flosim

The fact that you commented against a proposal made by a parent made me believe that you were in agreement with it. Sorry!

To be honest, it's not about what people value. It's about what we have in practice. There hasn't been a war between EU countries for a while now, and that's something that I appreciate, given our history. Sure, you could argue that nuclear dissuasion is the reason why, but we don't even have any kind of cold war going on either, and I think the EU is to thank for that.

What's really good is that this creates a system where it's not only nonexistent, but it's also not even possible at all. It's like what Typescript/a linter does to Javascript: the EU greatly discourages entire classes of problems threatening the life/well-being of its citizens.

The leverage against foreign countries is a real pragmatic thing, though, not some ideology. Why else do you think Trump celebrated Brexit, and actively tries to break up different unions that we've spent years building, like NATO? I'm not saying that he's the devil, even though I'm not a big fan, but I understand that he's doing it to have his way with less opposition. Divide and conquer?

This is the textbook definition, yes. At least in France's political jargon.

For me, the whole aspect on which the EU is a no-brainer is peace, and leverage against powerful lunatics and maniacs, like Trump and Putin. Which is precisely why the latter is hell-bent on dismantling it.

Not from the economical standpoint.

These conclusions are only yours. One could argue that although the ceiling could be pretty low, it's not something that is set in stone.

Besides, it's not like your alternative is any more appealing anyway. I'm not so sure about the absolutism of saying "oh, it's not perfect, so let's just abolish it completely to make sure countries get even less to subsidize healthcare and education".

Before implicitly calling other people braindead next time, maybe consider that none of us are 100% right and we are all just having a discussion.

The anecdote is funny, but what does it have to do with anything?

One could argue that the statist systems in Scandinavia work quite okay... don't you agree?

More competitive, OK. Who doesn't want their country to be more competitive anyway, whatever that means? Certainly no one in their right mind would argue to make it more diverse, more educated while we're at it?

How about you share how you think this could work? While I agree for more competitiveness for my country, history has shown me repeatedly that low taxes isn't actually working out that great.

Equating low taxes with increased competitiveness is to me dishonest as a generality. I'm certainly not opposed to admitting that it can work in some cases, but I can't agree to this as a general rule.

Except we're not talking about a far country in a galaxy far, far away, but a close ally that actively benefits from the advantages of being a close ally, while pulling bad tax tricks that are detrimental to the countries that allow it to thrive.

It's not about fixing the Bahamas here.

I do agree with your first sentence though, whether this is good or bad depends on the particulars.

I wouldn't qualify this as a knee-jerk reaction. I'm not saying it's not misguided in its current form. What I mean is that tax evasion in the EU is a well-known problem, and a fix is looooong overdue.

1 - You seem to imply that for one to be a good "bureaucrat", one needs to have roots in the private sector. Can I just say that this is far from obvious for everybody? If anything, I'd be wary of those people as they pose a far greater risk of conflict of interests. I don't want to be run by lobbies, thank you. The recent story of M. Kohler, Macron's closest ally, makes me very wary. I won't say that all private bankers, CEOs and whatnot are the devil, because I am not a popullist know-it-all, but I do not trust them more just because they've worked in the private sector, as if it were some kind of holy virtue.

2 - I know a capitalist system that notoriously fails to redistribute wealth even though it's the richest economy in the world. Its ruling class seems to be keen on implementing those ultraliberal taxation ideas of yours. Sub-par healthcare and expensive education is the result. Then again, that is not a system that I think is worth emulating.

3 - As much as I appreciate politicians in general, I wouldn't be so immodest as to pretend that they're a bunch of stupid bureaucrats, meaning by that that I know how things work better than they do.

I was also taught in French schools that the Versailles "diktat" was a good reason why Hitler rose to power.

I work in a small full-stack JS/TS shop, and we've inherited a RoR application lately.

I see a lot of criticism against the Javascript ecosystem. Let me tell you why I prefer working in Javascript rather than with RoR.

It all boils down to the magic Rails advocates rave about, which is precisely what made my life a nightmare while working on that Rails project. Conventions over configuration is fine when you know those conventions. When all you have to do is work on the frontend part and rebuild an app, then you don't really care all that much about what an asset pipeline might be, or how you're supposed to use it. All those abstractions slow me down. At the end of the day, your run-of-the-mill CRUD apps are all structured kind of the same, and calling a cat a cat instead of inventing non-obvious abstractions is detrimental to speed of dev.

I prefer having `package.json` explicitly listing all the commands I might possibly need than having to memorize what does what with Rails. We've had absolute noobs work on both JS and Rails project and they seem to move much faster and be stuck less on the JS project than with the magic Rails provides. The fact that JS is more imperative helps linking parts of the source code intuitively, compared to Rails having standard classes and hooks and whatnot.

I'm very grateful for what Rails brought to Webdev in general, but I do think that monolithic framework are on their way out. I kind of appreciate being able to follow non-smart code when things go south, and being able to understand what is wrong by just reading the code. I've spent waaay too much time skimming through outdated documentation pages about things that were so clever that they were changed in ulterior versions.

I had the same problems when dealing with Symfony (which still angers me to this day), or Angular.js, or just anything that pretends to know better than me how I should write code. It's kind of a recurring pattern with frameworks that makes me increasingly wary of all of them.

Working with much smaller libraries that you can hope to grasp fully has proven to be much less frustrating personally.

Another advantage is that I can write code once for both the frontend and the backend, which helps me move a lot faster than writing the code + tests in 2 languages.

I know this is not a proof by any means, but I felt that having the point of view of a non-believer would be interesting to you guys.