appleskeptic

Go to Singapore.

Singapore is a really nice place to live.

War on Drugs works in Singapore where drug dealers get swift, harsh punishment.

A system that lets minor inefficiencies endlessly accumulate, because the activation energy to address them is too high, is rotten. As for picking up hundred dollar bills, Congress isn’t solving big problems either.

Your perspective makes sense if you accept as good that massive political effort must be taken to do obviously good things against the wishes of special interest groups. But most people would think that the US Mint churning out worthless coins every year at the expense of citizens is an undesirable state of affairs. Wasting other people’s money is inherently despicable.

Not that worthless coins are anywhere near the top of the list of bad and wasteful policies. But if we can’t even solve the obvious low-hanging fruit, we’re not solving those bigger problems either.

What an indictment of our system.

I’ve always been fond of the 50 cent piece too. It’s too bad that the ubiquity of the quarter makes it the only contender for a single-coin system.

I imagine it would cost less than all the money collectively spent on minting them and buying and maintaining machinery to handle them. Even better if they got rid of the quarter too. But yeah, I can see why no politician has decided to make this their signature issue.

What the US needs is to abolish all coins except the quarter. Due to inflation, a penny in 1913 is worth about 30 cents now. And somehow they made do with no smaller coins than the penny (the half cent having been discontinued in 1857).

Why are we shuffling these worthless bits of metal around? I’m sure it’s to enrich some medium size companies in a few important Congressional districts.

They would if they could. Spain is a weak little country that depends on the US for defense. The US is the most powerful country in history. There is no symmetry.

Wrong, allies spy on each other constantly.

No, we shouldn't. But anyone committing assaults on either side should be prosecuted. Much easier to do these days than back then.

This is false. Labor laws passed in the 1900s in most Western countries give you a right to strike without the risk of getting fired. It doesn't have to be bargained for. There's lots of caveats, but that's the general rule.

I'm not saying you should have to fire them. But you should be able to.

Views on collective responsibility for riots have changed a lot. These days, it's only the individual rioters who commit specific crimes that are thought of as bearing responsibility. But before the 1960s or so, a violent crowd was seen as collectively responsible, and it wouldn't have been considered unjustified to treat them accordingly, the way you'd be justified in violent self-defense against an individual rioter today.

He means cases where management is accused of violence against the strikers.

Violent strike breakers should go to jail too.

Violent strikers should go to jail.

Striking should be legal, but firing employees for striking should also be legal.

This is like a C# dev trolling a C developer by say “first novice exercise”, HTML encode a UTF8 string. I mean, it is a single line of code in C# so how hard could it be in C?

It’s not like that at all. The difference you’re identifying is that C# has it in the standard library while C does not. But it’s a conceptually intricate problem and implementing it from scratch in both C and C# would actually be somewhat similar, but C# obviously has some convenience features that would make the code tighter.

Linked lists are very simple and GP’s complaint is that Rust makes it very difficult to implement them.

You’re misreading the rule. Such titles are allowed.

If the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

Just the relevant bit:

translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X"

Ruby and C here.

It’s illegal in Canada, but only for the buyer. Which goes along with modern prohibition being an anti-man feminist thing.

It’s probably most accurate to say it’s an unspoken alliance between the two groups—feminists and traditional moralists. But when the church was actually politically powerful, prostitution was much less likely to be prohibited than it is now.

What’s funny is prostitution was legal most of the time and in most places in the western world until recently. Widespread prohibition of it is not as much a holdover from medieval times as a recent sex-negative feminist innovation. Which makes sense when you consider that the people punished are usually horny, kind-of-sleazy guys.

No, I’m saying the definition of bribery has been stretched so far to include ballpoint pens, a $30 lunch or free attendance at a conference, at the same time that high officials are underpaid, so as to place an absurd financial burden on middle-class people holding high office. No one says that a CEO who meets a potential supplier who buys him lunch is being bribed. But if a politician does that, it’s a crime somehow. Frankly absurd.

This would be awful. Theft and bribery are already prosecuted aggressively. If anything, too much. It’s gotten to the point that high government officials can’t afford to be lobbied. Here they are, some of the most powerful people in the world, paid barely enough to live an hour drive away from DC, having to spend a fair bit of their personal income to go to lunch and dinner with leaders of private industry.

As for criminalizing “waste”, you start to get dangerously close to criminalizing politics itself. Then it just becomes about controlling DOJ and using it to go after your enemies (this is already too true).

The better thing to do would with regards to intelligence agency abuses would be to have more review of the decisions, mandatory discipline of rulebreakers, and prosecution of specific crimes committed for egregious cases. No need to generally criminalize every time a government official makes a bad judgment call.

It's quite easy to find where the minorities are. The Census data is quite accessible. It like is not wholly complete given many minorities lack of trust of government officials, but it will give one a strong idea of where they reside.

Nothing I said implies it's hard. The problem is that the FCC is requiring you to base your decisions on race, ethnicity, and religion.

That's not how this works. It's not about income any more than it is about race. Racial disparate impact is enough for the FCC to fine you to oblivion. The fact that it's listed after "income" does not change that.

Starlink is probably your best bet for now, which is ~100/~20 depending on your area. I believe you can also multi-home two (or more) Starlink services and get double (or triple etc.) that.