Governments and industry are responsible. Personal consumption/waste is not the primary driver of climate change, no matter how much corporations tell us that using paper straws is the solution. It's tough to expect average people to take major action when corporations are essentially given carte blanche.
And who is buying all that stuff from corporations? Who is actually the one consuming?
We can quibble about edge effects like "induced demand", but by and large, people just love cheap energy, cheap calories, and can shift the moral burden by playing "not my responsibility" games.
Well, yeah. Corporations aren't just nefarious evil entities, dumping carbon into the atmosphere for no reason. They're doing it to sell goods. The problem is that a lot of the environmental costs for the manufacture and transport of those goods are externalized and go unpaid.
It's difficult to put the blame for that on the consumer, who has no visibility into manufacturing or logistics, and who has vanishingly-small options for not participating. Buying domestic goods is very difficult or impossible, and goods which are manufactured in more environmentally-safe ways are significantly more expensive (because the costs I mentioned earlier weren't externalized).
If a consumer is presented with two options, one that costs $X and has unknown environmental costs, and one that costs $2X and is marketed as being environmentally safe, the majority will choose the first. This is especially true as economic forces continue to squeeze average people.
Consumers absolutely participate in the problem, but the only process by which it could be corrected is regulation, and the only entity capable of that is the government. (Democracy being what it is, you can however place more blame at the feet of voters.)
I think pinning the blame on them is the wrong way to look at it. Its more a very complex system where each actor's behaviour affect the behavior of other actors. So politicians doing more is super important, consumers doing more is important, companies doing more is important. Everyone's collective effort pushes the flywheel in a different direction.
You over-estimate the amount of sway investors have on Stripe. If VCs had the influence you're describing, Stripe would have gone public many years ago.
I worked on developer experience at Stripe for a few years.
What really happened is that Stripe's products used to be simple. If you're only accepting credit cards and only serving the US market, the API surface is extremely simple. Once you start going multinational and accepting different types of payments it gets much more complex.
For example, OXXO gives users a barcode and lets them take it to a physical location and complete the purchase, so instead of a system like Visa which can confirm a transaction in a maximum of O(seconds), you also have to support methods where confirmations take O(days). Building custom API endpoints for each payment method isn't realistic, since there are hundreds worldwide, and merchants want a single integration point that can support anything from credit cards to coupon-based systems like OXXO.
TL;DR -- Stripe's APIs are definitely more complex now, but it's not because of poor design, it's because they simply have to be in order to serve the customers and markets the company is now reaching.
It's an obvious partnership because Void Cloud was built on Cloudflare anyway, so having Cloudflare buying them directly just means that both companies don't need to carve out their own margin. Cloudflare is also happy to fund the work on Vite, Oxc, et al. while also having a more direct answer for Vercel and Next.js.
With all that said, I don't think we can extrapolate that their business wasn't doing well or that they couldn't have raised more money. Cloudflare probably just offered a good enough deal that it didn't make sense to try to grind it out.
What I really mean is that when M&A happens, it seems like a lot of people think the acquirer is the only one with any agency, and that's not true at all.
"While the tax seems large, experts say the city's antiquated assessment and valuation system dramatically undervalues properties, reducing the burden. City valuations can often be 10% or less of the true market value, they said.
Rather than overhaul the system immediately, the city will gradually update valuations – and the tax – according to the budget documents. Starting in the 2028-2029 tax year, the property values will be based on comparable sales. Since valuations will skyrocket, the tax rates will fall to compensate."
this is, at minimum, a 10% increase in ALL property taxes. And the people most affected will be the lower and middle class.
That literally has nothing to do with the pied-a-terre tax. The assessment process is not related to taxing second homes. Each can be done with or without the other.
I don't think it's fair to consider writing an analysis (even a favorable one) about a topic as _shilling_ for it. It's not like he was pushing shitcoins or minting NFTs.
I have always been (and remain!) bearish on crypto but it absolutely was something that couldn't be ignored a few years ago. Even if you came to the conclusion that it was bunk, there was significant enough fervor that any technologist needed to reckon with their position on it.
For example, lots of engineers proclaimed very loudly that document databases would replace the RDBMs, or that GraphQL was the future of APIs. They were wrong, as it turned out, but only with the wisdom of hindsight.
No, I didn’t. I made my account private and stopped using twitter.
And the actual tweet says the opposite - that NFTs would need to develop some kind of cultural grounding for them to become a investment, which they didn’t have at the time and never got, and without that this would just be a speculative bubble, which is exactly what happened.
I made it very clear that I thought NFTs were a speculative bubble. I never suggested anyone should buy any crypto-related instrument. The idea that I was ‘shilling for crypto’ is something you would only say if you’re an idiot, as the OP and a few others on this thread clearly are.
We tried Chromebooks for our kids, and the instant I could buy Neos I did. It might just be that we're fully bought into the Apple ecosystem, but I had a hell of a time trying to get stuff like parental controls figured out on ChromeOS.
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