shlurpy

Rusts error handling is almost identical to checked exceptions in practice. The reason it works is because there is no real equivalent to easily handle-able unchecked exceptions, and because macros and sum types make it very easy to wrap a lower level error in your higher level error and rethrow.

Basically, checked exceptions could have worked, if they were the only type, and had better ergonomics of use, and a language culture that emphasized correctness more.

Checked exceptions were wrong for Java, but that does not mean they are wrong universally.

Empirically, most people care more about making the trip efficiently then how exactly it's done. If all those people are motivated to not use cars, think of how much less traffic there will be for everyone else? It turns out that bike and pedestrian friendly cities are also some of the most car friendly ones for this reason.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k

That's one of the purposes of government regulatory agencies. Laws could be enforced entirely through courts, but regulators can fine on behalf of the ordinary people instead of those wealthy enough to sue.

What would being held in contempt mean? It seems to be just another fine.

Somethinf that would require the attention of thr intelligence services, like, say, getting an unwanted pregnancy in America. The government can and does change its standards, and the tools that can be used against you will be used against you.

The biggest trick ever played by the ruling elite was convincing people that private property rights and capitalism were somehow related to and necessary for democracy. Democracy should be that power comes from the people, but wealth creates unaccountable power structures that have far more power over the lives of most people then any government.

Such rights mean nothing when people lose their respect for them. Democracies work when a sufficiently vast majority of those within them belive that the systems are fundamentally good.

Lynching represent a public belief that whatever systems are in place are insufficient to bring justice. They happen regardless of what rights are declared in some legal text or whatever. The solution to building a better democracy always returns to building better, more trusted institutions, and building thr peoples trust that they are fair, and inalienable rights are just another such institution.

Water is a necessity. Making it unaffordable literally is a death sentence. Those who would mass murder poor people rather then have a yellow lawn are morally reprehensible.

They literally constitutionally cannot ask the farmers, and you need a very mobilized populace to change the constitution. That's only going to happen when people see the consequences of inaction, and its probably better that happen gradually for useless laws then suddenly for all drinking water.

Yeah, I just mentally translate it to "Just shut up already and let's move on to stuff that matters."

The threat of suffering and death are the threats used both to make you work for money, and to make you eat healthy and work out. However, the consequences of the former are much more imminent, while the consequences of the latter can take years to show up. Unfortunately, we find delayed reward or punishment to be a much weaker motivator.

You gloss over the economic issues, but those are fundamentally at the center of it. Some copy-able work can be done by semi-amateurs in their free time, and some can be paid for as a 1-off contract without needing exclusivity, but most seems to require trained labor with a guaranteed return on investment.

What it comes down to is that under capitalism, a lot of art like movies, tv, video games, certain more polished professional tools, etc, requires an artifical concept of ownership to ensure that people are able to spend time creating them, because choosing to do too much uncompensatable labor is effectively choosing to starve to death.

But maybe, like me, you see the possibility of a future where we can find a way to compensate art that isn't locked into the grim realities of capitalism. Well, cool, but then political strategy has to be considered. As is, ML seems to be a technology that funnels money away from compensating creators and towards large corporations that can invest in ML and their shareholders. And in our practical reality, more money buys more speech, more speech tends to lead to more power. Thus, self interest rules the day, with the wealthiest uninterested in changing the fundamental economics systems and working to stop it.

That's why I am concerned about ML and copyright. It would be no problem in an ideal world, but in our world, it makes the status quo worse in a way that prevents progress towards that ideal.

It's not about pollution, it's about actively spending billions to prevent any solutions once we knew it was a problem.

The better solution would be something like separate elected offices for different interests, with representation based on how much an area is affected by that legislation, instead of a single position for everything.

I think the jury thing is onto something... a small group rather then an individual can work wonders to cover for the failings and corruptability of the others.

Another alternative is voting without choosing leaders. Aka actually trying democracy.

Go one further, why do we need to have leaders at all? Assigning specific jobs to make decisions for specific domains makes sense, but trying to have one person be in charge of everything seems like it's been proven too big a task. Politicians are terrible because anyone with that much centralized power is going to be bad at any individual task.

A 20% chance still happens quite often.

There are probably more people involved in providing food for people among the 10000 NYC people then the 100 Kansas farmers.

It's an embarrassingly bad take. "The sociopolitical system that I am benefiting from also happens to be the inevitable final and best one" is something that so many people have claimed over the years, and has failed each time. And that's not to mention the fundamental contradictions between democracy and capitalism, the existential threat capitalism has posed to the entire world via climate change, the fragility of pseudodemocratic institutions past and present, and dozens of other problems. But sure, the system we have had for less then a tenth of the duration of many ancient empires is final and complete, and everyone should just give up on finding solutions to its many problems that might inconvence those currently in power.

It turns out individualized software freedom, like all individualized freedom, results in deep systemic problems.

If they did, it would suddenly become that much more clear that the system is deeply antidemocratic, due to people not having any say in the institutions that govern them.

Maybe your time is wasted thinking about the lever, and would be better spent stopping the madmen who keep tying people to the tracks.

Then you would support an effort to get rid of the EC and increase democracy?

The reality in which we live is one crafted by people, and if you don't have a seat at the table crafting the rules, then you are the one being taken for a ride.

This is location specific, but one reason is because American cities were irreparably ruined by suburbanization.

Goedels incompleteness seems to me to disprove such omni, and if you are stuck thinking by our best models of thinking, its annoying exponential. Basically, to think about a universe enough to predict outcomes, you have to simulate it. To figure out which universe leads to a desired outcone, it seems like you would have to simulate most of the ones that do not as well. So if we presuppose the existance of a creator, maybe we are one of the failed universe thought experiments as she tries to make her intended universe?

The McDonald's leaving thing was always totally absurd to me for this reason. There are real examples of economic dependence that could and do cause problems. The owners withdrawing ownership though is a pure benefit to Russia. Threemployees get paid by the customers and get supplies from suppliers and all of that is totally unaffected. The only thing that changes is they pay less money to American buisness owners, so if anything, pay might go up or prices might drop as less is skimmed off the top.

I don't think they like ad absurdum arguments. But without systematic evidence, there is not way to determine if if such an argument is actually any less valid then the initial claim.

Counterfactual imaginings make for poor evidence. But ideology can make a fool of anyone.