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king_nothing

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That’s an immature perspective. Actually, that’s not the most important litmus test; it’s whether you trust them completely to make good decisions with your life, kids if present and all your worldly life in their hands should you be incapacitated and that they can keep things together. Being insanely happy or at least content is a bonus.. but their job isn’t to make you happy, that’s your job. Another common antipattern: NRE lasts a year or two, so those new turnips expecting infatuation to sustain things and be “totally perfect” after their giant wedding is also a recipe for disaster.

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond is a mind-expanding read. Furthermore, it should be noted that many civilizations have problems roughly around the 250 year / 10 generation time, and the US is quite close to that. Combined with climate change and peak population, things gradually getting more than unpleasant might be the understatement of the millennium. I seriously doubt many civilizations went under quickly, and that most were “frogs” boiled slowly. The time for a dramatic, practical course-correction is now... not tomorrow, not soon and not later.

There is an uncomfortable fact: many people only notice harm when there’s a victim similar to them involved, but are typically oblivious or unconcerned with the troubles not in their purview: impetus for mass-migration to Europe, genocides (ie Hutus & Tutsis), East Timor, PNG, nationless people (ie Rohingya, Kurds, Uyghurs, Palestinians, Catalans), terrorism in Africa and neglect/poisoning of poor people in rural areas.

Greedily evaluating both Haskell and OCaml for systems development work rn. Haskell seems a lot cleaner, perhaps too purely clean, and OCaml seems to have some rough edges where it can’t/doesn’t infer types without awkward syntax. Lazy haskell has STM, monads, parallelism, concurrency and a huge community. Greedy OCaml can do impurity and pseudo-procedural code easier but lacks much of what Haskell has. Thoughts?

Both observations have equal validity for middle-/upper-class denizens whom can spend money on increasing entropy much faster. Go to anywhere remote and/or poor, and the better-to-do outsiders will be gobsmacked by inventiveness that, to the local, will seem mundane and vital. For example, one of my great-grandfathers made a continously self-cleaning oil-filter for farm equipment... the sort of thing corporations clearly wouldn’t offer for monetized consumables reasons.

If only London hotels architects had known this, the majority of showers might not be a size smaller than a phone-booth such that you cannot turn around in it and must enter/exit sideways... while not being at all rotund.

There’s a subtle, lurking danger in commodification of everyday activities (ie bike racks replaced with expensive rental bikes), bodily functions (ie sleeping, toilet) and necessities that were part of the public good (ie water fountains replaced with bottled water vending machines, places to relax like parks replaced with mixed-use private patios and spaces that leave nothing for the public, in-spite of mandatory public spaces). On the current trajectory, there won’t be much of anywhere or anything left on the planet that doesn’t require spending money.. will breathing oxygen be monetized and taxed too? And if you can’t afford your oxygen bill? It sounds extremely ridiculous, but so would be VOSS water to a villager in the hills with free water, that is until corporations polluted their sources, public-private partnership works steal from the people and local sources commodified like in Ireland. Flint, MI; East Chicago; Durango; Crossett, Ark... thousands of communities can’t drink their local water because of pollution.

OTOH a social civil war/political upheaval or climate famine could be th straw that broke nearly pure crony capitalism’s back... unbounded greed and unchecked self-interest have, throughout history, led to the downfalls of civilizations.

Impossible color 8 years ago

That explains the invisible pink unicorn and colorless green dreams sleeping furiously. Flying spaghetti monster is still a mystery.

If someone wanted to connect with others and have a good time, rationality is the number one party buzzkill. I’d trade all rationality in perpetuity for being able to connect with people without even needing to think about it... social skills are far more vital to well-being than almost anything else besides industrious productivity. Worse, these skills are in abject crisis with infinite distractions, negative social polarization/crybullies/humorouslessness/long-tail civilization decline and a disposable, social-dilettance mentality that only allows for surface, fake relationships that go to die on Facebook. You also can’t have love with Vulcan analysis... it’s incompatible with mutual-affinity.

The subtle shift is from purely civil penalties (ie garnishment, collections, seizing funds) to denying rights. There might not be a resurgence of debtors’ prison (except for unpaid alimony/child support) but other half-step curtainment of rights like voting are a real possibility.

PS: “Literally” is an unnecessary word.

And so the totalitarian demagogue builds their “Berlin wall” to keep citizens in... anyone crossing will be shot. Any unapproved thoughts or speech will lower one’s social credit, eventually making them ineligible for travel, banking, voting, government services, etc... too low and they will be sent to reeducation camps. Parents and children split apart and sent to concentration camps. Blaming certain groups for a country’s problems. Where have I heard this before? hmm.

Lol. CoreOS and Hashicorp products often throw “cloud” and “discoverability” around but lack crucial features for ops supportability found in solutions that came before. Zookeeper, Cassandra, Couchbase didn’t evolve in a development vacuum chamber. New != better.