That's very hard to do in a work environment where you have someone above you who doesn't understand or care about this. Instead of keeping things sane so they can run smoothly, you will be seen as slowing down progress.
If I work for someone else it's not my problem. I should point the problem out to them, but since it will hurt them first and foremost, it's no major concern of mine.
You appear to be confused. Anyone can decide anything, the question is whether it is in their power to enforce their decisions.
Saying that they don't have authority to make a decision implies that there's some universal set of rules that internationally lays down what anyone's authority is - precisely the kind of thing you appear to be opposed to, because such a set of rules would likely need a court!
Seems to be a rather silly, pedantic point if it even passes. GP was clearly talking about sovereignty etc. which is exactly the caveat that you granted - that ICC may have no enforcement power over non-treaty countries. For the record I have no axe to grind with the ICC, but you and GP literally agree on the main difficulty facing the institution.
This is exactly the kind of discussion where the difference is important. Your reading of the point they were trying to make is impressively charitable. I shall try to learn from it.
If the point is that anyone can tell anyone else anything, that's vacuously true but a court typically wields the power of a state and its code of laws. For treaty countries ICC is perfectly unproblematic but for nontreaty countries there's a strong difficulty in calling it a court as it bears no legal legitimacy.
National courts routinely issue arrest warrants and rulings for persons of other nationalities, who could currently be located anywhere in the world. The ICC is not special in that regard.
> Right and you can imagine how much authority the average Russian lends to an American arrest warrant.
I have to applaud coming up with a sentence like that. The same sort of beauty one might find in an Escher piece.
Let me address the point underlying that contortion by asking a question: In the alternate semantic universe we're constructing, if that Russian later passes through a US-friendly country and is arrested, did the US court turn out to retroactively have had the authority to issue the warrant, and we pretend it always had it, or is it supposed to work some other way?
I don't really think there's a need to be so hostile. I don't really know how I feel about subjecting international citizens to US law to be honest with you. Certainly in some cases it's appropriate. But in others it seems strange to me.
And undoubtedly I agree that if Putin or Netanyahu pass through Europe they should be arrested. But I'm not sure if that's a legal decision or a political one.
> I don't really think there's a need to be so hostile.
There was no hostile intent or ill feelings. Some things were meant to be humorous, but in good spirits. If anything came across otherwise, that's a communication failure on my part. I'm sorry.
The entire point is to make it into (more of) a legal decision rather than a political one. That's the famed Rule of Law - a Schelling point that multiple parties with diverging interest can work towards to cooperate. It's not arrest Putin/Netanyahu/etc because "they're bad and we don't like them", but rather because they have done specific actions A, B, and C that we've written down to be considered crimes.
Well I think you hit upon an excellent point and one that I'm rather close to, which is legalization. Adopting a uniform procedure to deal with various cases and accord defendants some recourse is admirable. That doesn't make it law, but legalizing those types of proceedings is still valuable. I think Nuremberg rested on shaky grounds as a court, but it was still preferable to either summary execution or disclaiming any punishment on the accused.
Likewise I think where I'm uncertain with Putin is that while he's undoubtedly a nefarious guy and we have written down rules and norms he has broken, those norms do not apply to the Russian world. We claim they apply, but we could only make them apply through force of arms which runs opposite to the rule of law. That is rather the rule of "might makes right."
> we could only make them apply through force of arms which runs opposite to the rule of law
I'd say that these things are not opposites. Rather the rule of law is a way of tempering the power of force of arms. Look at your Nuremberg example - having won the war and enacted occupation by force of arms, the Allies were in a position where they could have simply imposed summary execution. Legalization was a stepping back from this dynamic - likely due to the amount of unilateral killing that had just gone on.
> those norms do not apply to the Russian world
The crux of the matter here is that parties on the receiving end of aggression (Ukraine, Palestine) have assented to adopting those norms. The legalistic theory is that by aggressing onto those parties, the aggressors become subject to the jurisdiction of whom they're aggressing against. I personally don't particularly like this model of international jurisdiction, but it is on solid longstanding ground. And so while I'll argue against this sort of thing at an individual level (especially where the nexus is say electronic communications), I don't feel much sympathy for leaders who end up suffering this dynamic because they decided to attack other countries.
In reality of course yes, to apply those laws requires force of arms - for there even to be something to temper in the first place. So Ukraine/Palestine assenting to those treaties is essentially asking would-be allies to defend them in some well-scoped circumstances, modulo the underlying diplomatic concerns.
That's a pretty tall assumption when every other customer is trying to copy their own data at the same time through the same tiny pipes and off the same spinning rust.
The typical customer also doesn't do their own backups, but rather relies on the infrastructure provider (that's a major selling point after all).
If we take the damaged Amazon data center in SA or the OVH fire as data points, the timeline appears to be measured in weeks and months, rather than hours.
In any case, I doubt that in 2 days most larger companies could even figure out where their data is and develop a strategy to copy it.
If you make 90k in Germany, you pay around 36k to mandatory (varying degrees) insurance/pension plus taxes if you're single. About 19.5k of that are actual taxes. If you're married/have children that total can drop to ~30k and will include health insurance for your entire family unit.
I just gave you the actual numbers. The same numbers you will quickly get by using any of the many available net income calculators for Germany[0].
If you have a different idea, feel free to break the 90k down yourself. Don't lazily push the work on other people, asking them to puzzle together where some neglected Wikipedia articles' table of magic numbers actually comes from. Hint: It's a number made up by an interest group called the "German Taxpayers Federation", representing mostly entrepreneurs and wealthy taxpayers. The number being opaque is intentional, because its purpose is to mislead and support their advocacy for tax cuts.
But by all means, don't let me stand in the way of your right to blindly believe whatever someone else wants you to. God forbid we input a five digit number into a calculator.
What will it take? A notarially certified copy of tax returns mailed to your address?
You have to add in all the other taxes as well. For example VAT, gasoline, and property taxes are significant. That's generally what tax freedom day is meant to mean - when an average citizen is done paying all taxes.
Edit: I was curious what the answer might be and couldn't find much. One source calculates the tax burden to be about 53% of income.
The link you provided is the web page of the interest group I mentioned. They will literally try any trick in the book to get that number up, including adding a bunch of things that aren't even taxes, a boatload of things they call "quasi-taxes" with numbers presumably pulled from their ass, and adding expenses your employer incurs only to subtract them again immediately. Anything to get that percentage number up.
But even they don't even call the resulting number "tax burden" - that'd be transparently stupid. They more generally call it a "burden ratio" (Belastungsquote).
Just to give you an idea of how ridiculous their calculations are: If my wages are 90k in Germany, they do their calculations as if I earned ~105k just so they can immediately subtract the entire 15k again and call it a burden (for expenses my employer pays on my behalf). Does this still sound like something you can easily compare one country to the next and draw useful conclusions from? Of course not. In the next country it might come from an interest group with a different goal, a government calculation, or a Fox News writer.
> You have to add in all the other taxes as well. For example VAT, gasoline, and property taxes are significant. That's generally what tax freedom day is meant to mean - when an average citizen is done paying all taxes.
What you're trying to get at - hopefully because the alternative is a nonsense number with no purpose other than being a fun fact supporting a discussion about degrees of individual autonomy in modern societies - is called discretionary income, and it's only meaningful when adjusted for cost of living and compared across similar living situations.
> If my wages are 90k in Germany, they do their calculations as if I earned ~105k just so they can immediately subtract the entire 15k again and call it a burden (for expenses my employer pays on my behalf).
Aren't you talking about social contributions that your employer is forced by law to pay on your behalf? You realize that if this was not in place, those money would go directly to you since your salary is whole sum your employer is paying towards your employment? Doesn't seem you grok it fully from your words.
I am not claiming if its good or bad (dramatic global financial changes will test viability of all these systems rather well in upcoming years, I'd expect many people will be unhappy when their naive views hit reality of numbers). I am outside of such system, in mostly private social system in Switzerland (aka I save for myself, mostly) and wouldn't want it any other way.
If that's the real wage, it should be used when comparing wages internationally. It's however not used as such, because trying to figure out what should and shouldn't be included in that number for each country will result in an even bigger headache. Do we add the average cost of employer-provided health insurance to US wages to keep the number comparable? What about those who self-insure?
In any case, the resulting individual "burden" is meaningless if you don't also quantify individual benefit. As an extreme example, imagine a country in which your income taxes pay for things such as transportation credits usable on gas, public transport and roads, while the neighboring country has mostly private toll roads and low taxes. Another example is health insurance. In Germany it is pretty nearly mandatory with most having some form of insurance, and total spending per citizen is around $9,000. In the US more than 90% are insured and spending is higher, but within the same ballpark.
What does the raw tax/burden tell you here in an international comparison? Fuck all. It's at best usable as a prompt for a philosophical discussion about autonomy, but often merely used for masturbation or making dishonest arguments designed to go over well in establishments specializing in alcoholic beverages - like those of a certain interest group.
> Do we add the average cost of employer-provided health insurance to US wages to keep the number comparable? What about those who self-insure?
Obviously yes, and obviously no. Just as we don't add the price of groceries or rent to wages unless the employer subsidizes those in which case obviously yes we must.
> What does the raw tax/burden tell you here in an international comparison?
It tells you how expensive it is to live there, relatively speaking. Obviously (as you note) that's only half of the discussion just as an expensive appliance might or might not be worth the premium to any particular individual. But you're wrong to dismiss it out of hand as you do. Just as it's disingenuous to dismiss the benefits of (for example) universal healthcare it is also disingenuous to attempt to derail discussion that focuses directly on total cost or effective tax burden or what have you.
What you are dismissing as a "nonsense number" of an "interest group" I would consider one of the most accurate and easily understood quantifications of total cost.
Imho, parent's point about attempting to quantify costs without balancing them against benefits is valid.
It's meaningless to say "Germans pay X, Americans pay Y" if the two receive completely different benefits in exchange for those rates.
Furthermore, the point that the German system would be paying to individuals if not to the government is somewhat disingenuous. There are a few options.
1. The government doesn't do it, so private options do at some cost
2. There's some government-private hybrid
3. It's not done at all
An example would be parental leave. In the US, it largely doesn't exist to the European extent. Employers don't offer it. You can't buy insurance for it. It just doesn't exist. That's something Germans are getting for existing in the German system.
Yes, as I acknowledged it is only half of the story. Certainly you need more information to make an informed decision about anything. But that doesn't make it meaningless. And generally where people level such dismissals there is conversational context being conveniently ignored (such as happened earlier in this thread).
I'm not sure what point you were trying to make with parental leave as an example. I completely agree with what you wrote but don't see it being at odds with anything said previously.
I think we all know that Germans enjoy substantially more free at point of service public services than those in the US let alone those living in a developing country. Obviously that costs something. Yet when someone brings up the price tag you get a bunch of partisan screeching about how prices are meaningless.
Prices _aren't_ meaningless. The US military (for example) is absurdly expensive. There are lots of things received as a result of that expenditure. Regardless, the relative cost is high and that's not meaningless to point out given that everyone involved in the discussion has at least some conception that there are important differences in the downstream impact.
I can spend that in whichever tax jurisdiction I want and the VAT rate might be whatever depending on what one buys. If you want to go that route you'd then also have to adjust for cost/quality of living to stay intellectually honest, which means you'd then have to come up with some statistical consumer basket. It's a stupid idea to even start down that route in what fits into HN comments.
You always have to cost/quality of living if you go that route. Because that's literally what taxes are for. Anyway I don't think it's fair to not include VAT. For every euro you want to utilize(modulo some exceptions) you have to pay it.
It's called PPP and yes, it makes Europe look sightly better but it's still behind the US and that's for median household income not tech income.
I've managed staff all over the US and in Europe and have had access to large corporate pay scales across zones. The difference is so significant that CoL is a total rounding error for software developers.
3€ fee on every line item for imports says no you cant'.
Yes the exact cost will differ depending on what you buy but that doesn't remove the cost, it just obscures it - which is the point of having so many different taxes.
You however have to admire getting things that wrong in the same paragraph that tells one to not trust what one sees in Google searches. Though I suppose HN comments would show in Google searches... maybe their humor just went over my head.
No, we're quite happy doing that. However on behalf of the German people I wish to thank everyone involved for the thoughtful suggestions and intelligent way to approach a possibly interesting topic. I can tell your hearts and minds are in the right place.
I don't think it is a uniquely German thing to trust the old institutions - which I think is what allowed Wirecard to do wire fraud. I'd say all of Western Europe is rather naive to Kremlin's shenanigans.
You're using quantity metrics to answer a quality question.
I had a look at the kind of issues that are reported at that project (there's 15k of them, so I can at best assess a couple). It looks like a complete mess: A lot of concurrency and resource mismanagement issues and edge cases that in a better-managed project would have been avoided by construction. They will now will likely be solved by more defensive programming, driving overall complexity ever upwards.
If you really want to check some quantity metrics to try to reason about code quality, look at whether "fix" PRs are overall LOC neutral or negative (not counting tests). In this project, almost every "fix" is an addition. Worse, almost every fix is more branching.
If almost every PR is some sort of fix, and most of them add branching, and there's thousands of them weekly... That leads to only one place and I want to be nowhere near it.
You're one unfortunate motor control fuckup away from killing yourself pretty much always. Most animals are good at not killing themselves and humans are decent at climbing to boot.
Yeah, if you fall you might hurt yourself, but when you're paying attention to what you're doing you're likely less at risk than when you absent-minded walk down some stairs.
We spent probably hundreds of hours climbing all manner of tall playground structures as children, and I cannot recall anyone ever falling. I do remember some instances of people tripping and falling down a flight of stairs though...
A while ago I was at a playground chatting with a neighborhood mom, and her 5 yr old son fell off the top of a spiral slide, and broke both his forearms. It's sobering how quickly and unpredictably a situation can turn from pleasant to horrible because somebody's grip on a railing was an inch off.
There are things you do 100,000 times in your lifetime, with a 99.999% success rate, where failure may kill you. You can't really avoid those.
It definitely does. Particularly under the hero imo.
Doing this is really time-consuming so certainly there were some corners cut -- need to also focus on product after all!
Particularly after we changed a lot of the messaging (after this post was written) I slacked off a bit. Keen to hear what's most annoying to you though, always looking for feedback.
The website is simple enough that any design decicion could just as well ahve been done by a real human.
The em-dashes, and the gradients were always egregious because they're strong opinionated decisions. This is just a straighforward, clean, tasteful website (really what most sites should aim for).
One of the worst things you can do is pull punches when you get "contributions" that are net-negative because they waste everyone's time.
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