That doesn't agree with my experience. I switched from Turbo Pascal to Turbo C in the late 80s while doing DOS development because it was a better tool for the job. It had nothing to do with microsoft or windows (v3.0 was not yet out and few people developed windows apps before v3.0). Pascal (the language) was definitely not preferred for DOS development at that time - it's just that until 1987 there wasn't really C development environment that could compete with Turbo Pascal.
I did some Amiga development back then also and that was exclusively in C with some 68k assembly. I don't really recall anyone hoping for a pascal environment to replace their C tools, but the Amiga OS was more C-oriented than DOS at the time.
I think I would give this advice to just about anyone who is trying to follow their interests and build a career at the same time:
It just sounds like you enjoy learning. That is great, but it sounds like you also want a career.
If you want to find similar happiness in a career as you do with learning you'll need to decide to enjoy making things that are valuable to others. It may be that you already enjoy this; otherwise you'll have to train yourself to be happy when others find your work valuable. If you can do that you shouldn't have much trouble building a career given the skills you already have. Learning to work with other people will dramatically increase the number of potentially valuable things you can create so you should also pursue that (as you've already surmised).
I agree that everyone is paying for them via the tax incentives. But I think the media portrayal is often incorrect about who benefits. The benefits of tax-exempt bonds are split between the municipality issuing them and the high-income individuals buying them. But most of the gain is captured by the municipality (because the high-income people would be getting a lot more interest in a taxable investment so the municipality would have to pay a lot more interest to raise money if they had to compete with those investments).
It seems like firms that are large enough to manage multiple offices do exactly that. In the games industry electronic arts is a good example. They have offices in Vancouver, Montreal, and Edmonton (a huge team grown out of the BioWare acquisition) and possibly other places in Canada.
Microsoft has a campus in Vancouver (well, Richmond, originally - it moved to downtown Vancouver later) since 2007. There was around 600 people there last year, mostly devs.
I don't know anything in particular about the program, but why do you think the business should pay the prevailing wage? How many prisoners would get hired with that requirement vs. without it? As a business owner why would I prefer to hire a prisoner instead of someone not in prison? Or am I thinking about it the wrong way? It sounds like hiring a prisoner benefits the prison system and the prisoner (and also the business as long as there is an incentive of some kind).
There are going to be costs, but maybe this is actually a relatively low-cost option for helping to get prisoners back out into the world (and not back into prison). It is certainly cheaper than keeping them in prison. It says on that page that 10-20 percent of prisoners stay with their employer after being released. That seems low to me, but I haven't studied other solutions to this problem for comparison.
I also have a model S, but I have owned a couple of other high performance gas cars that are much more responsive on the 55-65 or 40-70 acceleration test (passing at highway speeds). That's the only common case where the tesla loses to gas vehicles, and then only high performance gas vehicles (e.g. 300HP+ coupe/sedan models).
But the 0-30 thing is exactly right in my experience. Even more powerful vehicles don't have the instant and smooth acceleration feel of an electric motor.
There's that, plus the time that it takes for the automatic transmission to decide that yes, you really do want to accelerate, and yes, maybe it ought to get around to increasing the RPMs one of these seconds.
Electric cars opened my interest car performance. I now have a higher performance ICE than I ever thought I would spend money on, but I still miss my tiny little electric Fiat 500e, even though my ICE is definitely better at 40-80mph.
Fiddling with gears, monitoring RPM, what a terrible system. Feels like a steam engine after being in an electric.
I can totally see how that would be true. You build muscle memory and positive associations around the operation of the machine. But you've gotta see too how it's akin to turning a rotary phone dial.
In some ways, yes, but excluding dual clutch transmissions, manual transmissions really do have a performance advantage while rotary phones did not have any advantage over touch tone other than, maybe at one point, cost.
I disagree. As eeks points out, fully automatic transmissions are kind of awful at making decisions.
I have a case when I was driving into work this morning. I got stuck behind a funeral procession going 35 MPH on a 65 MPH interstate highway (Uggghhhhh)
I look to my left-mirror, and I see a spot I can feasibly make, I just gotta time it right to get "into" the flow of traffic. So what do I do?
I drop to 2nd gear (The Gear ratios on the Ford Focus are kinda "weak"). My engine roars but its cool, because my engine's top-Torque is in the 4000RPM to 6000RPM band. When the "spot" opens up, I floor the acceleration pedal and get in just fine.
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A fully automatic vehicle wouldn't "know" that I wanted to "prepare" for the sudden acceleration. It only knows after you push the pedal.
A manual driver however, can tell the car to "prepare" for acceleration, so that when you push the accelerator you are 100% ready to go.
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Semi-automatic vehicles (including some "sport" CVT engines I've test-driven) would work. The important bit is to be able to change gears way ahead of time BEFORE you push the accelerator.
Automatic transmissions are better & smarter than you. you may have to drive a little differently if you're driving an automatic in the scenario you described, but saying that it doesn't ''know'' what you wanted to do means either your transmission is virgin & hasn't learned your habits, or, had a different driver for several years & is shifting at the wrong points. This 'ready to go' thing is all hogwash manual elitism.
Look, a CVT semi-automatic probably would outperform me. I'm no master driver or whatever.
But a typical automatic transmission? Dude, I have a huge advantage as a human. I have eyes. I can see things the engine cannot.
It takes time for a internal combustion engine to rev up to its ideal torque band. The Ford Focus is a turbocharged engine, which means it only achieves maximum torque above 4000 RPM.
Since most automatic transmissions are tuned for fuel efficiency (ie: 2000RPM band or so), they will perform worse when you're trying to accelerate. The manual driver has the advantage that they can choose fuel efficiency (ie: 2000RPM most of the time), or in cases of emergency... kick it into (low) gear for very high RPM to maximize the torque band.
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ICE Engines are all about tradeoffs, and the manual driver can choose the RPM-band that best matches the situation.
Would a properly tuned automatic beat me in fuel economy? Probably.
Would a properly tuned automatic beat me in acceleration? Probably.
But no automtaic can be tuned to do both at the same time. Since high-Torque is high-RPM only... and fuel efficiency is low-RPM only... the computer cannot be tuned to try to do both at the same time.
Unless it's hooked into a sophisticated camera system, how could an automatic transmission possibly learn that I'm going to want a lot of acceleration in a couple of seconds once this car passes me?
By the way, I'm not a manual elitist, but rather an EV elitist. I like not having a transmission at all.
It's worth mentioning that none of these techniques actually apply to the case where you exercise stock options - other than the one that says basically "take options as compensation if you can because you don't pay taxes until you exercise them" which is true for everyone who gets options (because you don't get any liquidity) not just rich people with expensive accountants.
The only techniques that apply to income taxes are the "borrow against stock technique" (has a big caveat about a rich person who lost in court when he used it) and the deferred compensation example (which is also zero liquidity; presumably you pay all of the income taxes when you actual get the money).
The article makes a better case for ways to avoid death taxes or real estate taxes though.
I did some Amiga development back then also and that was exclusively in C with some 68k assembly. I don't really recall anyone hoping for a pascal environment to replace their C tools, but the Amiga OS was more C-oriented than DOS at the time.