... "Canada declined to interfere with Darwisnism", with the story going on to lament the fact that unfortunately by the time of Stocton's fatal stupidity he'd already passed on his genes.

To call it a "missed opportunity" is a little extreme.

Call me a troll, but both his daredevil idiocy and the fact that other people were stupid enough to get on were and are self solving problems. Both solved by the predictable outcome. An outcome that, I'll add, wasn't merely predictable in hindsight. One hopes that people will ask more questions before getting on a submersible vehicle designed to protect the occupants with pencil lead.

I would be in favour of a law that makes many if not most liability waivers unenforceable. A company that invites people on board a vehicle not type certified as fit for purpose should not be able to enjoy any litigation protection. I would also be in favour of requiring a company that so takes passengers to prove it can cover its liability, through insurance or bond.

But none of this falls on Canada.

Savannah likes to advertise its thousands of projects and call itself an incubator. I have a small open source project I wanted to move off of Github a couple years ago, and the pain I went through to try and get hosting there was immeasurable. The arrogance they displayed, like they were God's gift to hosting. And the "advertising" requirements they had. Not just the project licensing, which I can understand them wanting to be GPL and which I had no problems with. But the wording in the documentation, needing it to talk up GNU. The changes I had to make in actual functionality too were not insignificant. And the sheer arrogance with which they made these demands. Not all at once in a list. One. By. One. Always in a "Ya, your reply to our last request wasn't good enough... because what about this?" way.

I kept the whole painful email exchange in a separate email folder just in case I ever get tempted to go back. I ended up going with Codeberg, which was simple, easy, and very philosophically compatible.

So it doesn't surprise me they have unpatched problems. Savannah itself is ancient and primitive. The kind of thing a couple hackers whip up in a day which suits them so doesn't need polish. They are far too interested in resting on decades-old laurels than in actually doing good work today.

How long before GNU realizes that its entire code base has been static so long that it's irrelevant and that "GNU/Linux" just isn't a think because there is very little left that hasn't been replaced.

I don't care how much of an idiot you are, you're simply too stupid to respond to further. I don't want things to be as they were in my childhood. Back then, things were a mess. BECAUSE government tried either to micromanage everything or manage nothing at all. The idea of a third way, where governing is about just that, placing control mechanisms in place but not do the management, is obviously far beyond your pea-brain.

Oh god. If I spent enough time digging through my ancient Slashdot posts, somewhere back there there are posts of me going, "While I loved the strategy behind Falcon 9, I'm really not keen on this plan to make Starship out of huge carbon fibre tanks, that sounds like a really failure-prone solution..." I'm glad they only spent like a year on that idea before deciding it was dumb; somewhere back there there's also a bunch of posts of me cheering their switch to steel ;) . SpaceX still keep having random COPV problems (most of which they don't even make themselves). Not too encouraging for the notion of the cold gas thruster add-on to the Roadster, where the plan is to replace the back seat with COPVs, so you have a COPV right behind your head.

Electron has been getting by on CF, and honestly I'm impressed, but they've also been only working with very small launch vehicles thusfar. We'll see how neutron goes...

The problem is that you can ALWAYS get around rules. It isn't possible to make perfect rules for anything above a minimal level of complexity - that's just a variant of the Turing-Church Halting Problem.

So you are forced to invert the dynamics. There's no real alternative. Instead of you creating a high level of complexity that the departments will work their arses off to avoid, you force the departments themselves to create the regimens that they're prepared to live with. But you have to do so cleverly. They will always create regimens that mean they do the least work necessary (because that's cheap on resources and they will ALWAYS consider this sort of extra work to be an imposition) and have the least amount of culpability.

So you need to meet three conditions:
1. The department can't evade the bits they're actually able to do
2. The department CAN pass on work they're not equipt to do, but ONLY if it's their responsibility to oversee the department they pass it onto
3. The department IS inescapably culpable for failure to either do the work OR ensure that others do it

You do NOT need the frameworks for each department, and should not attempt to draw those up. Those will be departmentally-specific and timeframe-specific. Far, far better have people who actually know the specific context do that work. No department likes to look like it's being forced to do anything, so making the actual detailed specifics internal, you're utilising their psychology. They're not being "forced", they're defining their additional responsibilities and duties. From a psychological angle, they're much more likely to be receptive to this perspective.

But because the departments are all internally writing their own management protocols, YOU DON'T HAVE TO. You only need to have a framework which obliges them to write up what they will request. This is MUCH lighter and, because it is much lighter, it is far less prone to have failure points where generic ideas don't work for a specific type of work.

If we want to look at this in software terms, only an idiot would write an overly-restrictive langauge that imposes a strict model of thought regardless of the type of work. If you want to provide a high level of confidence in correctness, you don't try to impose it through a myriad of complex hurdles and rigorously controlled APIs. You achieve it by incorporating contracts (function X is guaranteed to take in data meeting these requirements, and is guaranteed to deliver data meeting these other requirements). Contract programming is much, much lighter on the development process, doesn't impose on the programmer, and yet creates a very high level of assurance. Mostly because programmers aren't working to try and cheat with irritating APIs.

In Linux terms, you want a lightweight virtual layer handling filesystems in general, the filesystem policies should be handled by the filesystem not the main kernel. You want the main kernel to be doing as little of the work as possible. As soon as it is heavy and micromanaging everything, you're going to end up with something slow and unstable, that really can't do a whole lot.

You want to push the complexity to the edges, that's where complexity belongs. The bit that changes slowly, can't handle special cases, has least visibility into what is needed, and is really a very blunt instrument wants to be lightweight. One reason for having things like Common Law and Case Law is precisely because the legal system figured all this out centuries ago.

Are we calling $7,500 tax incentives for the buyer 'subsidies'?

I'm not saying that's wrong, but that's a different kind of subsidy than the ones a company like BYD gets from the Chinese gov't... (Tesla sold the cars at a higher price, the buyer got the subsidy, in BYD the cars are sold at a lower price and the gov't just gives them money.)

As a reminder, it was "climate conscious" politicians, largely in one party, that used the gov't checkbook to prop up certain companies in industries they liked, all with great big press conferences and running for re-election on those generous handouts to 'green industries'.

Key part of demoralization of a nation is making people ashamed of it.

Damn, they listened to him during Obama's tenure?

He really is the Immortal Emperor in your minds.

Dear lord, why? That is an insane number of engineers - GM scrapes by with about 25,000 - 30,000 engineers by most estimates.

Fact check actually said "it was a crocodile enclosure". It was so stupid, it short circuited my brain when typing it out.

Also headlines are epic, going along the lines of "child ended up in the croc cage". How? No one knows, but they arrested "a man". What kind of man? No one knows, but he's not a straight white one, because that would've been all over the news.

Best part is that now there's reporting that this mystery man was so mentally retarded, they couldn't interview him. So they released him on bail until september. Guess there's more kid chucking coming up.

Just kidding. This nonsense made it to X, so they're probably going to have to arrest the poor bastard before he gets to try to see if he can chuck the next one into a lion enclosure, and then get fact checked that it's actually a tiger enclosure.

Ah yes, my favorite kind of a fact check Reminds me of the current story about immigrant who chucked a random 3 year old kid into the alligator cage with obvious consequences.

Then we get Fact check false. It was actually an alligator cage.

Same energy as this "debunk".

Ask your favorite LLM for a list of ROK tech that was cloned by PRC manufacturers as a result of industrial espionage.

I disagree. It actually needs less regulation.

The siloing of knowledge and duties is why it was always somebody else's problem. So you simply take out all the regulations that obligate siloing and replace all of that kerfufle with a single rule: "If it's on your plate and nobody else has published that they've done the work so far, it's your responsibility, silos be damned, and failure leaves you liable".

That's it.

That's all we need. A removal of siloed thinking and a duty to complete all of the scheduled work regardless of whose toes it tramples.

That would have solved the problem. But, because departments never like to give up powers they obtain, a side-effect would be that departments would be proactive. They wouldn't walk down piers, looking for strange things. Rather, if they heard of strange things that are their department, if they don't want to be shamed, then they need to ask the company for more information. Because then it's on their plate and not that of a rival department.

The other benefit of using this approach is that it isn't about the special cases, it's about the general problem that underlies all of the special cases of this sort: nobody takes responsibility until it's already a disaster.

If a department is liable for pretending the problems aren't there, then the department wil CYA. If the only way to do so is to do all the outstanding work, regardless of title, then that work will get done. If the only way to get it done right IS to give it to the right department, and they're on the hook until that has happened, you're damned right it'll happen.

I've worked in the public sector, I've seen the paranoia and closed-mindedness first-hand. That's not going to go away. So you solve the issue by exploiting those traits, since you can't eliminate them.

I will happily do so. Bear in mind I used Google and Gemini to help me find the sources and summarize the numbers, so take that for what you will.

First the problem is the definition of "productive allocation of resources". If you're a billionaire, either inherited or building a tech startup, that money goes to things that create new businesses, and your wealth is the reward of investing your time, energy, and resources into others. Very few billionaires can become one without average people buying what they're offering, be it rent from real estate or social media posts; the only exceptions are lawyers or finance people. The other hard part is it's not quite apples to apples; business people create jobs through their companies, whereas governments provide social safety nets to try and lift people out of difficult situations. Both can create jobs, but in very different ways and for people facing very different situations.

What we do know is that the California tech ecosystem, entrepreneurs deploy capital very quickly, creating jobs very fast. But by California's own data, the tech ecosystem now has 1.8M jobs in California, which is 9% of the State's workforce, but accounts for 19% of California's entire Gross Regional Product at $623B per year. On top of that, some older studies show that high tech employment is a net job multiplier; it is calculated that every tech job results in 4.3 jobs in services and local goods. Another estimate says that California's tech sector directly and indirectly supports 4.2M jobs, or 20% of the entire workforce statewide. That's with roughly a $150B and $200B annual deployment of capital. Notably, that capital comes from two sources, revenue generation (which also generates taxes, but is essentially lost as an expense) and investment. The investment part is key because the money isn't lost; while the money gets spent by the company, the source of the funds is the value retained by the investor, who often trickles money back to the money managers who backed the VC, and those money managers are often pension funds and insurance companies who serve individual needs.

Now let's look at the State Legislature. The annual budget of California hovers around $300B annually. They fund payrolls for state employees like teachers and various safety nets. Public sector job multipliers are around 1.3 to 1.5X. So right there, the tech sector where most billionaires are located, use fewer dollars to deploy into high paying jobs that have a statistical knock-on effect of creating 3 extra jobs for every tech engineer hired, whereas state employees create 1 extra job for every state employee job.

So there is one metric, backed by studies, showing that with less resources (around $200B spend annually) 4 jobs are created or maintained vs. the State budget which spends $300B annually but only 1.3-1.5 jobs are created or maintained.

But the bigger issue, and one of the key sources of why governments do not deploy capital efficiently, is the stated purpose of this tax. It is, per the SEIU who sponsored this, a one-time, emergency 5% tax to prevent the collapse of Californai healthcare and help fund California public K-14 education and state assistance food programs. Along with a bunch of other outright salesy stuff about how only 200 people will pay the tax who have $2 trillion. Sounds good for poor voters right?

The problem is, they're seizing assets to pay for expenses. This one-time tax will fund issues for 5 years; ok. What happens at the end of 5 years? The problems in education and health programs and food assistance are still there. Further, you practically guarantee capital flight. One study shows that with the billionaires who have already relocated ahead of the deadline, California has lost out on $2.7B in recurring annual tax revenue. Six have already left (Steven Spielberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel, David Sacks and others), but many others are considering leaving. This tax, if passed, is retroactive back to Jan 1st, 2026, but that may be entirely unconstitutional. So you can be sure this will be litigated up the Supreme Court, costing California tax payers more money before they collect on the fund. The tax bill will also remove an existing cap of .4% on "taxes on intangible and personal property", making this an entirely new tax and would allow for unlimited future wealth taxes; the government will have every right to extend this down to the middle class, including personal homes and going around Prop 13. So absolutely the State Legislature could raise property taxes if this bill passes because it is a Constitutional Amendment, and they would not need to to voters at all.

So how's that for allocation fo resources, plus sources and the like? You can refute the studies by being partisan, sure, but you can't change the facts. Six billionaires left California before the tax went into play for a direct loss of 2.7B in annual revenue, and many more will leave. They will challenge it in court, creating issues before they collect. In the meantime, those people will be spending money outside of California, creating those jobs elsewhere, whereas more people are going to need social safety benefits as their jobs move to other states right when California is losing tax payer dollars.

...been moving everyone I can off Acrobat Pro; PowerPDF is $180 once, and it's way better for 98% of users.
https://www.tungstenautomation...

If they're not dependent on Send & Track (or they can't move to Docusign), it fits most office environments I've used it in.