donall

When I was a child among the ashes I heard it said that in Belfast there was a sports store that sold a dozen baseball bats every week but never once sold a ball or glove. I always thought it was apocryphal but there's a few quotes here and there if you search.

You're absolutely right that they aren't in a parallel institution. As I understand it, the SF perspective is that there is no legitimate government representing the people of West Tyrone (other than Stormont, which is complicated). I think it sounds like we're saying the same thing but there's a subtle interpretation difference. When Idi Amin declared himself to be the King of Scotland the Scots didn't send representatives to Uganda to form a government. The SF position since their Árd Fheis before the 1919 elect has been to treat Westminster like Idi Amin. To simply engage in a conversation about Idi Amin's claim to the throne of Scotland would be to give him too much credibility.

So the core issue, from the Republican perspective, is that the people of West Tyrone are denied representation at the national level in Ireland by a foreign government. Once that representation is achieved the SF representatives will participate in it. (again, not trying to address the merits; just clarify the logic)

Agree that SF is not a protest vote but they do vote and debate. Since their first major electoral victory over 100 years ago they have been clear that they represent their constituents to the best of their abilities (I won't opine on the quality of representation in this forum). That has always involved a cabinet, votes, debates, and eventually a bicameral legislature.

The key aspect is that they consider the English government to be a foreign government and so they avoid involving it in the work that they do in Ireland for their Irish constituency. Statements about the illegitimacy of their government historically come from conservative English sources. But the fact is those SF debates in their "protest government" formed the foundation of the modern Irish state. They are a protest vote in the same way that the US Constitutional Convention was.

By the same token, they consider legislating on affairs that pertain to the English, Welsh, and Scots to be none of their business. To take up seats in a foreign parliament would be to meddle in the affairs of a foreign, sovereign nation. And that would be hypocrisy!

Like I said, it's a guess. I don't have firm numbers and I'm speculating. Aside from incidents like the one you described, I'm taking into account Wellington's military campaigns, which involved large-scale battles and entire kingdoms being conquered and subjugated. We are certainly talking about a death toll in the tens of thousands.

The original post was arguing that there were too many Irish people in Ireland because of the predominant religion. The implication, as I surmise, is that Catholics believe that only those who are constantly reproducing can be real BFFs with Jesus in the afterlife. Also, Catholics are seemingly too stupid to realize that Ireland is incapable of supporting more than 5-6 million people (apparently?) and therefore their mortal sex-cult doomed them and they have absolutely nobody to blame but themselves for a million people dying of starvation. The fools!

This is, at best, very fucking stupid. At worst, it is fairly bigoted and more than a little bit offensive. It is in the same category of Victorian pseudo-science that gave us phrenology and eugenics.

"[Citation needed]" was merely meant as a shorter and much more polite way of implying all of the above. I can be much less polite if that's something you're interested in.

> Irish one is seen as something special because it happened in the West, and because overpopulation there built up for a considerable time being allowed by potatoes farming

There was no overpopulation problem in Ireland! It was _less_ dense than England, while having similar climate and agricultural capacity. The reason for the famine was that the food that was abundantly produced in Ireland was transferred to England to support their cities (which did have an overpopulation problem). There was more than enough food produced in Ireland to feed everyone in Ireland. That is not what overpopulation looks like.

It's also easy to say no major famines happened in Spain because of her colonies, except that by the time of the famine she had very few remaining. Spanish people had the same capacity to emigrate to the Americas as the Irish did. Your argument was that Irish people were too Catholic to control their population but you haven't addressed the fact that that wasn't a problem in any of the other Catholic countries. The same should be true of Italy, who didn't even have a former empire to call on.

I'm aware that he has his detractors. I'm not a Coogan apologist! I'm just saying that the book covers the Malthusian angle well enough and it cites sources. The genocide angle is controversial to some but 90% of the book is straightforward fact.

It isn't difficult to find examples of people misbehaving in the history of any country. That doesn't mean they are irredeemable and they need a British Army battalion to come and save them from themselves.

I would guess that the British Army et al. killed at least as many people in India as were burned alive as part of funerary rites. How does one effectively compare those two actions? It's easy to take the coloniser perspective of "they were savages and we stopped them from doing X". But the colonised are telling their own stories "these savages came from across the sea and they committed the most horrible atrocities".

I'm not trying to defend burning people or eating people. But killing people to take their stuff and calling it civilisation is not better. It's certainly not civilised.

Complicated doesn't begin to describe him! I think that, by our modern standards, I would be very unhappy to be a citizen of Napoleon's empire.

However, considering the available governments in Europe at the tail end of the 18th century, I think a time-traveller such as myself would be more interested in spending a few years in France than any of her neighbours. I imagine I would think differently if I came from an aristocratic background!

I don't think the British empire was "uniquely nefarious", but I think most of the indigenous people of the places that they colonised experienced it as being _fairly_ nefarious! I'm not aware of many former colonies celebrating Colonisation Day or bemoaning the withdrawal of the British Army from their territories.

Even one of the most anglo-friendly and prosperous former colonies, the USA, didn't have very nice things to say about the Empire when they were a part of it.

"Up the RA" is a great slogan. The IRA made an important and undeniable contribution to Irish statehood. I don't think we'd be "a privileged and filthy rich country" were it not for their activities in the 20th century. There is an unfortunate tendency among some people to be unwilling to recognise that for fear of offending our neighbours to the east. As you say, it's in the distant past and not worth getting too offended about.

> Catholic church that pushed people to reproduce without limits

[Citation needed]

It's hard not to interpret this as just garden variety bigotry, of the same sort that caused the famine in the first place.

Let's assume it's correct, though. The Catholic church had been one of the most powerful organisations in Europe for well over 1000 years by the time if the famine. Why did it take until Ireland in the 19th century for their population mismanagement to become truly problematic? Also why did this not also happen in a country like Spain? Hard to find many more enthusiastically Catholic countries than Spain in that time period.

The population density of Ireland at the time of the famine was comparable to England (it is now much lower). Ireland produced enough food to feed itself and millions of people in English cities at the time of the famine. The issue was not a lack of food but the "ownership" of the food.

The account of capitalism emerging from the black death is a fine theory for continental Europe. At the time of the black death, Irish society was controlled by Irish people. After the 1600s it was increasingly run as a colony, with the indigenous culture outlawed and intensive resource extraction for export to England (timber, food, etc).

You might as well ask why industrialisation didn't take off among the Choctaw or the Cherokee. Or maybe they also just have the wrong religion?

Very much so. Tim Pat Coogan covers this in his book "The Famine Plot" (which is one of the major proponents that the great hunger was a genocide and has received a lot of criticism, but which covers the basic facts in good detail).

[edit: somebody elsewhere in this comment section has (apparently seriously) proposed Malthusianism as the root cause. In the Year of Our Lord 2025. With all of human knowledge available at their fingertips. You can't keep a bad idea down]

Strongly agree. I have been doing data engineering for 14 years and, in my experience, new grads need a lot of on-the-job training. There are a lot of real-world problems (e.g. consistency problems, scale problems, distribution problems) that benefit from a little bit more than just theoretical knowledge. A lot of data systems are full of problems because they were designed and implemented by inexperienced people. People don't know what they don't know and there are a lot of teams that say things like "oh yeah, this takes 3 days to run because it's pretty big" or "we release code daily but it would be too expensive to re-process past data to fix bugs" or even "what's a schema?".

YMMV, though. Some data engineers are writing basic SQL or playing with Azure Data Factory and there isn't too much complexity. Read Designing Data Intensive Applications. If that sort of thing resonates with you then find someone to work with who has experience with those kinds of problems!

[Edit: no disrespect to ADF! Just pointing out that the data engineering discipline is broad and different practitioners will have different expectations of complexity]

Fair comment. And I'm usually suspicious of young engineers wanting to implement the new hotness and I'm also a fan of "if it ain't broken don't fix it". In this case, though, the system was in very rough shape. Our customers were complaining about data problems which we had no way to fix (short of manually editing the prod db, which was the SOP). I definitely took it upon myself to do something that nobody had asked for, but it was because the people in charge were entirely asleep at the wheel! They did not last long in their positions.

I had a visceral reaction to this comment! I once joined a company doing ETL with Apache camel and a half dozen underpowered pet machines. Ingesting their entire dataset and running a suite of NLP models took 3-6 months (estimated; it was so slow nobody ever reprocessed the data to fix bugs or release improvements). I drew up a simple architecture using Kafka, hbase, and MapReduce to implement a lambda architecture. The CTO very patronizingly told me that just because something is shiny and new it doesn't mean we need to implement it. This was 2017 :laugh-cry:.

> Then we have the collisions between the Brythonic languages (Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Cumbric, Cornish and the rest) and English

Small correction: neither Irish nor the two languages people might refer to as Scottish are Brythonic languages.

Drinkhail! ;-)

I confess I laughed at this (you're good at the sarcastic takedown), but it's a bit mean-spirited and not really in keeping with the discussion guidelines. Belittling someone like this discourages dialogue and learning.

One aspect of the problem here is the difficulty in running a clinical trial, particularly at the recruitment stage. The covid-19 trials all had a surfeit of participants because of a pandemic, but with modern cancer treatment trials the qualification requirements significantly cut down on the eligible population.

This, in itself, isn't a huge obstacle. The problem is the state of healthcare data systems. It's next to impossible to perform high-quality search (even by individuals approved to do so by the IRB). The state of the art in most places is regex searching in SQL.

This is something we have the power to contribute to. Bringing modern search capabilities to important datasets like health (while maintaining HIPAA-conpliance) is a much better use of engineering time than mining spyware data for creepy insights...

[Disclosure: I contributed heavily to one of the major medical search products on the market. We dealt with organisations that expended tens of thousands of dollars and many months per candidate for recruitment. Using some very straightforward IR tech we literally found all their candidates in a few minutes, plus many more. But there is so much more to do!]

IANAL, but habitually screaming at and insulting employees sounds like textbook harassment/bullying. I suppose this sort of criminality is less likely to be reported in more precarious employment situations.

As a data point, I have worked a lot of (so-called) blue collar jobs over the years, from stacking shelves to washing pots to serving drinks to digging ditches, and I never had a problem with a bully or a disrespectful boss. I have now been working as a software engineer for 10 years and one of my more recent bosses refused to call me by my name for several months and instead referred to me as "dickhead" or "you Irish bastard" and was known to jab his finger in people's faces and yell "fuck you" when he lost his temper. Assholes are assholes, no matter what your job title.

(but I certainly agree that lower-paid jobs are a lot tougher; even if the wages were the same, I wouldn't go back to any of the jobs I did before software)

Do you have citations, particularly for housing? I'm not trying to be difficult; I'm genuinely interested in the sources because I have a sense that you're right but have never found great evidence to back it up. The raw number of residential-zoned buildings vs the number of homeless people is not as useful as it could be. I'd love to see some deeper analysis.

I think the difference is that the actors in movies aren't trying to give the impression that they wrote the script, whereas musicians talk about "their" songs like they conceived them in a process of true artistic expression. Revealing that they are actually manufactured in a formulaic manner by the same people who wrote all the other hit songs can leave a sour taste in the mouth of a fan who is perhaps emotionally invested in a song or artist...

You can get free access to the API, capped at 10K requests per day. Hopefully that is enough to be useful at this initial stage!

After that, I think pricing depends on your app. I think it is extremely favourable to small/new startups, but I am am engineer and not a sales guy, so I don't want to say anything that might be both specific and wrong... (I hope this isn't starting to sound like a bait and switch sales pitch; if you want to talk offline my gmail is donallmc).

[Edited to update email]

FYI, you can use Factual.com to get location data for all kinds of businesses. You'll still need to source reviews from somewhere else, but this might be a useful way of ensuring you have good coverage.

(disclaimer: I work at Factual, but a) I'm commenting as an individual, not representing the company; b) I genuinely think this is a good choice for you; c) for a small app like this, the data will likely be free, so I have no financial motivation!)

I can see that that would be interesting information to have, but why is it absolutely necessary?

A fair point about half being a little optimistic. But even if it is just Europe we consider, that's still doubling the population of great programmers and that seems like a win, objectively.

Just my $0.02: I agree with all of your criticisms. Despite that, I am an immigrant programmer living in California. I couldn't find any work in Europe that was as interesting and challenging as what I do here (obviously there are good companies there, but none aligned with my interests and were hiring). I routinely turn down opportunities to interview for companies that are far more appealing propositions than anything I encountered in Europe.

Well, he does say "if"...

I think PG's point is that some people are naturally great, regardless of their environment. So, yes, Congo or Nigeria or whatever have a bunch of guys who might have been great programmers if given the opportunity. But in less extreme cases, i.e. most of the world, those naturally gifted folks find their way into a compsci program or start hacking on an old machine and teach themselves or whatever. So even if only half of the 95% of people born with great aptitude are found in places with modern amenities and good education systems, that's still 9x more than here in the US.

This is the second time you've categorised it as choosing "the lesser evil". I don't think that's what the system was designed to be. It sounds to me like it's so far off the rails that the real lesser evil choice is to refuse to participate in the process and rob it of its credibility.

If I vote for the losing party, I implicitly agree to abide by the choices made by the winning party because I would expect the same from their supporters if the roles were reversed. None of the parties represent my interests, so I don't vote and I certainly don't agree to respect the decisions made by those who don't represent my interests.

To tie it back in with the original point, those who voted against Bush implicitly agreed to abide by his decisions if he won. Only those who refuse to participate in the system can claim zero complicity.

[Citation needed]