I've always respect PG's articles (obviously), but him pointing to a sole founder at a high growth rate (which founder btw, what is the product) as 'proof' that no bad has been done to reach that level of growth is so incredibly naive!
His founder is not at the level we are talking about. They obviously would not represent the 'bad' that AOC was trying to make a point about. Why don't you pick your actual billionaires?
Airbnb - Ignored and exploited local housing regulations, over time the blowback has been HUGELY negative. Here the 'bad' is the commoditization of housing in peoples' homes, causing housing problems.
Coinbase - For years, they built their business on bitcoin being used on dark nets for illegal purposes. There's the bad. If they were truly good they would have done KYC from day 1. Why would they? Billionaires gotta break rules.
DoorDash/Instacart - Exploitation of cheap labor, they _consistently_ underpay workers, hire undocumented laborers for that purpose, and pit laborers and consumers against each other rather than improving the system.
These, Paul, are the actual billionaires AOC was talking about. Not your young founder making the 200th to-do app.
Really unimpressed and disappointed by the shallowness of his thinking here.
I lived in Texas for ~20 years and am well-versed in the plains+midwest, I just don't agree here. If all you do is drive through highways in these states, yes those are truck stops. However I'm fully confident in saying everywhere has the places the author is talking about. Like he said, it's about creativity.
OP living in Switzerland is a comically poor messenger for this though. I follow a few accounts on Instagram of people that are good messengers in relatively boring places. A Japanese lady that lives in Texas and always has the nicest things to say about things I wouldn't usually even notice. And another lady from the Midwest that used to travel globally but cannot anymore because of her family and yet still seemingly enjoys her local sights.
If you look at recent data[1], this has only accelerated further. This was not attributable to one president. Attempting to point blame for complex economic systems to one person is so foolish I don't even know where to start picking it apart. Look at the actual legislation and actions by which this happens. This is done through tariff manipulation, regulatory capture, and insider trading which we literally have weekly evidence of.
In fact postgresML took naming heat because Postgres is right there in the name and they weren't affiliated with the brand. "pg" is just two letters. like WP-engine (literally the name as they say it is "double U P engine").
And a cat and a dog is fun.
don't think they're trying to get one over on you.
I don't think they're trying to get one over me, nor do I think it's _that deep_. One should simply acknowledge the prior projects that led to where you are today, even if they are your own. I 100% stand by my original statement and think that pgDog should mention that they're affiliated or a paid product on top of pgCat!
> you should own that layer yourself inside of your infrastructure
Unless you have millions of users, you don't really need this. It would be nice to have but its not a pressing need. So why invest into developing something that you only need once you are at massive scale? At this point you might as well switch away from Postgres because you'll surely have the manpower to do it.
Even with a proxy like PgDog the Postgres sharding story isn't solved. Resharding with logical replication is unlikely to work with databases which are already TBs in size. I never got it to catch up, I had to sync data at the filesystem level which is terrible. Tools like pg_repack also fall apart at scale.
For those that get to a point where a sharding proxy is required, switching databases is a very appealing solution.
And for those that are almost there, application side sharding is more flexible than building a query routing proxy.
Doesn’t PgDog also handle the sharding by proxying the writes? Maybe I missed something but I thought this is their value prop. It’s not just another PgBouncer.
Looks good, I would also recommened Ruflo, it does the same but also does agent orchestration and reduce spend in claude code, I have used for more than3 months, works quite well for me
Look at cloud spend - how many of your employers have measured the ROI of using cloud vs. self-hosting? At a certain point these things just become the cost of doing business I suppose.
Every single one minus Federal Gov. if you are in a leader position you absolutely should be assessing hosting options, trade offs, costs etc, and looking forward as things grow to make sure you aren’t just burning cash. Only my experience from Australia, the low interest environment could be different in the US, but I would expect this attitude to change if interest rates stay above 5%.
Of the 4 series A-B startups I've helped grow, none have measured and made decisions on cloud spend based on measurement. The only time this came up is when bills got too large and spend needed to be controlled. You're right that it may be a difference of environment (USA here)
GC holder of 25 years with citizen parents. I agree with you and I stress about this daily. It's always been a shitty deal though - we are taxed with no representation in government.
>we are taxed with no representation in government.
In which country can you emigrate to and be allowed votes in government representation just because you pay taxes? I'm an EU citizen and living in another EU country and am not allowed to vote in that country's government elections, just local ones. If you want to vote at government level then you need to apply and get citizenship which also comes with the responsibility(or obligation more accurately) of military draft.
Everything about this seems pretty fair to me. I'm not sure why not to you. If you're not a citizen you shouldn't be allowed to vote at gov level since you're not subject to a draft, because in case the shit hits the fan militarily, unlike citizens, you can just pack your bags and go back to your home country and avoid dying in the front lines. So why would any country let people who aren't subject to draft vote? Makes no sense. You don't have the same skin in the game as citizens who are draftable just because you pay some taxes.
Now if you're paying taxes in a foreign country where you can't vote, it means you're there voluntarily because you're getting a much better deal than being in your own country where you can vote. Probably you're in the US because you make orders of magnitude more money than in your own country, but nobody in the US dragged you there against your will to work and pay them taxes, you agreed to this situation voluntarily because it also benefits you personally, and you would just as easily leave if it stopped benefiting you.
> In which country can you emigrate to and be allowed votes in government representation just because you pay taxes?
There are a few, with varying degrees of residency time (and possibly other conditions) required. New Zealand requires being a resident for a year.
The UK is particularly interesting, if you're a citizen of a common wealth nation you can vote in national UK elections if you're a resident.
Personally, I agree with you though. I didn't vote in the UK despite being able too. Let the citizens decide the future of their nation, I have the privilege to leave (and have done so already). Feels wrong for me to influence the nation when I'm not fully invested in the outcome.
As a person, why should you not have a say in how things are governed where you live?
The idea that you should be required to swear some loyalty to a government before you get a say in how the place you live is governed is the position that’s actually absurd.
(Yes, I do think there should be a global republic and that there should be full freedom of movement. It’s way past time for that.)
Because as a non-citizen, you are technically still a guest?
If you love the place you're living in and want to actively participate in its governance, including implementing any changes, you should obtain citizenship.
And even if you do, your stake would still be less than those who've been living there all their lives, across many generations. Maybe the natives actually don't want the changes that the immigrants want to see implemented.
(not going to argue the finer details of ethics like racism or xenophobia, etc. which I acknowledge can often come up in cases like this).
It make sense, you don't want to give voting rights to someone who might decide not to continue living in your country anymore. If they are serious about it, then they must go through the process of obtaining citizenship. I have same issue with dual citizenships, it is absurd that someone holding foreign passport can have major decision making roles in your government.
We did not meet continuous residency requirements for 10-15 years due to travel for my dad's work. Afterwards, it took me nearly 5 years to meet that requirement due to the fact that I lived and graduated abroad for highschool. I tried around COVID, was denied based on truthfully admitting I had smoked some weed in the previous 5 years while I lived in Colorado. That reset my clock for another five years. I constantly wrestle with whether I even want to be associated with this country for the rest of my life. I'm prideful and a high earner, there's only so much I'll accept before moving my family and assets somewhere else.
Hope that provides some color. To all the fans of the current immigration policies - you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
> we are taxed with no representation in government
This is true in most highly-developed democratic nations. If it is so important to you, then you should become a citizen, or return to your home country (so that you may vote). And curiously, does your home country not have the same rule? Do you find that position hypocritical?
The choice is not so binary, as anyone seriously discussing this topic should immediately recognize. There are indeed ways for foreigners to participate in local politics in many countries, here is some data if you're interested in learning - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-citizen_suffrage
My country does in fact provide this right to foreign residents who live a certain amount of time in the country. Even if it didn't, it would not be a hypocritical position to state something is bad. Do you think I wrote the laws? Hardly seems like a good-faith argument or even a sound one!
Or perhaps they mean the same thing as was meant by the slogan when it was first coined, around the time of the American Revolution, and the same thing as was meant by the women's suffragists who used it in the late 19th century.
Maybe in some sense "no taxation without suffrage" would be more accurate, but it would be a worse slogan. In any case, "no taxation without representation" is a well known phrase, it's been around for over 250 years, and I don't think much is achieved by nitpicking its wording.
You do have congressional representatives and senators who represent you and your interests and can take action on your behalf just as they would if you were a citizen. I have had decent luck in getting assistance from them despite not being a citizen.
Yes and colonial Americans had personages they didn't choose representing their interests at court so clearly that was not what they meant by it, let alone as members of the British empire their interests were represented by the king the highest position in the land...
To exist is to be taxed. If you exist at all in the US, you will be taxed. You may even be taxed even if you are not in the US. So saying that taxation somehow implies voting ability would be quite absurd. This doesn't hold true anywhere in the world.
When someone says "No taxation without representation!" they don't mean "As a matter of fact, no one ever gets taxed by a government they don't have the power to vote for or against". (If that were true, there'd be no need to demand it.)
They mean "I would like our government to stop taxing people who don't get to vote for it" or "It is unjust for a government to tax people who don't get to vote for it" or something of that sort.
The fact that things aren't already the way you want them to be doesn't make it absurd to demand that they change to be that way.
(You might argument that governments don't give a damn what anyone demands and for that reason it is absurd to demand change. But I think that in fact governments do take notice of what people want, if they fear what the people might do if they don't get it. Whether that's voting them out of office or putting their heads on pikes or anything in between. And they will take more notice if more people are demanding whatever it is, and a large part of the point of saying things like "No taxation without representation!" is to get other people who aren't in the government to sympathize with your cause and maybe start demanding the same thing. So I think it's manifestly not absurd to make such demands, as such. Some particular demands -- "No taxation without $1M/year universal basic income!" -- would be absurd, but this one seems obviously not to be in that category.)
There is a typical ladder here though of non-immigrant/temp visitor, legal permanent resident, and citizen. The main practical distinction bw the last two is the ability to vote and hold office. What concretely is the demand here? That the last two should effectively merge into one? Or is it that everybody along this ladder should get to vote and that citizenship is a separate axis?
The demand is that there shouldn't be anywhere on that ladder where you are expected to pay taxes and aren't given the right to vote.
Is it a sensible demand? I dunno. Some people have thought so. Some other people have thought not. I'm not trying to settle that question; just trying to bring some clarity as to what the issue is.
what the..? This sounds like Facebook mumbo jumbo. Free speech has nothing to do with your state of freedom (i.e. being a 'free being'). Being 'free' also literally means choosing on what to spend your energy. Complete nonsense!
Apologies for the late reply. It’s nice that you take the time to read things on Facebook. I don’t. I suggest you read through your sentences again and recognize the mumbo jumbo you’ve cobbled together there. Good luck.
His founder is not at the level we are talking about. They obviously would not represent the 'bad' that AOC was trying to make a point about. Why don't you pick your actual billionaires?
Airbnb - Ignored and exploited local housing regulations, over time the blowback has been HUGELY negative. Here the 'bad' is the commoditization of housing in peoples' homes, causing housing problems.
Coinbase - For years, they built their business on bitcoin being used on dark nets for illegal purposes. There's the bad. If they were truly good they would have done KYC from day 1. Why would they? Billionaires gotta break rules.
DoorDash/Instacart - Exploitation of cheap labor, they _consistently_ underpay workers, hire undocumented laborers for that purpose, and pit laborers and consumers against each other rather than improving the system.
These, Paul, are the actual billionaires AOC was talking about. Not your young founder making the 200th to-do app.
Really unimpressed and disappointed by the shallowness of his thinking here.
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