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I’m only eyeballing graphs, but from this one, a Toronto detached house in 1999 was roughly $300k, and today it’s roughly $1.7m. That matches about a 7% annualized rate of return. A document from S&P Global says the TSX index has grown at an 8% annualized rate.
A house you buy as an investment might slightly lag behind an investment in an index fund. But, if you have to pay rent because you’re not living in your investment house-purchasing seems to win by a long shot.
Houses shouldn’t be primarily thought of as an investment
Not only should they not be thought of as investments, they shouldn’t go up in value like investments. A house should slowly depreciate over time. Because of inflation, the dollar-value of the house should maybe go up, but adjusting for inflation it should go down. If you do repairs, maintenance, etc. then maybe it should more or less hold value. If you do a renovation, maybe it should go up in value. But as a structure that gets slowly damaged by the passage of time, it should slowly go down in value.
What’s ridiculous is that someone who made a solid $200k investment 25 years ago and then lived in a small apartment is worse off than someone who simply bought a $200k house and lived there.
If housing keeps going up in value then pretty soon the only people able to live in a house will be the ones inheriting one.
It was Internet Explorer. But, what was probably confusing about it was that anything that required Internet access would start up the program that dialed the modem and connected to the Internet. So, clicking on the icon would eventually launch the browser, but first it would launch the dial-up program, which would take about 30s to connect.
As an aside, it really grates to see how Microsoft called their browser “The Internet”. And that’s the least dastardly thing they did that let them use their monopoly on operating systems to destroy Netscape.
My favourite story about aircraft design about some of the design mistakes on the F-16 fighter.
The F-16 was the first fly-by-wire fighter. They didn’t have much experience with it, and tried out some new things. One was that instead of having a stick between the legs of the pilot they used a side stick. And, since everything was fly-by-wire they didn’t need the stick to mechanically move. They decided they’d just use a solid stick with pressure transducers, since it was simpler and more reliable than a stick that moved.
The trouble was that the pilots couldn’t estimate how much pressure they were using. This led to the pilots over-rotating on take-off (pulling back too hard). Even funnier was that at early airshows, when the pilots were doing a high-speed roll, you could see the control surfaces twitching with the heartbeat of the pilots as they shoved the stick as hard as they could to get maximum roll.
That led to them adding a small amount of give to the stick, essentially giving the pilots feedback on how hard they were pushing the control surfaces.
Another more subtle issue with the design was that originally the stick was set up for forward, back, left and right aligned with the axes of the plane itself. But, they discovered that when pilots pulled back on the stick, they were pulling slightly towards themselves, causing the plane to also roll. So, they realigned it so that “pulling back” is slightly pulling towards the pilot’s body, rather than directly along the forward / backward axis of the plane.
There was a listener question on a science podcast recently that asked about how the temperature changed on the moon during the recent solar eclipse.
They almost got what a solar eclipse was, but not quite. During a solar eclipse, the moon gets between the sun and the earth, blocking the light getting to the earth and casting a shadow on the earth. The side of the moon facing the earth is completely dark because the thing that normally lights it up (the sun) is completely behind it. But, the back side of the moon is getting full sun and just as hot as normal.
I think part of the problem with understanding all this is that the sun is just so insanely bright. Like, it’s a bit hard to believe that the full moon is so bright just because it’s reflecting sunlight. It’s also amazing that the “wandering stars” (planets) look like stars when they’re just blobs of rocks or gases that are reflecting the insanely bright light of the sun.
It’s amazing if you think about it. Light comes out of the sun in every possible direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the surface of Mercury, and only some of that light is reflected back out. The light reflected from Mercury goes in almost every direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the earth. But, even with that indirect bounce, it’s bright enough to see with the naked eye.
You missed the part where they literally coordinated with the IDF on their trip, didn’t you?
No, I didn’t. I just don’t think that means much.
Yes, I’m sure they told the IDF, and that the IDF said “ok, sure”. Then the IDF essentially ignored it. Maybe they entered the information into a database or something, but I doubt it was widely communicated. Maybe you have this image of the IDF as being this ultra-competent, supremely vigilant organization that never kills anybody by accident, so any killing has to be deliberate. I don’t share that view. I think they’re tossing so many bombs and care so little about collateral damage that WCK checking in with the IDF means essentially nothing.
The only reasons this could happen are intentional or criminal negligence.
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be attributed to stupidity.
Given how well this fits with the trends, it’s hard to imagine it was negligence.
Given how well it fits with the trends, it’s hard to imagine it’s anything but negligence. When the IDF is leveling Gaza, killing indiscriminately, targeting civilians with only a very slight tie to Hamas, it’s no surprise if they kill some aid workers too.
The story I linked shows that they are targeting so many people that they spend only 20s verifying that the target Lavender came up with is a valid target before ordering a bomb strike. In that situation, it’s completely unsurprising if they accidentally kill a convoy of international aid workers instead of a convoy of Palestinians.
Your theory is what, Israel is targeting every one of the 29,000 bombs they’ve dropped very precisely, with a whole lot of planning and thought, and that each one of them is a deliberate and careful target, and there are never screw-ups in any of those 29,000 bomb strikes? Given that this is a PR disaster for them, isn’t it easier to assume it was a mistake caused by their unwillingness to thoroughly and carefully check every possible target to make sure that they never make a mistake?
Yeah, exactly my point. I don’t think they set out to bomb World Central Kitchen people specifically. But, their targeting is so broad, and they’re so willing to kill civilians that it doesn’t take a very big mistake to accidentally kill WCK people instead of some other group of civilians in white vans.
I don’t believe Israel was intentionally targeting World Central Kitchen. This whole incident is a massive PR disaster for them, especially given that the victims were citizens of powerful and influential countries doing one of the most selfless humanitarian jobs possible.
Having said that, this is the kind of mistake that only happens when a military’s targeting rules are basically “commit war crimes”. Like, maybe their target was white civilian vans being used as ambulances by the Palestinians, and they just blew up the wrong white civilian vans. The difference is that killing Palestinian doctors and paramedics doesn’t generate the same international headlines.
Just this week I read a story about how Israel is using AI to identify targets to assassinate. At first they were just targeting senior Hamas leaders, but at this stage they have tens of thousands of targets including police and civil defense workers. Technically these are affiliated with Hamas, but only because Hamas is the official government of the Gaza strip.
How do they kill them? It’s hard to target and kill them when they’re out in the field, so the Israelis wait until they return home and then they bomb their houses, killing them and their families: “for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians”
What do they call the system that alerts them when the targets return home, and can now be targeted for a bombing? I shit you not, it’s called “Where’s Daddy?”
When I first code something up, I think of it as a first draft, and I expect maybe 5ish typos / brainos per 100 lines. Only a few times in my life have I finished writing a few hundred lines of code, tried to compile / run it, and not seen at least a few errors.
When I don’t see errors, it’s almost always because somehow I managed to not compile / run the code at all. Like, one of my typos / brainos managed to cause it to skip that entire new block of code. Only once or twice has it happened because I actually wrote error-free code the first time. And, let me tell you, that perfect code sucked up so much more time than the more typical bad code.
With the bad code, I see the various errors, quickly fix them, and those errors convince me that the compiler / interpreter has actually seen all the new stuff and judged it. But, with perfect-from-the-start code, I now have to go in and throw in print statements, or step through a debugger to convince myself that yes, the system actually made it into that function and actually did execute those statements.
Rights are about being compelled to do something, mostly by the government.
In theory, if a business tells you that they’re going to share your IP address and you don’t like it, you can take your business elsewhere. In practice it’s not that simple, of course. There are too many huge companies who have monopolies or near monopolies, restricting your choice. They also often don’t disclose what they’re doing with your data. Also, often when they ask for consent, the consent is buried in some 400 page click-wrap agreement that you can’t realistically be expected to read before agreeing to.
Canada needs better privacy laws. Currently Europe is leading the way there, but Canada’s more aligned with the US, where corporate influence is much stronger.
The kernel definitely mixes tabs and spaces:
https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/block/bfq-iosched.c#L390
Why would I use spaces if I use tabs?
To comply with Python’s best practices:
https://peps.python.org/pep-0008/
Also, if you work on the Linux Kernel, you’ll see a mix of tabs and spaces:
https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/block/bfq-iosched.c#L390
Also, it seemd like a huge waste of time hitting the space bar so many times…
You use an editor that doesn’t auto-indent?
but you can follow any exception down to the exact line of code (or JNI call, I guess) where the problem occurs.
But, it’s not really where the problem occurred. How often do you get a stack trace and the bug fix is at the line referenced by the stack trace? Almost never. It’s more that it takes you down to the exact line of code where the effects of the problem are bad enough to affect the running of the program. But, the actual problem happened earlier, sometimes much earlier.
For example, NullPointerException isn’t actually the problem, it’s a symptom of the problem. Something didn’t get initialized properly, and nobody noticed for a while, until we tried to use it, and got a null pointer. Sometimes it’s easy to go from the effect (null pointer) to the cause (uninitialized thing). But, other times that “thing” was passed in, so you have to work backwards to try to figure out where that thing comes from, and why it’s in that broken state.
Sure, it’s better than nothing, but it’s still frustrating.
- @merc@sh.itjust.works to
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For people who aren’t reading the article:
She was convicted, in absentia, of a crime in Russia. The crime related to the war special military operation in Ukraine. The law made it stops “public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”
Canada, quite reasonably, has rules that you don’t automatically / easily get citizenship if you have a criminal record in another country. But, it’s based on whether the thing you did would be a crime in Canada. So, if an immigrant from Sri Lanka has a conviction for taking a selfie with the Buddha, it doesn’t count because that law doesn’t exist in Canada.
What gets tricky is that Canada does have a law that prevents “wilfully [publishing] a statement, tale or news that [the person] knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief”. So, if you pretend that the legal system in Russia is fair, then what she did would be a crime in Canada.
I don’t know how they can reasonably handle this except on a case-by-case basis. Of course someone publishing an anti-war blog entry and getting convicted for it should not have that count against them when trying to get Canadian citizenship. But, a conviction for assault should be a blocker. OTOH, what if the “assault” is a trumped-up charge that the police used when arresting anti-war protesters?
Of all the new uses of Mickey we’re now seeing, one thing I really hope is to see Mickey showing up on murals in kindergartens and daycares. This is really what it means for the character to be entering the public domain. He’s has been a part of American, if not world culture for decades, but that part of the culture has been illegal for people to use.
Finally, after nearly a century of Disney getting absolute control, that cultural element finally belongs to everyone. Now parents and caregivers can paint images of Mickey and make kids happy without having to get permission from Disney.
Thirty years from publication.
The original was 14 years renewable for another 14. I like that better. It means that abandonware goes into the public domain faster, but it’s easy to renew a copyright if it’s still being used.
No exceptions.
I disagree. Exceptions for sports and software: shorter. Sports is most relevant when it’s live, and copyright-holders for sports content are much more vicious when it comes to taking down tiny clips of goals or something. So, make a special category that gives them extra protection when it comes to tiny clips in exchange for much shorter copyright terms. For software, it’s essential to be able to maintain old equipment, especially old industrial equipment. That soft of software could be used in power plants, medical equipment, water purification plants, etc. Companies are notoriously bad at keeping that stuff safe especially decades later. Instead, make it public domain faster.
Simplify that to “Piracy isn’t stealing”. Copyright infringement (so-called piracy) is very different from stealing.
Sure, if “buying” isn’t permanent despite assurance it was at the time, then copyright infringement is even more justified. But, copyright infringement isn’t and has never been stealing.
I’m all in favour of people being pedantic, especially in the case of laws.
If you are using the term theft colloquially
I’m not, “theft” is misused all the time. It’s something that the copyright cartels encourage because they get to pretend that copyright infringement is theft. It’s not. We should push back and say theft has to meet certain conditions, and copyright infringement isn’t theft. Nor is “wage theft”, which is a form of fraud.
By buying into the colloquial definition of “theft” and expanding the scope to be any time someone is inconvenienced, you give the copyright cartels power to make people think copyright infringement is as bad as actual real theft, when it’s clearly not.
If it’s theft, it’s theft. If it’s fraud, it’s fraud. It could be either. But “wage theft” is not copyright infringement, which is not theft.
Here’s what California’s Department of Industrial Relations says:
Wage theft is a form of fraud
Which is what the game of monopoly was designed to teach.