I'm looking at this backlash against Google and other SV tech co.s and surprisingly find myself on the side of the 'backlasher's. The news articles emphasize the SF hippies, but I think the deep root of it all is the basic social contract these companies are breaking. There is an idea, and it works well. You start a business on the street. You probably hire people who are local, you serve people who are local. You pay taxes to the local government. The government fixes the roads and sets up bus service and educates your kids. Your customers increase in number and their ability to pay. Your business lasts longer.
Google and co seem to believe they can get away with creating their own parallel universe of buses and other infrastructure. But they would do much better to pay more taxes, especially local taxes, so that EVERYONE had a better bus service. Yes, their customers are more from outside SV than not, but their workers live here. If SF becomes a shitty place to live they will start to lose workers. Workers will not feel safe/happy in SF. When they go somewhere else, they might start out working remotely for google, but they might develop more ties to a different local business where they work. They might start working for them. These companies might be competing with Google.
Wouldn't it just be better for Google and Co. to simply pay a little extra in taxes and make SF a much better place to live in?
Python's context managers are a very neat way of handling code that needs a teardown once you are done. Python objects have do have a destructor method ( __del__ ) called right before the last instance of the object is about to be destroyed. You can do a teardown there. However there is a lot of fine print to the __del__ method. A cleaner way of doing tear-downs is through Python's context manager , manifested as the with keyword. class CrushMe: def __init__(self): self.f = open('test.txt', 'w') def foo(self, a, b): self.f.write(str(a - b)) def __enter__(self): return self def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb): self.f.close() return True with CrushMe() as c: c.foo(2, 3) One thing that is important, and that got me just now, is error handling. I made the mistake of ignoring all those 'junk' arguments ( exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb ). I just skimmed the docs and what popped out is that you need to return True or...
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