I tended to disagree on this discussion in the past, but I increasingly no longer do. For example, let's have a look at the new `implicit lifetime capturing` syntax:
fn f(x: &()) -> impl Sized + use<'_> { x }
It's weird. It's full of sigils. It's not what the Rust team envisioned before a few key members left.
The only parts of this that I (as someone who has dabbled in rust, but barely interacted with explicit lifetimes, ever) am confused by is
"&()".
And I assume it is similar to some kind of implicit capture group in cpp ("[&]") and "`_", which is a lifetime of some kind. I don't know what the "use" keyword does, but it's not a sigil, and "->", "impl Sized", and "{"/"}" are all fairly self-explanatory.
It's a reference to a unit type. unit is pretty useless (like void in Java). It's sort of a silly thing you wouldn't do in real production code, just whoever wrote this example picked a type that is short to type, would be understood by a Rust programmer, and doesn't require any external context.
It would need to be &u8, as without a reference, you won't have any captured lifetimes, and therefore it wouldn't serve as an example for the capturing lifetime feature. &u8 is also a mostly pointless type in reality.
My pet theory is that we could solve 80% of society's problems by providing affordable housing. Most other things that plague us are just symptoms of this one issue.
I’m a gigantic believer in this and will hop on the nearest soapbox at any chance to evangelize it. High housing prices are literally destroying civilization, pricing the next generation out of existence and fueling every form of resentment.
Home equity or the future. Choose one.
If we keep pricing the next generation out of existence eventually the pyramid will collapse due to population decline. But I suppose the older homeowners living on it now will be dead so they don’t care.
Houses should not be investment vehicles and almost required for retirement as they are now. Doing so means they need to increase at a rate salaries can never catch up with. It makes zero sense. We tell the younger generation they need to buy housing to retire then lock them out in areas they can have a career. It’s sick behavior. Our society basically deserves to fail at this point if we don’t fix this.
It’s mostly about home equity, and this is a very common collective behavior called a cartel.
It’s illegal for corporations to do this in most cases, but individuals certainly can. Housing is probably the main area where they do, with neighborhoods forming organic cartels to restrict supply to raise price.
As with all cartels the solution is to break it up or take away its ability to restrict production using lawfare and other means.
Clearly that’s not what I meant, and you seem to have figured that out yourself. I meant the common good of society. The greater good, if that makes more sense.
I was at risk of falling into that trap. When we purchased our current home we did so within a few months of $major_national_shitty_homebuilder having closed the real estate transaction and submitting plans to raze a huge forested natural area directly behind our home and develop almost 100 new townhomes.
It was easy to miss that in the due diligence.
And it was really frustrating to experience. The development company cut so many corners that our own neighborhood had to engage several times with the city council and development bodies because their water management was threatening our properties. During construction of the water infrastructure they backflowed a toxic concentration of chemicals into the water supply. Their retention pond design is absolute garbage and while it was inspected and approval has already caused problems. They forgot to account for water going downhill while making assumptions about water volume that a week of heavy rain already invalidated.
We need the housing though, so it’s good we have that. I’m not sure we need more housing in the form of townhomes that cost $700,000+ each but at least it’s higher density than single family residences, which are killing the housing market in their own way.
Would just be nice if home building firms weren’t such a menace.
>We need the housing though, so it’s good we have that. I’m not sure we need more housing in the form of townhomes that cost $700,000+ each but at least it’s higher density than single family residences, which are killing the housing market in their own way.
An optimistic theory is that new high-value housing leads to good outcomes for everyone: developers make a better profit, the area becomes more appealing, wealthier families can upgrade to the new houses, the local government gets more real estate taxes, and the previous houses of the relocators can be bought by less wealthy families (repeat this last step down the wealth scale).
You'd need to build a lot more around the houses. Many "bad neighborhoods" in various countries started as affordable housing projects, but that's not enough to have a healthy social situation.
We need the housing, but it doesn't solve most issues.
I agree with GP. I would amend their claim with "most problems* could be solved by building high density housing and services in areas with jobs." I.e., build real cities.
Building homes on federal land in the middle of no where will not do anything for people. We just need to allow people to build housing where there is a demand for labor.
Some things I think would be solved include:
- the housing crisis
- mobility => it would be easier for people to move to other parts of the country because they would be less tied to their homes
- labor mismatches
- climate change => less reliance on cars
- funding infrastructure => more dense infrastructure means you don't have as much infrastructure to repair and you have more people paying for it
- city government budgets => high density areas are more tax efficient
- home insurance => the homes on the outskirts of cities are most likely to burn down; if housing is cheap the cost to insure it will be cheaper as well
IMO, if housing is 30-60% of peoples budgets and transportation is another 10-20%, if you can bring those costs down you can de-stress a lot of people. That might make politics less intense too.
* "Most problems" is not strictly accurate. But "more problems than you might think are directly related to housing" doesn't really roll off the tongue.
If only there was a model that worked that we could copy and paste from. Some sort of plan for building healthy communities that would last a hundred years. Read the article.
Germany - where I live - built Housing like there‘s no tomorrow in the 60s, which lead to the most prosperous phase of the country‘s existence. Then we stopped. And now we‘re where we are. Companies can’t hire because people can‘t move. There‘s sub and 0.1% empty apartments in cities.
I was reading this yesterday and it's wild to me how much changed in Canada in 1995: https://progressingcanada.com/ - Seems like 95 through 97 set in motion some bad things for Canada?
Around the turn of the millennium many countries seem to have decided to underproduce housing, both by ending government programs like you describe and by erecting government barriers to private home construction.
My conspiracy theory is that homeowners vote at higher numbers and more reliably and like free money.
In a local election we had to stop talking about "Housing Afforbabiliy" as homeowners perceived that as "Shitty Apartments Brining Down My Property Value."
The thing that drives me insane is that this is endemic in extremely liberal cities. Ask them if they support Trump’s wall and his mass deportations, and when they freak out point out that the housing policies they favor are the same thing on a smaller scale with pretty much the same motives.
Decommodification of housing is the exact last thing that you want if your goal is to make housing more affordable. How did that particular buzzword get off the ground?
> there won't be enough housing, food or medicine for everyone.
This scarcity of resources is true and it has nothing to do with capital allocation methodology. It's just economics. Human beings collectively have unlimited wants. You can't solve it by changing the allocation method.
When there's a stable supply of food, medicine, and housing people reproduce. More aggregate people implies more aggregate demand.
Suppose only 5% of the population breeds like rabbits in the presence of food, medicine, and housing. It won't take long for that cultural subpopulation to dominate.
Humans are not unlike microorganisms in a petri dish when one adds nutrients. All life is.
Wtf are you even talking about. Do you feel like some people should be starved, homeless and sick because else they would "breed like rabbits"? What a deranged view to hold.
I said human wants are limitless. You said no they're not. I said yes they are, giving the example of population growth as a way that aggregate demand increases even if some people are completely satisfied. This is ECON 101 and a small amount of biology. That's what I am talking about. Notice "need" and "want" are 2 distinct words and you are reading past the difference.
Demographic transition in one culture does not imply universal demographic transition across the species. Because those who haven't yet transitioned will control population growth rates.
Now why did I say this? Because you opened by presuming that socialism would solve human wants. Which is nonsense. Nothing solves human wants.
Demographic transition is absolutely a universal phenomenon, no country has ever been observed taking another path.
I reiterate, the need for food, housing and medicine is not unlimited. The population is not infinite and humans have a limited need of these things. Do the math: finite×finite=finite
"Nothing solves human wants": what about prices? It seems like it does. It's a flawed solution that leaves some with nothing, but it does solve it. Now, what if we distributed the basic utilities on an as-needed basis. That too would solve "human wants" on those things, and would ideally leave none lacking.
Please don't quote "econ 101 and basic biology" at me without actually engaging with what I'm saying. You're ignoring material reality and using abstract nonsense to deter from the subject.
People reproduced much more when food, medicine, and housing were much more scarce. Humans are quite a bit different from micro-organisms. Humans are a K-selected species - the optimal strategy for passing on our genes is to invest as many resources as possible into the smallest viable number of offspring. In the past people needed large numbers of children because infant mortality was very high - the average number of children that actually survived to reproductive age in rural, pre-industrial populations was less than 2. Now that infant mortality is low, there is no need for spares.
We see this quite clearly. Wealthy nations have much lower fertility rates. Wealthy individuals tend to have fewer kids. Even those pursuing large families have smaller families than they did in the recent past - my grandfather was the youngest of 12, when was the last time you met someone with 12 kids? Even Elon Musk, one of the richest people in human history whose net worth exceeds what a medieval peasant would make in their lifetime a million times over and who has an obsession with maximizing his reproduction has a number of offspring that would not be seen as exceptionally large by a medieval peasant, particularly when spread across multiple women.
Realistically, no one is going on a breeding frenzy because they can suddenly afford a 3 bedroom apartment.
> Humans are a K-selected species - the optimal strategy for passing on our genes is to invest as many resources as possible into the smallest viable number of offspring.
It's certainly fashionable these days in the West. I don't know that I would call it optimal. Optimal now for passing along genes is probably donating at a sperm bank after getting into a regionally swanky university. A joke, of course, but notice it stacks! Certainly the donating to the sperm bank plus what you profess dominates what you profess in isolation. Since I just improved the strategy, it wasn't optimal.
> People reproduced much more when food, medicine, and housing were much more scarce.
Yet the population was smaller. You're talking per capita rates and I am not.
We successfully produce more viable adults now in absolute terms than ever before, the number of live births notwithstanding. Otherwise, global population would drop. Which it hasn't. Definitely slower growth but not shrinking: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growth rate
That site says "The latest world population projections indicate that world population will reach 10 billion persons in the year 2060 and 10.2 billion in 2100."
> Humans are quite a bit different from micro-organisms
Humans increasingly inhabit inhabitable parts of the Earth with increasing density. This species-wide growth, regardless of the optimal reproductive strategy for any single individual, is like a microorganism spreading across a petri dish. We're starting to run into the edges of the dish so we're slowing down a tad. But, likely growth for at least the next 75 projected years per the above 10.2B people in 2100 projection.
Going back a step: My point is there's no end in sight for needs around housing, food, and medicine. Human beings aren't special. We consume all available resources, in part due to population growth. I did not expect population growth to be such a controversial topic. Population, it grows.
> Since I just improved the strategy, it wasn't optimal.
You did not improve on the strategy.
> You're talking per capita rates and I am not.
Because per capita rates are all that matters. specifically your concern was "Suppose only 5% of the population breeds like rabbits in the presence of food, medicine, and housing." This requires individuals to have more children per capita.
Population growth has been dominated by demographic momentum. Because a few generations ago infant mortality fell, those generations that had high birthrates produced much larger subsequent generations than thir immediate predecessors. These later generations had much lower per capita birthrates but they were larger, so as you say, they have more aggregate children. Subsequent generations after this have very similar numbers of children, but these generations are replacing smaller generations from when the infant mortality rate was higher. Once you get far enough from industrialization that no one from before the infant mortality decrease is left to be replaced, the population stops growing, at least from births. In the developed world which is now well over 100 years from this transition, population growth is purely from immigration, and in fact without this immigration the populations would be decreasing (as it is in a few less desirable locales like eastern europe). East Asia which went through this transition about 60 years ago is plateauing now. World population growth is only continuing in parts of the world where infant mortality is still falling, particularly sub-Saharan Africa.
You conveniently failed to mention in your link that it shows the world population dropping to 10.2 billion in 2100 after peaking in the 2080s.
> Humans increasingly inhabit inhabitable parts of the Earth with increasing density.
False. Huge potentially inhabitable parts of the earth remain uninhabited and are unlikely to ever be inhabited, and population densities in most inhabited areas are falling. There are a few distinct areas, namely urban centers, where population density is large and increasing, but this only proves that population density is not resource constrained.
> We're starting to run into the edges of the dish so we're slowing down a tad.
False. Resources are more abundant than ever, and our rate of production is growing faster than ever. Places with the most resources, the most petri dish available, have the lowest birthrates.
> But, likely growth for at least the next 75 projected years per the above 10.2B people in 2100 projection.
57 years based on the above projection
> We consume all available resources, in part due to population growth.
False. See above.
> I did not expect population growth to be such a controversial topic. Population, it grows.
Because you were uninformed on the topic.
> My point is there's no end in sight for needs around housing, food, and medicine.
There very clearly is an end in sight for the need for higher levels of housing, food production, and medicine production. Specifically it's in decades, not centuries, barring some future demographic shift comparable to the reduction in infant mortality during industrialization.
There is a lot of affordable housing; it's just that no one wants to live there for reasons such as work, location, crime, etc. Sure, there is no affordable housing in places like NYC, because too many people want or need to live there.
A quick search on realtor.com for a place like Cleveland. Plenty of houses for 150k.
Yeah, the problem is that if housing is cheap, chances are you can't afford it unless you have an independent income stream (say retirement). And those who benefit from it usually prefer more expensive areas and/or have a need for more premium services like specialist hospitals in the area because they are old.
Most of the scarcity around houses are artificial. Home owners want housing to be scarce because they have an expectation of property value going up, forever.
If housing becomes more abundant, a lot of middle class people become decidedly poor. Well... that's bad. And they're the voters, so is that going to happen? No.
We can build denser, cheaper per-unit housing. We decide not to, because the only people that want that are the ones who don't have a house. As soon as they get a house their opinion will change.
In corporate environments people often get into a frame of mind where they acknowledge they are behaving irrationally but are convinced - convinced! - that behaving rationally would bring terrible results and everyone is going to move in mad lockstep. I think it is some sort of groupthink-related phenomenon. They're pretty much always wrong about the bad results if someone can force change.
It can be true that sudden change can lead to bad results and I wouldn't necessarily advise shock therapy, but making the basis of a system more rational usually leads to good outcomes. Being honest about how valuable something is won't cause society to sink beneath the ocean and neither does letting people just build houses on land they own. Someone is already eating economic losses here, we just don't quite know who or how much. Letting them do better will surely outweigh the negatives.
I don't advocate for the current system - but the western capitalist system is (rightly or wrongly) based heavily around property.
> Someone is already eating economic losses here, we just don't quite know who or how much.
It's an intergenerational transfer of wealth from the young to the old.
Rough and dirty you could probably reverse back the amount by taking the change in Average house price-to-earnings ratios. Very basic estimate is from 4x earnings to 7x, which on the stock of US housing is about $20 trillion.
If you believe this site economics are equivalent to reality and rich people losing money is the end of the world. I don't think you're going to convince them.
That's not what re-inflated prices. Basically, no houses were built from about 2007 to 2017, and then far too few houses were built. Meanwhile, loads of people immigrated to Ireland for jobs (mostly in tech and finance).
Then, because lots of people spotted that Irish property was a good investment, people started piling in using rents as their baseline for investment, driving rents up, which pushed prices up etc.
But fundamentally property prices are increasing in Ireland because of population growth and a lack of supply (driven by poor planning for water and services, along with a culture of property owners objecting to the opening of an envelope).
Quite the opposite; the state should instead have borrowed 105% GDP and kept the construction industry on life support (during the financial crisis many countries did this, generally with public works stuff, but Ireland essentially let its construction industry die). As is, almost no housing was built between about 2010 and 2016, resulting in a massive shortage.
The extremely high cost of the Irish bank bailout was largely down to bad bank practices and not merely the fact that there was a property bubble.
The noughties Irish property crisis was largely driven by a speculative bubble, and there was not really a huge supply shortfall. Unfortunately, he _current_ one is supply-side. In 2023 Ireland built more housing per capita than any other OECD nation and it was close to the top last year, but, even optimistically, that is only stopping the shortfall from getting _worse_.
(A lot of this is down to catastrophically bad estimates made early last decade, which had Ireland returning to its traditional economic pattern of perma-recession, and draining the working age population off via emigration.)
I think if you go even deeper: it's that humans primitively require novel and emotional experiences, it got us out of the cave. These systems are a way to generate.
There are places in the West where this has been done and all you get is ghettos full of scum and crime. You have to pair this with jobs and a way of promptly removing undesirable elements from the neighbourhood. Cf. section 8.
Which might reduce the value of existing homes 20%. Current homeowners (who are more likely to vote) really don't want their homes to decrease in value 20%.
The plain reading of “There ought to be more affordable housing,” is not “Society needs 100% taxation administered by a genocidal ministry of housing.”
> The West isn't ready for the conversation about what would be necessary to "provide" affordable housing.
The majority of the developed world (including the United States) has already built affordable housing developments. Austria and Japan both have extensive public housing projects.
If you build all those houses, people will have a ton of babies, and you'll be back to square one within a generation: only with more pollution, more ugly, more traffic, more crowded parks, trails, and parking lots, and a less water and beauty. And lots more carbon in the air. This is how the planet is choked off: one house at a time. Habitat control is the only solution.
As far as I can tell, no_std doesn't change anything with regard to either the usability of panicking operators like integer division, slice indexing, etc. (they're still usable) nor on whether they panic on invalid input (they still do).
Honestly, I don't think libraries should ever panic. Just return an UnspecifiedError with some sort of string. I work daily with rust, but I wish no_std and an arbitrary no_panic would have better support.
Example docs for `foo() -> Result<(), UnspecifiedError>`:
# Errors
`foo` returns an error called `UnspecifiedError`, but this only
happens when an anticipated bug in the implementation occurs. Since
there are no known such bugs, this API never returns an error. If
an error is ever returned, then that is proof that there is a bug
in the implementation. This error should be rendered differently
to end users to make it clear they've hit a bug and not just a
normal error condition.
Imagine if I designed `regex`'s API like this. What a shit show that would be.
If you want a less flippant take down of this idea and a more complete description of my position, please see: https://burntsushi.net/unwrap/
> Honestly, I don't think libraries should ever panic. Just return an UnspecifiedError with some sort of string.
The latter is not a solution to the former. The latter is a solution to libraries having panicking branches. But panics or other logically incorrect behavior can still occur as a result of bugs.
Interesting because I think jQuery, although a nightmare, is a much smaller one than the today's stack of React single page apps. Everything from bundling to package management and the hell with modules and dependencies seems to be too much to maintain. I am probably going to be okay to take it on the front end, but I cannot take JavaScript on the back end.
That's very cool. You probably know more about it than I do, then, but my advice is to articulate the exact problem you try to solve.
I expect your field is probably teeming with AI proposals or offers on how to manage vulnerabilities, but that is doubtful the way, because again it is adding complexity, and no classifier is perfect, especially when scanners fail to understand scanned applications and their threat models or environment.
Stop selling external scanners, start simplifying code? This will never work, of course, because security vendors sell the promise of security to those willing to buy it, in the form of add-on products and capabilities.
Empower people to ignore scanner reports without so much red tape? That would never work either, because megacorp wants compliance and reduced liability.
Build secure systems as opposed to cataloging and scoring flaws? That would never work, because building secure systems is hard, nature tends to favor otherwise.
Charge people for adding complexity and credit them for removing complexity? Sadly, there is no way to do that, especially since products must ship and quality is hard to observe, since it is often invisible and only surfaces when things are broken.
Off the top of my head, would be nice to require proof of exploitation, by adding CTF-like capabilities to apps, such that only if the flag is captured do we consider the report real. This places more burden on scanners, in that it is no longer enough to report an outdated library. Requiring some proof of exploitability reduces noise and increases SNR, reducing false positives. Naturally, not all vulnerabilities have working exploits, and scanners can never fully simulate an adversary, so we may get more false negatives, but at least we would not have to waste so much time upgrading pointless modules and breaking applications to appease a false report. So the idea is "here is a dummy asset, show me how you leaked or compromised it". Adding the dummy asset should be cheap, but would force scanners to better simulate an attack.
At the very least, there ought to be a knob to decrease scanner sensitivity.
The GP sounds like one of these people who describe themselves as self made, or libertarian, where history begins where you like it and coalitions are only worthy when you’re the biggest benefactor. Best to ignore and let the leopards find them.
German here. Me and my employer pay 12 (together) for healthcare. I have no clue where the idea of „free“ healthcare came from, but it’s far from free. 20% of your wages is the general rule for healthcare here.
On paper, my employer pays me 72k per year. I net 36k of this after taxes and social insurances are paid.
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