marklgr

You know you can find data supporting whatever you want, or at least casting doubts on whatever you don't like.

This does not mean data is irrelevant, but it is quite important to know who collected it, following what procedure, and with what goal in mind. Not sure that study above is the most unbiased, for instance.

So what? He/she didn't say there was a _total-and-exclusive_ correlation between the ban and the murders; other factors come into play. You got to watch on the long term here.

> "decide what I want first and rationalize it later"

Incidentally, this is Jim Jefferies point[1] about guns: guns are fun, people enjoy having them and shooting, so they rationalize with evil governements threats from centuries ago.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rR9IaXH1M0

As a publisher, you should say fuck you to the ads networks that pay you to track your readers, not to the readers trying to protect themselves.

That's the flip side of the point, I guess; you can't go against the obvious interests of a majority of citizens, but if you can manipulate an uninformed/prejudiced/scared majority, then you have a relatively free hand to abuse everybody. Hence the importance of informed voters.

Not sure it's a good habit for newbies to run arbitrary commands to see what they do. Asking for help somewhere (eg. `--help` flag) looks like a much better practice

It's more readable because other programmers have been taught the imperative style too, because their teachers find it more readable, because <tail call here>.

For personal projects, you can pick whatever language you want, possibly the most fun one that is still practical. Haskell or Elixir look promising in this regard.

For companies, there are more factors to consider, eg. finding devs at a correct price, getting existing workforce to work on a new tech, size of standard/open source library, getting help and bugfixes from community instead of hacking on your own, risk of language/tech losing steam, etc. That's why several comparatively "boring" languages still thrive.

> Payment, or ads that we'll try and keep ok. The response is, we'll weaponize and win.

You really got to realize this is not about showing ads, ie. some plain jpg/gifs--which a lot of people would accept--but loading tons of tracking scripts that slow you down and violate your privacy. So yeah, I'm gonna protect against that, I don't deem it as an acceptable choice.

/s grandparent, methinks.

By that logic, there is no black Isaac Newton as well. Do you stand by it?

> Except for links to images. I can never freaking remember those.

They work like standard Markdown links (text in square brackets, followed by link in parens), except you add a bang in front of it. The bang looks like an upside-down "i", the first letter of "image".

Edit: read too fast; _links_ to images use image instead of text in a link, so you just replace the text with text in square brackets with the syntax of Markdown image. I've never struggled too much with this one, so I don't have any useful mnemonics, sorry.

> It seems to me you are just the typical example of "French Bashing" : always complaining and seeing the bad side of things.

I think it is partly brought on by the strong political turn that any discussion takes over here. Any topic becomes a Left vs Right debate, and since the country is still mostly divided between the two (or at least used to be till recently), you got highly polarized opinions, like, "we suck because of the other guys".

> why can't Europe produce a Google, Facebook, Apple, Oracle, Microsoft?

Market size, for one. Europe is not a country, and startups begin on a small national market, or at least national-scale funding.

The Netherlands have quite a bit of "drug tourism", with people from across Europe going there to party and/or bring some stuff back home--so small wonder that it's quite easy to find pretty much anything there.

As for whether usage would get more widespread, I believe it's to be expected, since legalization means more resellers, more legit businesses that you are not reluctant to deal with, and a de facto approval from governement that the stuff is clean, so less fear of poisoning.

> Whether it's legal or illegal, I can get it very easily where I live. Yet, I don't take it because I know it's not good for me.

Not everyone got the connections, and not everyone use good judgment. That's the whole point: to what extent can society decide what to authorize and what to forbid.

> The choice isn't between making drugs legal and having a drug free world. The choice is between making it legal or spending resources throwing those who choose to use drugs in jail.

That's a legitimate way to look at it, but there are other points of view too eg. the choice is also between a rather limited user base and widespread usage once it becomes legal. I guess it could be argued that marijuana is already everywhere, but what about 'stronger' stuff.

> Still the Wild West out there.

Strangely enough, it is both a kind of freedom ideal to some, and an unfair, immoral and violent dog-eat-dog society for other.

People are seldom happy when doing nothing; they like to be recognized as worthy and valuable members of their group/community. Work is the most frequent way to partly achieve that, but it is not the only one, depending on how you define 'work' (generally involving exchange of money or service).

This does not mean the competition will always, necessarily be strong enough to prevent the formation of a monopoly.

> Who defines 'social good'? You assume an elite that can determine efficiency! This is the socialist conceit.

Er, no, democracy defines it.

> Without those the argument goes, that firms would never get so big because competition would sprout up immediately to cut into their market dominance.

That's how the argument goes, but this is neither a proof nor an observation--just a piece of economic theory, and there are others going against it.

It sounds like you're a libertarian somewhat "by default", as you say you don't trust the political system anymore. But, to be fair, shouldn't you compare "mediocre/bad government" vs "mediocre/bad libertarianism"? Both could be as bad, so that would not be a decisive reason to prefer one vs the other. Or the latter might even be worse than the former.

> It's the very point of the original article that working fewer hours can increase the quality and focus of the work done during that shorter period.

To me, it depends on how you cut the hours, and to what extent. I'm all for working shorter days, eg. 6-8h, 4-5 days a week; however, the more you get close to half-time or below, the more difficult it becomes to stay fully focused and as motivated as a (more) full-time employee. This is admittedly less of a concern if the person uses their free-time on related projects (eg. writing open-source stuff).

> To use an incredibly bad analogy: It's like moving from a monolithic "big iron" server to a pair or farm of smaller ones. There are many advantages, but it means it's now a distributed system with all the problems that can bring.

The thing is that, as you noted yourself, the analogy doesn't hold, for people are not AWS servers waiting for charge or failovers. If they chose to work 20h/wk, it's presumably to spend their time for other pursuits, eg. family, and they often won't be able to or won't agree to work more when their employer need it, perhaps unless it is planned well in advance (eg. Black Friday period).

> Basically, the company is renting two brains for the price of one.

Or, as I questioned, you might got two partly focused and perhaps less skilled people thinking about your problem, instead of someone more skilled totally focusing on it. As was brought in another comment, if you got two freelancers, then yeah, you could pick two brains, but if you have two family guys, not so much.

Freelancers often work part-time because they are more expensive, so they are not hired full-time, but they generally have many clients in the same week when they can. Moreover, they most often have some expertise in their field, which means they still devote quite a bit of time keeping up to date--they don't just spend their time with the kids. What they can do, though, is taking several months off, either between contracts or when it is ok with their long-time clients.

Anyway, that's a kind of special situation, essentially unrelated to the employee working 20h/wk to take care of their family.

> We need to stop labeling the first of these persons as "successful" and second one as a "failure"

It's not about judging employees from a moral standpoint, but getting the most skill and involvement going into your project/company. So, one of the questions would be: does 20h/wk + 20h/wk = 40h/wk skills+involvement, ie. is it linear? Wouldn't 20h/wk jobs be limited to inherently part-time, low importance tasks--which means you got to have plenty of funds to staff for them in the 1st place?

From one of the comments in the article, it's probably more like we've lost control of how businesses work. Many people don't like the phrase "race to the bottom", but that's what comes to mind when you get to see how personal data is handled to third parties and/or cheap, expendable workforce.

This is not about inevitability and immortality of monopolies, but their likelihood and the detrimental effects they bring on while they exists. Both can be pretty high in some domains, so it is worthwhile to think about it, to me.

As a note aside, that's what many religions have been doing for ages: help the poor, build schools etc. No doubt there have been mutual benefits.

In theory, you could also ignore all ads in general, but in practice you can't really ignore them, so you'd better realize that you're trading off a service for some influence over you.