Trump being elected again arguably is a sign the system is working, that people when unhappy with the status quo were able to change their government to someone they feel will represent their interests more. Now, I have no love to lose for Trump, I think he's a asshole, braggart and charlatan - but his election is a sign we can enact change - I dont think Trump will bring much real change, but its a sign the system works.
The only reason that this doesn't happen more often is the electorate is mostly disengaged from the races that do matter, and tied down by partisanship.
It seems you contradict yourself. Yes change is Trump's platform. But you agree he won't change anything. So the system has the illusion of change, but no proof it can actually facilitate it.
No, not at all - it means that the power of the people to vote their choice is alive and well - that doesn't mean we're putting good candidates up, or that people underestimate the difficulty of wholesale systemic change - it just means we can vote for who we choose.
So I'm arguing for democracy. I'm a fan of it and you see a lot of prominent people even within the US (Theil, the GOP, Curtis Yarvin, as well as burned out doomers) arguing and working against it so that is not just pointless posturing.
Democracy generally works well, and America becoming a poster child for "Why Democracy is bad" is a development that could lead to real horrors, at home and across the globe.
You don't have to condone political violence to support more democracy to avoid it. Even in nations, like the US, where political violence is celebrated every single day.
And yet the US were created by bloody revolution, preserved by bloody civil war, and made prosperous by countless bloody coups, wars, etc.
Perhaps the problem is that democracy isn't really any different than any other form of country-level government. Perhaps we lost for ever when our ancestors started founding cities a few thousand years ago.
They really are hard to work with compared to languages where you declare which exceptions you'll throw,. I always get angry when pylint raises an error for catching over-broad exceptions[0]
Of course I'm catching broad exceptions because I have no idea what kind of exception is going to be thrown 12 dependencies deep and I don't want it to completely crash the program instead of letting me retry or do something else.
Yup this drives me crazy. I've been bitten by urllib3 or SSL exceptions being bubbled up by random libraries so many times that now I always include an except Exception: block just in case.
100% agree. Most of my bare except: are followed by import pdb;pdb.set_trace() so I can figure out what went wrong and then fix my code so that it never happens again, but I still leave it there because I I don't have time to consider the millions of ways my hastily thrown-together python script is going to fail nor do I want to game out how many different errors could happen. If Python would have been this hard to use 20 years ago, I wouldn't have been able to learn to program.
I don't think its comparable. phone cameras are assumed to be off, its pretty obvious when someone is recording a video, because he has to hold the phone in a very uncomfortable position.
Unless someone is actively pointing their phone at you, you can reasonably assume you're not being filmed.
this thing, on the other hand, is supposed to be on all the time. So having your head pointed in someone's general direction is going to be interpreted as "actively filming that person".
This could easily lead to getting punched in the face.
they will probably be discouraged in the workplace too. no one wants to be dealing with a sexual harassment case, just because someone didnt pay attention to the direction his head was pointing in, while reading some random article on his glasses' internal screen.
The USPS has an embedded law enforcement agency [0] whose full time job is to track down people who are using the postal service to commit crimes. Tor is very specifically designed to make an equivalent impossible.
Do you listen to the same song twice? Do you choose the same path to travel consistently? Do you choose to look at the same art piece more than once? How about poems?
Do you have a response to other comments about valuing the prose, and looking for depth in the art (book in this case)?
My opinion is that a single piece of art can have more variety, and more content than a thousand other pieces of art. Getting to know a single piece can be more fulfilling than a thousand others.
It just sounds like you appreciate uniqueness. But others might enjoy depth. you are quick to dismiss others as shallow, but I think the same point could be made about your interest.
I think there might be a disagreement about what "big" means. Google can easily afford to sink millions each year into pointless endeavours without going out of business and they probably have. Alphabet's annual revenue has been growing a good 10% each year since 2021[0]. That's in the range of $20-$30 billion dollars with a B.
To put that into perspective, Alphabet's revenue has increased 13.38% year-over-year as of June 30, arriving at $328.284 billion dollars - i.e. it has increased by $38.74 billion in that time. A $10 million dollar mistake translates to losing 0.0258% of that number.
A $10 million dollar mistake costs Alphabet 0.0258% of the amount their revenue increased year-over-year as of last month. Alphabet could have afforded to make 40 such $10 million dollar mistakes in that period and it would have only represented a loss of 1% of the year-over-year increase in revenue. Taking the year-over-year increase down by 1% (from 13.38% to 12.38%) would have required making 290 such $10 million dollar mistakes within one year.
Let me repeat that because it bears emphasizing: over the past years, every year Google could have easily afforded an additional 200 such $10 million dollar mistakes without significantly impacting their increase in revenue - and even in 2022 when inflation was almost double what it was in the other year they would have still come out ahead of inflation.
So in terms of numbers this is demonstrably false. Of course the existence of repeated $10 million dollar mistakes may suggest the existence of structural issues that will result in $1, $10 or $100 billion dollar problems eventually and sink the company. But that's conjecture at this point.
Not every invention is the wheel. One cannot evaluate the effects of every invention upon humanity by making analogies with the wheel. Grade school analysis.
