This is the response I’ve been looking for - one that acknowledges the issue and points out that it’s primarily a problem for places rich people (top 10-20%, not just the usual 1% boogeyman) like to vacation. Being in that demographic and spending more than half my life in the other types of towns you describe, I’ve been acutely aware of the challenges and opportunities of both vacation towns and, for lack of a better term, “80% towns”.

Vacation towns, for example ski resorts, have struggled with this for decades. My 80% friends who wanted to work at them (primarily to ski when they’re not working) always had to live 30 minutes or more away. With more demand on these towns from Zoom workers, this has just gotten worse.

This is the main problem the original article is addressing. It’s real and has been around for a while. Without an incentive such as skiing, there’s little reason for many of the low wage workers to put up with with increased hassle of living away. Foreign workers have filled the gap, but they run into the same issues.

The parent’s post, on the other hand, hits one key factor left out of the conversation of Zoom towns: there are thousands of nice, small towns around the country (I’m in the US, so use that as my point of reference) that were decimated over the years by factories closing and Walmart’s killing local businesses. These are ripe for revitalization. There is enough supply that they likely will be able to support a healthier mix of incomes. And if we continue to see a rise in the income floor, those really will be healthy incomes that allow everyone to feel a sense of belonging in their community.

It won’t happen overnight, but I hope this is the first step towards revitalizing the “80% towns” and building an economy that supports all people, regardless of their location.

For the ski/vacation towns, the top 20% will just have to find a way to make it worthwhile for the service workers.

The mid-level managers will get a little sticker shock when it comes to their state taxes in Texas vs. California.

While Texas doesn't have an income tax (and won't for a long time thanks to a recent ballot initiative), everything is funded through property taxes. Industrial property taxes are negotiated and are generally very low (they are also kept private, so no one really knows what they are unless they are leaked). Home property taxes, on the other hand, are high simply because houses are expensive.

As an example, in Austin many of the houses that mid/senior managers will want are in the $2-3M range. That seems like a steal coming from the Bay Area (you can get a nice house for that). Property taxes on those are $40-60k+ a year.

For a manager making $200k/yr, that's 20-30% of their income going straight to the state in the form of taxes. If you're a two-income household, the math is a little better, but to get the math on your side, everyone has to work or you have to be paid very well (it's still a win for the actual rich).

Kinda makes those California income and property taxes seem reasonable...

Thanks for the insightful reply (no mod points since I posted the parent :) ).

I didn't realize how much the SOC approach was used with the M1. The dual monitor limitation makes sense in the that. It's still annoying, but at least it makes sense technically.

It'll be interesting to see where this goes for Apple and what other design limitations emerge if they stick with the wholistic approach. Another reply mentions incomplete OpenGL implementations as another casualty.

From a dev perspective, I love the heterogenous multicore model (I'm an HPCer from the Cell/Roadrunner days), but also don't like architectural limits when it comes to using well established libraries. The Cell was a fun processor to work with, but of the key lessons was that overly specialized hardware can't gain a foothold against commoditized standards (GP-GPU techniques, while still somewhat proprietary, were more standards based and worked on different hardware platforms and emerged as the VHS to the Cell's Betamax ;) ). While Apple can do a lot with it, if developers can't bring what they know and maintain some sense of portability, it's tough to get 3rd parties really exploiting the platform.

Will be watching the M* chips through a different lens now...

Hopefully they'll fix that little oversight with the first gen M1 laptops.

I was ready to buy one the other day. I had it in my cart and was just adding accessories and couldn't figure out which dongle to get to support two monitors. Turns out that the M1 MacBooks don't support dual monitor* setups (well, not easily - there's a software driver + dongle solution, but it's not as pretty as plugging in two cables).

Seemed like a huge miss on Apple's part, will the new ones address this?

*really tri-monitor - two external + the laptop screen, which I've been doing on a 2016 Intel MBP since 2016

Minor, but important, correction:

Python is a strongly typed language - all variables have a type associated with them and operations respect those types..

The debate here is between static and dynamic typing - the ability of a variable point to entities of different types or be constrained to only on (or a few) types.

This is slashdot, so it seems appropriate to ask this here.

It’s not rocket science to run your own secured servers for a simple database backed app. That’s literally what we all did in the 90s. Heck, I still do it on occasion from home.

Scaling, you say? Again, not rocket science. In fact, with nginx it’s even easier than it was back in the Apache days.

Hardware? We used to support 300k transactions a second on hardware that’s less powerful than a typical gaming PC.

Hosting? You don’t need it.

UI? You don’t need apps for this, a browser is just fine.

The only part you need to rely on outside providers for is your connection to the internet. I’m sure there are some Trump supporters out there who run ISPs that would gladly sell some bandwidth. And just to close the last scaling/reliability argument: get a few of these and distribute your severs.

It’s not rocket science.

(For the record, I fully support the deplatforming of Parler... I’m just shocked no one from that side of the political spectrum can setup a basic interactive web site).

Austin resident here... Texas loots its residents much more effectively than CA.

My property taxes have doubled in less that ten years. I pay more in taxes to Texas than I would in CA with a comparable income and house.

The “we don’t have a state income tax” line sounds good in theory, but in practice it’s a scam.

Then there’s also the fact that commercial real estate is taxed differently and at significantly lower rates than residential. There’s a reason Tesla and Oracle are moving here...

M-x vi-mode

My dad and his brother collected the Science Fiction series books that Star Conquerers was published in. I read them all, the it was SC that really got me hookedf. I still have an original copy and am looking forward to my kids reading it.

RIP Ben

We’ve had a Quest for about a year now and it’s the most used gaming platform in the house. The 6th grade set uses it preferentially. The 3rd grade set does to. And, it’s got the adults back into gaming.

The reason? The same one that made the Wii a hit: accessible, arcade-style games with minimal learning curves or no excessive narratives.

We just upgraded our gaming PC and the top requirement was VR (via the Quest Link).

I’ve been waiting my whole life for VR (ever since I saw Jaron Lanier in the 80s). From my perspective, it’s here and in its NES phase.

(Aside: yes, the Facebook connection sucks, but I’ve been scaling back FB use and just sacrificed my account for the Quest. Should be fun to see what their engagement algorithms do with that)

No. I was 100% the test prep. All the logic and math problems follow patterns. Once you know the algorithms to solve them and have practiced them a bit, it’s pretty easy to do well. The third time I took the test, I thought I remembered the algorithms well enough but it turned out I was rusty. A week of practice fixed that.

I know you want to believe that these tears are meritocratic, but they aren’t.

This. I have four sets of GRE scores - 2 from my senior year in college and two from 7 years later when I actually went back to grad school (CS PhD).

Why two each time? The first of each I went in cold and did OK. The second of each I prepped (using a book, not a course) and got near perfect in math/logic (English was mediocre both times, I hate memorizing word lists).

It’s not what you know, it’s whether or not you know how to take the test.

win32 is mostly an OO framework writing in a procedural language. Those HANDLEs that are ubiquitous are the object pointers, the function calls that take them as an argument are the methods. This was a very common style of C programming and essentially what the first versions of C++ were (when it was just a preprocessor).

It’s just saline solution. They’re going to start their “program” and talk about how they’re leading the world in vaccinations, infuriating Trump. Putin will offer the vaccine to us. Trump will buy a billion doses for $10B (so not other country can buy more and catch up to us). We’ll all get saline injections, Russia will be $10B richer.

Huh? I traveled extensively before Airbnb and never stayed in overpriced hotels. I also had no problem finding rental properties before the internet for longer term stays. Sure, Airbnb opened up a new type of lodging (anyone being able to rent out their place) but it’s not any cheaper than hotels and often is more of a hassle.

As for traditional BnBs? Those have always been a niche business and still are.