kdmccormick

I would say that a rule is "cheating" iff it is implied by another rule for any arbitrary N.

I think the issue is 'could any other decision be made'.

IMO, no.

In the computer analogy, if the 'run time' always arrives at the same answer, because that is the answer from the calculation. Then was there ever a choice?

To me, there was a choice, but that choice was made by an entity which operates deterministically.

I guess this and the other comments are really saying just because we have the illusion of free will from our perspective,

Kinda. I would only disgaree with the "illusion" thing. It's not an illusion: from our perspective we DO have free will, we ARE in control. Like everything else, free will is relative.

Realize that when we say "we", each of "us" is a facet of that deterministic universe. The universe is not some big external VM that controls us like zombies. It is us. We are the hardware, firmware, and software of the universe, operating and evolving with agency, modifying one another and the world around us. We're not sandboxed processes. You and I, we are two manifestations of conscious thought occurring in the same grand unfolding of physical phenomena. We see a clear boundary between ourselves and the universe, but that's a human point of view, not a physical truth. When the universe decides something, we decide something, and vice versa.

Maybe that's too far into woo woo land for your taste, but it's how I personally reconcile free will and determinism and it's resolved a lot of the existential dread I used to feel around this. ymmv

This is two ways of saying the same thing.

To use a computing metaphor, every animal has "buildtime" predispositions and "runtime" choice-making ability. That "runtime" decision making is based on exercising free will, but of course free will is a biologically built-in capability which executes on the deterministic "VM" that is our physical universe.

i.e., we have free will from the perspective of ourselves, but if you zoom out, that free will is just another predetermined physical phenomena.

It's very simple: Transit in many places is underfunded. Travel info screens cost money to install and maintain. Ads, on the other hand, make money.

Bad comparison. I am not seeking rent on any of my stuff.

Now, if I hoarded a bunch of stuff that other people needed and then charged them for access to it, that'd be rent seeking.

Sure, you can come up with some obscure examples of rent seeking being immoral, like charging a dehydrated dying person $1000 per glass of water, but that's not what we're discussing here.

This is in fact what we're discussing, and your strawman example is ironically very on the nose. Except it's not water, it's housing. People are being forced to move away from my city or sleep on the street because the average unit rent is $3400 a month. The beneficiaries of this system are property owners who spend some money on development and upkeep (which they deserve to profit from) but largely just rake in passive income from having been lucky enough to buy when prices were low.

I agree with your parallel to rent seeking. Rent seeking is indeed both (a) arguably immoral and (b) seemingly inescapable in a society which respects property rights.

The theory of Georgism [1] suggests a way that we could eliminate rent seeking: by taxing ownership of all common resources at the value of the rent they would demand. That way, property owners, telephone operators, etc. would be rewarded for their labor in development and upkeep of the property, but would not be rewarded for ownership of the property itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

Sure, they're worse than walking or biking, but compared to an electric car battery or an ICE car?

At least scooters did something useful for the environment.

the answer is WAY TOO MUCH, meaning the "eco friendly walkable cities" are not eco friendly AT ALL and they are also unsustainable since they can't evolve without rebuild witch consume much more and demand much big effort than spread areas of small buildings who can be re-built and evolved one at a time issueless for all the others.

This is absolutely inane. Destroying and rebuilding is the opposite of eco-friendly. Building to last is eco-friendly.

Those tightly-packed brick and stone buildings in dense walkable cities last longer and also tend to have less need for AC, since they were designed before that existed. And their use does evolve, from meeting places, to storefronts, to family housing, to condos... old buildings can do it all.

Cookie-cutter suburban homes are the exact opposite. Expendable, inefficient, and inflexible.

What? No. When you are 0, it is your first year. When you are 21, you have begun your 22nd year. In the US you are legal to drink in your 22nd year of life.

You are correct that nobody says "22nd year" in this context, but nobody says "21st year" either. The former is awkward but the latter is just incorrect.

But at the very least Henry George agrees with GP ;)

Spam

Phishing

Buggy generated code

Cheating in online courses

ChatBots that try to do too much and do it worse than real human service reps, like that one that wrongly assured a customer that their airline ticket was refundable

Deluge of low-value generated content taking attention and revenue away from high-value content creators

why?

That's all great in theory, but in practice, I see except clauses mostly used to handle particular exception classes that callees are known to throw.

Unless you're using exclusively Java-style checked exceptions, then there literally (literally!) is huge difference. That is:

    def main():
        try:
            my_a = a()
        except ExA, ExB:
            my_a = None
        ...
         
    def a() -> A:
        ...
        my_b = b()
        ...

    def b() -> B:
        ...

BUT if b begins raising ExC instead of ExB, then that will break main at runtime. That is, main needs to be aware of what b could raise, even though it doesn't directly call it.

Ha!

Lol plain old VMs have been shipping your machine since well before Docker was around.

Except that those special cases often land on the same groups of people. Accented characters, multiple given names, multiple surnames... these are all common for people whose ancestry isn't the US or Western Europe. No driver's license, no permanent address, no social security card... these are all common for poor people.

It's great that admins can fix the special cases, but the fact that they're special cases at all makes life harder for assumption-breakers. An action that took 10 minutes on the Web for Jim Smith living at 11 Place Road might be 3 hours on the phone for Hector Marίa Gonzalez López whose address is a P.O. box. Those hours add up and can really make folks' life hard for no good reason.

Do your users a favor and make as few assumptions about them as possible!

For open- or closed-source work?

If I'm doing open source coding, whether professional or not, I'd always want that associated with my personal GH account.

If it's bipolar, then it's bipolar plus a lack of regard for other human beings.

Plenty of us are bipolar, do regrettable things when we're manic, and then own up to them and pay what's due when we're not manic.

I was thinking state-administered. Public school enrollment would just be the precondition to access the program.

But sure, yeah, there'd be some admin time spent managing it. As with anything, there are plenty of reasons not to do it. It struck me as a low cost-to-impact ratio thing that could get kids into tech, but reasonable minds could disagree.

Cost would be negligible compared to a teacher's salary.

(1 teacher / 20 students) * ($50k / teacher-yr) = $2500 per student per year to fund teacher salary.

Compare that to $40/yr domain+hosting, which maybe 10% of students will use. $4/student-yr will not be the diffence between paying teachers probably or not.

Would be really cool if public schools provided a free domain and basic hosting for any interested middle/high school student.

Cable has always been ad-funded as far as I can tell.

Big print newspapers were mostly independent and subscriber-funded, so they answered to their subs rather than advertisers.

The Economist is still independent and subscriber-funded. But, most sub-driven publications now have to fight tooth and nail to stay above water, so the writing needs to be tailored towards engagement/clicks :/

Yeah, I grew up in a town like that in CT. It's nice, for sure. I would call it semirural rather than suburban, though.

The issue with lovely semirural living is that there literally isn't enough space on Earth for everyone to sustainably live like that. It's a privilage to live in house surrounded by woods with grocery store a 15 minutes drive away. Many people (not you, congrats) need to live very close to one another, and the best, happiest, most sustainable way for them to do that is in a dense city with good transit, good sidewalks, and limited auto traffic.

That is all not to mention the economics of suburban and semirural living. Those nice roads with little traffic? They are crushingly expensive. Towns would not be able to afford them if it were not for huge federal and state subsidies, which are largely funded by... wait for it... tax revenue from dense cities.

Sprawling suburbs are the opposite of nature.

A single large park inside a dense city is far more nature-rich than acres upon acres of suburban lawns are.

Did you read? Article states that cut and cover is still much cheaper technically, but can end up being practically more expensive due to the political/legal ramifications of the surface disruption.

I feel the same way about list concatenation! I'm sure some will disagree, but IMO now that Python has "splatting" in list expressions:

    xs = [2, 3, 4]
    ys = [1, *xs, 5]

    xs = [2, 3, 4]
    ys = [1] + xs + [5]

Because raising children is essential to the survival of human society.

If we're going to be brutually economic about it: Are you invested in stocks or bonds at all? If our population collapsed, so would those. Today's investors' wealth is tied to the success of future generations.

Your point was my initial reaction, too. But hey, these people have been raising kids to survive in the freezing cold for hundreds of years, who am I to say they're wrong?

I bet there is a certain delicacy to telling the stories as allegories so that you can transition them from fantasy to rationality as the kid grows.

For example, the "sea monster that swallows you and brings you to another family" sounds like an allegory for "the water will drown you and bring you to the afterlife / death". If you respect your kid's intellect, I bet that you can explain that connection to them once they're getting too old to believe myths, while still holding onto the emotional connection.