Ha, what a coincidence. Just today I was reading a three year old Stackoverflow discussion about this [1].
It prompted Laurenz to submit the documentation patch that is cited in the article. In the discussion of the patch itself, people seem to conclude that it's a good improvement to the docs, but that the behaviour itself is a bit of a footgun. [2]
According to [1], the White House claims Vietnam has a 90% tariff rate.
According to [2], 90.4% is the ratio of Vietnam's trade deficit with the US -- they have a deficit of $123.5B on $136.6B of exports.
The same math holds true for other countries, e.g. Japan's claimed 46% tariff rate is their deficit of $68.5B on $148.2B of exports. The EU's claimed 39% tariff rate is their deficit of $235.6B on $605.8B of exports.
Who knows, maaaaybe it just so happens that these countries magically have tariff rates that match the ratio of their trade deficits.
Or maybe, the reason Vietnam doesn't buy a lot of US stuff is because they're poor. The reason they sell the US a bunch of stuff is because their labour is cheap to Americans. (They do have tariffs, but they're nowhere near 90%: [3].)
America's government is not trustworthy. Assuming that what they say is truthful is a poor use of time.
We definitely had a dim view of the Iraq invasion. At the time, I ran a Microsoft recruiting event on campus at University of Waterloo. Students made some widget using whatever framework du jour was popular in order to win a prize. The top-voted widget was one that showed how many Iraqi civilians had been killed by the US so far during the war. Still, we sort of understood: y'all had a legitimate grievance due to 9/11 (just, not, y'know, against Iraq...)
We had a dim view of the first Trump administration. Muslim ban? Trump's anti-vax horseshit during a pandemic? January 6?
And then Americans re-elected him. Whether it's the Nazi stuff, the tariff stuff, the annexation stuff, the trans stuff, the firing the blacks and women stuff, it's just exhausting chaos that was all predictable.
Now we have a dim view of Americans.
There is a benefit, in that I'm hopeful this will be the impetus for Canada to become a more serious country. Still, it's incredibly wasteful. If we retool to trade more with Europe and Asia, both Canada and the US will be poorer for it. But god, it will be worth it.
Yeah, the author seems to be writing for a white male audience in some regards.
My wife and I host bicycle tourers when they pass through our town. One was Thomas Meixner, an East German who started travelling the world on bike when the wall fell. He's visited something like 120 countries and biked 250,000 km.
My wife asked him if he thought a solo woman could do what he did in the places he did it. He tactfully changed the subject.
Canada has begun cracking down on this. There are now caps on the number of visas issued. Foreign students are no longer allowed to work full-time jobs by default while studying. This is especially relevant, because the Comprehensive Ranking System for permanent immigration gives points for years of full-time work experience in Canada, as well as for diplomas earned in Canada.
Unwinding it will be a bit messy: lots of post-secondary institutions have to figure out how run programs with a lot less funding, and what to do with capital projects that no longer make sense in light of greatly reduced enrollment, etc.
The damage done to the average Canadian's view of immigrants will take some time to fade away. But I suspect it will, with time, especially since our traditional immigration system really does just skim the "good" immigrants -- the ones with money and the skills to succeed.
Are you my doppelganger? I made almost this exact comment word-for-word to a friend of mine a few weeks ago.
Trudeau's immigration video from December [1] was one of the most dishonest, condescending productions that I've ever seen, basically amounting to, "Yes, we destroyed our previous internationally respected immigration system and imported five million low skilled laborers over a couple years without adding any housing or infrastructure. Yes, that's hurt a lot of you and made you angry. No, we don't think that's a problem. But because you're so angsty, we'll throttle it back a tiny wittle bit over the next year or two before throwing the floodgates wide open again."
Not a shred of anything even resembling self-awareness or humility throughout.
The most shocking thing to me is the heavy involvement of McKinsey consulting in all this[1]. Feels anti-democratic to let a foreign consulting firm set immigration targets.
That's absolutely bananas. $3 million for a _report_ about suggestions for possible immigration reform (to speed it up of course). In the hole $62 billion a year, and a sizable chunk is going to overpriced MBA grads right out of school to produce PDF documents. How the hell do we reign these people in.
The Lieutenant Governor of Texas, one month into the pandemic, was mulling how it might be best for society if we just carried on as-is and accept that a lot of old people would die:
> As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival, in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? And if that's the exchange, I'm all in.
The chief science advisor of the UK described his meetings with the PM of the UK in 2020:
> “He says his party ‘thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them. A lot of moderate people think it is a bit too much.’”
> Vallance’s diary also recounts how then chief whip Mark Spencer told a cabinet meeting in December 2020 that “we should let the old people get it and protect others”. He said that Johnson then added: “A lot of my backbenchers think that and I must say I agree with them”.
FWIW, I live in the region and disagree with OP's characterization of "serious decline" and "most people have left".
I went to school here from 2003-2008, moved away and moved back in 2011.
The area's population has increased by ~20% since 2012 (~the death of RIM, according to its stock price). In 2011, it got regional train service to Toronto. In 2019, it got a local light rail train.
The university area that the OP seems to be referring to is, IMO, more walkable and bikeable now than before. Some of the towers are mixed use, with ground floor retail.
The city is definitely quite different from the early 2000s, though.
It's a bit complicated, because I think the versatiles brand is used to describe multiple things:
- the schema of the map: what objects are available in each tile at different zoom levels. It sounds like versatiles uses the shortbread schema (contrast vs OpenMapTiles, protomaps)
- a container format: a way to pack multiple tiles into a single file. It sounds like they created their own format here (contrast vs mbtiles, pmtiles).
- the scripts/tooling to build everything
- the overall finished map product itself (contrast vs Google Maps, Stadio Maps, protomaps, OpenMapTiles, etc)
The versatile container format seems to require a custom HTTP server. But if you want, you could produce the versatiles map and store it in a pmtiles container. Or you could stick a caching proxy in front of their publicly available tile server at https://tiles.versatiles.org/tiles/osm/{z}/{x}/{y}
It would be interesting to hear them describe why they decided to create their own container format. The text that I have found seems to be contrasting it to RDBMS containers, but is silent about mbtiles/pmtiles.
As far as my understanding goes, mbtiles is based on SQLite, so it would be a RDBMS container based format.
There was a YouTube talk published 4 weeks ago showcasing this project, which was where I discovered it in the first place. The (German) video can be found here https://youtu.be/8A51WkJ5S8I
Thanks, that's a handy video! Yes, mbtiles is based on SQLite, I was imprecise in my language.
When I said RDBMS, I meant those that have a client/server model. The versatiles docs talk about the complexity and surface area of database systems as a motivator for creating their own container format. From this I inferred they were referring to Postgres and PostGIS, which are used in the canonical OpenMapTiles implementation.
Watching that video, they do mention not liking the traditional Postgres/PostGIS approach due to its heavy weight. But they also say they disliked mbtiles due to its SQLite dependency, and that the versatiles format is inspired on/based on pmtiles. (Apologies if I'm missing nuance here, I was watching auto translated auto generated captions.)
I found https://github.com/versatiles-org/versatiles-rs/issues/24 which contrasts the versatiles format vs the pmtiles format. After reading it, I'm not personally convinced of the benefits of versatiles vs just throwing a CDN in front of a clustered pmtiles file, but perhaps I'm missing something.
I think the auto translation of the subtitles captured most of the mentioned concerns very well.
In large part the conference talk indeed referenced operational concerns. However, there were also scalability and simplicity mentioned as a key consideration. One motivation for this project seemed to be having a good map for visualizing data for journalistic purposes (for example as embeds on news sites), so this concern makes sense.
In the video linked there also was a bit of a comparison between versatiles and protomaps during the Q&A block.
It prompted Laurenz to submit the documentation patch that is cited in the article. In the discussion of the patch itself, people seem to conclude that it's a good improvement to the docs, but that the behaviour itself is a bit of a footgun. [2]
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73951604/autovacuum-and-...
[2]: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/Y8cQJIMFAe7QT73/%40mom...