In the last six months, yes. It suggests short cuts that can create long delays. Shorter by miles, but often worse in the end.

That means you’re not down with OOP.

You’re talking about the wrong thing. The Mozilla Foundation is and has been acting a fool in recent years. Firefox, the open source program, is doing mostly OK. Obviously the two are closely connected, but they’re definitely not the same thing, and this matters when discussing policy.

Now now. If Mozilla is breaking the law here, of course someone would report them for it. There’s no need to shoot the messenger when everything was predictable.

I appreciate your apprehension. Fortunately, you don’t need to speculate. Go try it and find out.

This was your deck. Now it’s your new cat’s deck.

For the most part? That’s an empirical claim. Any evidence? My gut disagrees with you, but my gut also has no evidence.

I might help people because it makes me feel good, sure. But I might also do it because those are my values, long since established, and I try to live by said values. So it’s about what following a self-imposed expectation, not about getting something. For some people, some of the time.

Similarly, the argument that “being selfless is selfish” is not useful and provably false. Just go ask people, and they’ll tell you why they did things and how they felt. Then you have to argue that many of them are either lying or mistaken, which doesn’t seem like a winnable argument.

I’m not a professional code monkey although I’ve done a fair amount of coding, and every time I tried to do parsing myself, I later regretted it.

But telling people that they’re doing it wrong is rarely met with positivity. :-)

I think there’s an element of responsibility that some people feel when they respond. If you’re asking for a very niche solution that is likely to create other problems in the future, should anyone else look at your code or refactor it or rely on it, or should you forget how it works, perhaps people are going to be less inclined in helping you craft it.

If you still want to craft it, that’s okay, but you have to expect that some real percent of the answers are going to be those folk who know what the tried and true solution is, often because they’ve lived through the reality that you’re attempting to create and they’ve dealt with the aftermath of doing it special and different.

I feel like you’re ignoring a lot of background, but let’s run with your argument. Let’s assume that we have to have some elected politicians and some appointed or elected bureaucrats, and either we should try to have a capitalist system or a communist system of some kind.

Let’s try to keep things as equal as possible, knowing that we really can’t, but just for the sake of argument. Which system is more likely to be corrupted? Remember, the express goal of capitalism is to throw wealth at the capitalists. If the regular person gets screwed, that’s not corruption, that’s a feature of the system… Oh, wait a second, I guess we already have an answer to our hypothetical, don’t we.

But you did raise a good point. Any government, if it’s to function somewhat reasonably, needs to be one that has a lot of transparency, oversight, and accountability. If you don’t have those, it doesn’t matter how you start off because it’s going to end badly. So I agree with you, we shouldn’t be trusting politicians.

Disneyland is so creepy and depressing.

When the mice eat it, you gotta change the roll out for a new one. That’s my policy. Also, the cardboard hurts; don’t use it.

One thing that struck me as an adult is that I grew up learning about some ancient civilizations, but in school I never learned that Mesopotamia is a location in present day Iraq. It just feels weird that we could study about ancient cultures and not learn where they are on the globe today.

It doesn’t really matter if they’ve been infiltrated, because they’re so dependent on Google’s cash. The money corrupts, even if there are no specific moles.

I don’t know what culture you live in, but I think your description of what’s embraced by modern culture is at odds with what we see on TV, on Netflix, on YouTube, in magazines, in books, talked about by people everyday.

What is it specifically that you wish you could find that’s not available, that you feel ought to be appropriate but isn’t, somehow? I’m struggling to figure this one out.

Finding out people’s salaries is a good thing. It’s how you prevent your bosses from screwing everyone over. Of course that information might be sensitive so don’t go around inquiring willy nilly, but it’s definitely a topic that you can and should sometimes visit.

(I know this is a s*** post so it’s all good but some people don’t realize the value in discussing salaries, and they think it’s something that has to be super secret when that only hurts you, the employee.)

You still have spending wars. Politicians are bought and sold every day, and any large company probably donates to politicians of multiple parties.

I don’t see the problem originating from Congress necessarily being polarized. I think the problem is that corporate and big money interests are too strong, and they fund politicians that will try to divide the people on social issues so that they can distract the people from badness happening on the economic front. In other words, I think we’re seeing a problem with corruption that’s expressing itself as polarization.

Even the term “polarization” can also be used as a trap, because it tends to be used in a way that frames politics as a linear spectrum, and your views are somewhere between these two end points. In reality everything is far more complicated. People have highly nuanced views on many different subjects with good reason, and there’s no way you can easily capture it on one single sliding scale.

Unclear how legit they are. Don’t rush judgment, especially when the victim and his associates are narcissistic liars.

Or rather, define “legitimate”. It matters in a situation like this.