gridlockd

Where is the evidence that this is true? Sounds like wishful thinking to me.

In many European countries, Holocaust denial is literally a crime, yet de-facto Neonazi parties are more popular than in the US, where no law stops you from brandishing a swastika flag.

...which is arguably not compatible with the GPL:

"The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."

Of course immutable data structures, like training wheels, make some things easier. You don't have to worry about certain classes of errors, because they just can't happen. It's the same with garbage collection, you can stop worrying about managing memory, for the most part.

However, if you can't do your job without these helpers at all, that's going to be a problem. At some point, there will be something that your garbage collector can not clean up for you. There will be state that is going to be mutated, whether you like it or not. Your brain should be prepared for that.

For one, the client must not be able to tell the server "what happened" (e.g. "I shot player B"), because that would make cheating trivial without significant extra development effort.

Rather, the client simply transmits only its own input for the server to process in its simulation. The server then gives the authoritative answer as to "what happened" to all clients. The client may need to patch up any visual discrepancy that may arise from differences in the client-local simulation.

What you propose of course isn't impossible and it's exactly what I'd expect people with a DLT background to attempt, it just doesn't really have much of an upside for what it requires. It's the wrong trade-off for the domain.

Yet, this is how immutable datastructures often work in practice. That may or may not be a worthy tradeoff, but please do not act like it is the right way to do things by default.

No. This breaks down as soon as you have references to other objects in your objects. If you compare by reference, you probably don't get what you want. If you compare by value, you need to go arbitrarily deep, which is not a sane default, because of possible reference cycles. You need a distinction between objects and value types. C# has that (record types).

"Once created, objects and collections must be immutable."

If this is how you want to program, fine. Don't tell me this is "the right way" to program. Immutable data structures can have a lot of overhead, which disqualifies them from many domains.

The real world is all about mutable state. At some point, you need to take the training wheels off.

Maybe that's the intention, but what a minimum wage actually does is remove the possibility for anyone to work below an arbitrary number of dollars.

If that value is lower than the going market rate for low-skilled labor, minimum wage makes no difference.

Above that, it removes more and more people from the "eligible to work" pool. There's nothing humane about preventing people from being able to work, especially when you don't have a welfare system to pick up those who are now doomed to unemployment.

You can argue that such agencies are more likely to disregard laws and regulations, but how would you fix that? With laws and regulations?

It doesn't, you're literally paying a middleman to take away the risk and hassle of hiring an employee. That's the added value here.

Otherwise, you could just hire the worker directly for what that middleman is paying them. Working as a contractor, you get a pretty good idea of what your "rights" are worth in pure dollar terms.

The minimum amount of money you have to pay for someone to show up for any job rises (and falls) alongside demand for labor in the broader economy.

> Under our current system that heavily favors returning productivity gains to capital instead of labor...

If you look at the profit margins of those companies that employ a lot of low-end labor, you will find that they're generally in the single digit percentages. I think that's a pretty fair deal for organizing all that labor and taking on the capital risk. Profits aren't guaranteed, after all. There just isn't that much money to redistribute here, you would have to raise prices, which can make you uncompetitive.

It then makes sense to compare Sweden against all other European countries instead of just those few neighboring countries.

Full vertical integration isn't necessarily good business. Even Apple doesn't do its own manufacturing.

This is an unfalsifiable claim, considering that virtually every country has done something to inhibit spread. It's also meaningless, because nobody is saying that nothing should be done to inhibit spread.

The question is, what should be done? How many people-years can we realistically save, and at what cost? Every year, almost 3 million Americans will die of any cause. If we take a CFR of 0.4%, and a "herd immunity" threshold of 70%, the upper bound of deaths in the US from COVID-19 is under a million. The average age of a COVID-19 fatality is higher than life expectancy, which means that half of these deaths would've occured under any circumstance, in the near future. We can see high excess mortality right now, but we haven't seen how that translates into lowered mortality in the future.

Not quite. The number of recorded cases in the UK from one month ago is equal to the number of recorded cases at the height of the first wave, yet the fatalities are 10x lower.

I do expect excess mortality due to COVID-19 in the coming months, but not to the same extent as during the first wave. We need to re-evaluate the risk profile based on those numbers, not the numbers of the first wave.

> One could even draw the conclusion that if less people have covid-19, less people are likely to die from it.

One could also draw the conclusion that the more people have already died from COVID-19, the less people are likely to die from it in the future, because fewer susceptible people remain in the pool. Unlike with Influenza, it takes many decades of lifetime to develop a serious risk of dying from COVID.

Meanwhile, Norway has almost twice the per-capita GDP of the other nordic countries. Finland has no large metropolitan area. Sweden has more people in elderly care. Lots of factors to consider, but geographic proximity isn't really one.

However, we need to compare COVID-19 to Influenza to get some perspective. I would argue that Influenza is worse than COVID, for the simple reason that it kills more young people and children. The average age of a COVID fatality is higher than life expectancy. Influenza destroys more years of life.

We also need to make a distinction between the time frame in which the virus was new and killed a disproportionate amount of susceptible people, versus the time frame we are in now, where the virus is once again kills less people than Influenza - as the data clearly shows, though it isn't highlighted in the publication.

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

Also, several countries show no excess mortality.

The 5-year average minimum of deaths from "Influenza and pneumonia" is about 50 cases per day. The average for 2020 is about half that. Adding up COVID fatalities and "Influeanza and pneumonia" after July comes to about 50 cases per day. In other words, there is no excess mortality from COVID-19 since July.

If you believe the problem is with "everyone else", the problem really is with you. Nerds generally struggle with holding conversations without constantly sending "out-group" signals while failing to send "in-group" signals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yN2H3--1aw

Unlike in this satirical clip, I don't think it's possible to fake being "a normal guy". However, in my experience, it's possible to build rapport by being respectful and signaling that you get where the other person is coming from. Avoid being intellectually dominating. That way, you'll be perceived as "that okay smart guy" instead of "that fucking nerd".

Even if you don't care about being popular, learning how to read people is an extremely important skill, especially if you're somewhere on the autism spectrum. Just approach it as another nerd subject (human psychology).

> As to your "We effectively incentivize people to not get insurance", that was the point of the individual mandate which was repealed by the Republicans in 2017.

There never was an effective individual mandate, but if there had been, it most likely would've been ruled unconstitutional. Whether you pay a small fine or no fine whatsoever, you are ultimately incentivized to defer paying the far higher insurance premiums.

Only if you ignore the alternative of not doing something. Parkinson's law tells me there's a lot of strictly unnecessary things running on there as a means unto itself.

As for banning imported drugs, this is a bipartisan issue, both parties have called for allowing it, but both parties are effectively against it.

Price controls - at least with a Democratic administration - are more realistic, because the FDA doesn't care about that and the pharmaceutical companies at least get to keep their moat, which they will prefer over some lost profits from generics.