Easy, don't tax so much that it becomes ineffective. There is a sweet spot to find.
Honestly, I dislike smoking as much as anyone else but I frankly oppose the way Australia is taxing cigarettes and alcohol. These are sin taxes. They are high to deter people from doing things they want to do. That's overreach.
Taxes should aim to cover externalities. That's fair. Your choice forces a burden on the collectivity which it's trying to recoup. Above that, that's just coercion and paternalism. Plus it disproportionally affects the poor but I guess the moral police pushing for this kind of taxes sees that as a benefit.
>Easy, don't tax so much that it becomes ineffective. There is a sweet spot to find.
The taxation level that maximizes revenue or minimizes harmful noncompliance never satisfies the moralizing people who wanted the thing you're discussing (whatever it is) punitively taxed in the first place.
Have a look at the earlier discussion. Plenty of people have moral motivations, hence the call for banning, rather than taxing. Moral in this case means: "I know better what's good for poor people than they do".
I also experience this. We were lucky enough to do a three week holiday around Japan, which felt very long. Three weeks of getting up, going to work, and while I enjoy what I do, it flashes by.
I think the driver for me is routine. The more routine, the faster everything seems to fly by.
Yep routine is the opposite of novelty. I'm curious what it would be like to work while travelling, if time would continue to feel stretched. I'd love to try the digital nomad lifestyle for a bit.
Haha, now that's DEFINITELY true. The amount of machines some people own, especially machines that revolve entirely around sampling, but amount to being essentially 500 dollar toys is astonishing....
People just want their quirky single purpose gadgets back. Tech got kind of boring after a laptop and phone do everything.
I kind of want the device in the OP, assuming it's cheap enough. Not because I think it will be more productive, but because it would be fun to pull out a Nintendo DS shaped device to note tasks down.
I find it so hard to reconcile using Chat-GPT to write some Terraform code which hallucinates the way of using the timer provider, tells me that it's right because it "simulated" the rest on an AWS staging environment that it has access to (can I see it? No.) then when confronted with the evidence that this doesn't work in a GitHub issue tells me I've found the "smoking gun" of evidence with what I read in the news articles and my LinkedIn feed about how programmers are out of a job in six months.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here, is anyone else getting this?
As an SRE, I completely agree.
I've had some more success with claude code recently. I use it as a fancy find and replace, if I explain it in detail what I did in one file it can repeat it in a dozen other files. Which is super handy, like once every 2 days, when I have to work in a legacy monorepo.
Whenever I try to use it to generate code from nothing I end up losing more time than winning.
I've owned the domain name richardson.co.nz for some 25 years now and since then someone started a Richardson's realestate and registered richardsons.co.nz (note the additional "s").
I left the catch-all on my domains email going for a year or two before I had to disable it. The sheer amount of house blueprints, sensitive information about transfers etc was overwhelming.
"Private personal space + collaboration friendly areas to be available as needed" has been the recommendation of basically every study I've seen on how to maximize software developer productivity.
Especially useful for phone calls -- don't need to hunt for an empty phone booth or book a room.
I used to have my own office working for an older industrial company. Now that I work for a tech company, it's all open concept. I have no problem focusing, but taking calls, especially private ones, is a pain.
In my opinion that's what makes Villeneuve's so great. For example, I think almost any other director would have had an info dump about what Mentat's are in the Dune universe, motivations and they they are important. Instead in Villeneuve's version, you simply see the results. For those watching the film without the context you simply chalk it up to a weird and wonderful way that the universe works. For those that have read the book, you get to do the information dump about Mentat's on your poor unexpecting wife who's watching the film with you.
This embodies show don't tell and it works amazingly.
> This embodies show don't tell and it works amazingly.
That's not "show, don't tell". That's "you need the companion book".
A masterclass in "Show, don't tell" is the intro to Pixar's "Up". If you haven't seen it, you absolutely must.
"Show, don't tell" isn't stuff that is lost on the uninitiated. It's stuff that is masterfully communicated without the need for corny expository dialogue.
Villeneuve's mentats are like an adult joke in a kid film.
The films don't really give themselves a need to explain the mentats beyond "they're good at maths".
I do think they could have done better at showing that mentats are capable of huge feats of computation and planning and take the place of advanced computers, and that wouldn't need exposition. The "answer a numerical question with unnecessary decimal places" trope was worn when Commander Data did it for the millionth time. Moreover, it was something that seemed like a simple multiplication: something normal humans who are good at mental arithmetic can do. Having Thufir do the eye thing to deduce the exact location of the hunter-killer agent based on a huge stream of data would have been a good way to do it, for example. That would have made it clearer that Thufir (and by extension Piter via the lip tattoo) was more than a uniformed wedding planner and is actually a powerful, indispensable and dangerously skilled superhuman.
Likewise having someone lament that, say, an ornithopter or carryall could use an autopilot and someone reply "ha, yes, and get the planet nuked from orbit by the Great Families for harbouring a thinking machine, not a good plan" would have shown the approximate limits on technology leading to the need for mentats.
Not showing that didn't really affect the story they did choose tell (i.e. one that, for example, doesn't ever mention or allude to the Butlerian Jihad), but I think they could have added just a little more useful depth without it just being superfluous book details added for the book fans to notice.
One wonders if they left out the war on thinking machines as being at risk of breaking the suspension of disbelief for being too (pre-!)derivative of the Matrix and being overly close to current zeitgeist with LLMs dominating every conversation.
You don't need to know that the character is a mentat. The story works perfectly well without that knowledge. But if you do then it adds a second layer to the scene. Much like watching something like the early Simpson's is even better if you have a grounding in the novels and movies that they're parodying but isn't required to get the show.
> A masterclass in "Show, don't tell" is the intro to Pixar's "Up". If you haven't seen it, you absolutely must.
I have seen it quite some time ago, please point out some clips where you feel the show don't tell is executed well.
Alcohol appears to be going in the same direction.