I personally enjoyed the challenge of setting up PTP at home. Why would a hacker scoff at nanosecond-level timekeeping —- isn’t the entire internet a “telco/enterprise” thing?
To do PTP "right" requires every switch to support it and a NIC with hardware timestamps. Also, I've seen claims that PTP is no more precise than a good implementation of NTP.
ptp is <1us synchronization. From my testing NTP is ~20-60us after about 10 minutes of sync, but it intentionally drifts the phase around. On average, NTP is pretty close.
If you look at the white rabbit FPGA PTP updates, its in the ns range.
Any kind of GPS + most intel nics will get you PTP with an accurate clock. If you didn't need to sync too many devices you could use a single system with a bunch of nics as your "switch".
This post didn’t sound right to me, but I realized that my raspi4 GPS NTP server has been running ntp and not chrony. Chrony is better at modeling non deterministic timing behavior, so I swapped to that.
It’s been ten minutes now and chronyc tracking has been marching the offset down. It’s sub 1 us at this point.
System time : 0.000000123 seconds fast of NTP time
Last offset : +0.000000366 seconds
How to get this precise time out of a non deterministic OS? Beats me. Once I figure that out I can finish my clock project.
My best lead is to step through the different python timing and scheduler implementations and see which has the lowest jitter relative to the PPS on an oscilloscope.
Assuming you're using a PPS signal and a kernel driver, presumably there's an interrupt handler or perhaps a capture timer peripheral that is capturing a hardware timer when the PPS edge occurs. It doesn't matter too much when the userspace code gets around to adjusting the hardware timer as long as it can compute the difference between when the PPS edge came in and when it should have come in. The Linux API for fine tuning the system time works in deltas rather than absolute timestamps, so it is once again fairly immune to userspace scheduling jitter.
Even good hardware oscillators can have a wide amount of drift, say 50uS per second, but they tend to be stable over several minutes outside of extreme thermal environments. Therefore, it's pretty easy to estimate and compensate for drift using a PPS signal as a reference. Presumably, that compensation is partially what takes a while for the time daemon to converge on.
Additionally, the clock sync daemon likely takes a while to converge because it isn't directly controlling the system time. Rather, it is sending hints to the kernel for it to adjust the time. The kernel decides how best to do that, and it does it in a way that attempts to avoid breaking other userspace programs that are running. For example, it tries to keep system time monotonically increasing. This means that there's relatively low gain in the feedback loop, and so it takes a while to cancel out error.
It's possible for a userspace program to instead explicitly set system time, but that really isn't intended to be used in Linux unless time is more than 0.5 seconds off. The API call to do that is inherently vulnerable to userspace scheduling jitter, but it's fine since 0.5 seconds is orders of magnitude longer than the expected jitter. You get the system time within the ballpark, and then incrementally adjust it until it's perfect.
If you're not using a kernel driver to capture the PPS edge's timestamp, then you're going to have a rougher time. Either you're just going to have to accept the fact that you can't do better than the scheduling jitter (other than assume it averages out), or you're going to have to do something clever/terrible. One idea would be to have your userspace process go to sleep until, say, 1ms before you expect the next PPS edge to come in. Then, go into a tight polling loop until the edge occurs. As long as reading the PPS pin from userspace is non-blocking and your process doesn't get preempted, you should be able to get at least within microseconds. You can poll system time in the same tight loop, allowing you to fairly reliably detect whether the process got preempted or not.
Thank you for the detailed response! The PPS is currently driving a hardware interrupt on the raspberry pi that is read in by kernel mode software. My project is to drive an external display. Normally I would bypass the raspberry pi altogether and connect the PPS signal to the strobe input of the SIPO shift register. The problem is that the PPS signal cannot be trusted to always exist. Using a raspberry pi has a few benefits. Setting the timezone based on location, leap seconds, and smoothing out inconsistent GPS data. So while opting to use system time to drive the start of second adds error, I think the tradeoff for reliability is worth it.
I have considered adding complexity, such as adding a hardware mux to choose whether to use the GPS PPS signal or the raspberry pi's start-of-second. I should walk before I run though.
If you want to precisely generate a PPS edge in software with less jitter than you can schedule, you can use a PWM peripheral. Wake up a few milliseconds before the PPS edge is due, get the system time, and compute the precise time until the PPS is due. Initialize the PWM peripheral to transition that far into the future, then go back to sleep until a bit after the transition should have happened, and disable the PWM peripheral.
This works because a thread of execution generally knows what time it is with higher precision than it can accurately schedule itself.
I'm not sure I understand how you're using a PPS signal to drive a display, though. Is it an LED segment display? I assume you want it to update once a second, precisely on the edge of each second. Displays generally exist for humans, though, and a human isn't going to perceive a few milliseconds of jitter on a 1Hz update.
Nixie tubes driven by a pair of cascaded HV5122 (driver + shift register). The strobe input is what updates the output registers with the recently shifted in contents. The driver takes 500 ns to turn on and the nixie tubes take about 10 us to fire once the voltage is applied.
I know it's absurd to worry about the last few ms, but it's part of what interests me about the project. The goal is to make The Wall Time as accurate as I can. I could go further with a delay locked loop fed from measuring nixie tube current. There is room push down to the dozens of nanoseconds of error relative to the PPS source, but I am content with the 10s of microseconds. I can't imagine ever having access to a camera that could capture that amount of error.
Thanks for the tip. Hardware timers are best. I'll likely have to take some measurements to calibrate the computation time of getting the system time and performing the subtraction.
Sounds like fun! For what it's worth, ublox GPS modules and their clones should be configurable to always produce a PPS signal regardless of whether or not they have a satellite fix. The module would probably do a better job than software on a pi could during transient periods without a fix (due to how accurate the oscillators need to be in a GPS module). So, as long as you can trust the GPS module to exist and be powered, you should be able to reliably clock your display update with it. The only reason really to generate your own PPS would be if you want it to work without a GPS module at all, perhaps by NTP or something; you're then of course again looking at only a millisecond or so of accuracy.
I'm using an uputronics GPS/RTC hat that has a u-blox M8 engine. I set it to stationary mode for extra accuracy. I'll have to look into other configuration options.
NTP gets worse if you sync more than two devices across a broader network with other switched traffic, more into low 100s of µs. PTP does not degrade similarly and yes, most of PHYs made since middle of the last decade support it.
> If you look at the white rabbit FPGA PTP updates, its in the ns range
As I recall, I had even better performance than that. Around the tens of picoseconds. But I guess the advertised 1 ns is a conservative estimate. The precison is incredible but its not magic, they squeeze the maximum amount of determinism out of custom hardware and fiber optic links. It is a bit of pain too set up, as you need to calibrate each link individually every time you change the fiber or the SFP.
> To do PTP "right" requires every switch to support it and a NIC with hardware timestamps.
I agree, but PTP will in fact work over regular commercial switches on a LAN. The problem is that it will introduce jitter if there's other traffic on the network, but as long as the paths from master to slave (terms used in the standard) remain symmetric, you can filter this out and achieve performance almost as good as if you were using PTP transparent switches.
The NIC with hardware timestamps part should be pretty easy if you're already implementing it using an FPGA like this project did - in fact, in a sense that seems to be exactly what they're doing with NTP. Finding switches that support it might be a little harder.
Many many computers on the internet have a RTC with second resolution and timer tick resolution in the microseconds. Reference time resolution that's that much higher than your timer tick period is useless.
I’ve been using APU2 systems for several years. It can handle gigabit if you’re using Linux and your ISP doesn’t use PPPoE. On PPPoE it tops out around 500mbps for download and 800mbps for upload.
When you use encrypted backups on iOS, Google Authenticator maintains its state and there's no need to reset 2FA. I'm sure there are similar mechanisms for Android.
Do not go to law school unless it's a passion that you're willing to sacrifice financial and mental well-being for. It's only "worth it" if you're able to attend an elite (top 10) institution -- otherwise, in an industry obsessed with status and prestige, you'll end up on the wrong side of the bimodal salary curve¹ struggling to pay your six figure student debt. BigLaw, IP (patents), and tax attorneys are the only specialties that make decent money. Once laden with debt, 2000 billable hours is standard at most firms, meaning that 50+ hour weeks are the norm. Lawyers are unhappy: alcoholism² and depression³ are rampant in the profession.
Source: Lawyer that hated writing patents and went back to tech.
This doesn't really answer any of the questions I asked but thanks for the perspective. I'm not worried about the financial cost and planning on focusing on IP law in the company I currently work at.
You must be independently wealthy to not worry about a $150k+ outlay for school.
I obtained a CS degree, worked in tech for several years, and decided to attend law school to study IP like you’re intending. I attended one of best schools for IP, and worked writing patents. Despite a great law firm and clients, the work was not stimulating and a net drain on society. I left to start my own company in tech again.
My work as a core Django developer during school was more fulfilling intellectually and professionally.
Studying law will not bring the prestige you’re seeking. I didn’t listen to the lawyers who told me that either.
I guess you are set on assuming who is asking the question. Cost isn't a concern in my decision, I can pay for it out of pocket and I'm not seeking prestige. Thanks for your time.
Money market funds have significant yield compared to banks; the Vanguard Federal Money Market Fund (VMFXX) has a current yield of 1.81% and is used as default settlement account on Vanguard brokerage accounts (easy to transfer in and out from).
If you can hold off on needing the funds for a year, then US I-Bonds can be purchased from TreasuryDirect. I-bond rates are adjusted semi-annually so they always yield more than inflation and currently at 2.52%. Treasury T-bills can be purchased in 4, 8, 13, 26, and 52-week terms. Current rate for 4-week bills is around 1.89%.
Thanks jbronn and sibling commenters. Lots to look into. I have the e-fund in my local credit union's money market and always just assumed that would be the best I could get. I-bonds seem to be a good compromise for non-emergency savings that don't have to be liquid.
Since everyone is joining in with anecdotes, I’ll share mine. During second grade I had strep at least four consecutive times. One of those times I developed an ear infection with pain so intense my parents took me to the emergency room. On doctor’s orders, I had my tonsils removed. While the procedure was not pleasant (I had severe nausea from the anesthesia), the effects were immediate and permanent. In nearly three decades since I’ve yet to develop strep again.
The 40 hour week is still not guaranteed. Especially in startup environment overtimes are quite common. In US more so than in Europe, you can easily be pulling 50h+ in a startup with all that overtime not paid for. So it's not like we don't need unions anymore.
On the other hand pulling 50h+ on a shoestring budget is exactly how many startups grew into successes we know today. If that's problematic, one shouldn't work at a startup: it's part of risk-reward equation.
But some want the potential (low probability but out-sized) upside at no risk and strain.
I'm not anti-union per se, but I am familiar with the economics literature, and the 40-hour work week, minimum wage, and lack of child labor are artifacts of economic development. People don't want their kids to have to work, so when societies become wealthy enough that they don't have to, they stop sending their kids to work, and around that time manage to also ban child labor (which has little effect at this point in the development of societies, and some of the effect it has is negative). Same with the 40-hour work week (and again, some of the effects of enshrining this in law are negative). Similar with the minimum wage, with some variation by country (and yet again, to the extent the minimum wage is above the market clearing wage, you end up with negative effects, as locales that have drastically increased theirs have seen).
>the 40-hour work week, minimum wage, and lack of child labor are artifacts of economic development
The economy hasn't stopped developing however. 80 hour work weeks at the factory have been replaced with 40 hour weeks with 20 hours of unpaid overtime. Child labour has been replaced with unpaid internships. Minimum wage often doesn't match increases in inflation and cost of living, not to mention regional changes in cost of living.
Also productivity has practically doubled in the UK since 1980, yet labour laws have largely stayed the same. It could be time to implement 32 hour weeks, or ban unpaid overtime, or raise the minimum wage. All of these require strong unions IMO.
"Unpaid" internships are good -- they allow people who don't provide much value to learn and build their capital. People who want to work more than 40 hours should be allowed to work more than 40 hours, and should be allowed to make agreements with their employer that don't double their expense per hour at 40 hours. The minimum wage is just a price floor, and doesn't actually determine wages for more than an extremely small margin of workers, and raising it can increase unemployment among the most vulnerable populations.
Unions have the economic effect of boosting working-class wages and well-being for people in a particular group: high-skill working class people. They depress wages, increase unemployment, and reduce well-being for the most vulnerable groups, particularly minorities and those with low education. There is no broad positive effect on labor from unions; we know from the data that the benefits accrue to a certain type of worker, and it's nowhere near the lowest classes of worker. These gains are relative, and do not enlarge the pie.
(EDIT: Downvoting me doesn't make the economics literature less conclusive on this point, and there's no reason why we should expect it to be otherwise. The labor struggle is an intra-class struggle between the more-employable working-class subset and the less-employable, which is exactly what you'd predict looking at who makes up the groups.)
FYI, wasn't me who downvoted you (check my karma, I actually can't)
But one by one:
>"Unpaid" internships are good -- they allow people who don't provide much value to learn and build their capital
Unpaid internships are not available to anyone who doesn't have the necessary capital to go without income for a year or so. Which is very few people, and mainly the rich. Or people who can take internships near their parents home provided their parents earn enough to support them and provided they're not in an abusive family situation which is still far too exclusive.
>People who want to work more than 40 hours should be allowed to work more than 40 hours, and should be allowed to make agreements with their employer that don't double their expense per hour at 40 hours.
Sure, but that's still paid overtime, I was talking about unpaid. And a lot of the time it's not a case of "people who want to work more than 40 hours" it's "people who have to work 40 hours". I didn't get a choice at my last job, I either did it or I got fired, and that was with the EU working time directive (it wasn't very effective)
>The minimum wage is just a price floor, and doesn't actually determine wages for more than an extremely small margin of workers, and raising it can increase unemployment among the most vulnerable populations.
A fifth of the UK workforce earned less than the living wage in 2017 [1] and the living wage here isn't that much higher than the minimum wage. I wouldn't describe that as a small margin. All those workers would benefit from increasing the minimum wage. Furthermore regarding increasing unemployment, this isn't a valid argument: it's well established in quite a few countries that minimum wage is not enough to actually live on, so if a business cannot afford to pay the minimum wage people need to survive then they are not an effective business. I really can't emphasise that enough. If people are unemployed because of reasonable increases in minimum wage, it is entirely the fault of the business owners for not being profitable, not the fault of minimum wage law.
>Unions have the economic effect of boosting working-class wages and well-being for people in a particular group: high-skill working class people. They depress wages, increase unemployment, and reduce well-being for the most vulnerable groups, particularly minorities and those with low education. There is no broad positive effect on labor from unions; we know from the data that the benefits accrue to a certain type of worker, and it's nowhere near the lowest classes of worker. These gains are relative, and do not enlarge the pie.
Source please.
>The labor struggle is an intra-class struggle between the more-employable working-class subset and the less-employable, which is exactly what you'd predict looking at who makes up the groups
IMO plain wrong. The labour struggle is between workers and owners of capital, in fact pitting the working class against each other has been a tactic those in power have used for millennia.
There is poor evidence to support your points. And what about Switzerland that has very low union membership, have pretty much 40 hours weeks, no child labor, and the highest compensation across Europe despite having no minimum wage? It does not add up if we follow your narrative.
Switzerland is an exceptional country that has a political system far removed from the rest of the world. Democracy in Switzerland is so direct that there is a much higher level of engagement of the voters with the issues at stake.
You can't take something that works in Switzerland out of that context and then apply it to some other country with the arguement 'it works in Switzerland'.
Of course you can. The above narrative clearly implied that unions are the motor of social progress while it is blantantly false. Economic development is what brings social progress. And the richest countries in the world are the ones with the best working conditions, regardless of unions power.
> Economic development is what brings social progress.
Not necessarily. Economic development can be limited to the owners of the companies whilst exploiting the employees. That is what gave rise to unionization, it was a reaction to abusive practices.
That unions later on became self sustaining and that they work against the interest of some of the people that are employed (seniority system for instance) has nothing to do with why they exist in the first place.
> Economic development can be limited to the owners of the companies whilst exploiting the employees.
This is often heard but there is little truth to it. The more developed a market is, the larger the opportunities for employees to move to other jobs, and therefore exploitation is a problem that goes away by itself. Many countries in South East Asia have close to zero unions yet benefit from very high living standards and reasonable working hours (at least very much equivalent to the US).
If the "union" theory had any truth in it, then you would expect unions to be everywhere in the world before and during economic development to lead social conditions improvement. Yet social/working conditions improve regardless of unions presence.
Sorry I wasn't trying to undermine the power of unions and what it did for the population in the last decades. I grew up in Europe. But also grew frustrated by the impossible situation it puts startups in, to achieve anything and remain viable.
The unions in France are currently crapping our transportation system with their unlimited strike 2 days out of 5, all because the unions are clinging to their power. Unions in France has stopped caring about workers a long time ago, they just want to have unionized worker in order to get their (and the gov's) money.
Unions are not necessary at all in any country that has decent and enforced labor laws. In developed economies they only serve as a levelling mechanism, which also make it impossible to fire anybody. The only people they serve are unproductive and incompetent employees.
> Unions are not necessary at all in any country that has decent and enforced labor laws.
I suppose no political organizations are necessary in places where there are decent and enforced laws, not even political parties, but that's not how humans work. Decent laws aren't the result of generosity from those in power - decent labor law isn't a result of corporate altruism - but of political struggles between different elements of society. Democracy doesn't work magically; it works by the people who have a seat at the table competing and negotiating. Those without a seat are ignored - their obvious needs, their priorities (you can always identify those without a seat: the others say about their needs: 'they're exaggerating; it's not that big a deal'), and needs that only they have the experience to know or anticipate. Individual factory workers don't have a seat, but their union does.
This comment sounds a lot like hyperbole to me. People have a seat at the table, that’s how democracy works. People also have an incredible amount of entitlements and protection in the labor market. The labor laws in the west are generally quite good, most of the reasonable criticism you could direct at them comes down to enforcement. If you have a problem with them, then participate in your democracy.
In economies where minimum entitlements are sufficient to protect workers from exploitation, unions serve no useful purpose at all, they are simply leveling mechanisms. Meaning the do not protect workers from getting less than their worth, they simply pull people down and prevent people from advancing themselves beyond the average. Worst of all they make it nearly impossible to fire the incompetent, which itself seems like exploitation to me, forcing the component to pick up the slack of those who aren’t.
> In economies where minimum entitlements are sufficient to protect workers from exploitation, unions serve no useful purpose at all
They serve the purpose of making sure workers get their legal entitlements.
For example, Unions right in Australia are tackling the problem of underpayment of legally mandated wages “wage theft” and have succeeded in getting a state government to adopt as policy the treatment of deliberate underpayment as a criminal matter with criminal penalties.
>most of the reasonable criticism you could direct at them comes down to enforcement
Sounds like you agree with me. In a democracy, unions are just about the least efficient way you could possibly address inadequate enforcement of labor laws. If all you want is a workers lobby group, then why do you think the best way to achieve that is with organisations that exploit people with collective bargaining agreements, and enforce a tyranny where nobody can be fired? Want to know why it’s so impossible to fire a corrupt cop? Unions. Want to know why incompetent teachers can last a whole career defrauding our children? Unions.
There’s no rational connection between wanting to better enforce labor laws that are already on the books and wanting unions. Democracies offer many far superior ways to address such issues.
I have no first hand experience with unions protecting the rights of labor in the US, but I do see that nobody else is doing it while unions have receded. Forced arbitration seems like a significant problem, which is far more deserving of the visceral outrage you express towards unions.
I gave you a concrete example of the good work unions are doing and you responded by just calling it inefficient and saying "many far superior ways" without outlining any. The reality is it was a thing that was happening and unions took a leading role in the political process to fix it. Unions are people participating in democracy.
Not only that, you seek to put words in my mouth about exploitation and tyranny.
I'd also like to point out that beyond your (in my view) irrational distaste for unions, you have a very US-centric view of what a union is. Those of us looking from the outside in are constantly bemused by people like you.
Please only respond to the things I actually say, not the things that you think I will say in the caricature you have built.
> The labor laws in the west are generally quite good
According to who? By what standard? And regardless of their current state, shouldn't workers get as much as they can for themselves, just like everyone else? Corporations sure do everything they can for themselves; IMHO even enlightened self-interest, such as net neutrality or reasonable tax laws, is not a limitation.
> Unions are not necessary at all in any country that has decent and enforced labor laws.
You clealy have no idea about what you're saying. For your comment to make any sense you need to believe that any worker acting exclusively by himself has the resources to enforce those laws agains any company and suffer no repercussion during the process. This idea is utterly absurd.
Meanwhile, unions do offer specialized legal services and do pressure managers to not overreach or overstep their authority, and do so as a proxy to any employee and even while preserving his anonymity if needed.
In fact, if anything you've said made any sense then unpaid overtime or unpaid weekend work would be unthinkable, but instead it's the norm in some abusive companies without any union.
Again, you clearly have no idea about what you're talking about. It's quite obvious that a law means nothing if you have no way to enforce it or if there are serious repercussions if you try. The moment a lone employee acting alone creates a problem for his immediate supervisors or higher ups, he singles himself out as a target. In jurisdictions that follow an at-will employment doctrine, where any employee can be immediately fired without any justification, then any employee that raises any problem to the company's managers can be fired just for being a nuisance.
How can you accuse me of not knowing how labor laws work, and then try to suggest that it is up to employers to enforce employment law/regulation? It is employers role to comply with the law, the department of labor enforces it. You don’t need your employers permission to report law violations to the department of labor.
I have always assumed that, since lawsuits and whistleblowing leave public records, that employers can and do blackball employees who cause trouble. Or worse in some cases.
> How can you accuse me of not knowing how labor laws work, and then try to suggest that it is up to employers to enforce employment law/regulation?
That's not what I said at all. Please don't attribute to me a claim I never made.
> It is employers role to comply with the law, the department of labor enforces it. You don’t need your employers permission to report law violations to the department of labor.
Again, you keep missing the point. What I've said is quite obvious: an employee acting alone has very few, if any, resources to go against his employer, and in the rare cases an employee goes against his employer then even if he wins he is left wide open to repercussions. I don't understand how you failed to get the point I've made when I've mentioned the effect that at-will employment doctrines has on this.
That is exactly what you have said, you keep trying to imply that the only way for an employ the address labor abuse is to complain to their management. This is in outright lie. There are entire government agencies devoted to enforcing labor abuse, and anybody can file a complaint with them at no cost at all.
In addition to that, it is also trivially easy for an employ to launch a civil suit. Any case with even an ounce of merit will attract lawyers willing to work on commission.
Even further, you have offered no justification at all for why you think unions are necessary to enforce the law, instead only resorting to the fallacious line of reasoning that it is up to employees to argue with their employers for minimum entitlements.
> In addition to that, it is also trivially easy for an employ[ee] to launch a civil suit. Any case with even an ounce of merit will attract lawyers willing to work on commission.
Lawyer here. Your second sentence is incorrect: (1) Litigation is far more expensive that you seem to realize; most rank-and-file employees can't afford it – when my wife, also a lawyer, and I were younger, we used to joke that we couldn't afford us. (2) The default rule in the U.S. is that each party pays its own attorney fees unless otherwise stated in a specific statute or in a contract. The availability of class actions helps plaintiffs' lawyers achieve cost savings and increase the likelihood of getting paid, but the conservative wing of the Supreme Court just helped put the kibosh on that by ruling that employers could avoid class actions by insisting on one-at-a-time arbitration, which results in massive duplication of costs. (3) An individual employee's likely damage award is almost never enough to entice a lawyer into taking the case on a contingent-fee basis, i.e., where the lawyer only gets paid if the employee prevails. (4) Consequently, it's extremely difficult for an employee to find a lawyer to take on a garden-variety case against her employer.
It sounds like you’re comparing cartels to unions in respect to corruption and inefficiency. Well, I certainly agree with you there. Both are a threat to an efficient free market.
Laws aren’t permanent. They can be, and in fact often are, rolled back or abolished. See Glass-Steagall Act and the much more recent Dodd-Frank rollbacks as examples.
The fact of the matter is that when you make progress in an area you can’t just sit back and relax. You have to continue to work hard to prevent regression, especially when there are strong economic pressures in that direction. This is why unions are as important today as they were in the mid-19th century.
The perpetual cruft stacking seems to be a far greater problem of passing large laws like eg Dodd Frank. In terms of regulation, the biggest problem the US has, is a century of cruft having built up, and the rarity with which it gets fully removed or even looked at + questioned for whether it should be on the books at all. The perpetual, hilariously absurd expansion of the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations is a nice example of that in action (180,000 pages).
My favorite example, that does a wonderful job of pointing out the absurdity of this endless stacking, is the Twitter account A Crime a Day:
Who is going through and removing all of that trash? Nobody, it's perpetually expanding.
They almost never actually remove large bills like Dodd Frank from the system, they stack more cruft forever on top. If you want to roll back a section, you add 20 more pages of cruft to do it.
The point was hardly that every law on the federal books is bad. If you read the first 100 tweets on that account, my opinion is maybe 90 are bullshit that shouldn't be on the books. Nobody is going through all of those and removing the trash. Every little thing doesn't need a law, everything shouldn't be a federal crime.
eg
"18 USC §1465 makes it a federal crime to produce an obscene, lewd, lascivious, or "filthy book" for sale in interstate commerce."
"10 USC §2674(c) & 32 CFR §234.11(a) make it a federal crime to drink alcohol at the Pentagon without written authorization."
"40 USC §6307 & 36 CFR §520.4(h) make it a federal crime to play a ball game at the National Zoo, except in an officially-designated ball game area."
"21 USC §§331, 333, 343(g) & 21 CFR §139.150(b) make it a federal crime to sell "egg noodles" that aren't ribbon-shaped."
"18 USC §46(b) makes it a federal crime to knowingly barter for out-of-state water chestnuts."
"16 U.S.C. §§707(a), 718g & 50 C.F.R. §91.14 make it a federal crime to submit an entry in the Federal Duck Stamp contest that you copied from a picture on the internet."
I disagree with treating every specific refinement or implication of an age-old law as some irrelevant newfangled detail we don't need.
I looked up "21 USC §§331, 333, 343(g) & 21 CFR §139.150(b) make it a federal crime to sell "egg noodles" that aren't ribbon-shaped."
21 USC §331 is just about regulating fraud in commerce. It starts:
"The following acts and the causing thereof are prohibited:
(a) The introduction or delivery for introduction into interstate commerce of any food, drug, device, tobacco product, or cosmetic that is adulterated or misbranded.
You could show that to someone a couple thousand years ago, and nothing would prevent them from understanding the purpose of it. You could probably get someone from the time of Hammurabi to understand the concept.
21 CFR §139.150(b) doesn't make it illegal to sell egg based pasta that isn't ribbon shaped, it defines "egg noodles" as such, as opposed to tubular shapes which are not "egg noodles". Standards to facilitate commerce are normally considered legitimate even by libertarians who wish to radically shrink the federal government. So unless you are an anarchist or particularly wish to abolish egg noodles or inhibit commerce in them, I don't understand where you're coming from.
On an unrelated note, can we talk about why aviation has moved away from the biplane? Biplanes gave us the first heavier than air flight. Therefore we should keep flying biplanes forever, because they gave us these great gains in our lives.
OP seemed to be arguing that because unions provided benefits in the past, we should keep them around now even regardless of whether they can provide current day benefits on order with their earlier benefits.
That doesn't seem surprising at all - a CEO's reputation is tied to the reputation of their company, so it makes sense that a poorly-performing company would have to pay more to attract the same level of expertise as a well-performing one. If the poorly-performing company fails, then the CEO's market value will decrease. Higher compensation offsets that.
