Interesting Links for 02-07-2014

[andrewducker]

• 820,000 Scots living in poverty
  (tags: poverty Scotland )
• A brief introduction to the Rust programming language
  It says 30 minutes, but it took me about five.
  (tags: programming mozilla )
• Men's Rights Activists don't actually care about men
  (tags: men rights feminism viaTheFerrett )
• A short story about time passing by new technologies, and

Comments

[theferrett]

Whenever I look at Rust I'm never sure whether to be sad or happy that I have no experience with pointers and garbage collection.

[andrewducker]

I'd go with both :->

I rarely have to worry about pointers, and garbage collection Just Works for me most of the time (I have to worry about manually breaking references about once every two years).

You work in PHP, right? So you have References, which are like pointers, albeit more limited, and you don't have to particularly worry about special syntax to deal with them.

I'm very happy to not have to deal with very low-level details most of the time - C# insulates me from it nicely. But I am fascinated by the details of how things work at lower levels (which is what keeps me reading articles like that one).

[witchwestphalia]

Rust sounds interesting. Article took me about 10 minutes to parse. Ick. Who wants to deal with low level memory management anyway? But this language does sound like a safer way to do it if one has to.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes, it's very-much aimed at people writing low-level code, or very performant code. Like Browsers. Or interpreters/VMs.

I'll stick to C# :->

[a_pawson]

820,000 is about 1 in 6 people, which seems incredibly high. How exactly is poverty defined in that article?

[erindubitably]

Looks like the 'poverty threshold' is defined as 60% the median household income as per this document.

[a_pawson]

So really it's a measure of the inequality of society, not of poverty in an absolute sense.

[andrewducker]

The article links to the PDF from the government report:
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/0045/00454875.pdf

Relative poverty:
Relative poverty is a measure of how many people are living below a defined income threshold in the most recent year. In this report, individuals are said to be in relative poverty if they are living in households whose equivalised income is below 60
per cent of UK median income in that year. Relative low income rates fall if household income for the poorest households increases faster than median income.
In 2012/13,the relative poverty threshold for a couple with no children was an income of £
264 per week (BHC) from all sources (see Annex 2 for further information on income definitions). For a couple with children the threshold would be higher and for a single person (without children) the threshold would be lower.

The PDF is worth a look.

Household incomes at 2001-02 levels (and falling, once housing costs taking into consideration)

[channelpenguin]

yup. been noticing that in my personal income /people round me for a while now...

Re: Household incomes at 2001-02 levels (and falling, once housing costs taking into consideration)

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I'm lucky to have had a promotion or two in-between, or I'd be struggling, with Julie off work.

[drplokta]

While those are interesting figures on income redistribution, they can't be right. They show the overall average income before tax and benefits being almost exactly the same as after tax and benefits -- which implies that none of the taxation pays for anything else other than benefits, like the NHS, defence, education, and so on. Since that's obviously bollocks, then so are those figures.

[del_c]

But the NHS, defence, education and so on *are* somebody's income. Every penny of that is put into someone's hand.

[del_c]

Squinting hard at that last bar gives me the impression there is just a hair less after than before. That may be the UK buying goods and services in from abroad.

[drplokta]

Yes, but they're not benefits. They're not counting money that the government pays out in salaries on the benefit side of the ledger.

[apostle_of_eris]

Iirc, in the States, median income went down faster in the two years of the "recovery" than in the previous two years of "recession".