I also reject "just building more", at least in already too big cities. I think a more viable long-term approach would be to foster the economy in such way that creates more jobs in smaller cities. Spain needs cities like "Düsseldorf" or "Austin".
I am sceptical of this kind of central planning. Fighting against organic growth and artificially trying to increase jobs in other cities seems like it would cost a lot more as a whole than trying to solve the problem where it actually exists.
You are right to be sceptical and should be. However in this particular case, what we see today, is exactly the outcome of central planning, from the previous regime that ended in the 70s, which effectively decimated industry on the countryside and forced everyone to live in large cities.
> was to force the owner of the flat to pay the expenses for signing the leasing contract of their tenants
The reality is, anyone renting in Spain can readily tell you things don't work this way, if you query this, they go with someone else. Tenants paying the contract fee has an enormous momentum and it's way to easy for landlords to ignore it, in our hot housing market.
It's difficult to comment on news like this, if there was a good, fast solution, it would have been enacted by now. I do somewhat agree that more renter protection is unlikely to solve much. Spain had years of complete eviction bans, meaning even if you completely default on your rent, the owner couldn't do anything. Even if a court ordered removal, enforcement was impossible.
This lady was living in a very desirable, central area of Madrid, paying peanuts for rent. Think Central Park rent for $500.
The spanish public generally doesn't want to, "build more", as they reject megacities. One of the biggest problem is there are no good, viable second and third-tier cities that have jobs. While there are very cheap places on the countryside, no one wants to live there as there are no jobs.
A complex solution would help: Canada-style ban of non-resident ownership, at least in stressed areas, "building more", but not in Madrid, Barcelona or Valencia, and in parallel, boost small businesses and remote work to help de-centralize living. However I don't think any country really cracked the code how to fix housing.
As Iberian, the reality on the other side is unfortunately quite similar, the remote working part is spot on.
We have a very strong culture regarding office work, meaning those in charge.
When I see news or talk to friends, relatives, it seems the daily reality is eons away from central, northern Europe regarding remote, even after covid.
So it is back to either living on the city center, or spending 4 hours a day commuting from the city outskirts, with several connections, and various timetables.
While at the same time, we have those sponsored housing, and gold visas, for digital nomads with US salaries, which make natives very unhappy not being able to afford rentals priced for foreigner purses.
Those making TikTok and YouTube Shorts videos how living in Portugal and Spain is so great, the food and the "cheap" prices.
Yes, exactly, I agree. I'd argue that's what the smaller, viable cities would fix: in Germany, big cities are equally expensive, but you can rent a very nice flat for 5-600 euros, in Erlangen, Nürnberg, Dortmund, Jena, etc. Spain has a lot of available space and great infrastructure, with fast trains and fiber internet everywhere. As a thought experiment, it would be pretty cool if Spain could create a digital city, in say, Teruel province, with brand new housing and high added value jobs, perhaps paired with lowered company taxes to attract companies settling. Perhaps it would also achieve nothing, I'm just brainstorming here.
Sorry to say but that part about the waymo being the only car pulling over is the embodiment of "f*ck you, I got mine". I could never live in a society like that. Germany has many issues (or at least, its adversaries like to portray it as such), but the moment traffic stops on the Autobahn, cars split into forming a corridor immediately. And yes, the fact German society is, broadly speaking, very considerate of others, makes it a better place to live there, overall, despite lower income.
Neither can I live in a society like this, but currently it is more difficult to die than live, thanks to f*cking EMTs and hospitals...
Seriously though, there seem to be many considerate people out in traffic, and oftentimes I am the rudest one on the road, for whatever reason. I do not drive, but I find that queueing up and boarding the bus all the time, that people are generally real polite one-on-one, but also extraordinarily inconsiderate to the collective, insofar as flouting rules and breaching etiquette in crazy ways all the time. And the same goes for my neighbors around here, who seem to go out of their way to irritate others, and oftentimes I snap.
Perhaps it is an artifact or side-effect of DEI, multiculturalism, melting-pot mentality, in the big city, that really there is no common culture or common manners to any of us, and mostly people are out for their own interests. It is extremely common in American cities for road-rage escalations to violence and death. Surely the news outlets cannot even report the accidents and fatalities from people simply losing their temper whilst operating motor vehicles. And we're back to the EMT grind.
I believe that a lot of people accused of xenophobia, or hating immigrants, are actually frustrated by a loss of culture, or a dilution, and the inexorable pressure to cope with increasing diversity of cultures around us, which is simply inhuman and unworkable, IMHO. You can't solve it by mass-deporting or any human strategy. But people who share heritage and share common values are more likely to get along daily, than a crucible of ethnicities, tribes, and subcultures, that are all asserting their supremacy or dominance over one another.
Is there anything that you learned through the FF/PM job that you find applying in your SE job? If I would have to guess, it's estimating outcomes quickly, people and expectation management?
The one thing I feel I can point is being able to talk to people either one on one or giving a presentation. Part of it could be getting older but I do feel like the FF/PM experience played a significant part in it.
What it did not translate to, for me, was working under pressure in IT. As a paramedic I had standard operating procedures / guidelines to guide me AND once we departed the scene I was usually no more than 30 minutes away from a doctor AND I didn't cause the problem to begin with AND once I gained confidence in my abilities I didn't get nervous as much or questioning myself. For the most part there is only so much you can do in an emergency situation in the field.
However, if something breaks in the IT world and I have management breathing down my neck (doesn't happen often) I worry that it was something I did, I don't know how to fix it, I'm not fixing it fast enough, blah, blah, blah. You would think non-life threatening IT-issues would not bother me but they do. Day to day office politics and team interaction doesn't bother me much though.
Another thing I feel like I got out of the FF/PM career is a get-it-done-figure-it-out-as-you-go. From the proverbial cat in the tree (never had that call) to a person having a heart attack, to person needs to be extricated from a vehicle, you can't just say "nope can't be done" or "I'm not doing it". I now see coworkers pushing back on stuff without even making an attempt. Try something, anything, but just don't say "nope can't do it". That is frustrating to me.
Jumping on this as one who was a ff/pm and officer and is a product manager: break things down into smaller and smaller problems, prioritize and resource manage. Show up at an MVA, it's a series of questions: how many patients do I have? how acute are they? what resources do I have coming or need? traffic control? tow? more patient transport? what do we need to make each hit a success point - do I need to take the door or roof off of this car to get the patient out? stabilize that vehicle to make it safe for us?
As you slice and dice, the problems become simpler, the answers easier, and the insurmountable chaos you showed up to becomes progressively more manageable.
There really isn't anything in react that is inherently "bloated", most companies were indeed using it wrong, or at least in a naive way. Over-reliance on useEffects, re-render issues, non-memoized components etc. When used correctly, react 18 provides really fast web apps on whatever scale (small one pager app to massive enterprise apps).
React is very similar to PHP in this regard. PHP has (had?) several major design flaws, and yet it became the default for people with less experience.
I don't think that React is as problematic as PHP ever was, and also frameworks like Laravel have improved the PHP experience tremendously, so there is now a way for less experienced people to use it.
IMO: the problem here is pretending that everyone has an innate right to use React right when it's clearly a library that works better when people have a bit more experience than the average web dev.
We as an industry tell people "don't do your own crypto, it's hard to get it right". We don't blame crypto for being hard, or demand new frameworks. Same for things like assembly, C++, Rust, formal proofs, writing an OS, operating BGP infrastructure, etc.
But with React it has to be "kid gloves on", otherwise it's shit?
This is perhaps a bigger problem in our industry: lack of experience is not seem as an individual problem, and we blame-shift, blame marketing, blame Facebook, Dan Abramov, trends...
Perhaps we should be saying "React is not for beginners", same as "don't do crypto".
Web dev is special. The industry has spent the last 20 years sacrificing almost everything to make building web sites more beginner friendly. There is an expectation that the "full-stack" (everything between node and react) should be effortless, that is absent from other fields. "one click to deploy" in not a thing in crypto, in embedded or in kernel dev, for instance; whereas it's expected that a junior web dev is productive from day one. That's just normal industrialization, specializing jobs and then making them simpler, starting where the numbers are larger.
Ironically, piling up simplistic technologies have created quite complex houses of cards in places. HTTP itself being the most obvious example of a tech meant to be simple and quick to grasp that morphed into a super complex, ineficient and insecure gremlin of which nobody who is not a specialist (or an AI) has a full picture anymore.
Nobody I ever worked with ever said anything even remotely close to that first paragraph.
"Full stack should be effortless"? What? This is definitely not coming from anyone other than two groups: random HN people with an axe to grind, or people trying to diminish the value of the profession.
Hiring for web is difficult, salaries are historically good, people complain about complexities, including yourself: "quite complex", "super complex", "nobody has a full picture".
Nevertheless: React proves that it's not effortless. There are complexities in there and kicking and screaming saying "it was supposed to be easy!!!" won't change the situation.
"It should be simple" yeah Crypto should be simple as well, so there are no bugs. But it's not.
> Nobody I ever worked with ever said anything even remotely close to that first paragraph.
No, they’re correct. Many people in the web dev community spent a couple of decades there obsessed with being beginner friendly. For example, “Anyone can learn to code”. We pushed back against anything perceived as gate keeping. There was general assembly and other coding bootcamps, to teach beginners web dev. And a million beginner videos. Web dev events at the time were full of beginners. I remember a show of hands once at SydJS. 70% of people in the room had been programming for a year or less. I stopped going, because speakers started catering to the audience.
Other areas of programming aren’t like this. Nobody runs 12 week coding bootcamps to teach complete beginners to build operating systems. It’s accepted you shouldn’t roll your own crypto. And we tell beginners to use Postgres, not roll their own database.
I’m not saying it’s a good or a bad thing. But it was definitely a thing.
> We don't blame crypto for being hard, or demand new frameworks
This is not true. There are innumerable cryptography libraries whose primary reason for existence was to replace or offer an alternative to a library with the same affordances but with primitives that were too easy to use incorrectly. “Maybe we should redesign this knife so it’s hard to slice a finger off” is not unique to web dev
> If everyone is using react wrong, react has a design flaw.
You're asserting that everyone is using it wrong. It's your personal opinion, and a baseless one at that which is based on a personal belief that everyone around you is incompetent and incapable of critical reasoning. It's silly posturing.
In the meantime, React is by far the most popular web framework in production. Some surveys list React with a market share of between 60-75% of all web frontend projects. It's so popular that it even leaked into GUI programming with native GUI toolkits.
It's rather obvious that assertions such as yours are detached from reality. Naturally the dominant framework will also dominate the number of newbies taking their first steps as well as drive-bys. It's also natural that the dominant framework will be targeted by the "aktually" crowd, invested in contrarian self-promotioj comments instead of doing anything constructive.
But to assume everyone is incapable of using something... That takes a lot of self delusion.
> based on a personal belief that everyone around you is incompetent and incapable of critical reasoning.
This is all news to me. I don’t think any of that. Do you make a habit of writing fanfic about other people? You also seem upset that I used word “everyone”. I thought my exaggeration was obvious. How embarrassing for us both.
If you want to make any technical arguments in support of react, I’m all ears. The only argument I can find in your comment is that react is popular right now. But that doesn’t mean react can’t be improved upon. Jquery was once that popular. Then react displaced it, by being better. Soon react will be displaced in turn, by a library which addresses react’s flaws. I can’t wait.
> This is all news to me. I don’t think any of that. Do you make a habit of writing fanfic about other people?
Pointing out the absurdity of someone like you throwing blanket accusations of incompetence is something that's very specific and verifiable. If you have strong feelings about making broad accusations about whole communities, you should pause and pay attention to what you are saying.
> If you want to make any technical arguments in support of react, I’m all ears.
Would you listen? I mean, the main issue with your post is the way you throw absurd blanket statements about a technology, on how either everyone using it is incompetent or the framework is somehow broken.
I mean, does it even dawn upon you that maybe perhaps throughout the past decade there might be people using the dominant framework well, and happen to know what they are doing?
It seems not, by the way you opt to disregard it and tell yourself no, everyone is either incompetent or the tool is broken.
Do you understand the absurdity of this sort of claim? Because it isn't even about React, but the way you feel it's reasonable to throw such blanket accusations.
> But that doesn’t mean react can’t be improved upon.
But that's not the claim you made, was it? Do you need me to quote you back at you?
> If everyone is using react wrong, react has a design flaw. Other frameworks aren't slow by default.
The claim that react is frequently misused was from the parent comment, not me. If you read it, you’ll see I’m explicitly not blaming react devs. I’m blaming react. Vdom diffing makes websites slow by default. And it is totally unnecessary.
Most of your comment is a big ad hominem attack. To answer your explicit question, yes I would find a technical argument much more convincing than a list of made up character flaws. Especially from a stranger, based on a two sentence comment. What a waste of time.
For what it’s worth, I don’t go around thinking everyone around me is an idiot. But your comment does get me thinking.
"You're asserting that everyone is using it wrong. It's your personal opinion, and a baseless one at that"
Their comment does not assert that. They are responding to someone else's assertion, and turning it around to make a completely different point. It's a common form of argument - "if you're saying that the problem is everyone's getting it wrong, then I disagree and the problem must be something else."
Basically the exact same point that you are using to launch a stream of insults!
Saying that it is "silly", "detached from reality" and "delusional" for making assumptions about folk is the most incredible self-own.
If most people can’t use it properly perhaps the problem is in react itself and not most people. React is the only framework that will blame the user for its own mistakes.
My grandfather used to burn sulphur strips to clean the glass demijohns. I guess this is why most wine carry a sulphate allergy label these days. Apart from this, I don't recall any other "chemical" being used, other than sugar.
Of course, this was decades ago and today would be called "artisanal" wine making.
> I guess this is why most wine carry a sulphate allergy label these days.
Partly. There is some natural level of sulfites present in wines - very dependent on the terroir, and then the rest comes during the manufacturing process; some sulfites may be added directly so the wine does not spoil.
There are wines that do not contain any added sulfites and even then may cause trouble to the sensitive persons if the sulfur content of soil is naturally high. Some manufacturers therefore also add info about total measured sulfite content to the label.
And nowadays, not only demijohns or wooden barrels are used to hold wine; of course stainless steel vessels, but also concrete vessels and even things like the Georgian qvevri underground clay vessels or amphorae are having a comeback.
I hope wines don't contain enough sulfates to trigger "allergies" because it would actually be toxic.
Sulfites and sulfates are very different, though related, and the sulfites are the things in question that have required warning labels.
I hate to be the grammar scold constantly, but swapping "i" for "a" is a weird category error and it's quite the deadly difference, like lowercasing "MegaBytes/MebiBytes" or capitalizing "kilobits per second", geez.
Chemistry has a lot of fiddly notation. My mother summed it up thus:
Johnny was a chemist.
Johnny is no more!
What Johnny thought was H2O, was H2SO4!
Bacons vary widely even across brands today. It is very much not a simple commodity product. You are taking a living animal which may be of several different breeds and raised in any number of environments. You butcher it, itself a skilled occupation. Then cure it using a number of highly variable ingredients and parameters for a variable amount of time. Slice it with varying thickness.
Cured meats are entire world unto themselves. I have had bacon that tasted like a salty strip of cardboard, and bacon that is a peppery, savory, chewy/crispy revelation.
In many ways the BLT is sort of the perfect example food for showing how non-commoditized ingredients actually are. It's only five ingredients: bread, bacon, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise. But each of those ingredients can vary extremely widely.
Take some generic white bread, thin cheap bacon, old iceberg lettuce, out of season grocery store tomatoes, and Miracle Whip and you'll have a result that you wouldn't understand why anyone on Earth would eat.
Then get some good bakery sourdough, thick cut heavily peppered bacon from a small farm that treats their pigs well, fresh butter or Bibb lettuce, late summer tomatoes from your own garden (the best tomatoes simply don't ship), and whip up a batch of mayo yourself without any preservatives using good eggs and oil. It will likely be one of the best meals you've ever eaten.
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