2ion

>> Pension funds inherently depend on population growth to avoid shortfalls. > >Pension funds inherently depend on increases in production. Population growth is one factor, but technological development can also increase production.

Interestingly, capital returns and population growth are (unquestionably?) on exponential curves. So, are production factors too slow to evolve along with the exponentials? Maybe they are, because of waste, lack of recycling, raw resources decline and environmental damage.

>> The other near-ponzi scheme is the real estate market. In my city of Toronto, average real estate prices have gone from 2x average income in 1972 to 16x average income today. > >Hello from a Vancouverite! I broadly agree with this point, and I'm not sure how to work our way out of a housing bubble beyond popping it and dealing with the aftermath. Too many people are invested in the status quo, so any politician who tries to pop it will be crucified for destroying the savings of a large portion of the population.

You could argue that in the same time frame, world population has more than doubled, and because the cost of capital is a lot cheaper elsewhere than in Canada, pressure on attractive living space in peaceful and stable countries has increased exponentially. At this point, the "liberal" view on capital flows and capital control, the fuel of foreign direct investments of Western countries into overseas properties since WWII, came back to bite the originators of the idea in the ass.

That's really interesting. Is it normal in UK (thinking £) to get such an extremely short (introductory) loan and then refinance every few years? In Germany, most people take a 10y fixed rate at least to reduce such risk.

Snap makes sense, because it deals with desktop application confinement. Any Firefox process launched as $user is able to use all the RAM, read and write all the files, access all the networks and basically do everything as that user. You don't want that, it's stupid and so Windows 95.

There are alternative solutions: QubesOS uses VMs as the isolation layer, desktop application confinement using firejail with its good selection of profiles tweaked to my liking, systemd-run confinement configured through the vast resource control options made configurable through systemd. There is no reason ~ or even / shouldn't appear completely empty to Firefox the process except for the resources you pass to it (open file, grant download permissions...) or which it needs to run (of course, those would be immutable as far as possible). SELinux and AppArmor are child's play; you don't have a lot of problems of those tools if there are no objects a process could acceess in its namespace to begin with.

macOS I believe is already there in terms of desktop app confinement. Windows is not but at least it has the controlled folder access layer available after they gave up on making store apps meaningfully secure as its own app category (too many escapes/config tweaks possible now). Desktop Linux though has not had squat in that field in the mass market for 2 decades. Basically, you guys run all applications unconfined. Snap is a way to work on changing that.

Not saying though that the current implementation is exceptionally good. It's too slow, and they should have reused systemd or whatever for a thin, tweakable resource control and container layer, not invent a container format from scratch.

What's impressive to me here is not the capacity but the price for the capacity. At allegedly 777 CHF per year this is a steal so far removed from my reality it's obscene.

This sounds like a nice system.

Does it also tell you of its own volition if the tax office owes you money instead on a return without you having to declare anything? For example, if the tax office knows where you work as an employee and where you live, and the tax code has provisions that stipulate that an employee gains a tax advantage of 0.xx€ per kilometre commuting distance between his home and his place of work, does it factor that in or doesn't it? Because that would actually be _nice_.

Rather than this being a special quality of Apple, I think the marketing strategy of a lot of other B2C brands has now involved """leaks""" to enthusiast circles for a long time, probably since """evangelists""" and """influencers""" became subjects of pop consumer culture --- so I think that Apple leaking not less but the others just leaking intentionally more info ahead of release to fuel the hype is an important factor at play here.

I don't wish to comment on the "and quality" part in your question though.

Hereabouts, unfortunately, for certain things, they are the only option. Because they excel at logistics and customer service.

It's the same reason I buy my nongreat nonoffice furniture from IKEA --- because they have the product and the logistics.

> However, the power structures in academia are heavily skewed and toxic. Individually graduate students have little recourse when they are wronged. Life in academia is hard. You have to work long days, the chance of success is very low. At every stage the probability of getting that next job is very low.

A "research precariat" is what keeps German universities going as well. This is an international issue; even the OECD seems to have studies on the subject. Would be interesting to see a cross-country comparison of who really has the "best" universities --- or university systems, as this kind of issue does not tend to be specific to one institution.

This is pretty accurate as an observation I believe. "My" middle manager does a lot more and acts more like a PO/PM combination fixing things in a horizontally integrated manner, whereas most typical PO/PM roles do their PM/POeing in a vertically integrated manner, on a product/product team basis. He's very good at that and therefore far from feeling irrelevant. Instead, he's drowning in useful work.

> Eric Schmidt even recently weighed in about the return-to-work debate, [...] "I don’t know how you build great management [with remote work]. I honestly don’t," he said. And about half of managers, 51%, genuinely believe that their workers want to return to the office.

Instead of believing, perhaps ask them?

In general, I find this article to say almost nothing. The headline is the clickbait bringing in a Fortune of clicks, I'm sure.

As a hobby mail everything is fun (from MUAs to sieve). If it needs to be reliable it's not. Don't miss self-hosting my email service either ("has the response to my application arrived or did I fail to receive it").