Malan is a "Professor of the Practice". That means teaching only. There may be some kind of job security for such teaching roles, but it's not a tenured nor tenure-track title. Usually just a fixed contract you have to repeatedly renew like visiting professor (but possibly with less degree requirements).
1. A lot of these property values wouldn’t be 2M if current owners had to pay the taxes. Prop 13 directly incentivizes home owners to (a) never sell and (b) block new housing in their neighborhood that might increase supply.
2. Prop 13 directly incentivizes cities to court Google/FB/Apple to come in. With Prop 13 limiting access to property taxes, most cities look to sales and business tax income to fill in the difference.
3. It’s not all or nothing like ”we need Prop 13 or seniors get kicked out of their homes!” Prop 13 is unique in that it blindly exempts large businesses and wealthy folks who can afford to pay, not just folks who need help.
Other regions (e.g. Boston area) address this with targeted property tax breaks for vulnerable communities, and California would be better served with a well-tested, reliable solution like that.
But that’s hard to implement because California ballot props are wildly difficult to get rid of.
I feel like this gives an overly rosy picture of the past—
The need to serve Paradigm 2 existed all over the place in the plain html days.
It’s just instead of having standards-based languages for Paradigm 2, we used to embed janky Flash SWFs and Java applets, were dependent on single vendors to patch zero-days in closed source code, and had to pay hundreds of dollars for licenses for developer tools.
Today’s Paradigm 2 now has multiple competing implementations, open standards, and powerful DOM inspectors in almost every web browser to tear apart any modern Paradigm 2 app you come across.
I think today’s Paradigm 2 gives more power to users than the Paradigm 2 of the past :)
Absolutely agree with this. The Internet-as-appplication-platform has never been better, from a developer's perspective.
From a user's perspective, it's maybe a bit more nuanced... I'm tired of websites trying to get around my adblocker, and everyone attempting to enable desktop notifications, for example. If I'm trying to read someone's document they've published, I'd like it to just be a document, thanks. But, increasingly, "Paradigm 2" webapps like Spotify and Google docs are as good or better than "rich" desktop apps.
The "notifications" request REALLY pisses me off to no end. A simple "Subscribe" button (if the notifications API is present) would be enough to trigger the request. I wish I could just turn it off all around in the browser... Looking now... Nope, at least in chrome, cannot just disable the feature.
Also agreed, many web apps these days are as good or better than desktop. I actually have worked and am working on applications that replace their desktop counterparts. They're practically easier to scale, tend to have tooling to handle window sizes better, customization is easier and imho just nicer to write against. Better still if you don't have to support legacy browsers. Most browsers today are supporting modules and async import. Still using Webpack and Babel for JSX, but really close to a point where I'd just assume write for esm and have a server-side translation for JSX on demand (cached).
Funny, I think you actually pinned that interpretation yourself - the post was meant to discuss use cases of the web today and doesn't mention the past at all! Regardless, I see your points, but I'd rather compare today to an idealized future and discuss how we'd prefer it to be.
This is absolutely an important issue. Brian Bondy from Mozilla's platform engineering team put together an awesome little website called Code Firefox (http://codefirefox.com/) with a series of 1-minute videos that teach you everything you need to know to get started. :D
Tufts had a professor who was nationally recognized for incredible intro CS lessons: https://www.computer.org/profiles/benjamin-hescott
They denied him tenure: https://tuftsdaily.com/news/2017/08/29/professor-computer-sc...