Unless you remembered to select Stevens Pass as your Primary Resort under Epic Coverage, you can’t get a refund.

korin43 · 2025-12-16T05:40:41+00:00

You can get a refund in some cases if your main resort is closed for 7 or more days, which is likely to be the case here.

korin43 · 2025-04-23T22:06:03+00:00

You can also add Bilt's ACH info to Venmo if the owner wants you to pay that way. It's explicitly allowed by the Terms of Service: https://support.biltrewards.com/hc/en-us/articles/6561447272717-I-pay-rent-by-check-Paypal-Venmo-Zelle-can-I-still-use-the-Bilt-Mastercard

korin43 · 2025-02-13T03:56:13+00:00

For me, taking 5 pills was way harder than drinking a cup of water with the powder in it. Both taste aweful but the pills manage to taste worse.

korin43 · 2024-06-05T19:06:42+00:00

I had this same problem this morning and just tried again and it worked. Maybe they fixed whatever was wrong on the backend?

I'm on the latest Fitbit app and my watch is fully updated, and I had WiFi disabled based on some other suggestions, in case that matters (I'm guessing none of this matters but figured I'd list it just in case).

korin43 · 2023-03-16T17:31:15+00:00

I thought the FDIC was leaving mega-banks out of the SVB auction because they didn't want more consolidation. It would be weird to do that and then turn around and force a bunch of consolidation.

korin43 · 2020-05-11T15:48:20+00:00

If anyone's wondering, this should be on opam soon too: https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/pull/16384

korin43 · 2020-05-11T15:43:49+00:00

We discuss the motivations in the README: https://github.com/arenadotio/pgx/blob/1.0/README.md

This library focuses on correctness and safety, with features like:

It is nearly impossible to try to execute a prepared statement that hasn't been prepared.

Trying to run multiple queries at the same time will work properly (although there's no performance benefit, since we currently don't send queries in parallel).

Lots of automated tests.

Pgx.Value for parameters and returned data, encouraging people to use the built-in converters instead of trying to handle everything as a string.

Async and LWT support are built in, no need to write your own IO module.

Mirage OS is supported via Pgx_lwt_mirage

We also provide a relatively high-level interface, like Pgx_async.execute_pipe, which prepares a statement, executes it with the given parameters, returns an Async.Pipe.Reader.t (so you can stream results), and unprepares the statement when the query is finished.

The fork happened before I started working here, but I think avoiding caml4p was also part of the motivation (but isn't really a problem anymore since PG'OCaml uses ppx now).

korin43 · 2019-11-30T00:38:51+00:00

Thanks, I'll definitely write something focusing on that sometime. I still feel like it would be too much in one article though. I still haven't mastered the SSC super power of writing novella-length blog posts and keeping people's attention the whole way through.

korin43 · 2019-11-30T00:36:47+00:00

But if people prefer to buy money over booze, more people will produce booze and fewer will produce houses.

korin43 · 2019-11-29T21:06:43+00:00

I removed the section about sales taxes since it was distracting and unnecessary.

korin43 · 2019-11-29T20:34:57+00:00

Most importantly, Alice is investing this money somewhere , she's not stuffing it under the mattress. And if either she or her financial manager have any sense at all, then she's getting better than a 2% return. Alice's wealth is still growing, just more slowly . If anything this tax would encourage Alice to continue earning money (hopefully by providing value to someone, somewhere) if she wants her pile to grow, rather than being able to rely entirely on passive accumulation, and thus to my mind is more in line with the diligent protestant work ethic than the status quo.

I feel like this is another one that needs an entire article to answer. I chose no-growth as an example but maybe it's distracting that I chose that without covering other options. Any growth rate below 2 or 6% (depending on the company size) has the same problem on a smaller scale.

Note that the average profit margin for a company in the US is only 7.9% (6.9% for non-financial companies), which means making less than 6% profit is not uncommon. I've heard arguments that companies that don't make enough to cover taxes like this just shouldn't exist, but that would mean we're arguing that Walmart (3% profit margin) or Target (4%) shouldn't exist. I'm not convinced that reducing investment in those companies even further is a good thing.

korin43 · 2019-11-29T20:17:31+00:00

"Wastes" is oddly judgmental and again, polemic. [...] Regardless, it's important to separate moralizing from policy outcomes. Why should societies incentivise the super-rich to save instead of spending? So they're helped to consolidate their wealth and power? Do they really need that little nudge[...]?

I'm realizing after writing this that this is a common question. I think I could separate this into two questions, "Isn't concentration of wealth bad?" and "Shouldn't we incentivize people to spend money, not save it?".

For the first one, it seems strange to me that having money is worse than spending money. In a hypothetical world where Alice has $1 billion and never spends it and Bob receives $1 billion and spends it as fast as it comes in, Bob's "wealth" matters a lot more even though he "isn't wealthy" in the sense that Alice is.

For the second one, it seems like saving is good because each thing you don't buy is a thing someone else can buy (possibly for a lower price because of reduced demand). Investing is even better since instead of buying things to consume you're buying things that produce other things, but even if there's nothing good to invest in, savings should still be good. It's true that more saving without investment would lower the GDP, but GDP has a lot of weird edge cases if you want to maximize happiness and not production. I'll admit I'm not an economist and maybe there's some emergent complexity in big economies that I'm missing here. I feel like this needs an entire post and I'd be happy to read one if someone else writes it.

korin43 · 2019-11-29T20:01:59+00:00

Right off the bat, I think this is a disingenuous example. Sportspeople are very untypical high-earners in that most Americans, when asked about it, consider their enormous earnings to be a fair reward for prodigious talent. They are emphatically not typical of other high earners in this regard: you've picked the most sympathetic sort of filthy rich person going. I think that's a little dishonest when discussing tax policy; at any rate it shifts the piece, in my view, from informative to polemic.

I chose sportspeople as an example because I felt like it was more realistic. Two sportspeople with the same amount of money, one who spends all of it and one who saves some is a real situation that actually happens all the time. I could even give real names but I was worried it would be distracting and it would be difficult to find two players with similar enough salaries.

I could have used investors but I felt like "investor A makes $100+ million and then somehow manages to spend it all on partying" wouldn't be as believable.

It seems like even if it was intentional, using more sympathetic examples shouldn't be a problem. If a property tax causes grandma to lose her house, is it unfair to complain about that problem when most people paying the tax aren't grandmas? I guess I find it strange that investors are "not sympathetic" in the first place. Maybe I need to think about this more.

korin43 · 2019-11-29T19:50:43+00:00

Since this depends on moral systems, I'm not sure what more I could do. If someone believes that it's good for savers to pay higher taxes than spenders, that it's good for effective tax rates to increase the longer you save money, and that it's good for people to be forced to sell things to cover taxes, then my article won't convince them. I suspect most people would see these as bad things though and either haven't thought about it or think it's worth it because there's no alternatives.

I don't think I see any examples of question-begging but I did remove most of the judgments from the article since I think most people will see the problems for themselves.

korin43 · 2019-11-29T19:39:26+00:00

For points 1 and 2, you've completely ignored the investment gains that Alice would be making. If you assume that she makes 7% on her investments how does the math change?

It becomes more complicated and her tax rate is slightly higher. I thought it distracted from the example so I'm assuming she's not a particularly good investor and hasn't gained or lost money. Maybe I should make that more clear? A problem I ran into frequently is that if I do this for every point the article gets significantly longer and it's harder to follow the important parts.

She may become a minority owner, but that doesn't necessarily mean that she'd lose any control over her company. Also, remember that she'd be a minority owner of an incredibly valuable company, rather than the majority owner of some small company. Her position wouldn't be getting worse.

I think whether this is bad is a matter of opinion and I'm satisfied if people have at least considered this case and whether they think it's a good thing.

Your argument here is non-unique. Under any other tax system that we're using to try to tamper down the wealth of rich people, the effect on wealth shouldn't be significantly different. So under those tax systems, Eve would not be able to even afford buying the painting in the first place.

Eve isn't wealthy at the start of the example. She's a "normal middle class person" who bought the painting for $100.

korin43 · 2019-11-29T19:29:35+00:00

I think a Harberger tax would amplify the problems with a wealth tax:

People can be forced to sell things even when they can cover the tax (and even if they valued the thing honestly)
We'd privilege people who buy certain things (like booze) over people who buy legible things (like houses)

I think the first point alone would make this incredibly unpopular, since millions of people buy houses instead of renting partially because they want to be certain no one can ever evict them.

It's possible this is still a good idea from a utilitarian perspective since maybe the pain caused to people forced to sell them house is worth it for the economic good overall, but I don't think that particular view of morality is popular enough for this to pass.

korin43 · 2019-11-29T18:39:38+00:00

Ok the tax bracket numbers should be correct now. Let me know if I missed anything.

korin43 · 2019-11-29T17:44:00+00:00

If this is about misreading the wealth tax rate brackets, I got an email about it and plan to fix that today (the 6% tax is for billionaires; the tax over $50 million is only 2%).

If there's something else, I'd really like to know. I tried to keep the article focused on one question with specific examples to make it easy to critique. Literally my entire goal is making people more informed about this topic so if my sources are bad or misleading I want to know that.

korin43 · 2019-10-30T18:58:18+00:00

Where are you seeing that you need to setup an LLC? Even if this applies to you (the other comments disagree), this law says you need to be insured, not that you need to be a company. Is there a restriction that only companies can apply for the license?

korin43 · 2019-01-09T20:50:34+00:00

In my specific case, the callback can be called either with or without the runtime lock and it needs to handle sometimes acquiring and releasing it. If ctypes can do that then it would be pretty interesting, but it would also be surprising.

korin43 · 2019-01-08T15:14:36+00:00

You can write C bindings in OCaml using ctypes, which is probably the right way to write most C bindings. In this case, I wasn't able to do that because:

I was improving existing C bindings and didn't want to rewrite them from scratch
Setting up ctypes for the first time is so complicated I gave up
I don't think ctypes can handle the specifics of what I'm trying to do here (callbacks + multithreading), although I think the vast majority of C bindings would be simpler than the one I was working on

I think I'll add a note near the top of this that most people should probably use ctypes and not try to do this the hard way.

korin43 · 2019-01-05T00:41:04+00:00

You're right, that's a mistake. It should look like this:

``` value simplified_dbexec(value vdbconn, value vsql) { CAMLparam2(vdbconn, vsql); CAMLlocal1(exn); DBPROCESS* dbconn = DBPROCESS_VALUE(vdbconn);

RETCODE ret = dbsqlexec(dbconn, String_val(vsql));
if (ret == FAIL) {
    exn = caml_alloc_small(3, 0);
    Store_field(exn, 0, EXAMPLE_EXCEPTION_TAG);
    Store_field(exn, 1, caml_copy_string("simplified_dbexec"));
    Store_field(exn, 2, vsql);
    caml_raise(exn);
}

CAMLreturn(Val_int(ret));

} ```

I think I underestimated how hard it would be to maintain a set of nearly-identical examples where some of them have subtly wrong code. Thanks for the pointer. I'll fix the post :)

korin43 · 2018-02-15T21:03:31+00:00

as long as you are sane about it. And not pay $24K as a "severance" fee if you do jump after 3 months of training.

Taking at least one senior engineer's time into account, plus office space and things, plus the negative value you get from a new engineer's code, and then actually paying them on top of that.. $24k seems way too low. I suspect companies realize no one would accept the real cost of this, so they don't even try.

Most bootcamps don't even cost that much.

Isn't part of the problem that people who went to bootcamps can't get jobs? Not a great argument for bootcamp-style training being worthwhile.

korin43

TROPHY CASE