Let's be honest here, there was a long period of negotiation that spanned the Reagan - Clinton admins as well as approval from congress required. Everyone said it was a golden opportunity to open up a huge new market for US goods. I was doing a concentration in Chinese History in the late 90s and was flabbergasted at the very mainstream idea that this was going to be a win-win. I guess at the time they thought Russia was going to be a liberal democracy, too.
I suspect a lot of powerful people knew that it would hurt US workers, US industrial strength, were neutral on the latter, positive on the former, and very positive about profits (during their lifetime).
The theory of comparative advantage is that both countries will benefit, and I think these people put a lot of stock in their own theories. As I understand it, what they wanted was a situation where high skill US workers focus on design and innovation, meanwhile China does the manufacturing for all of it. Not a bad setup really, if you ignore the fact that China probably wants to cut the US out of that equation.
Its the cycle of life and the people at the top win either way.
They export all industry for short term profit, the people whose lives are destroyed are then exploited further(all good property is sold at fire sale prices, they are sold drugs to cope with the pain,are sent to war because the military is the only good employer) until they revolt, they elect a demagogue, disaster finally erupts among the population and the people causing this mess go elsewhere to wait it out(EU, Israel, New Zealand, the Bahamas etc.) until there has been enough of a destruction, industry is painfully rebuilt and then the cycle starts again. The people making the decisions never got hurt, never will suffer any consequences of their actions and will continue to play chess while everyone else plays checkers.
I know several people who play games like this. They have like 3-4 citizenships, they buy up as much property as they can, own assets and even give up their US citizenship for tax purposes to then intend to buy it back with an investor visa when they decide to retire in someplace like Montana.
There probably were probably a bunch of people who'd internalised the message that capitalism favours the wealthy party and weren't expecting what actually happened. But nevertheless the history books will record the period as one of generosity, and a successful international strategy that is to be emulated. It is hard to look at a billion+ people rising out of poverty and call it anything but a win.
I am quite certain that nobody ever claimed that banning 6-PPD was enough. I get your sentiment, it's totally not enough. Especially since it hasn't been banned, and to the extent progress has been made, it looks like they are slow-walking it.
The cuyahoga river caught fire in cleveland in 1969, the EPA was founded about 1.5 years later, the bill signed by Nixon. You are correct, we are not doing enough.
Its been 4 years since this was known, 8-10 since it was known that something in road runoff was fatal specifically to coho salmon. And basically nothing has been done. Sure tire companies or whatever are working on a fix. If I was "working on a fix" for 4+ years with no visible milestones I woudn't have a job. people love to complain about "overregulation" but 1) coho salmon fisheries are a multi billion dollar business and 2) those people are wrong, they've almost always been wrong, possibly even greedy and heartless. and if you happen to be religious they are complicit in destroying the gifts that God gave us.
Wow. Against my better judgment I will keep to the rules of this site and assume that was a good faith question.
Rust is already a good systems language and is getting adoption. D is a great c++-alike already and for 20 (?) years.
There is a mature C++ toolchain for any processor and OS you can imagine.
Simply adopting a different C++ compiler or a newer version of one you are already using can take many months for a large company. Migration to even Carbon would probably take 10x as much effort.
Carbonlang is meant to have a seamless migration path, that is, flip the compiler on the same codebase for starters, no changes. It's not like TS/JS as a superset langauge, but you can have both at the file level and compile side-by-side.
First there is no Carbonlang, it is called Carbon.
Second, it is mostly a Google thing for their C++ use, it is still mostly a frontend implementation at this point, with semantics yet to be fully defined.
They are also open that Carbon is basically an experiment.
Frontend in a compiler, is what converts the text code representation of the language into some intermediary format, usually a graph or intermediate language, that is than further processed for type checking and other semantic analysis, suffering other transformations in the process, until fed into the backend, which takes it from there for the further phases required to generate machine code.
I don't understand why you provided that link to goldbolt though? What was it supposed to demonstrate?
Also, you said that one need a backend for a frontend (to be useful I guess). Do you mean to say that the "Carbon" frontend does not have any backend to work with?
No worries, I see some interest there, hence pointing out some literature on the subject, and the LLVM tutorial, as means for getting a better understanding than through plain HN comments.
That seems a very elegant solution to the problem of fair income taxes. Just don't tax income, that way you can't have a disparity in income tax.
What should we tax instead? Capital seems to me a viable choice. It would be a lot more work for everyone, though.
My proposal (in the GP of the post you responded to) was to tax consumption, i.e., a national sales tax or something like it.
> Capital seems to me a viable choice.
What would count as "capital"?
Whatever the answer is, this would seem to me to have the same issue as income taxes have: you would be taxing production instead of consumption, hence lowering the incentive to produce.
I feel like Amiga was never really alive in the US. I never knew anyone who owned one, or a 520st. Schools were almost exclusively Apple IIe, later some IIgs before Mac SE and LC. And of course PC. IIgs was more comparable to a Commodore 128 but it ran all the Apple II software. Sometimes you'd see a Mac II or SE/30 in an administrator's office running a screensaver.
It's one of those rare cases where being in the US or Europe gives an uniquely skewed perspective.
It's astonishing to think that the Amiga hardware was done in 1984 and the A1000 came out in 1985 - the same year the NES released in the US! It took Nintendo until 1991 to come up with something roughly comparable power-wise.
From what I understand in the US the Amiga slowly petered out without never truly taking off. In Europe the A1000 never was a thing, but we had four years of the press talking about this mythical monster of a machine and its custom chipset. Then in 1989/90 all of a sudden everyone bought A500s to play Kick Off and Speedball II. That 89/92 period was glorious.
At least in southern Europe Wolfenstein wasn't regarded as a killer app at all, it barely made an impact. Doom and Wing Commander most definitely were, though.
For another data point, as kids in Greece we made fun of our friend who first switched to a PC, (we had Atari STs). Even after he got a Sound Blaster and a VGA card we still had better games like Kick Off and Dungeon Master. But one day he invited us to his house and showed as Wolfenstein. I distinctly remember the feeling. It was over!
Over half of the Amigas sold worldwide were the 500 model and, in Europe, most people with an Amiga had the 500 or 1200 at home for gaming so you would see it when you visited.
The Amiga was less popular in the US and used more for graphics, sound and video for TV and movies on the 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000, and with the Video Toaster, but you wouldn't see one as often when you visited people at home.
It is very nice to see US-targeted media use F. All climate related news seems to use C and I'd bet that 95%+ of Americans don't know 2 degrees C = 3.6 degrees F. So most Americans are underestimating the effects of climate change by almost a factor of 2. And those are the ones that believe in it.
I think the US should move to SI but as long as we haven't (and have actually taken steps backwards during the Bush administration) as far as I am concerned it is journalistic malpractice if not active disinformation to report temperature changes in C in US media.
> F is a much better unit than C for everyday use.
People say this, and it confuses me.
Basically the only difference between the two is the absolute numbers and the resolution.
Regarding resolution, for me the difference between, say 22 C and 23 C isn’t consistently noticeable - it depends on what I’m wearing, my recent activity level, humidity, etc. having a finer resolution - i.e. between 72 and 73 F isn’t that useful. That is to say, I’d change my plans if it were say 8 C outside instead of 18 C, but I wouldn’t if it were 17 instead of 18.
Regarding absolute numbers - sure with Fahrenheit you don’t need to use negative numbers as much, but apparently you still need to across much of the US, and dealing with negative numbers is… fine? Having generally smaller numbers (i.e. most of Earth has natural temperatures of - 40 to +40) is probably better? And having that obvious distinction of when water freezes makes some sense maybe?
I honestly don’t thing either is particularly better for everyday use, it’s just that a lot of people are habituated to one or the other.
F is nice b/c it's pretty much on a 0-100 scale. 0 is really cold, 100 is really hot. Anything below 0 or about 100 is pretty much death without proper care.
The corresponding range for C is -50C to +50C which covers virtually all human experience. 20-25C is typical indoor comfortable temperature. And veering from it either above or below makes things uncomfortable. 0C is freezing, below which hypothermia risk increases rapidly.
> but apparently you still need to across much of the US, and dealing with negative numbers is… fine?
Honestly, you don't really need to, at least on a day-to-day basis. I grew up somewhere where it got <0F every year for like a week at a time. You will just colloquially refer to it as "below zero" which roughly translates into "yea f** that, we aren't going outside".
The only time I ever really remembered distinguishing between degrees below 0 was midwestern trash talk between e.g. IL, WI, MN, and ND. (If I remember correctly, ND wins on wind chill)
I've used C all my life, but moved to the US lately and trying to start using F.
Probably the easiest measurement change to get used to. There's very little difference in actual practice.
C makes it easier to reason regarding freezing/boiling - it's simpler to think about if it's going to snow by relating it to 0 then 32. But that's about the only difference in day to day use I can think of.
I haven't heard any reason to prefer F over C however (unlike Feet for example).
> Probably the easiest measurement change to get used to.
here is a counter-anecdotal evidence I moved to the US 25 years ago, still hate F with passion
I gave it a serious go. After trying to get used to F for 20-some years, I went back and set all my thermometers and online weather maps to Celsius.
Farenheit is an absurdly bad scale choice. It is needlessly granular for everyday use and feels wholly arbitrary.
32 degrees is freezing, so how far is 19 F from freezing? 32-19 ... ummm 13 degrees and that is as far as 32+19 ... ummm 51 degrees ... what are we talking about? -10 and +10 Celsius ...
I still don't know if 120F would burn my hands or not, if 150 F scalds or not. I have no sense about temperatures above 100F (and that one only because it is a threshold for fever)
I use both F and C (I grew up exclusively using F, but now I have a lot of experience with both), and I prefer C.
It's more handy for cold weather because freezing is 0° (which is way less awkward than 32°), and it's more handy for cooking because boiling is 100° (which is way less awkward than 212°).
It's also nice that the human body temperature is a round 37° (rather than 98.6°).
For warmer weather, F and C are about the same to me. It's easy to remember that 20°C is perfect, 30°C is hot, and 40°C is miserable — just as it is easy to remember the equivalent 70°F, 85°F, and 100°F.
So I have found that C is better for day-to-day use, even though it's not what I grew up with and I have drastically less experience with it. All I needed was a little time to get used to it.
It’s only boiling at sea level. See, this is why it’s such a poor unit. It relies on a rare environmental condition. Fine for the lab but not everyday use.
Having lived in regions that use both, I have to say that there’s not much difference in everyday experience once you’ve gotten used to it. I don’t think I’d like to be dealing with Kelvin (the actual SI temperature unit) on an everyday basis, though. Or maybe I’d get used to it just as easily as switching between C and F.
yen an pound are at historic lows vs dollar.
Dollar vs euro is at historic average.
Let me guess, you'an Austrian/freshwater econ fan. Know theres a problem and what it is before you see the patient.
companies in top or even middle tier don't do this. saying you work for a faang+ is an important part of compensation even if benefits and salary are the same (they aren't).
I literally just applied for a role at Callaway that did this - It is more common than you think. I've also seen it done for NBC Universal, Stubhub, and large satellite companies - just off the top of my head and own experience.
I suspect a lot of powerful people knew that it would hurt US workers, US industrial strength, were neutral on the latter, positive on the former, and very positive about profits (during their lifetime).