Governor Newsom refers to California as a "nation state" about once a week, in case the author was wondering. He's used that language quite often.
I'm totally ok with it, so long as the Federal government remains impotent and balks at California's efforts to manage itself, while simultaneously being run by the party of "states rights." Purely in spite of the lack of leadership and outright derision for our needs as a state, regardless of being home to over a tenth of the population and being our breadbasket and technological power house.
I know not all Californians agree on everything, but I think we can all come together and recognize that we do have to look out for our state as if it was an independent nation these days. Because the Feds aren't going to help us when we need it, just tax us and tell us we can't have proportional representation.
California has proportional representation in the House of Representatives.
California used to have proportional and geographic representation internally in a bicameral state legislature. Then came the Supreme Court's one man one vote ruling. Now southern California has pure proportional representation and gets all the fresh water it demands from northern California, environmental concerns be damned.
I don't agree with that categorization of water issues in CA, but that's off topic.
And having proportional seating in the House isn't particularly meaningful, when it takes both the Senate and the Presidency to drive policy. Dirt doesn't vote, and frankly I don't see any argument for less than proportional representation that isn't predicated on the notion that some people are more equal than others. Any weighting of the voices can be done in the debate forum, but at the ballot box the only fair way to distribute power is equally. That goes for all levels of our representative democracy.
No system is perfect, it's just about making one that's more perfect. And I would strongly argue that our bicameral government designed by slave owners 250 years ago has both been continuously eroded (they never planned for the Executive and Congress to be in cahoots!), and could be drastically improved by expanding on the 9th/10th amendments and being reformed into a unicameral legislature and abolishing the electoral college.
> frankly I don't see any argument for less than proportional representation that isn't predicated on the notion that some people are more equal than others
Consider two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. That's why the Senate exists.
Good thing we're not sheep or wolves. That's why I alluded to Orwell. The pigs from Animal Farm are a better metaphor.
The senate doesn't exist to protect the will of sheep at the hands of wolves. It exists because 250 years ago, the edit: New Jersey delegation wasn't willing to relinquish its equal power at the Constitutional Convention to a state like Virginia. Its never been about sheep and wolves, it's been about the political power of a political class that sought to concentrate as much of it as possible for themselves at the expense of others.
If you want a better way to look at it, it's a dozen wolves convincing a dozen sheep that the wolves should have twice the voting power on dinner because they have a bigger grazing area.
How does the senate stop the strong from trampling the weak? Who are the strong and who are the weak? Are African Americans weak? Are poor people weak? How do the delineations of state lines interact or align with boundaries of power?
If there's a proposal that Nevada should be the nuclear dump site of the nation, how would the structure of the house or senate stop that kind of thing? What if Nevada is just a trading item between two powerful parties? What does the constitution even say about this?
Now we are seeing a situation where California flexes its economic capacity during an international emergency. What are other states supposed to do in light of that? It's either a central force steps in to stop logistical contest based on morally and strategically questionable context (which state has more money), or...? What about the structure of congress speaks to this?
What Gavin Newsom is implying here, IMO, is that there's responsibility (and thus power) being left on the table. Due to this vacuum, even Jeff Bezos or Jack Ma could step in. What about the structure of congress speaks to this?
The states with more population have more votes in the House, meaning they are the strong. The Senate stops Florida and California from eating Rhode Island for dinner.
> If there's a proposal that Nevada should be the nuclear dump site of the nation, how would the structure of the house or senate stop that kind of thing? What if Nevada is just a trading item between two powerful parties? What does the constitution even say about this?
> What Gavin Newsom is implying here, IMO, is that there's responsibility (and thus power) being left on the table. Due to this vacuum, even Jeff Bezos or Jack Ma could step in. What about the structure of congress speaks to this?
And how do the delineations of American states align to the delineations of the most salient lines of power in the US, such as money? How does it provide balance?
I just talked about a scenario where the negotiation is between two parties and the proposal is a national site for nuclear waste in Nevada. And that's not a very nationally energizing issue, so that wouldn't even be a very interesting priority to be traded on.
I then talked about a scenario where during an international emergency its money that talks, even Jack Ma's money. What does having equal senate votes matter here?
We seem to be safeguarding some old boundary that fails to negotiate with the real lines of power. Party and Money.
this isn't true. Since the house has been capped, it hasn't grown or hasn't been redistributed based on population changes. A person in Wymoing has more representation than a person in California.
No, they're right. We have 53/435 (12.18%) of the House, which is roughly equal to our proportion of the total population (40mm/330mm, 12.12%, numbers will change with the census).
The "at least one" rep has a bigger impact on some of the medium/small size states. My point was more on the senate/electoral college.
I wish there was a better method for deducting state taxes from federal, especially with Trumps repeated "States should handle this problem on their own" stance when 85% of my taxes are going to federal govt.
If this were true we wouldn't have done so much research into programming languages over the last 50 years.
PL design is not a problem to solve, it's the study of the way to express problems and their solutions. As long as their are new problems and ways to solve them, we'll find new ways to improve PL designs.
No, it's just that a prolific rust contributor made a blog post and then a follow up and things have been heated in the community a bit (I lurk a bit).
The fuss isn't over what the syntax should be, but whether it should be changed at all. The proposal isn't even an RFC, just a blog post and some discussion threads. I think the proposal made good points about the ergonomics of error handling. I think the community might just be a little stir crazy with the quarantine, and talking about a syntax change that upends the much loved Result idiom rustled some feathers.
FWIW it is a purely syntactical change that adds sugar, the underlying mechanism does not change. The "hacks" for not having exceptions are strictly superior to having exceptions, at least in my opinion because the error monad is both opt-in on the caller side and opt-out on the callee, it does not include non local returns (errors don't cause the program to jump up the stack, like C++ exceptions, or any need to pass down the exception handler or pass up a continuation), they support all sorts of wonderful combinators that exceptions don't play nicely with, and unless explicitly disabled by a binary author the stack will always unwind and RAII patterns observed. The issues with exceptions are well documented.
I don't really want to go through the laundry list of issues I have because none are critical, just the software is very rough around the edges on Linux. It just feels less than flushed out, and I've had a million little problems and bugs that I've reported and never heard anything back (as a paying user!).
I can't find anything suggesting they're spending more than $100mm on their ongoing litigation, the technology isn't particularly novel or complex, is the rest just going to compliance or to pay for previous commitments?
Just seems like an absurd amount of money. That's like one year of revenue for them.
AirBnb is in an existential crisis right now... it might take years before their market recovers...
It makes absolutely sense to have enough money to weather this storm....
Even firing people costs money... even just keeping their lights on, and service at bay, (with no new features) costs money....
People that usually comment like the above are either: Young and inexperienced, or just not don't have real life experience on running a business. I used to think like that when I was young, but after some years of experience your view on things changes and becomes more nuanced.
In general, it’s a great question: why does it take such extreme overhead to run a digital company that’s like Craigslist with better pictures. I understand it’s more than that but it’s still a valid philosophical question to ask it there’s a way to run it with say 1,200 employees? Or maybe there’s not.
It’s analogous to the size of government and this trend of doing less with more.
Craigslist has 50 employees. I know there’s a ton of counter arguments to minimize my point but surely there’s a third way between 50 and 12,000.
Craigslist is only the listing part. Airbnb does listings, but it also does booking management, cancellations, payments and refunds, host support, etc as well.
Plus Airbnb has reps all over the world helping hosts. If they had ten staff (photographers, sales, etc) in every city that has more than a million population that'd account for more than 5000 people alone.
Not sure how much "helping" of hosts Airbnb does, at least when it's really needed. They quick and thick with platitudes but thin on support when push comes to shove as they almost always side with guests.
I'm a superhost with only 5 listings one has over 100 reviews with 4.98 average rating. So far Airbnb has remotely adjudicated 2 guest disputes (on my 4 years of operations) that cost me $5k. Not trivial.
That's subjective though. The guests who raised the disputes presumably think Airbnb did a great job.
Dispute resolution is essentially marketing. When a host tells people they lost a dispute most people don't care because they're not going to be in that position. Most people can't afford to buy property to let on Airbnb. Even it they are in a position to buy and let a property, so long as Airbnb have more supply than demand then they're happy - they're getting every booking they can. Having another host in an area that already has hosts doesn't add much to their business. (If you were the only host in the area then you'd be much more likely to win disputes.)
When a guest tells people they lost then everyone can imagine being in that position, and might stop wanting to use Airbnb. That has a measurable impact on Airbnb's revenue.
The key thing to remember with any company that runs both sides of a marketplace is that they care about themselves more than either party in a dispute. I have no idea about the numbers, but if Airbnb side with hosts more than 10% of the time I'd be absolutely amazed. In popular areas it's probably less than 5%.
I agree completely with all you say, particularly the incentives to favor guest outcomes. There is a rising tide of hosts scarred by Airbnb here in Bali. The market is (was) ripe for alternatives.
I think the question is what are they going to do with $1B though? Like why would they ever need that much money? I have the same question about a bunch of unicorns like Lyft and Uber. Their core offering hasn't changed all that much in years. My only guess is that it's like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where they have spend 10% of operations and 90% on running their complaint department.
When you write it like that, they sound generous. In reality, they tried to pass the hit for Coronavirus related cancellations to the hosts and then realized they were in for legal trouble if they followed through.
Iirc they passed the costs from the end user to the hosts by enforcing a much more lenient refund policy than what many hosts had put on their listings?
> Guests who cancel are automatically refunded according to YOUR cancellation policy—unless the cancellation qualifies as an extenuating circumstance or falls under our Guest Refund Policy.
Exactly. And they were not legally allowed to do that. Which is why they are reimbursing hosts. They were flooded with cancellations and did right by the renter, but wanted the host to take the hit, when in reality the broker (AirBnb) is liable.
Yes, particularly those with "strict" policy which was originally no refund, then Airbnb degraded it to 50% refund if cancelled before 14 days, then degraded to 100% refund if the guest had an "extenuating circumstance", then a full refund when virus-related things were added to the ECs.
Might you or someone else be able to elaborate? Did they simply tell hosts that they were responsible for refunding the money or was it that hosts were on the hook for AirBnBs percentage of the bookings?
Why would they do this? I thought this is what travel insurance is for, at least in Norway I think they are liable for the bill when the government deems an area unsafe to visit
It’s not just that. Being flush with cash causes engineering bloat. You start chasing blue sky trendy ideas (AirBnb was reportedly doing chatbot for a while, ala Volara.) or chasing more and marginal gains on existing products. It’s inevitable, when money is cheap.
The vulnerabilities of this business model laid bare. If you're a business like Airbnb you have to be global, otherwise a competitor will be and they'll eat you up. You need solid in country representation otherwise competitors with a deeper regional focus (even smaller companies) will have better offerings and eat your market share. It seems being global and local is possible with 13,000 employees.... except when tourism crashes 90+%.
And comments like this usually come from people with a warped concept of money and funding. But it doesn't help to comment on the nature of a poster because you don't know much about them.
The comment is not on the necessity of money but the amount. I legitimately can not fathom why AirBnb needs that much money to run a service business on top of a custom app and website when the fundamental complexity of the business (the particular nuances of local markets, their regulatory/compliance needs, etc) has always been a second thought to their management and trawling for articles, it does not seem like they need that much money to continue. Particularly since regulatory bodies and courts have closed worldwide.
They are a middleman but a very complex one with what I would guess are enormous legal costs. Paypal has the same amount of employees. Uber has twice the amount. Could they exist with fewer employees? I'm sure they can but that means less people employed.
This is something I've struggled with as well conceptually. The company has 12000+ employees and is essentially an online marketplace.
I mean at what point will people stop valuing a business like that like a tech company and start valuing it like a rental company? Because the defining feature of technology is essentially low marginal cost at scale, and these companies just seem to keep growing in their human labour.
This seems generally true for a lot of companies in the "sharing economy" space.
I think a good counter example is Etsy. They're like an old dog in the startup unicorn space. They took an existing market and commoditized it. Grew too fast behind a sneaky CEO and well-publicized tech culture. Went IPO, got sued, fired the CEO, let go off a bunch of staff working on projects outside their core business. And since then have been kinda cruising for a while earning a lot of revenue and keeping their business stable. They have <1000 employees to do all of this which seems like a reasonable number.
> Because the defining feature of technology is essentially low marginal cost at scale
Outside of the current crisis I think this holds true doesn't it? I'd be curious to compare how many employees AirBnb has per bedroom compared to a hotel chain (and then factor in that they are still in the process of scaling).
The issue now means they have pretty much zero revenue, but that's kind of beside the point. I'd venture to guess they can manage costs better than a hotel since they don't actually own any buildings, or employ the folks that maintain those buildings. As far as property costs, they take a one time hit on cancellations.
I feel like it’s unfair to suggest they stop valuing the company like a tech company while simultaneously calling them nothing more than an online marketplace.
Google suggests Marriot has 176,000 employees, and Hilton 169,000. So AirBnB is massively smaller, still.
Underestimating employee counts is a phenomenon similar to underestimating software rewrite costs/time. The happy path seems simple... but then there's thousands of marginal features or requirements that have come up over the years that make the thing more viable that all take more people and more time.
AirBnb doesn't operate any properties. I'd bet 90% of Marriott and Hilton staff are running hotels. Not applying machine learning to the check-in process.
Its understandable why a global hotel chain would have so many employees. Each location needs management staff, supervisors, front desk attendants, housekeepers, etc. Makes sense why AirBnB is so much smaller. It's still curious why they have so many employees. Probably a lot of regional support staff but idk.
Essentially think of it as a lifeline for a year, they are prepared for things to be rough for a while. Now if the virus persists and things are still as crazy now as late into the summer/fall all these hosts who bought a few houses for airbnb rentals begin to lose the houses to defaults. Millions laid off don't have money to travel for hotels or airbnb rentals and those that do are afraid due to virus concerns. What seemed like a total bulletproof business model is falling apart. But that's if things stay bad for awhile. I truly hope not but the loan keeps them solvent.
When you're large enough it's easy to hire people to gain a 0.01% lift in metrics and still come out ahead. At least on paper/dashboards but that's usually all that promotions and budget allocation is based off of. Downsizing after that is hard and expensive.
So Airbnb has tried to unsuccessfully pivot to a payments infra company for several years now. Notable acquisitions for this effort include acqui-hiring ChangeTip, a bitcoin micropayments platform, and Tilt, a social payments platform. But Square and CashApp are way ahead of the curve. I suspect there's internal political problems.
From what I understand and looking at the supported opcodes [0] io_uring allows submitting certain "system calls" (and some other auxiliary operations you would normally expect in an async API) asynchronously. So, if you can interact with your device driver using those system calls, then you should be able to do so. I am personally not familiar with Linux, so I am unsure if those system calls are sufficient for normal operation, but it lacks ioctl, so it is not sufficient for total replacement in all cases.
I don't know the answer to that question, but if you are developing an embedded project (and especially if it's a raspberry PI) you can mmap() the hardware I2C registers to userspace memory and use them directly.
You will have to basically write the I2C driver in userspace and it won't be portable but it's not that hard and it will make for very low latency I2C communication. I had to do this once for latency.
I don't know anything either, but I assume not? With a device driver you'd be handling interrupts directly by registering an interrupt service routine and all that good stuff. io_uring is a user->kernel API because userspace doesn't handle those interrupts directly. Instead, device driver ISRs fill buffers and what have you, then kernel notifies user via io_uring that data is ready.
As neighbour says, io_uring is for really high performance (as in high throughput) stuff, so… not I2C !
But you can still want async I/O with an I2C device, of course, as in you don't want to block a thread to wait on a message. And for that I believe you can still use good old select/epoll as usual on your I2C device file, and as a consequence also just use your favourite async I/O framework of the day (libevent, node.js, what have you).
I think the tone of this post is insufferable, and the arguments have little merit presented this way.
The alternative suggested is also non ideal, since array declaration/indexing is semantically different than a function call, not all languages have method calls, not all languages have postfix method calls, I can think of a few ways to break that syntax (what if the type has a call operator and indexing operator?), and it is hypocritical.
The problem with <> is that they are used elsewhere. If you use [] by sacrificing arrays, () will cause problems because they're used elsewhere.
The lowest friction solution would be to introduce a new two character bracket. How about <: or :>? (: :)? I don't know but writing about it in that tone won't get anyone to do something different.
4K makes cheaply animated content look cheap. Sometimes that's ok, other times viewers want more.
Another example outside anime is Fantasia 2000 on Disney+. That kind of content requires high fidelity. Disney+ looks and sounds bad and it harms the content.
I think it's fantastic Netflix is doing what they can to make fidelity a competitive advantage for content creators, especially the ones that can't spend as much on it.
I'm totally ok with it, so long as the Federal government remains impotent and balks at California's efforts to manage itself, while simultaneously being run by the party of "states rights." Purely in spite of the lack of leadership and outright derision for our needs as a state, regardless of being home to over a tenth of the population and being our breadbasket and technological power house.
I know not all Californians agree on everything, but I think we can all come together and recognize that we do have to look out for our state as if it was an independent nation these days. Because the Feds aren't going to help us when we need it, just tax us and tell us we can't have proportional representation.