Except that the plural of anecdotes is definitely not data, because without controlling for confounding variables and sampling biases, you will get garbage.
Sorry, but a VAT is paid for by the final consumer. US suppliers paying taxes would be a manufacturer's sales tax (MST), but they went out of style decades ago. If any states are dumb enough to still have an MST, maybe they should start there.
Except that all the people using left-pad weren't paying for left-pad, and didn't have a contractual relationship with the author. IANAL, but I'm doubtful the courts would find there is enough of a relationship for the author to be liable.
You shouldn't compare the unemployment rates between countries. There are different criteria for "unemployed", so measures in different countries don't measure the same thing.
Labor participation rates are more comparable. The US rate is worse than the EU rate.
Actually, lots of circuits can be built with components specified to within 20%, perhaps with some key components specified more tightly. Good designs are robust against component variation.
If rule #1 is don't break userspace, we might need a rule #0, which would be don't support insecure behaviour. In the end, people might need to balance competing concerns...
Go is surprisingly good in this role. Super easy cross compilation, good platform support, and easy distribution means that it's very easy to get the tool where you need it. For a lot of file munging, Go is serviceable.
That fact is certainly a stain on history, but sidesteps the observation that European powers were able to militarily overpower so many other regions because they were already richer and technologically advanced compared to other regions.
Backwards compatibility is holding the evolution of C and C++ back. Design improvements can't get approved if they affect ABI. Many of those improvements affect performance. The ecosystem needs a way to move forward without breaking ABI.
I don't mind if it inconvenience the government, but they have severely impacted residential neighbourhoods as well. Others in the movement have blocked commercial traffic across the border, putting people jobs at risk.
Ironically, I think these higher pressure activities will back fire. They could probably find a lot of support for easing restrictions, but destroying people's homes and jobs is not going to make or keep friends.
I agree that this approach is much better for stability. The trade off is that a lot of systems will end up missing their needed security updates. Very few people are consciously balancing their type I and type II errors when considering upgrade strategies.