rmah

Lol, you know this is sorta sad but true.

IMO, it's similar but worse. at least dogs and cats are living beings.

So every time your side loses a vote is equivalent to "cannot vote for"? Interesting perspective.

It actually is an addition marginal expense. They have to pay for infrastructure and possibly licensing fees.

People have literally started revolutions and wars over taxes. Empires have fallen because of taxes. People are often emotional and don't even want to think logically about taxes. I suspect that it's been like this since taxes were invented :-)

Because, for white collar jobs, that is so rare that it's reasonable to say that it never happens.

It sorta does, that's one of the primary points of a federal system.

Yes and no. it's not like they ever extracted taxes from most of the natives living in the amazon jungle. Saying that you rule over people that have literally never heard of you is, IMO, stretching the definition of "rule" quite a bit :-)

I see. So by "cannot vote for" you meant "did not vote for". Thanks for clearing it up.

Your statement doesn't make sense to me, perhaps you could clarify it? Did you mean that 85% of the population didn't vote for the current leader of the executive branch? If so then perhaps "that 85% [...] did not vote for" might be more appropriate. Or were your referring to the electoral college used to elect the POTUS?

For the first, 100% of citizens cannot vote for the federal government representatives (children, most felons, etc do not have the franchise), and about 1/2 of citizens who are eligible to vote do not. The vast majority of adult citizens can vote.

For the electoral college, that only applies to the POTUS. I agree that the electoral college is deeply flawed. But both senators and congressmen are elected directly. They are the ones who make the laws. The executive branch just enforces and executes those laws. The responsibility for the many vague laws that hand over power to the executive is on congress.

IMO, to say "85% of Americans pay taxes to a federal government that they cannot vote for" is misleading at best.

All of it.

Most people live in asia. thus most foods are both produced and consumed in... you guessed it asia.

I disagree.

It's like you didn't see where I agree that current enforcement is too aggressive. Why are you writing in a tone that implies we disagree when we agree? This is the sort of thing that confuses me.

Giving something away for free and then whining that people use it for free confuses me. I mean, what did you think would happen?

Yes, but it's essentially just a re-branded INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service). They were conducting raids to catch undocumented immigrants (often at workplaces) for as long as I can remember (i.e. back into the early 1980's). IIRC, spanish speakers called them "la migra".

It saddens me that your rather innocuous comment has been down-voted so aggressively. Immigration enforcement is required. Illegal immigration should be discouraged. ICE's current tactics seem overly aggressive to me and, yes, seem to be used politically. But immigration laws should still be enforced. I imagine you'd agree that if ICE agents/supervisors act beyond the scope of their duties or with excessive force, they should be disciplined/prosecuted. I also have a hard time understanding people who don't agree with what I just wrote. I can only imagine those that want to disagree think I'm writing with some sort of underlying agenda and in code to push some broader political narrative (I'm not).

You are conflating legal and illegal immigrants. The visa restrictions are on legal immigrants. And while, as a legal immigrant myself, I would like to think that the vast majority of legal immigrants work hard and contribute positively to the country, it is a fact that certain groups in certain regions have an extremely high usage of social welfare programs (SNAP, Medicaid, etc), sometimes exceeding 80%. This is cause for some concern, IMO as it suggests problems of one sort or another. All that said, I have doubts that the administration's new visa restrictions will have a meaningful impact. Of course, I've been wrong before :shrug:.

Metro Atlanta has a population of 6 mil, say 2/3 live in detached homes with 2 persons per home. So that's 38,000 out of 2 mil homes, so about 2%

Many people seem to be assuming some sort of bias on Polymarket's part. Without evidence, these seems unlikely as whichever side of the bet wins, Polymarket makes the same amount of $. That is, they have no stake in the outcome. The only time you can blame them is if they pay out to neither side and pocket all funds at stake. Which, as far as I can tell, no one is accusing them of.

The same way every president since ww2 has been able to.

The US consumes about 20 mil bbls of oil per day and imports around 4 mil bbls per day from Canada, about 20% of US consumption. Total oil imports is about 6 mil bbls/day, with about 2/3 of imports coming from Canada.

Two fun facts: 1) the US is now the largest producer of crude oil on the planet and 2) the US exports about 4 mil bbs of oil per day. Venezuela is a distant #18 at around 1 mil bbls/day

And lastly, pretty much anything you can distil from heavy crude, you can also distil from light crude, just less of it (by volume). There's a reason tar, asphalt and such is so cheap, it's made from the distillation waste products.

Our firm uses python extensively and the virtual environment for every script or script is ... difficult. We have dozens of python scripts running for team research and in production, from small maintenance tools to rather complex daemons. Add to that the hundreds of Jupyter notebooks used by various people. Some have a handful of dependencies, some dozens of dependencies. While most of those scripts/notebooks are only used by a handful of people, many are used company-wide.

Further, we have a rather largish set of internal libraries most of our python programs rely on. And some of those rely on external 3rd party API's (often REST). When we find a bug or something changes, more often than not, we want to roll out the changed internal lib so that all programs that use it get the fix. Having to get everyone to rebuild and/or redeploy everything is a non-starter as many of the people involved are not primarily software developers.

We usually install into the system dirs and have a dependency problem maybe once a year. And it's usually trivially resolved (the biggest problem was with some google libs which had internally inconsistent dependencies at one point).

I can understand encouraging the use of virtual environments, but this movement towards requiring them ignores what, I think, is a very common use case. In short, no one way is suitable for everyone.

I think the main limitation is not code validation but assumption verification. When you ask an LLM to write some code based on a few descriptive lines of text, it is, by necessity, making a ton of assumptions. Oddly, none of the LLM's I've seen ask for clarification when multiple assumptions might all be likely. Moreover, from the behavior I've seen, they don't really backtrack to select a new assumption based on further input (I might be wrong here, it's just a feeling).

What you don't specify, it must to assume. And therein lies a huge landscape of possibilities. And since the AI's can't read your mind (yet), its assumptions will probably not precisely match your assumptions unless the task is very limited in scope.

Yes, except their cookie preferences to comply with european law. Oh, and they should be able to change their theme from light/dark but only that. Oh and maybe this other thing. Except in situations where it would conflict with current sales promotions. Unless they're referred by a reseller partner. Unless it's during a demo, of course. etc, etc, etc.

This is the sort of reality that a lot of developers in the business world deals with.

I agree that both geometry and game theory are very useful tools.

Game theory is no more a description of nature than Euclidian geometry is.

The statement "Game theory is inevitable. Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives." implies that the "actors" are humans. But that's not what game theory assumes.

Game theory just provides a mathematical framework to analyze outcomes of decisions when parts of the system have different goals. Game theory does not claim to predict human behavior (humans make mistakes, are driven by emotion and often have goals outside the "game" in question). Thus game theory is NOT inevitable.

You can't use unrealized capital losses (property paper losses) or even realized losses to offset property tax, you can only offset realized losses against realized gains for income taxes.

I believe that seeking external validation, inspiration and/or reason is not robust and a path to unhappiness. IMO, it's better if the reasons for you to care come from within.