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We use patroni and run it outside of k8s on prem, no issues in 6 or 7 years. Just upgraded from pg 12 to 17 with basically no down time without issue either.

Yo I'm curious if you have any pointers on how you went about this to share? Did you use their provided upgrade script or did you instrument the upgrade yourself "out of band"? rsync?

Currently scratching my head on what the appropriate upgrade procedure is for a non-k8s/operator spilo/patroni cluster for minimal downtime and risk. The script doesn't seem to work for this setup, erroring on mismatching PG_VERSION when attempting. If you don't mind sharing it would be very appreciated.


I did not use a script (my environment is bare metal running ubuntu 24).

I read these and then wrote my own scripts that were tailored to my environment.

https://pganalyze.com/blog/5mins-postgres-zero-downtime-upgr...

https://www.pgedge.com/blog/always-online-or-bust-zero-downt...

https://knock.app/blog/zero-downtime-postgres-upgrades

Basically

- Created a new cluster on new machines

- Started logically replicating

- Waited for that to complete and then left it there replicating for a while until I was comfortable with the setup

- We were already using haproxy and pgbouncer

- Then I did a cut over to the new setup

- Everything looked good so after a while I tore down the old cluster

- This was for a database 600gb-1tb in size

- The client application was not doing anything overly fancy which meant there was very little to change going from 12 to 17

- Additionally I did all of the above in a staging environment first to make sure it would work as expected

Best of luck.


Thank you! o7

Going to have some more figuring out what's up with spilo - turns out that running that outside of k8s is rare and not much documented. But it's still patroni so this is very helpful.


> if you don’t compare it to doing it manually yourself

Even if you do ZFS makes this pretty trivial as well.


Ah.. ZFS, really under rated and unfortunate with the unrelated history around it, the tech is quite solid.

> Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him

How can you say? The ultra wealthy are not playing team sports. If the country burned tomorrow they would just sit on their yacht or buy citizenship somewhere else.

Sure the lion share of his investments are currently in the US, but that could easily change.


Most cynically? I sincerely believe there's more value he can extract from American workers if he can keep the ride going on just a bit longer. For example: it's better to keep the stock market a float a volatile so he can transfer a bit more wealth from the American people before it does eventually break down.

Yes, they'll all be on yachts when the shit hits the fan, but they're still fighting to figure out who get the biggest yacht, and right now it seems like Trump has more to milk from us before he entirely lets this thing fall apart.


He also has dementia so he probably can't plan that far ahead. He's operating on a very short term feedback cycle: this reporter asked me a question that makes me look bad, so I call her piggy. That's the timescale we're operating on. Not even quarterly profits but moment-to-moment.

The other reality is that as much as this industry is up its ass about scalability you can run a very very busy site on a single machine now a days.

A lot of people out here designing their blogs like its 1989.


This is completely wrong, everyone knows you should rewrite everything in microservices immediately :-D

Not enough yaml in the schedule

The schedule is generated from a Python script, but doesn't involve YAML

Cloud databases have been pricey for a while.

The reality most databases are tiny as shit and most apps can tolerate the massive latency that the cloud provider dbs offer.

It is why it is sorta funny we are rediscovering non network attached storage is faster.


They didnt lose aspirations.

A lot of the UK seems to be struggling with their loss of Empire even 80 years later.

They ran out of money, 2 world wars bankrupted them.


They didn't run out of money just because they fought two wars. For some bizarre reason the UK has simply chosen to be (relatively) poor instead of embracing a growth policy. Despite all their potential advantages their GDP per capita is about equal to the poorest US state.

Since it's so germane, I'll share my little widget that compares EU countries to US states on various metrics: https://evmar.github.io/states/

It's actually a fun demo, that shows a fairly common difference between Europeans and Americans. The demo is mostly about comparing GDP, while HDI or something else more "human" is left as an exercise to the reader. If someone was doubting Americans only care about money, now you have some more evidence :)

This comment feels in bad faith. There are ~340 million Americans and you draw evidence about all of them from this one thing? It's not even an insight into its single American author. It was a quick weekend hack.

The purpose of the thing is to try to put things into perspective, like "Portugal is about the size of Indiana", or "California's economy is about the size of Germany". It compares three numbers, two of which are not money!


I'm not drawing evidence or making an argument in some parliament, it's an offhand comment about a common behavior I keep seeing repeated, basically me sharing a pattern I seem to notice every now and then.

I'm not trying to claim every American only care about money, only that when Americans compare countries, they tend to compare monetary values like GDP, gross salaries or other similar values, and your weekend hack (cool at it is) fitted that pattern I've seen before.

Again, obviously not all Americans are the same as each other, then elections wouldn't be needed for starters, and I'm sorry if my comment came off as dismissive or harsh, it really wasn't my intention, I just aimed to share a reoccurring pattern I come across.


Does Czechia really have 4 million square miles and NaN population?

A really nifty tool, thank you!

BTW the population figure for Czechia is NaN, for some reason,


I took this morning to gather the data again and sanity check it further, so please try again!

(I guess Wikipedia and the UN call it "the Czech Republic" so my update also renamed it...)


That's pretty fun.

It's not surprising per se but it does put things in perspective that Texas has a bigger footprint than every country in Europe.


There is a much nicer visual tool that helps you visualize this: https://thetruesize.com/. (It works best on desktop)

You can place a state/country on top of another country and see the true size. Helps to make up for the improper sizing caused by map projections.

I use it to help my lovely dutch friends realize why I can't just bike to work. :)


Yeah, money machine go brrrr is a great sign of "footprint", lets just ignore millenniums of inventions, technology and others things coming from Europe, before the US was even a colony. Texas GDP was $x millions last year, clearly larger footprint on the world :)

It's actually pretty fun and interesting the different bubbles we all live in, for better or worse.


A lot of those discoveries were actually made elsewhere ( not the majority, but an embarrassingly significant amount)

https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/indians-predated-new...

https://sd2.org/bibha-chowdhuri-a-woman-of-firsts-with-no-re...

> After the war ended, Cecil Powell, a British physicist, continued the research in England using similar methods with more sensitive plates, detecting a new particle and winning him the Nobel Prize in 1950. Chowdhury and Bose’s work was acknowledged in his book, but their recognition quickly faded.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/01/hidden...

https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/fibfibs.pdf


> lets just ignore millenniums of inventions, technology and others things coming from Europe, before the US was even a colony

Those people are dead. They did great things. But it's irrelevant to their standing and influence today.


True, like how Silicon Valley should change it name, because Gordon Moore died so lets forget everything he ever did.

No place in the US has "Silicon Valley" as its formal name.

I meant the geographic footprint. I was surprised by how big Texas is, even though it is famously big.

Alabama has GDP per capita higher than Finland? Hard to believe....

Maybe you can afford Universal Health Care after all...


This is actually the reason why I'm a proponent of the US Federal government doing far _far_ less. Things like Healthcare and other safety net things (along with most other things) should be done at the state level, and the the fact that European nations, which are near universally poorer than all US states, are able to do these things, are the proof that this would work.

I'm convinced that the federal government doing more and more things is the root cause if the increasing toxicity of American politics. The further removed a populace is from their representatives the less control they have and the worse they feel. Everything should always be done at the most local level that it is possible to do it. Some things have to be done at a relatively high level, but Americans have increasingly been jumping straight to "this is a job for the federal government" when very often state, or even city governments in some cases, would be perfectly capable.


> which are near universally poorer than all US states, are able to do these things

What do you mean that the countries are poorer? Are you just thinking about the gross salary people get per month, or is there something else in this calculation?

The fact that people get health care, parental leave, can freely move between countries, able to afford having a child, have emergency services that arrive relatively quick and all those things mean that a country is not poor, and the countries that don't have those, are "poorer", at least in my mind. When I think "poor country" I don't think about the GDP, but how well the citizens and residents are protected by ills.


I know you've made a handful of comments all to this effect throughout the thread, but it's really not helpful in this particular comment chain. Yes, we know your quality of life in Europe is great. Yes, we know life is more than just GDP. "What we mean that the countries are poorer" is obviously GDP in this comment chain, and this comment chain is not disputing your quality of life, it's pointing out that we (collectively) have the money to have that quality of life here in the US, too.

But thats a flawed metric. How much cash do you need saved to send 2 kids to university in US vs typical Europe, without burdening them for their best years of life with crushing debt? How much is left afterwards? How much after acquiring some long term illness with expensive treatment or being in bad accident? Don't think that due to being young this ain't your concern, all elders have messed up health in many ways. Retirement. And so on. These are direct costs and its all about money. Ie US couple with teens just about to go to college with say 500k are same or poorer than similar family in Europe having say 200k savings, or will be after few years. Or maybe not, depends.

I'd say its uncomparable directly, or very, very hard. You can say visit both places and walk around and see the general state of the country and its people, compare capitals. This is where money is spent (or not).

Not going into happiness, stress levels, depression/anxiety and meds consumption, obesity levels or longevity, that would be too easy I agree. Although this is also money related, more than anything else.


80% of US college grads have debt under 30k. Despite the bleak picture painted, servicing that interest at say 7% is $175 a month, or about 3.5% the average salary of a new grad.

This pales in comparison to some of the elephant in the room ways most common ways to go broke, which is to say get something like a child support judgement against you (20% pretax, like 26+% post-tax in middle income brackets) or have an alimony payment (these conveniently don't generally show up in bankruptcy statistics because they are not dischargeable). Medical debt can at least be discharged in bankruptcy.


The federal government has no constitutional authority to provide universal health care, per the 10th amendment which leaves an extremely narrow constraint of enumerated powers to the federal government and the rest left to the people and the states.

However, the feds already siphon about as much tax as the populace can bear just on accomplishing what it is allowed to do, so there is basically nothing left for the states to implement these kind of measures.


Yes, if the states were to take over many of these things, obviously federal taxes would need to dramatically decrease (luckily, the vast majority of federal spending is doing the things that I think states should do anyways, so you'd be simultaneously dramatically decreasing federal taxes and federal spending).

You couldn't just have the states take over these responsibilities and have nothing else change. My suggestion is in fact a pretty radical change in how the US federal government works. I'm not under any illusion that this is likely to happen. The ratchet of power unfortunately only goes in one direction.


Our GDP would drop several percent if we fixed our healthcare system. Part of why we look richer on paper is that we light a lot of money on fire for exactly nothing.

Not really. That money didn't appear out of thin air. It would be lit on fire for some other purpose instead.

Ah, there’s always zero-sum competition for housing to eat up any excess that might otherwise go to savings. That’s true. Money gets freed up across the board, you spend it on housing or lose ground in the housing competition. Good ol’ red queen’s race.

We already do have universal health care for the most expensive groups to insure (lower income households and the elderly), and technically have it for everyone in that hospitals aren't allowed to deny life saving care to anyone regardless of their ability to pay (which is expensive, short sighted, and quite inadequate overall).

Adding the rest of the population to the existing public insurance system would not cost much financially, but it would be a political catastrophe for whatever party implemented it if it didn't go well.

In short, I don't think anyone seriously argues the US can't afford universal health care, but the real and perceived risk of change is seen as too great politically.


The American government spends an incredible amount on healthcare already. If it were competently administered, it would already be enough money to cover universal healthcare.

It's the cost of procedures/medication

Example: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-i...

And why, in free market land, is a buyer of services and medication, not allowed to negotiate prices?


> why, in free market land, is a buyer of services and medication, not allowed to negotiate prices?

Because W Bush decided to forbid that while simultaneously forcing the fed'gov to pay for it

"we need to pay face value because big companies need the money for their R&D" was the discussion years ago IIRC. it's BS, but that was the narrative.


Which buyer are you referring to? Consumers paying cash can negotiate as much as they want, and often secure large discounts. Commercial health plans also negotiate hard with their network providers, although some of them play unethical tricks with PBMs to artificially inflate prescription drug prices. Medicare and Medicaid don't really negotiate with providers, they just set rates by arbitrary fiat and providers can take it or leave it. Medicare does have some statutory limitations on how they can negotiate drug prices, though.

Its the cost of keeping American doctors living in mansions big enough to house a whole village.

Which doctors? Some specialists do quite well but many primary care physicians earn less than software developers, especially once you account for education expenses and ongoing mandatory professional expenses. What is the correct amount for them to earn anyway?

The ones in my town, I know where they live, up by the lake.

Where should they be living? You seem to be upset about something but you're not making any sense.

Above all it's great example of why we'd do well to drop our quasi-religious fetishization of GDP as an indicator.

Who is fetishizing GDP? I've never seen public policy be set based on the goal of maximizing GDP to the exclusion of all else. You're arguing against a strawman.

then prices will decrease and thus GDP will be lower, isn't it?

It's worth pointing out this happened entirely post 2008. This is not some "decision" people took, or some long term loss of empire. The US recoevered from the 2008 crisis way better than everyone else, and nobody really understands why yet.

We know why, we just don't like it.

A country with a business friendly, low regulatory environment, coupled with a high work ethic and poor work/life balance, if nothing else, is not going to be a country that falls behind.

Americans complain a lot, and the system isn't that comfortable or respectful, but they aren't facing existential economic irrelevance.


> low regulatory environment

Quite the opposite. The US quickly recovered from 2008 thanks to tech. Tech that the rest of the world wasn't able to keep up with thanks to it being a heavily regulated environment (patents, copyright, etc.).


You would be hard pressed to find anyone who claims the EU has a "Tech Friendly" environment.

Every techie with skill and an idea in the EU said "F-this, I'm going to the US to start my company" which lead to others saying "F-this, I'm going to the US for tech work". There is no one to point the finger at, because even today, this is exactly what Europeans want. They just haven't put the pieces together to link "heavy regulation and very worker/consumer friendly environment" with "Nobody wants to plant their seeds here". Instead it seems the EUs plan is to just continually fine foreign tech companies to make up for the barren infertile business lands they cultivated.

Germany is a borderline shrinking economy with workers averaging 400 hours less time at work per year than their American counterparts. And this is celebrated like it's some kind of triumph. Everyday I wish I could violently shake Europeans and beg them to open their eyes. Economic strain will fracture all of Europe.


The only hope the EU has is that Trump fucks up the US enough in the next 3 years that we aren't able to continue to attract the vast majority of the people worldwide who actually want to work and reap the rewards of their efforts.

The EU has chosen stagnation, which seems fine at first but looks worse and worse as all the people (or nations in this case) who didn't make that choice continue to grow. Unless you have a closed, close knit community like the Amish, stagnation does not end well.


> with workers averaging 400 hours less time at work per year than their American counterparts

If true (seems dubious to me), that's a ~20% difference. The difference in wages is a lot larger than that though, at least for tech workers. So that doesn't really explain why German tech can't compete against US tech.

Also, there's quite a bit of evidence that a better work/life balance improves productivity.

I think vacation time is a red herring. My guess is that the various forms of worker protection, making it impossible or very laborious+expensive to get rid of disfunctional team members, are a much larger factor.

But also, let's not forget that the major difference between the state of the economy in the US and the EU is Silicon Valley. Without its tech companies, the US doesn't amount to all that much anymore. This could also be explained as a historical fluke with lots of momentum.


> If true (seems dubious to me), that's a ~20% difference. The difference in wages is a lot larger than that though, at least for tech workers. So that doesn't really explain why German tech can't compete against US tech.

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html

1805 for the US (slightly more than the OECD average) vs. 1335 for Germany, which works the least.

Germany can't compete with US wages in tech because their companies don't generate as much revenue or profit, either per employee or in total.

> Also, there's quite a bit of evidence that a better work/life balance improves productivity.

There is, and the US is more productive per hour worked than the EU. Maybe that work/life balance in the US isn't as bad as reddit would have you believe.

> I think vacation time is a red herring. My guess is that the various forms of worker protection, making it impossible or very laborious+expensive to get rid of disfunctional team members, are a much larger factor.

An emphasis on regulation over productivity is the core issue IMO, including mandates for paid time off. By incentivizing leisure and bureaucracy designed to stifle change (both for the better and for the worse), you're effectively punishing highly productive individuals.

> But also, let's not forget that the major difference between the state of the economy in the US and the EU is Silicon Valley. Without its tech companies, the US doesn't amount to all that much anymore. This could also be explained as a historical fluke with lots of momentum.

No, productivity in the US is higher than the EU in nearly every sector: https://eei-institute.eu/publications/understanding-the-eu-u...

It's not a fluke. Like every other organization, the EU is getting what it encourages, which is stagnation and a lack of productivity. They will have to adapt at some point, the only question is how painful that process will be.


> Germany can't compete with US wages in tech because their companies don't generate as much revenue or profit

Right, because, thanks to heavy regulation driven by the USA, it is illegal to compete on a direct basis. The only hope Germany could have is to compete on being more innovative, but how do you out-innovate when you don't have much of a revenue basis to use to fund innovation and are trying to challenge businesses in the USA that have secured the moat that gives an effectively unlimited money printer? Not going to happen.

Like was pointed out earlier, you cannot successfully operate in a highly regulated environment (well, except where those regulations are to your favour, as is the case for Silicon Valley tech). While Europe tends to want more balance in IP laws, what practical choice does Germany have but to comply to the USA's demands? There is no benefit to Germany in allowing Dinsey nearly endless copyright terms, but the USA has a lot of leverage that it isn't afraid to use and that is something everyone else does have to concern themselves with.


This is the second time you've just stated that the US is the source of "heavy regulation" in the tech sector without any explanation of what that means.

Given that virtually no one else on Earth agrees with that claim on its surface, do you care to explain what you mean, or are you just going to repeat it and move on each time?

And to be clear, pointing at copyright extensions for IP like Mickey Mouse is not a compelling argument, because it in no way prevents a German company from producing a product like Instagram, Claude, AWS, or virtually anything else that was launched in the US in the last 20+ years, both because its irrelevant and because the companies responsible for those products also had to operate under the same regulatory regime you're talking about.


> This is the second time you've just stated that the US is the source of "heavy regulation" in the tech sector without any explanation of what that means.

So? I know what I mean.

> because it in no way prevents a German company from producing a product like Instagram, Claude, AWS, or virtually anything else that was launched in the US in the last 20+ years

Aside from all the patents, trademarks, copyright, etc. that would make it impossible to reproduce. You could create something that kind of like sort of the same to a squinting onlooker, but the users are going to know that they are nothing alike.

In theory you can innovate to provide something that is actually better, not just the same, but can you actually when you are up against moat-ed money printers?


> So? I know what I mean.

No one else who has responded to you does, so you'd think you'd care, but I guess that makes the chances of a meaningful dialogue very clear.

> Aside from all the patents, trademarks, copyright, etc. that would make it impossible to reproduce. You could create something that kind of like sort of the same to a squinting onlooker, but the users are going to know that they are nothing alike.

Again, what specifically are you talking about? Not only does all of that regulation exist in the EU (plus many others, which is what makes your claim about heavy regulation in the US so bizarre), but there are numerous alternatives to each product I mentioned in the US (I specifically picked ones that did not create a new product category for this reason).

What is it about the regulatory policies in the US that allows US competitors to exist, but not EU ones?


> No one else who has responded to you does, so you'd think you'd care

For what reason? Not my problem. It makes no difference to me.

> What is it about the regulatory policies in the US that allows US competitors to exist, but not EU ones?

Where do you think these competitors are, even if based in the USA? I'd much rather support my neighbour, but I have no idea how to find the Instagram not owned by Zuckerberg and friends and, quite frankly, despite your insistence, I am quite certain it doesn't exist. There is really no chance of it existing as if anyone tried to complete on a direct basis, the law would see that they be shut down immediately.

I can find photo sharing services with different usage models, but you would be hard-pressed to think of those as being direct competitors. Perhaps that is where things break down here, though? Not noticing the usage of "direct" in the earlier comment?

While a direct competitor can just straight up copy other parties, indirect competition requires innovation. That brings us back to the question of how do you innovate when you don't have revenues to support investing in innovation?


New York City and Los Angeles both have slightly larger GDPs than silicon valley.

In fact tech isn't even the largest sector of the US economy, finance is.


Finance is a larger sector, but largely exists to support tech. If tech disappeared, as suggested in the earlier comment, the USA's finance sector would soon diminish to near-nothing and might even totally collapse under the weight of that loss.

For a more relatable example, it's kind of like how agriculture manufacturing (machinery, fertilizer, etc) is a larger sector of the economy than agriculture itself. All well and good when everything is functioning, but if agriculture collapsed, it becomes pretty obvious that said manufacturing would go down with it. It is no help that it is a larger sector.

In modern economies supporting sectors will almost always be larger than the "core" industries they support.


Please explain how US patent and copyright law prevents "the rest of the world" (which I assume really means the EU, because China seems to be doing just fine in their own sandbox) from developing a meaningful tech sector?

Doesn't China do well partly by ignoring our IP laws (and having access to a lot of our IP since they're in our supply chain)?

They have done very well in the manufacturing sector via IP theft starting in the 1970s.

I don't see how that's relevant to much post-2008 in the tech sector, which is primarily software driven and where China has very intentionally built their own walled garden.


> It's worth pointing out this happened entirely post 2008.

Really? Because IIRC, Britain has been steadily declining for over a century.

> The US recoevered from the 2008 crisis way better than everyone else, and nobody really understands why yet.

And Poland avoided the recession entirely.


...i am confused. Yes, we do understand why.

The UK choosing to shut down most of its native financial sector is a good example. With RBS it was particularly mad because the government ended up being a massive shareholder and then they chose to shut down all the profitable parts of the business, and double-down on the worst parts. Natwest rates franchise was probably worth £5bn, they basically shut the unit down in entirety (and a lot of those people went to large hedge funds and just went back to generating hundreds in millions in revenue) meaning that the taxpayer lost tens of billions AND the economy was knee-capped for decades.

This is taken as an example to show that even when the incentives were there, the government took a decision for nakedly political reasons. In the opposite direction, they folded HBOS into Lloyds, this was done to protect Scotland (both the PM and the Chancellor had a large number of constituents who would have lost their job if these banks were shut down...they were bailed out) and the result was Lloyds needing a bailout about one year after the banking crisis ended in the US. Again, this was sold to the public as the result of "risky casino bankers on huge bonuses"...in reality, it was just poorly paid commercial bankers lending very large amounts of money to people who couldn't ever it pay back AND politicians then making terrible choices with other people's money to boost their chances in some byelection no-one remembers.

This attitude permeates almost everything the UK does. Schools, politics first. Healthcare, politics first. Electricity, politics first.

I genuinely do not understand how anyone can't look at the scale of political intervention into the economy in the UK and not understand why this might lead to lower growth than the US. In Scotland, the government is 60% of the economy, this higher than Communist states with no legal private sector, it is an incredible number. If you look at income distribution, after-tax income under £100k is as flat or flatter than Communist states too, again this is incredible.

What is surprising is that the UK's economy is growing so quickly. The supply-side in most sectors is almost completely gone, in some economically-significant sectors you have regulators effectively managing companies, very few workers have economically useful skills because of the strong incentives in place to acquire non-economic skills...and the economy is still growing faster than most of Europe. To be fair, almost all of that immigration of low-skilled labour into the UK which is going to be absolute time-bomb financially and the rapid growth in public-sector pay has also helped consumption (even more so, the UK is running a deficit of 5% of GDP with revenues growing 4%/year in an economy that is shrinking in per capita terms...obviously, this is not sustainable)...but growth is still way higher than reason would dictate.

Comparing this to the US is not serious in any way. You have a country that prioritises growth beyond reason and are comparing that with a country which is hostile to change beyond reason. There is no possible comparison. The decisions every government since 1997 has made have been intended to reduce growth, people happily voted for this, and are now upset that the economy is shit...why?


but then why was our GDP growth essentially identical (if not exceeding) the US between 1997 and 2008?

leverage/performance of a few hundred people in the City who have now left

Thanks Obama.

Decisions made in 2008 were also a huge part of this.

The UK had a framework to liquidate financial institutions that was similar to the US, and this was deployed in early 2008 with Northern Rock and B&B. The end result was a multi-billion pound profit to the government.

Gordon Brown then decided that he needed to lead the global economy (and he has written, at the last count, two books which explain in significant detail that he was a thought leader and economic visionary through this period) by bailing out banks that were large employers in his constituency. With RBS, this involved investing at a very high valuation and then shutting down all the profitable parts of the bank, the loss was £20-30bn. With HBOS, he forced the only safe bank to acquire them, this resulted in the safe bank going bankrupt a year after the financial crisis ended in the US, and another multi-billion pound loss.

The US benefitted massively from having one of the most successful financial executives of the period, Hank Paulson, running the economy rather than (essentially) a random man from Edinburgh who have never had a job in the private sector (apart from law, obv) but held a seat with a huge number of constituents working at the banks he should have been shutting down (Brown himself had never worked in the private sector at all, parachuted into a safe seat after his doctorate). Geithner nearly suffered from that same fault, but did well with TARP (again though, iirc, this was Paulson's plan).


The most concrete example is energy policy. The UK doesn't have to have the most expensive energy in the world. They chose that!

But there are many similar examples in agriculture, manufacturing, etc.


Because everything in the US is inflated thanks to rampant printing of the USD. Healthcare? Inflated. Education? Inflated. Day-to-day stuff? Inflated. Property values? Inflated.

Most of Europe has lower GDP per capita than the poorest states of the US, yet the lifestyle of European citizens in those countries is much better than the lifestyle of the poorest Americans. American growth is built on the backs of piss-poor healthcare, shoddy education and an overinflated perception of the tech sector which holds the rest of the world hostage (but not for long).


UK has higher inflation than the US, and has had so since inflation first picked up in 2022.

I think you are making broad generalizations, so broad that the only statement it's clear you're trying to make is "The US is bad" and the broadness of your argument weakens it greatly.

Cost inflation isn't unique to the United States.

Europe isn't a single country.

> yet the lifestyle of European citizens in those countries is much better than the lifestyle of the poorest Americans

Does this include the Romani people? Does this include the Ukranians being attacked by Russia?

Greece's housing cost burden is higher than 30 US states. Not all regions in the USA have faced serious property cost pressures. [1] [2]

"Day to day stuff" is a very broad category, and that includes items that are flat or decreasing in cost. In that sense I will point out that VAT is much higher in the EU than sales tax in most US states, with VAT rates of >20% being very common while the highest combined sales tax in the USA is just over 10%. Sales tax/VAT is a very regressive tax that harms the poor the most. For someone on the poor end of the spectrum in Europe, buying something like a computer or television is a greater burden than someone in the US.

I'm reminded of the natural gas price spikes in 2022 in Europe, and of how the EU's average electricity price is about 2-3x higher than it is in the US. The US has an extremely stable supply of basic needs like energy and food.

Education costs have been flat or lower than the rate of inflation in the US since roughly 2016, so for the last 10 years the idea that education is becoming more expensive in the USA has been squarely false. [3]

Healthcare, I'll give you that one, the US is not faring well. But we can look at some systems in Europe having their own difficulties like the UK and Spain and it's not like healthcare isn't a challenge elsewhere. I will also point out that the US does have public healthcare for the poorest (Medicaid) and for all people over 65 years old (Medicare), and Medicare is a standout in quality among public healthcare systems in some outcome categories.

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/europes-housing-cost-burden...

[2] https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/measures/cost...

[3] https://educationdata.org/college-tuition-inflation-rate


Like they can’t survive without the money from their empire? It’s hard to imagine how plundering trillions (in things, labor, etc) can lead here.

[flagged]


If you’re that keen, go join the reserves?

https://jobs.army.mod.uk/army-reserve/


Nobody in their right mind is keen for a war. Nobody would fight in one unless they believed they really had no other choice. I don't blame the people who would runaway to relative safety if the option is available.

But. It's clearly a massive security issue.

> If you’re that keen, go join the reserves?

There is not currently a war, and if there was, there wouldn't be a choice but to join.


Anyone who thinks war might be fun should watch some of the interviews with veterans from the “great” wars on YouTube.

That's a valid statement that nobody in this comment chain was disputing. It is exactly why the person you're responding to is assuming anyone who can leave, will leave, in that event (and why "you should join the reserves if you're that keen" is an irrelevant comeback-- nobody was saying anyone's keen, only that people aren't keen and will leave to avoid it if able).

> They ran out of money, 2 world wars bankrupted them.

With the second war destroying a lot of the country and calling to rebuild at home. This is a fundamental difference with the US. I don't blame the UK for focusing at home for a while to rebuild.


> With the second war destroying a lot of the country and calling to rebuild at home.

WW2 did not 'destroy' the UK. It wasn't subjected to any of the horrors of ground warfare, and the Blitz failed to inflict any meaningful damage on it.

What WW2 did destroy was the UK government's ability and will to finance the sort of repression that was necessary to maintain a globe-spanning empire. Churchill in his pigheaded hubris could scream from the rooftops about India forever remaining British, but Clement wasn't going to kill people over it.

(In contrast, France lost the ability, but not the will, which is why it fought a few wars in Vietnam and Algiers, instead of letting their colonial subjects have self-rule and independence sans bloodshed.)


> and the Blitz failed to inflict any meaningful damage on it

c. 40,000[1]–43,000 civilians killed[2]

c. 46,000–139,000 injured[2] Two million houses damaged or destroyed (60 percent of these in London)

Sure.. Okay.. France was worse, France is also no longer a world influence it was once.


France's role in future global affairs easily eclipses the UK's. France still has a future as a great power, whereas the UK's opportunity is already squandered.

40,000 dead[1] and two million houses damaged in a country of 40 million people (presiding over a global empire of a billion souls) over six years is not meaningful... Especially in the context of the largest and most destructive war the world has ever known.

> Sure.. Okay.. France was worse,

Don't look at Metropolitan France, two thirds of it got to sit the war out as a puppet state.

Look further east. How many houses were 'damaged or destroyed' in Germany, Poland, the USSR..?

This isn't a suffering Olympics, but compared to war expenditures, the cost of rebuilding the damage inflicted to the Isles was a rounding error. Those expenditures (and their associated debts) were what crippled Britain's ability to maintain an empire, not the cost of rebuilding.

---

[1] That sort of thing was a normal day over there. A normal one - not even a bad one.


This isn't a "who had it worse"

My point is the UK decided to rebuild at home after significant damages in their capital city, and I agree with them.

A lot of EU was destroyed and had to rebuild, the US wasn't and was able to boom.


As a mostly back end dev Elm looked really nice but all the conflict with the creator and then the lack of compiler releases made me shy away a bit.

I have bumped into "the Elm architecture" in other projects though and it was nice.


Not many people use elm directly but it has influenced the design of so many frameworks and libraries.

Right now I’m toying with the idea of building a GNOME application in rust, and the framework I’m using is relm4 which provides elm like abstractions over gtk-rs.

Previously I’ve built web applications with F# and elmish, which again provides elm like abstractions for building F# applications.


The Roc programing language is being developed because Richard Feldman wanted an Elm like experience in more places then just the front end.

> all the conflict with the creator

Just so no one misunderstands this. The creator (Evan) didn't get into, or start, any drama himself that I ever noticed. I'd argue he's a very chill and nice dude.

I've been on the edges of the community for probably a decade now (lurker), and all of the drama came from other people who simply didn't like the BDFL and slow releases strategy.


Yeah I'm not a front end dev but I do kind of keep track of what's going on in that space. From what I saw it seemed Elm was all but dead. Maybe that's not true, but that was the impression from the outside looking in.

https://iselmdead.info/

I can't believe this is still up tbh. And I can't believe there's still people defending Elm's lack of development

> It’s true that there hasn’t been a new release of the Elm compiler for some time. That’s on purpose: it’s essentially feature-complete.

Last talk I saw by Evan Czaplicki (from the 2025 Scala Days conf) he seemed to be working on some sort of database language https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OtN4iiFBsQ


> And I can't believe there's still people defending Elm's lack of development

Why? (I'm one such person defending Elm's lack of development)


From the outside the project honestly does look kind of dead, what's your take on the development and community?

The project is kind of dead but the community is alive!

I get the sentiment. He feels like everything he wants is there so it doesn't need much more development. But it still feels off.

> the lack of compiler releases

I'm a backend dev mostly and use Elm for all my frontend needs. Yes there are some things compiler-side that could be improved, but basically it's fine.

I appreciate not having to keep up with new releases!


Which conflicts? Gleam seems to be released often?

The elm drama

In 2011 smart tvs / phones were not quite the data harvesting devices they have become.

The things stopped working because they were for you the consumer.

The modern smart tv will keep working as long is its piping data back to the data retailers, they have a vested interest in keeping it going.


It very likely depends on what you are playing on it and what size it is.

Even most cheap TVs now a days are 4k even if the panel is low end.

There is a large difference between 1080p and 4k which is usually quite noticeable if the TV is large but if it is a smaller size I can see how it would be less obvious.


> There is a large difference between 1080p and 4k

I cannot tell the difference at normal viewing distances. Up close, sure.

This is how they get you to buy the 4K version, in the store you are standing 2 feet from the screen and you can see the pixels at 1080. Sitting at a normal viewing distance and 1080 looks great.


Actually large LCDs (>65") were pretty uncommon in 2010 but if you ever watched a 1080p DLP television I would be surprised if you didn't notice when looking at them side by side.

There is also of course the issue where people have bad internet (so netflix or whatever destroys the bit-rate, or they have the cheaper 1080p only plan... is that still a thing?) or old cable boxes plugged into 4k televisions.

There is a lot that people can do to inadvertently destroy their image quality without knowing which is not great.


Problem is I am not looking at TVs side by side. I'm watching a movie or a show, and the enjoyment I get at the correct viewing distance is unlikely to be significantly more on a 50" or smaller TV.

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