormous amount of power at a dysfunctional government (public health care) is an insane bid completely disconnected from reality.

We need people to care about the basic functionality of government and for it's various pieces to do their duty. They aren't, so maybe let's shelve the idea of handing over control of our healthcare to them until they can deal with their cowardice in front of an aspirational king.


At least elected governments are in theory accountable to the public through voting. Insurance companies and healthcare providers are not in any way accountable to the public, and the public has zero power (outside of regulation) to affect their actions. Just because public [X] is currently a bad choice doesn't make private, corporate [X] always a better choice.

Who cares about theory when the reality is a corrupt insane government was elected. We're not dealing with theory. Healthcare is too important to propose major changes based on theory instead of reality.

You DO have healthcare choices now. Consider the healthcare option provided when accepting a job is on the table, provide feedback to your employer about their chosen provider (i.e. say NO to United Healthcare). Even though it involves big life choices with private healthcare there ARE options on the table instead of what the electorate chooses every 2/4/6 years.

And people are pretty misguided. The typical HN crowd person would STILL HAVE private health insurance on top of the public care in almost any country today that has the public option. The public option is bad, slow, and has a habit of denying care. You'd be rich, you'd still want better care than what was available for free.


The most shocking thing about entering Software as a career was the enormous number of "Brillant Paula Beans"[1] that are out there silently working, doing meetings, participating in all the software rituals, but producing useless and ultimately scrapped work product.

1: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean


Maybe "mission-chauffeured." Revenue/business model is in the driver's seat and the mission just comes along for the ride and adapts to wherever the car is going.

An entrepreneur I used to admire a great deal was once described to me this way: "So and so doesn't do what's right. He makes whatever he does right." Ever since I heard that phrase, I haven't been able to unsee it in so many founders who I think sincerely want to do the right thing, but their ego gets in the way.

I learned in my 30s that most of the software profession works on boring projects. Uninteresting, low value code, for a barely-working product, used by customers who don't really care, in a low-stakes market that doesn't reward excellence, rigor, or quality. If you can find the rare company where this isn't the case, go for it!

One of the things I try to teach my kid is: You are going to have to deal with the fact that there are deeply stupid people all around you, without it affecting your mental health. Those stupid people might be in a position of power over you, they might be other kids in school (or coworkers, later), they might be the president of the country, they might be your neighbor, or they might just be obstacles on the road on your way to work every day. You need to learn how to cope and accept this, gracefully deal with them, and how to protect yourself from their stupidity when it might affect you. It's emotional regulation that smart people need to learn or they go crazy.

i hope you don’t actually refer to these others as “deeply stupid people” to your presumably young kids.

Of course not. I'm translating for HN

Yes, in this case, void* is kind of smelly. If the intent of your function is to receive a const struct MyCustomData*, then that should be the type of the argument. If you later need to handle a const struct MyOtherCustomData*, you can add an overload that takes that argument. Or use a template as others pointed out. Use the type system to help you, so you're warned if you try to pass the method const struct BadCustomData* by accident.

If you truly don't know what the underlying structure of the "blob" of data is, sure, go ahead and use void* and explicitly convert the pointer type when you know what it is, but at least add a comment that you're entering the danger zone.


To be fair, the `void*` is already a pretty big hint that you're in the danger zone.

Unfortunately, many applications now treat your filesystem as a dumping ground for their dependencies and caches and config files and temporary data and all kinds of other non-userdata trash they create. This ship has long since sailed :(

What happens, specifically? Not that I'm a fan of "population increase forever" but what's wrong with Canada?

Pop increase faster than housing / good jobs. The usual. Tried to juice economy post covid with MASS Indian immigration, for reference peak "Chinese" immigration was post HK handover was 60k, settled at 40k per year, lots of Chinese wealth transfer to Canada. Indian immigration went from 60k per year to over 140k, outrageous amount. Bluntly, most of west including Canada gets second tier immigrants, all the good opportunities in US, Canada doesn't get to retain tier1 talent, and Indian immigrants are in aggregate less wealthy. The entire point of brain drain is to get best brains, or in lieu get wealth. Canada got neither. This not knock on Indian immigrants, who work just as hard as every other, just acknowledging value proposition is not the same.

The broader context is Canada is on paper a small pop country with sufficiently alright governance to get per capita rich selling shit from ground. The more people you have have, the less that model works, and frankly Canada at 25m in the 00s already passed that point (vs 6m Norway). It doesn't help that... foreign influence have stagnated Canadian fossil/extractive industries development. Trudeau thought it was good idea to aim for 100m Canadians by 2100 (century initiative)... which on paper makes sense - only way for Canada to compete/influence vs US is heft, but of course that means a lot of brown and eventually black people fighting for housing and opportunities in the interregnum.

Unsurprisingly, broken housing market = no one likes that interregnum.


Canada is really bad with housing and inftrastructure. Blame immigrants not crack head white politicans who see bike lanes as the devil take car and oil money whole worshiping Trump and far right parties all over the world.

Yeah immigrants are really the problem.


Immigrants not worth their economic value are the problem. That's not blaming "immigrants" but "immigration policy", which like housing policy - failure of politicians. But ultimately immigrants, who are not citizens are the going to be the scape goat. And reducing/denying/removing immigrants is short term more feasible than solving political sclerosis that require longer timelines, if can be fixed by system at all.

The overwhelming majority of immigrants are worth it and long term they all are because they have more kids. Every immigrant who comes grown up with minimal education is a huge benefit.

Also its acceptable to have some immigrants who are not 'worth it', because it is something that is literally good to do, you are improving peoples lives.

> who are not citizens are the going to be the scape goat

Mostly because of far right misinformation.

> And reducing/denying/removing immigrants is short term more feasible than solving political sclerosis that require longer timelines, if can be fixed by system at all.

Its a falls believe that removing immigrants is somehow easy. Its not, its politically as hard as building new transit.

The difference is that building new transit is going to be great for everybody, specially Canadians who already own property or just live in the region, while focusing on removing immigrants will hurt everybody on net.

So the right solution is to focus on solving the fundamental problems you have no matter if immigrants or not.


>overwhelming majority of immigrants are worth it

Unlikely with Canadian exploding diploma mill immigration patterns post covid i.e. the 100k increase in Indians. That's not some, i.e. a few 1000 refugee/asylum charity to make feel good headlines. That's structurally unsustainable. Hence new cap reduction and strict field of study rules. Reality is Canada was importing fuckload of low skill hoping to juice economy short term with international tuition injections, but having students fill service and gig jobs driving up rent / suppressing wages / straining infra / services is bad short term politics and bad long term ROI. These generally aren't turnkey high skilled immigrants that boost economy long term. These aren't even wealthy economic immigrants dump $$$ into economy, these are bluntly marginal immigrants from poor households that goes into debt/leverage and have to take low end jobs with high remittance culture to payback - the give/take ratio is not great. They are no where nearly as "worth it" as a rich PRC international students dropping $$$ into economy and trying to capital flight $$$ into Canadian economy. And removing them is easy... a few signatures to cap study permits, change crs and pgwp requirements, already down ~70% from peak, much easier to building. Of course building is great for everybody, but Canada ain't building.

The right solution is move back to sustainable high-value immigration patterns. 60k to 160k Indians is unprecedented. Like 2nd/3rd largest cohort is PRC and PH at ~40k. 160k per year from any country is stupid policy, only justifiable if the plan is basically to steal their tuition and kick them out of the country after making PR/citizenship harder, i.e. Canada bait-switch (scammed) a bunch of Indian villagers pooling their limited resources together, and it's looking likely that's how this saga will end. Again, it's not Indian immigrants fault, but they don't vote so they're the one's whose going to get screwed because bad policy screwed Canadians who vote.


A lot of people on the internet blame Canada's malaise on their historically lax immigration stance.

While to a certain extent it has caused some social issues (eg. Indian, Chinese, Viet organized crime took advantage of it to leave crackdowns during the 2010s and 2020s and degree mills abounded), it's impact on the economy is overstated.

Canada's economy was always a resource extraction and construction driven economy, and

1. the blocking of the Keystone Pipeline project (thus making Canadian ONG less competitive than American sourced ONG for refineries)

2. the rise of America as a net energy producer and exporter especially in ONG (thanks Obama/Biden, Trump/Pence/Tillerson, and former Govs Burgum and Perry)

3. the blocking of the GasLink LNG project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Asia)

4. the blocking of the Northern Gateway pipeline project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Asia)

5. the blocking of the Energie Saguenay LNG project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Europe)

6. Bipartisan support in America for trade barriers against Canada even before the Trump tarriffs (eg. Biden and Trump's softwood lumber tariff policy)

7. (becuase this failure is bipartisan) Blue provinces halting renewables projects in Alberta and Saskatchewan while American governors on both sides took full advantage of CHIPS and the IRA, thus preventing Canada from building domestic dealflow in GreenTech

all played a much larger role than immigration in causing economic malaise for Canada.

At the end of the day, Canada's economy in the 2010s was structurally unprepared for America becoming a major energy producer and exporter by the 2020s, and was unable to successfully build infra to make Canadian ONG cost competitive against American ONG nor the ability to sell outside of North America.

THIS is the legacy of the Trudeau administration - if your economy is based on resource extraction, fighting against it for political reasons is self-harming.

Canada's GDP has essentially been stagnant for almost 15 years, and all kinds of infrastructure projects that would have helped the Canadian economy grow were blocked. Additionally, Canada has the same economic complexity [0] as Bulgaria [1] and Serbia [2] and is even less complex than Mexico [3], which makes Canada the least competitive choice for FDI within NAFTA.

Australia is in the exact same boat as Canada, but unlike Canada, their political class fully backed their resource extraction industries.

[0] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/124/export-complexit...

[1] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/100/export-complexit...

[2] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/688/export-complexit...

[3] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/484/export-complexit...


Serious question: what is ONG? I assume it's like LNG (liquefied natural gas), but after multiple searches, all I can come up with is Oklahoma Natural Gas, NGO in French, and On God.

It's the abbreviation for Oil and Natural Gas sector.

I can't wait until these datacenters go bust and bulk DDR5 RAM and GPUs are sold on pallets by the kilogram rather than by the gigabyte.

So little of that is going to happen.

The DDR5 will be registered DIMMs. The GPUs will be 600W paperweights with a custom form factor. Similarly the NICs and other PCI-E accelerators. The motherboards also adopt custom form factors to fit in racks. The hard drives will be using SAS connectors. The flash will be in E1.S form factors.

The server CPUs that you want for a home desktop or small server, high clock SKUs, will be in high demand.

Any savings for someone willing to build a system from second-hand server hardware will be eaten by using adapters or sourcing a rack.

I'm not saying you won't be able to make a slightly outdated frankenserver with more compute than you need, I'm saying that's not going to bring down prices for Grandma's machine that she needs working to check on her retirement account.


Trusts have always seemed to me to be pretty vulnerable. You have to trust the entire line of future trustees to actually implement what's written down in the agreement. Say I donate my property to a trust set up to keep that property a public park for 1000 years. I choose someone I trust to implement it when I'm dead. But, then that person has to choose someone they trust, and so on, and at some point in the future, inevitably it's going to fall into the hands of someone who would rather sell the land and spend the proceeds on hookers and blow.

It'd be nice to have a non-profit that honors these. Made of collective like-minded individuals. Protected by case law. You know, like a government is supposed to be.... But I suppose a big non-profit would work. Make one.

Everything is ultimately vulnerable, especially once you're gone. No institution lasts forever. Some are probably more likely to endure than others but there are no guarantees.

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