If I remember correctly, Massachusetts has a law that says that potential employers are not permitted to ask candidates what their previous salary was. The intent of this law is to ensure that people who have been discriminated against in the past will not continue to be discriminated against by new employers who "copy" the treatment of previous employers.

(a) Can anyone confirm that I'm remembering this correctly?

(b) Is this behavior by Equifax not a violation of the Massachusetts law (at least as far as it concerns citizens of Massachusetts, and in the spirit if not in the letter of the law)?

That’s an excellent question. Several states ban asking for salary history, but this seems like an easy loophole.

I've listened to only 2/3 of it, but: he promotes Crystal+Lucky (crystal is compiled) as good replacements for Ruby and Rails. The second part of his talk is about promoting a new variant of open license called PostOpen, which will require commercial users of Post Open software to pay 1% for using, 1.5% for using without sharing modifications. There is a 10% fee for worse offense. All percentages are percentages of revenue. This is partly aimed at large companies that host open source software with few modifications as a service and charge for it. Money goes to PostOpen and possibly conventional Open Source developers.

I think any license that requires a percentage of revenue is DOA.

First because involving all the chicanery of accounting to figure out my fee is asking for lots of resources just to calculate and audit fees.

Second, unpredictable costs are bad. If my company’s revenue doubles in a year, that doesn’t mean that my department’s budget doubles. Or that I even have enough earnings to cover licenses.

Finally, this is hard enough with a single product. My org uses thousands of products. If they all charge 1%, where does that leave me.

PS- morally this just seems dumb. If my grocery store charged me more or less depending on my income or the value I derive from a tomato, I won’t shop there. Just publish a price and let people decide to buy or not.

That's not correct. It's a flat 1% of revenue regardless of the number of Post-Open software packages used. (From the slide at 13:30 "The same fee whether you use 1 Post Open program or 1000.") The organization that receives the payment is supposed to handle splitting up the revenue among software package authors, so it does require auditing of all usage.

That helps with my final point but #1 and #2 are deal killers as well.

This also places an undue burden on the payment receiver as they have to get into the business of running enterprise audits to find out who is using what.

Yeah, I don't know what corporation would be happy with a license where the cost is nebulous like this.

I would suspect lots of Hollywood Accounting is likely; putting all the PostOpen software in a subsidiary that has no revenue, or developing your own software under PostOpen but not distributing it outside, so that the majority of the usage is apportioned to affiliated companies.

Plus, apportioning by usage is a negative incentive for optimization. If your DB reduces query runtime by 10% in the next version, it reduces its revenue, assuming other PostOpen software is in use and doesn't optimize.

Having spent 20 years in the film industry (see https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0673302/), I am well aware of your concern. The demand is for 1% of end-user revenue collected, through all entities. This is to use all Post Open software, not just one program. Obviously this is not going to gain immediate acceptance by many companies. But if the collection gets large enough, there may be a tipping point.

You make a compelling argument except for ignoring the fact that many licences (in particular patent licences) work on percentages of sales or revenue. So it seems not to be a problem in those cases, why is it for software?

I’m sure there’s some software that works on percent of sales or something. But it’s not common. I’ve worked on some fixed cost, percent value contracts and they had very distinct parameters unique to the contract and they weren’t very good for generalization (eg, “your foo process costs $50M today, I’m going to deliver changes that reduce that cost, I want 50% of the cost reduction” with tons of pages of caveats and details and stuff).

I’m not saying that PostOpen is impossible or can never be used anywhere. Just that it sucks and is not feasible for broad use.

What if only companies above some revenue threshold were charged? Would you feel differently if licenses had a progressive fee of some kind?

I don’t sell software so this is just theoretical. But I wouldn’t want to know my customers’ revenue. That’s too much work and not my business.

I also wouldn’t buy software that had a cost contingent because I wouldn’t want that kind of relationship with my software vendor. Of course, this happens now with enterprise software where a big company will get a quote for $5 and a little company will get a quote for $1. But having something explicit is illogical since software is a near zero marginal cost product.

But even for real world stuff, I’d never hire a gardener who charged differently based on customers income.

Maybe. That depends if OSS devs switch to this or not. This only hurts those making money off OSS which is fair. Think of it as contributing to improving the OSS.

I think the more software the better so if people like using this then good for them. More software in the world.

But it doesn’t replace OSS and I think will produce different software. I can’t imagine many developers switching to this. I wouldn’t contribute to a project with this license because I don’t want to bother with some incremental level of income. I’d rather just donate time.

I see a low probability that anything licensed "post open" will see adoption if there is a royalty owed for it.

Imagine the business decision of selecting between a post-open licensed ware and BSD licensed similar functionality. In return for 1% of revenue and the hassle of an annual usage audit, you get what value in return, exactly? That is the key question.

So as a purveyor of post-open software, you must have a business proposition that closes the deal. Not impossible, but different from the way most OSS projects operate today. Your skepticism is reasonable. To separate a customer from their money, you need to provide obvious value.

It strikes me that once you take one post-open package into your stack, the incremental cost of the next N is zero. So maybe there is enough virality in that feature to drive adoption. One high-value post-open project could create a coat-tail effect.

Ah, so a linux system contains more than 100 packages, does that mean if it used this scheme companies would have to pay out >100% of revenue?

Colour me unconvinced of the viability of this scheme.

No, and this is expressly discussed in TFV. It's a flat 1% regardless of how many "post open source" resources are used. This is intended to encourage adoption of more POS (unfortunate acronym) once you use any.

Well if people want their ideas to be heard they need to write them down instead burying them in long videos amidst topics i dont care about. (Not blaming bruce, we're not the target audience here, but im still not watching a long form video).

I still think its a weird business model. I can't imagine any propriatary software would work with that. Its very discouraging for small projects that do simple things, or for companies that want to try out software a little at first before committing to using it at a large scale.

I think I obtain a lot of the benefits of focus without quite being this extreme. I use a lot of virtual desktops. One virtual desktop per logical activity. For example as a student it would be one desktop per course I'm studying. As a software engineer, each git-repo that I touch gets its own virtual desktop (especially when one application involves many git repos). Each virtual desktop has its own editor process, terminal, and browser window for documentation and tabs related to that activity only. This means I can change my focus just by switching to another virtual desktop. And the tabs and editors and such on other desktops are not visible (they are not even in the panel) while I'm not working on them. So unlike you, I have lots of bystander applications, and each one is exactly where I left it. They just aren't visible until I switch to that activity. So I would argue that they don't distract me at all.

I also have things set up so that there is a keystroke that raises the editor on the current desktop to the top. Another for the browser and another for the terminal. When I switch to another desktop, the same keystroke raises a different editor process for that desktop, etc. So within a desktop, I switch between these apps using the same keystrokes regardless of which desktop I am on. And there is only one way to switch desktop. I can't switch to another desktop via choosing another application on another desktop, because the other applications that are not on the current desktop are completely invisible.

When I'm working on something with a Scala backend, an Elm frontend, and C/C++ embedded device, and when I need to go back and forth often between these sub-applications making related changes, I can't afford to close and reopen each one when I change the language/repo. I can change desktops very often this way. eg. Add a new field to the frontend. Immediately add it to the backend and the embedded also. But they are in different repos. etc. etc.

If I have one editor opening all three projects it is a nightmare to navigate between files. But one editor for each language and repo is the sweet spot for me. And it means my documentation for Elm is all in a separate browser window from my documentation for Scala (which is on another desktop) etc etc.

Sorry this was so long, but I think all the details add up to making it an efficient system.

Yes! I started a very similar process just this week.

Some of us have no choice but to multitask. I just learned about multiple desktops in Mac OS X and using something very similar to what you just described.

Each desktop gets its own browser window, emacs frame, Iterm window and a sticky. Sticky says what was the last thing I did and what is next. So context switching is easier.

I keep Outlook and Slack on a second monitor always visible. So far I am liking it. I am dreading the inevitable reboot.

I also wish Apple supported renaming the virtual desktops.

Same here. Tried a few times previously, but this time I took the time to set up proper keyboard shortcuts which made all the difference.

For windows, this project is a great way to get keyboard shortcuts for desktop switching: https://github.com/yalibian/i3-windows

Here is a book I happen to own (and I recommend highly), on the general topic of how to practice piano effectively.

"The Practice Revolution: Getting great results from the six days between lessons", by Philip Johnston. It contains a lot of advice including some overlap with some of the comments in this thread.

Not to be too nit-picky, but a thousand dollars would help or save many children, not just one. $20 will get you a mosquito net on Amazon.

Ah but not each child will die. GiveWell estimates that one grand roughly to spend enough netting to transform one dead child into a live child.

With the bees will go lots of foods that depend on them for pollination. Bees are very essential for agriculture.

Actually very few of our foods, and none of our staple crops rely significantly on insects for pollination. Grapes for instance, can use insects but don't have significant problems in their absence.

I remember when I was a kid the EMP trucks went around to keep the nano swarms down, but most of us got bot-lung anyway.

Even rogue nanoswarms are less worrisome than mosquitos as a vector.

The article mentions that there is a 500 gallon tank of some toxic material buried at a unknown location in the property. 500 gallons is very small -- 66 cubic feet, which is about 4 ft by 4 ft by 4 ft.

In my opinion, that makes it completely plausible that a problem relating to that tank could be so localized that it will only affect one tenant.

I'm not saying her problem was due to the 500 gallon tank. All I'm saying is that if it is, then it is not unbelievable that it affected only one (or a small number) of tenants.

The site she’s referring to is almost 100 acres and the apartment in question is on the third floor. It’s exceedingly unlikely that a tank is located precisely in a way to leak into a single 3rd floor apartment.

> The Santa Clara Square project encompasses approximately 93 acres

The challenge with these stories is that they rely on vague details to create an appearance of plausibility. The fact that a tank containing some substance exists somewhere in a 93-acre property would not normally be credible cause to believe that someone’s symptoms in a 3rd story apartment are the result of the soil.

Again, to emphasize: I am not doubting that this person is suffering real symptoms. I think it’s a mistake to focus on the soil or mysterious tanks in unknown location as the cause to the exclusion of other possible causes.

> a single 3rd floor apartment

I haven't seen this particular complex, but a lot of new apartment construction in the area has a basement parking garage. You'd think it would have enough ventilation and have enough natural circulation that this would be even more unlikely. Unless they shut of the fan because no one was leaving during covid.

I lived in an apartment two floors above a pool and barbecue area for a year. I regularly had severe air quality issues that did not affect the floors below me. I could watch the smoke from the barbecue grills rise up to my level, then travel horizontally across and into my poorly sealed windows due to persistent local air currents.

I moved to another apartment building for the two years after that, and continued to have measurable AQ issues because the dryer, bathroom, and kitchen vents were flowing in reverse due to a poor building ventilation design that used a single central vent shaft and didn't adequately account for wind or the height of the building. I was on a side and floor of the building that had negative relative pressure much of the time.

Air isn't a perfectly homogenized uniform fluid -- there are very localized effects, and because it's often invisible, those local effects are often dismissed.

IMO the only sane and responsible way to develop apartments in a challenging environment (by a highway, by a fire or bbq environment, in an area where weed is legal, or on a toxic site) is for every single unit to have its own air handling system to maintain air quality and positive pressure in that individual unit.

Nice idea and execution! Just one small suggestion. Could you consider increasing the height of the map? Even if it means putting the top white-background banner as a vertical column on the left edge. I was trying to find a location which required navigating due north, and one has to make very many short swipes because of the limited height of the map. Compared to when you're navigating East-west, in which case you can make wide sweeping swipes. Also it would allow you to see more context for any given location. Thanks. Nice work!

Do you mind sharing how many mg (milligrams) of zinc are in the one you have which advises to limit use to 7 days? I noticed that the Mayo clinic site says the maximum dose per day for an adult is 40 mg. I'm curious whether this 40 mg is safe for indefinite use, or such a 40 mg limit would also be for a maximum of 7 days.

I agree -- I would say the government should recognize the utility of the idea and request an emergency technical team from both Apple and Google to join up in a public-health emergency response consortium (to ensure interoperability) and brainstorm this idea. And Microsoft too, if they are still making windows phones.

I'm sorry but are you literally asking governments to cooperate with Apple and Google to backdoor all of our devices or do so and bully the population into submitting their data? There's a point where we need to talk about trade-offs between tracking potential disease contacts and what this does to our society. China isn't supposed to be a role model in this regard people.