Whether it is a fee or tax is less about whether it funds the government and more about whether when you pay the amount you get some benefit that you wouldn’t if you didn’t pay (above and beyond compliance with tax law). For example a fishing licence is a fee while a flood levy is a tax.
Yes, I understood that (and stated as much). The first part made sense to me. It is the second that I find perplexing.
> By contrast, ‘taxes’ are expected to ‘inure[] to the benefit’ of the wider public.
That seems to apply to both taxes and fees as far as I can tell. It seems to me that a tax can primarily be distinguished by virtue of not qualifying as a fee. Put another way, are not fees paid to a government a subset of taxes much as squares are a subset of rectangles?
No, because the government collecting sales tax isn't a party to the transaction. The fee itself needs to be in exchange for a good, but the government is giving you anything marginal in exchange for sales tax, instead it's going into accounts spent for public good.
It does all seem a bit arbitrary doesn't it? If you frame it as purchasing the privilege of purchasing a certain quantity of arbitrary goods denominated in dollars then it sure looks like a fee. But obviously that isn't what is meant.
At the end of the day shall-issue permits, hyper specialized taxes, and fees all seem to amount to the same thing. However I think you can probably construct a reasonable criteria based on whether or not the other side of the transaction is fulfilled by the government and whether or not it is legal to do the thing by default. By that logic sales taxes and car tabs would indeed be taxes while fishing and camping permits would both be fees.
If the request data is larger than the limit it doesn’t get processed by the Cloudflare system. By increasing buffer size they process (and therefore protect) more requests.
When I worked for a company who worked with big banks / financial institutions we used to run disaster recovery tests. Effectively a simulated outage where the company would try to run off their backup sites. They ran everything from those sites, it was impressive.
Once in a while we'd have a real outage that matched the test we ran as recently as the weekend before.
I was helping a bank switch over to the DR site(s) one day during such a real outage and I left my mic open when someone asked me what the commotion was on the upper floors of our HQ. I said "super happy fun surprise disaster recovery test for company X".
VP of BIG bank was on the line monitoring and laughed "I'm using that one on the executive call in 15, thanks!" Supposedly it got picked up at the bank internally after the VP made the joke and was an unofficial code for such an outage for a long time.
In most BIG banks, "Vice President" is almost an entry-level title. Easily have 1000s of them. For example, this article points out that Goldman Sachs had ~12K VPs out of more than 30K employees: https://web.archive.org/web/20150311012855/https://www.wsj.c...
Just like all Sales folks have heavily inflated titles, no customer wants to think they're dealing with a junior salesperson/loan officer when you're about to hand over your money.
It seems like every vendor sales team I work with is an "executive" or "director of sales" even though in reality they're just regular old salespeople.
VP at Goldman is equivalent to Senior SWE according to levels.fyi and their entry level is Analyst. I'm surprised by the compensation though. I would have thought people working at a place with gold in the name would be making more. Also apparently Morgan Stanley pays their VPs $67k/year.
In fairness to the fly.io folks (who are extremely serious hackers), they’re standing up a whole cloud provider and they’ve priced it attractively and they’re much customer-friendlier than most alternatives.
I don’t envy the difficulty of doing this, but I’m quite confident they’ll iron the bugs out.
I don’t always agree with @tptacek on social/political issues, and I don’t always agree with @xe on the direction of Nix, but these are legends on the technical side of things. And they’re trying to build an equitable relationship between the user of cloud services and the provider, not fund a private space program.
If I were in the market for cloud services I’d highly prize a long-term relationship on mutual benefit and fair dealings over a short-term nuisance of being an early adopter.
I strongly suspect your investment in fly is going to pay off.
I'm several steps removed from day-to-day engineering at this point; the team working on this is much better than I am. It's just a very hard problem; biting it off is something you can certainly blame me for, though.
I may be the minority on this view, but I think that it's possible to be both a recognized expert aka legend and loud ("visible" might be a kinder word).
When you talk technology, I listen, and I doubt I'm alone in that. Keep up the good work with fly.io!
I want to believe, but in the meantime they’re killing the product I’ve been working hard to build trust with my own customers though. There is a limit to my idealism, and it’s well and truly in the past.
I suspect that making a cloud service provider run reliably requires tons of grunt work more than it requires technical heroism from a small number of highly talented individuals.
(Neon employee) We auto-upgrade minor versions as long as they can be done autonomously. For major versions, you're right it's still manual but we're working on improving that. Here is our version policy: https://neon.tech/docs/postgresql/postgres-version-policy
I didn't know that was decided, and was just catching up on it now. This was a fun read:
> Mr Walker and other high-level executives from Iceland (the supermarket), took an emergency delegation to Iceland (the country), where they were met with a cold shoulder.
Jetbrains only “did it right” because there was huge community outcry about their move to pure subscription so they moved to the “if you subscribe for X amount of time you get to keep the last version you had when you stop subscribing”.
Props to them for listening to the community but question whether they should be the gold standard given it is still a compromise position.
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