> We usually have long testing periods, but we didn't this time, for reasons that remain unclear
A pandemic ravaging the globe doesn't seem clear?
> Please remind me, when was the last time that we gave people vaccines not to protect that person specifically, but to allegedly protect some unknown other person, somewhere?
Herd immunity and personal protection are both parts of every vaccine, they go hand in hand.
I'm surprised this is even a discussion on a place like HN... I guess I'm feeding the trolls...
> A pandemic ravaging the globe doesn't seem clear?
A fear campaign ravaged the globe. If there hadn't been a fear campaign, I don't think anybody but doctors and immunologists and such would have been aware anything significant was happening. Similar to previous seasonal illnesses that were technically pandemics, but no normal person recalls doing anything about it. For example, ask people who are old enough what they remember about the HK flu in 1968.
> Herd immunity and personal protection are both parts of every vaccine, they go hand in hand
I'm still waiting for the example from the past where we administered a vaccine to someone, saying to them "this is not to protect you, since you are not at risk from this virus, but it is just to protect someone out there, we don't know whom". Are you able to provide such an example?
> If there hadn't been a fear campaign, I don't think anybody but doctors and immunologists and such would have been aware anything significant was happening.
So the excess deaths, the health services stretched to capacity, this is nothing, nobody would have noticed at all?
I think this is a very, very strong claim given the numbers and would take some extraordinary evidence to back up.
Regardless of how well the democracy your government is based on is functioning, I have a rather hard time imagining that a corporation focused on maximizing shareholder profit would do anything better than a piss-poor job for the vast majority of the population.
The whole idea of the government stealing from people makes no sense to me. You live in a democracy, the people choose their government and it does what it's elected to do. If the government starts actively stealing money from its people, the problem isn't the way in which you file your taxes. The problem is that the government brought by your democracy isn't working as intended.
For what it's worth, in the Netherlands it takes most people 5 to 10 minutes to flip through an app that has all your tax info filled in already. If you need to add anything that isn't already filled in, you get every chance to do so.
It doesn't stop you from getting an accountant to do it for you either, if you'd prefer.
> How would you even know if it is right?
Because it's still the same tax system you had before they made it easier by filling it out for you already. It doesn't get automatically filed, you still have to check it yourself and approve it.
It doesn't make any sense to compare the Netherlands to the US on any metric. The Netherlands doesn't have the population or gdp of just Texas or California by themselves.
The sheer magnitude of the difference between the US and the Netherlands is crazy, and it is like comparing a house to a town.
Communism works on a small scale, the bigger the scale, the less you can just trust everyone is doing the right thing. The bureaucracy of the IRS has every incentive to maximize tax revenue, and that is what they will eventually do.
I see this sort of sentiment repeated over and over in different contexts both here and on Quora; but the poster never explains why scale is relevant.
Most people in both the US and the Netherlands work for one employer, own or rent one house, have a few credit cards, and a car. In most cases they have no complicated investments or debts. So how does the simple fact that one population is larger than the other have any effect?
In a larger community you simply need proportionally more computer power to process proportionally more data, but the data types and business rules are the same for all the individuals.
It isn't about the person. It is about the scale of government.
Running a small business is not the same as a large business.
Ok, have you ever played civilization? In civilization corruption goes up as you build more cities and the farther those cities are from the capital. That is to reflect the reality of managing larger and larger groups of people.
Solutions that can work on the state level don't necessarily work on the federal level. The Netherlands are basically the size of a state with an extremely homogeneous population, and a far less cut throat culture than the US.
In small groups of 10-20 people communism works very well. It doesn't work in bigger groups though. The bigger the group the more perverse incentives are acted upon.
Even beyond that though the US is a cut throat competitive culture. Eventually the person in charge of treasury will want to show that the democrats/republicans before them did a bad job of collecting tax revenue. They will realize by not offering deductions a lot of people will just pay and this will end up with them looking like they did a really good job. Or maybe it will be someone lower on the totem pole that wants to move up and can show that they did a better job at collecting tax revenue.
Also, solutions that work in the US probably won't work in China or India because the population is so much larger that US solutions won't scale properly.
Indian tax system largely resembles British and Brazilian systems. Chinese tax system is simpler, but they compensate by tighter population control (which is unfavorable in the US).
True, the size difference would mean the time/effort saved would be tremendous. I detest the hours and hours of my life I've given to the IRS simply because they are stuck in a time warp. My UK tax return took me under 2 hours last night (and only because they keep getting the student loan wrong - but it's simple to correct). But yes, it does require investing in a suitable computer system. I seem to be giving them the benefit of the doubt and attributing it to an infrastructure issue but that's probably not the real problem, is it.
This might be true if you view the government as adversarial. If you view the government as a service provider for citizens I don’t think it holds water.
Your statement could easily be flipped. Turbo Tax is incentivized to keep the tax code as complex as possible, the government is incentivized to do the opposite.
> Furthermore it only takes one of the 12 to stop a miscarriage of justice.
On the other hand, it only takes one of the 12 to stop justice from being served if they for whatever reason disagree with the other 11.
> inally, a jury doesn't need law education. Their job is to judge the facts. They are informed of the definitions of the crime, and the evidence, and must reach a verdict of yes he did this or no he did not. Upon rendering a guilty verdict, the actual law part of the law is executed by the judge.
Except they don't just judge facts. They judge based on the stories they're told. Even if the evidence (facts) is lacking, a good story can still sway people. This would be a lot less likely if the panel consisted of people educated on the law (eg. judges).
There's a reason the supreme court consists of judges, not 12 (or 9...) random people from your populace.
> it only takes one of the 12 to stop justice from being served
Blackstone's formulation applies there:
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
In a perfect world, we'd only convict the guilty. The revolutionaries that founded the U.S. decided that justice would be better served by minimizing false positives---the conviction of innocents---instead of minimizing false negatives---the release of criminals. In practice, we've still sent many innocent people to prison (or worse, to death) despite our various protections against false positives, which includes the right to trial by jury.
> This would be a lot less likely if the panel consisted of people educated on the law (eg. judges).
People educated in the law (e.g., judges) would disagree with you:
"Those who wrote our constitutions knew from history and experience that it was necessary to protect against unfounded criminal charges brought to eliminate enemies and against judges too responsive to the voice of higher authority. The framers of the constitutions strove to create an independent judiciary but insisted upon further protection against arbitrary action. Providing an accused with the right trial by a jury of his peers gave him an inestimable safeguard against the corrupt or overzealous prosecutor and against the compliant, biased, or eccentric judge."
I’ve served on 3 juries. Two acquitted, and in each case the facts made the case.
The hardest case was the one that was “not guilty”. The defendant was almost certainly guilty of manslaughter. But for reasons that don’t matter, aspects (time) of key evidence could not be evaluated, which created doubt.
> "I’ve served on 3 juries. Two acquitted, and in each case the facts made the case."
> "The hardest case was the one that was “not guilty”."
Would you clarify? I read the first paragraph as there was one guilty verdict, yet the second paragraph implies there was only one not guilty verdict. Did you perhaps intend two convicted, or alternatively, in the second paragraph, one of the cases that were not guilty?
As I read it, he means that one not guilty was correct. However the other he believes was guilty, but someone messed up the evidence. With the evidence messed up he was forced to vote not guilty on a guilty person.
I don’t think it’s true that it only takes one to stop justice from being served. If one juror disagrees with the other 11, the result is a hung jury and a mistrial, and the prosecution can retry the defendant.
I would be interested in knowing how often trials with a hung jury are retried. Presumably if it goes that long and is that contentious there is a fair amount of resources that have already gone into it, would the state look at it as a sunk cost? Are they more likely to retry a case hung on 11-1 as opposed to say 8-4?
Oh yeah, nothing makes a mess of your network like someone coming in and saying "we need to remove these IPs from the middle of our advertised blocks for security reasons".
I think we're going to see less of this due to IPv6's design, renumbering is less of a pain than it was with IPv4 so instead of splitting off a route in the middle of your address space and bloating the BGP table you can just move to a different subnet entirely.
Network Operators dislike buying new hardware. As the policies matriculate through tiers of providers, raw numbers of announced prefixes becomes a sticking point.
But then you're tunneling your L2 across your L3. So if you provide connectivity to a customer in a datacenter all they'll see is the L2. But you're right. Underneath everything is an IP fabric these days.
I must be the only person who adores Bloomberg's design/presentation. It's a very interesting intersection of flat-modern and brutalist, and completely unapologetic. So much of their content also features distinct art and layout in a way that conveys a special amount of care went into its publication, but always within a familiar design language.
I understand that it's not appealing to everyone, but I am always surprised at how much it gets ragged on.
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A lot of the people commenting don't seem to understand how hard it is to fend off such DDoS attacks. You either need some serious infrastructure (cloudflare style) or you need to buy equipment to mitigate attacks (like radware devices) or route it via a DDoS mitigation service (prolexic style). The one thing all these solutions have in common is that they are insanely expensive. People can buy a 1 gigabit DDoS for only a few bucks, whereas mitigating a 1 gigabit DDoS will cost you either $20K+ dollars for a mitigation device or some stupid amount of money to have a service like prolexic mitigate it for you.
Services like cloudflare are a whole load cheaper but only provide basic reverse proxy protection and still leave your server vulnerable for attacks directed at it's IP instead of DNS name.
I can't say I've ever heard of Hetzner, but from the comments I'm reading they apparently offer servers for cheap. Bearing in mind how much money DDoS mitigation costs I don't see how they could handle this any other way without having to make some pretty serious investments (which in turn would make their hosting less cheap as the money has to come from somewhere, right?)
You can do some of it via BGP, which is a standard method for handling routing once you become any sort of server provider with multiple bandwidth providers. It is builtin to some Juniper devices already, for instance: http://njetwork.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/mitigating-ddos-att...
There are other ways to do it via BGP also. Plus there is null-routing, bandwidth limiting, etc.
juniper is the only one that provides that and flowspec is not going to be able to block everything. Other then that BGP is not really going to help with attacks.
A pandemic ravaging the globe doesn't seem clear?
> Please remind me, when was the last time that we gave people vaccines not to protect that person specifically, but to allegedly protect some unknown other person, somewhere?
Herd immunity and personal protection are both parts of every vaccine, they go hand in hand. I'm surprised this is even a discussion on a place like HN... I guess I'm feeding the trolls...