Speak for yourself. I'm typing on a thinkpad at the moment, I use the trackpoint all the time. Once you've mastered it, you no longer need to move your hands between typing / moving the mouse. Your fingers stay on the keyboard.
Maybe large swaths of users wouldn't download enhancement suites if you actually listened to them? It took like 3 years to support the basic feature to "never group tabs" in the Taskbar -- that's been supported by previous versions of windows for decades. That's why I downloaded patches.
This is a shame. CBC should trim the fat elsewhere.
What are your thoughts on state funded media? I see the benefits but also the drawbacks, namely their partisanship when a political opponent wants to stop the hand outs
> This is a shame. CBC should trim the fat elsewhere.
I wonder what their new strategy is. Looking at the linked articles, at least two or three are hit pieces, swipes intended to sway opinion. For example "The hidden costs of EV batteries" article linked is a hit piece on the EV market, a common target and thus likely to generate clicks. There's a political hit piece in there was well.
Contrary to conservative talking points that the CBC is some sort of pro-liberal propaganda machine, the CBC just runs the same news, with roughly the same slants, as the rest of the media here. The anti-EV hit pieces get clicks. Clicks bring money. Money keeps CBC afloat. Those kind of articles frankly everywhere right now, likely because someone is paying to propagate them, and the outrage they generate ("guvnment forcing EVs on us") sells.
I think CBC should transition to being entirely publicly funded and move away from creating most if not all of its original programming.
Instead, they should focus on 3 things: news, children's educational television, and high quality documentaries (in reality, even the docs might be irrelevant with the NFB). They should be ad-free (online and on television), and completely independent from profit or revenue concerns. There should be no bonuses for executives.
Parliament should also pass something like a "fairness doctrine" that is obligatory if any news agency receives any public funding.
The problem with this is, as they say, that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Running a successful broadcaster is hard, and there's a limited pool of talent that can do this well.
So if you want to be successful, and not a public-money-wasting amateur-hour operation, you need to attract experienced professional talent. And if you aren't competitive on salary, why would they come to you?
I understand the spirit of your idea though.. Maybe bonuses should be based on specific metrics - like viewership or fundraising - that and publicly tracked and paid out in a very transparent way instead?
And maybe they shouldn't be only for executives.
Ad-free is a tough one, but maybe they have limited categories for advertisements, say things that are of public interest like events? Not sure...
There shouldn't be a bonus, just a salary. If the salary is big enough, then you'll get talent. Executive's often fail upwards because they obsess over getting their bonus even when the org is failing or in trouble. The idea that bonuses are mandatory is something executives repeat ad nauseum because it is obviously in their own interest.
With executive bonuses all you get are executives who focus on short term metrics ("how do I maximize the chances of getting my bonus?") over their roles as public servants and the long term sustainability of the organization. Maximizing their chances of getting a bonus might make sense when the metric is profit, or share price, or revenue, because theoretically the executive's interest would align with the employees and the organization. But, when the point of the organization is a public service and disconnected from profit, revenue, or share value, then maximizing the executive seeking their bonus over all else does not easily or really align with public service or the organization's sustainability.
There are many other incentives to working in public service, for one example: public servants in Canada get frankly an insane defined benefit pension. Few people in Canada nowadays are able to get as good retirement benefits. There are also people who have dedicated decades to working at the CBC or in public service. The assumption seems to be that only ~executives~ from some chosen ~executive class~ can run an org, but in fact that is only a relatively recent idea. Choosing someone with proven dedication to the org, and with proven skills in many of the departments of the org, someone who has worked their way up, is probably a far better choice compared to someone from outside who has only private experience. It's also the way that executives were hired or developed for decades before the bonus obsession.
Well, how would you design a tax scheme to pay for it? Remember, a tax that doesn't directly derive from healthcare would be unjust according to these axioms. So it can't be an income tax, just as it would be unjust to pay for roads using an income tax. You tax everyone using the healthcare system and to the degree that they use it and pay for it that way.
Further, healthcare isn't a commons, so it is arguable that a state has no business interfering. Emergency facilities specifically are a commons, if the hippocratic oath is followed and all in need are helped. So some scheme where people pay for the maintenance of these facilities and services rendered in them based on how much they stand to benefit from them would be just. I don't know how you'd do that beyond sending them a bill. Maybe yearly renew on an access card, like vehicle registration, that isn't based on income but maybe could be based on medical history, or just flat rate for everyone. Taxing income, or wealth, to pay for blanket coverage including person to person contracts with specialists would be unjust, socializing something that isn't a commons would be unjust, but managing emergency facilities as a commons and funding them with some type of tax directly derived from their existence would be, because they are a commons and do suffer from tragedy of the commons.
Lots of reasons, but mainly that I don't consider null values to be a fault of the language. Even if it were, this doesn't solve that problem.
But now we're in a situation where we still have nulls, but compiler warnings force us to decorate them and treat them the same as before. It obscures the difference between value and reference types. Plus the syntax implies Nullable<T>, which is something everyone should have learned to avoid when all it did was box value types.
The more correct solution would have been to finish the contract system that allowed you to declare a function argument as non-nullable.
Ultimately I think it was the wrong solution to something that wasn't a problem to begin with. Now we have muddied the syntax and the null situation is the same as it always has been.
Agreed that Microsoft is adding features for the sake of setting C# apart rather than making it a better language (IMO).
I strongly disagree about the treatment of null values, if there's one thing I like about C# it's that (even if it's crude, it's better than Scala's way of doing it which is Maybe or Option or something, sorry, it's been a while.) Also C# doesn't 'force' you, you have to require it before it enforces no-nulls.
> It obscures the difference between value and reference types
How, and how is that a problem?
> Plus the syntax implies Nullable<T>, which is something everyone should have learned to avoid when all it did was box value types.
Err, now I'm getting really rusty. What are you saying here?
> The more correct solution would have been to finish the contract system that allowed you to declare a function argument as non-nullable.
That's effectively what the no-null enforcement does, only it applies inside a function as well (if you make it do so anyway).
I completely disagree that it "wasn't a problem to begin with" .Hoare called it his billion-dollar mistake, and that's an underestimate. And we haven't muddied the syntax because you enable no-nulls with a pragma, and the null situation is definitely not the same as it has always been. The compiler picks them up and reports them (like I said, rather crappily but it's a damn sight better than nothing).
The question mark to denote a nullable type is inherited from the .net framework days. You'd use that to mark a value type as nullable, which is syntactic sugar for Nullable<T>. Internally, that object stores a bool for IsNull and it packs your value into an Object. When dealing with value types, this results in a copy-by-value every time you access it, which is bad in most cases.
I don't like this solution because it reuses something that I've learned is a Bad Thing. Though I'm sure the current implementation just stores a reference to the object in question.
But fundamentally, I think nulls are a good thing. Null carries information. If C/++ can handle null pointers for the last 40 years, I think C# can handle it. But then again, maybe this is a problem domain that I've just never encountered. The only problems I have with nulls is around ergonomics, but the null coalescing and safe access operators solve that for the most part. Maybe it's a bigger problem at scale, I really wouldn't know. At the scale I operate at, non-nullable reference types causes more headache than it solves problems
Can the down voters explain themselves? I genuinely want to hear more discussion on both sides, and this commenter has provided some interesting points..
It’s a duplicate story. And this one raised to #1. So yeah I’m going to post this interesting information again. Nothing in response to it challenged it well.
I did change the last sentence to clarify the data a bit.
I often hear this apocalyptic outlook and I wonder how probable it is.. people speak of it as if it is a certainty but I am not entirely convinced. Can someone point me in either direction?
For a less apocalyptic point of view I’d recommend UW professor and meteorologist Cliff Mass.
Fair warning that he’s a bit of a lightning rod for controversy due in large part to his relatively centrist views on exactly these and similarly hot button issues.
