edynoid

Living in the area at the height of the protests, so I can fill in.

Some of the reasons: many people (including experts) argued that the project could have been done for half the price with almost the same effect by upgrading the existing station above ground instead of building an entirely new underground station, for example. Costs kept increasing – nothing new for big public infra projects, of course. But when a multi-billion euro project slowly triples its budget, people start asking questions.

That way it also took away funding from other smaller necessary projects. One should consider here that DB (railway operator) has been shutting down smaller, rural lines for decades making it harder and harder to rely on them, when you don't live on the main intercity network.

There were ecological concerns about the planned changes to Stuttgart's inner city layout and how it affects the already bad micro climate.

Plus there was a general sense of the project being pushed through by stubborn DB officials and state government as a kind of vanity project despite the aforementioned concerns. They acted completely tone-deaf to the protests and in one instance used excessive police force to crush a peaceful assembly. Just altogether bad topics, which did not make the project more popular.

And that, comrades, is yet another way to realize our economy's incentive system is misaligned with people's material needs.

It is the most successful social welfare system ever implemented, saving billions and billions of dollars for everyday Americans without costing taxpayers a dime. It is a testament to the power of compounding interest, to the power of a focused plan executed violently for decades.

A social welfare plan? Are you for real?

Both Walmart and Amazon are pioneers of modern union busting practices. They screw workers over as much as they can get away with to squeeze out the maximum amount of labour. Instead of writing this you could as well spit in the face of working class people.

The premise of this article so willfully ignorant of material reality, that it is impossible to take this serious.

What's up with that weird tangent about feminism? It's not like no feminist ever noticed the bottled-up toxic masculinity in some gaming communities and started analysing that.

Do more sports is definitely one of the more naive "solutions" I've come across.

Who said a hobby had to be useful? This self-improvement cult is really annoying...

exactly, and that's a good thing. scaling means basically exploiting of other people's labour.

You'd have a hard time arguing that breaking GDPR is the only way to stay in business. There are enough compliant news websites to undermine that argument.

Nix contributor here. You are completely right, that is missing. Unfortunately the documentation is somewhat fragmented and its structure makes it quite hard to find relevant information, especially to newcomers.

We started to work on making official guides for common Nix tasks, about how to get a development environment set up, how to build a Docker image… focus is on the DevOps side at the moment, not so much on the desktop user, as we see that as the most valuable use case. This is part of the work of the NixOS marketing team to facilitate adoption of Nix into the mainstream.

Have a look at https://nix.dev/ for the first guides being worked on – pretty barebones so far, but we are aware and working on it.

You can get pretty far with a statically typed, purely functional language. For example, Elm's package manager enforces semantic versioning: https://elm-lang.org/

I don't think you can do that with JavaScript.

Yes, cyclists should not run red lights. But we need to improve cycling infrastructure a lot. Right now there is a lot of incentive to break the rules in small ways here and there, because the situation is pretty bad.

There are quite a few places in my city, where I have no idea what the legal way to get from one side of a large road to the other. Sure you can always act like either a car or a pedestrian, but that is either dangerous or slow. For example, I find it quite unfair, that many left turns require me to either ride between cars or stop twice.

Some bike paths just look like the planners reserved space at the roadsides and simply skipped coming up with a solution at the intersection. And that is frankly disappointing.

Electricity is not everything. Heating and transport eat up much more fossil fuel. That can be replaced by, uh… nuclear-powered electricity and synthetic fuels, I guess? However you do it, it adds a lot to the necessary power budget.

Trains and isolation are great. But gas still produces net carbon emissions. So if you adopt it, you have to move away from it very soon anyway. Seems like wasted effort from my point of view.

My first thought to this: can the turbines be made from wood instead? Searching for it, I found this:

https://newatlas.com/timbertower-wooden-wind-turbine/25007/

Making things out of wood is generally a good idea to save on carbon footprint. I have doubts you could build a nuclear power plant from timber given all the containment & shielding requirements.

Paying for traffic to be prioritized is the exact opposite of net neutrality. No need to pay lip service to the idea then. The obvious danger here is that small indie studios may not be able to afford making enjoyable real-time multiplayer games.

How about improving public internet infrastructure instead?

This website consumes about half my CPU. But for what?

Don't know about the material science behind it. But from a purely physical point of view, the problem there is that void (= vacuum) does not have any pressure. So the frame would have to support itself against the atmospheric pressure instead of the gas doing it from the inside – that is a big technical challenge. The catastrophic failure scenario (hull breach) would be an implosive compression of the entire hull, which kinda sounds worse than a hydrogen-fuelled fire.

Interesting… most of the motivation to use new tech is that it enables me to solve problems more efficiently. When you use older, but more established technology, its limitations still hold back the problem solving a bit. This is especially hard to take when I know there are better solutions out there. And it also costs more time & money.

There probably is a pain point somewhere, where it makes sense to switch. I did like the point about reducing the cost of new technology – that may be quite often easier said than done though.

What you allude to there is pretty bad TDD. It was never intended as a replacement for good design, rather as an aid to be clear about design and requirements without writing tons of specs up-front.

And I agree, that there are lots of anti-patterns that have grown in tandem with TDD, like excessive mocking with dependency injection frameworks or testing renamed identity functions over and over just to get more coverage. However, I'd argue that is equally the fault of object-oriented programming though.

Where I disagree is this: TDD and unit tests are still a very useful tool. Their big advantage is that you can isolate issues more quickly and precisely, IF you use them correctly.

For instance, if I have some kind of algorithm in a backend service operating on a data structure that has a bug, I do not want to spend time on the UI layer, network communication or database interactions to figure out, what is going on. Testing at the right scope you get exactly that.

If you look at more recently developed GUI architectures there is this heavy influence from functional reactive programming. The UIs are modelling as reductions over event streams with no mutable state.

Most architectures around React do this, for example. The reasons why virtual DOM technology has been developed on the web, was to hide away the stateful nature of the older, OOP-influence DOM API.

I find it quite fortunate, that they don't use it automatically. Introducing a 1e-3 relative error is quite a deal breaker for some. Not for games sure, but for science that is mostly unacceptable.

The "right-wing" categorization is probably not that helpful, I agree.

If I understand you correctly, by turning the argument around (against LGBT, atheist, liberal, etc. people) you want to challenge my point that it is okay to criticize and resist certain opinions and draw consequences from them.

I feel like there is a big difference between the scenario at hand and systematic persecution of certain groups of people.

You seem to assign a huge value to keeping a job. Do you think this is equal to being tracked down and killed by police? That's what e.g. LGBT people face in some countries, is that what you mean by that?

From my point of view, that employee actually tried to advance a very hostile political agenda with what he wrote, that might have harmed many people. Of course, this harm is not as visible as being fired, but it does hurt the opportunities for women, who have to try twice as hard in an environment, where you need to fight with people over whether you are even biologically capable of doing your job.

On the other hand, following your example with the guy making pro-LGBT statements: you make it sound like LGBT is some sort of political agenda by itself. But people usually just _are_ lesbian or trans without making a huge fuss out of it… I do not see how this compares to writing a 10-page essay systematically attacking half of your co-workers.

And, no, I would not defend Google for firing somebody for, say, being a lesbian. That's a completely different scenario.

For the record, I am not alleging this in particular. For all I know, it might be true. Although given Breitbart's history reading anything on that site does not hold much value.

After all, they have run stories about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring and continuously deny the scientifically evident reality of climate change, for example.

Admittedly I have not fact-checked a statistically significant sample of their articles. But their Wikipedia article for instance tells a tale of published falsehoods, conspiracy theories and the like.

The political disagreement is an orthogonal factor, but does play a role, of course.

This sounds like that weird right-wing notion of "censorship", that has become popular recently. Let me elaborate a little…

When I hear "censorship" I am thinking of government agents sitting in newspaper editorial rooms striking out all statements in an article that does not align with the government's point of view. It means actively suppressing certain kinds of information from being distributed.

What is happening here, looks more like this: a Google employee publishes an email. Lots of people in the company find the content objectionable. Subsequently they decide that they do not want to work with somebody having these opinions. I do not see, how that is even close to censorship. It is not like he has a right to keep that particular job. He can still go out on the street and shout his opinion at the crowd.

Censorship, intimidation & oppression are very strong words to describe a situation, where somebody lost their job, because they wrote an objectionable essay on a company mailing list.

There is a difference between a right to express your opinion, which I support, and a right not to face any resistance or social consequences for voicing that same opinion. The latter of which is made up by the political right trying to relabel it as "free speech".

You can't cry censorship every time you are criticized for something you said. And let's be honest here: white men with regressive points of view are still not particularly threatened of not being heard. After all, they are well represented in pretty much every single powerful institution like parliaments, courts and executive boards. They'll manage to get their opinion heard, I'm afraid.

That is barely credible given the source is Breitbart.