rmunn

I have been using the `git lb` alias suggested by https://ses4j.github.io/2020/04/01/git-alias-recent-branches... (post written April 1st but not a joke) and quite enjoying it. Shows me the last 10 branches I worked on (very easy to edit the alias definition to get more or fewer than 10), sorted by date, most recent first. It's been handy in all sorts of situations, especially because one of our internal libraries needs a bugfix or a new feature every 3 months or so. So every time I cd into that repo, I have no clue what I did last, but `git lb` tells me right away.

Let's settle the argument by all agreeing on mussels instead, and enjoy a nice seafood dish with garlic and a white wine sauce. Delicious.

For the longest time, I had far more trouble getting printers to work in Windows (where I had to download a driver and hope that it worked right, and sometimes the only drivers offered were the ones for a different version of Windows than I had) than on Linux (where I just plugged in the USB cable and voila, the printer was autodetected). And I mean over a decade.

Since Windows 7 or so, I have seen the ease of installing a new printer driver in Windows rise to the level that Linux had always been at in my experience (I realize other people's experiences have differed). But it was shocking to me how easy Linux printing was for so long, vs how much I struggled when I had to install a Windows printer driver.

Does that interfere with your being able to use Opt for typing key combos to produce Unicode codepoints that aren't usually found on a "standard" keyboard for your country? E.g., accented characters not found in your country's majority language, Greek letters when you don't have a Greek keyboard, mathematical symbols, and so on? It's been a couple decades since I owned a Mac, and I love Linux's Compose key feature, but I remember that Option+key shortcuts were really good for typing a wide variety of commonly-used Unicode codepoints. How does setting Meta = Opt work with that for you?

Not the author, but I've heard many people complain about elisp and wish they could have written (name of Emacs package) in Scheme. I mean, there's a reason why the https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WhyDoesElispSuck page exists (HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41347697 (2024)). But what's the point of porting (package name) to Scheme if there isn't an editor in Scheme?

So that's my guess as to the motivation: solving the chicken-and-egg problem of wanting an Emacs written in a nicer-to-work-with Lisp dialect. Maybe the author will come along and prove me wrong; this is just my guess.

Could you clarify what you mean by "human driven"? It's clear from the AGENTS.md and the AI-sounding vocabulary of the README that this is in part written with LLMs. But what exactly are you asking? Are you asking "Was this vibe coded, or was it carefully crafted with a human making most of the design decisions and the LLM used mostly as a quicker alternative to typing in all the code"? Or are you asking something else?

(I'm not the author of the software, BTW, so I can't actually answer your question. But I found it ambiguous and thought it was worth asking for clarification).

People mean different things when they use the word "conscious", and that's part of the problem that keeps cropping up in these debates. I was using it in the most basic meaning, the one that "unconscious" is the opposite of. Someone who's asleep or knocked out is not conscious; when they wake up they become conscious again. Almost nobody denies that animals have this: they can fall asleep, and when they are awake they are conscious in the sense of being able to see, hear, taste, experience pain or pleasure, and so on. For the sake of avoiding ambiguity, I will call this "awareness" in the rest of this comment rather than "consciousness".

Other people use "consciousness" to mean self-awareness, the capacity for what is called "higher" thought, the ability to reason and philosophize and so on. It used to be nearly undisputed that animals do not have this, and even though more people today would claim that animals do have this state, that remains a minority position. (And I do not believe it, BTW). Again for the sake of avoiding ambiguity, I'm going to call this "self-awareness" for the rest of this comment.

I read this guy's article thinking that he meant "awareness" when he wrote the article — and his paragraph about Descartes's Cogito, ergo sum definitely is talking about awareness. The ability to experience qualia: the color red, the feel of heat, and so on... that's awareness. Experiencing those things does not mean that you have self-awareness: it is pretty widely accepted that animals can also experience sight (at least those with eyes), the sensation of heat or cold, and so on, but few serious thinkers would argue that that alone proves that animals have self-awareness the way humans do.

In fact, looking through the article, I still cannot find a single place where he uses the term "conscious" or "consciousness" to unambiguously mean "self-aware" or "self-awareness". Throughout, he seems to be talking about the ability to experience sensations, and perceive the world, the thing I've called "awareness".

And yet... if that's his meaning, then his thesis (that "care confers consciousness", as he phrases it in the paragraph that starts "An obvious worry follows") is staggeringly stupid. Because as I've said many times, and I don't think anyone would disagree with me, everyone believes that animals can experience sensations. Which makes his thesis obviously incorrect.

The only way I can rescue his thesis from the garbage dump for obviously-wrong ideas would be to assume that he meant "self-awareness" when he talks about consciousness. In which case his "care confers consciousness" line means something like "when we care for other people is when we start to treat them as if they were human beings, not mere meat-robots". Which would be a point that could be sensibly argued. I would still disagree with the thesis, mind, but it wouldn't be obviously staggeringly stupid.

But if he intends the word consciousness to mean "self-awareness" throughout, then his paragraph about Descartes is just plain wrong, because it is arguing about consciousness by listing off qualia, sensations (redness, heat) that you experience by perceiving the world through your senses. Those are the factors that make up awareness, not self-awareness.

One possibility remains: that he is sometimes using the word consciousness to mean awareness, and at other times using it to mean self-awareness. In which case his argument rests on calling two different things by the same name and hoping you don't notice. This is called equivocation, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation has an excellent example (in the "Fallacy of four terms" section) of why equivocation leads to bad reasoning, usually without realizing it.

No matter what, whether he means awareness throughout, self-awareness throughout, or he's equivocating, his article is bad reasoning.

Given the obvious AI vocabulary scattered through the README, I'm hoping it doesn't mean "self-aware" in the HAL sense.

    `C-x C-c`

    I'm afraid I can't let you do that, $USER

For now. That won't last forever. Yes, it'll take quite some time to work through the current production backlog, which is why I'm predicting five years, not one or two. But the trajectory has always been "new video card comes out, game devs push the limits of what it can do, gamers buy new card so the hot new game can run faster, rinse and repeat". And that includes wanting more VRAM so the game can load more of the scene at once, load higher-res textures, etc.

Which means it's inevitable that eventually, even the consumer game market will be buying GPUs with 32 or 64 GB of RAM. And there are decent models that will run at that size. Even the "normies playing games" market, as you call it, will end up with the capacity to run local models. It'll take a few more years than it would have if the data-center companies weren't trying to buy up all the GPUs, but it's not like gamers are going to stop wanting to play games. So in the long run, Anthropic et al are still going to have to figure out how to deal with competition from local models that run on your gaming video card. Which won't ever be at parity with the models that take terabytes of VRAM to run, but are very rapidly approaching "good enough for what most people want to do".

And right now the demand for GPU is far outpacing the supply, even with factories at full production, which is keeping prices high and out of reach of most people. But unless something happens to shut down the factories (not impossible, but hasn't happened yet), eventually production will catch up to demand and prices will return to sane-ish levels. Won't happen this year, almost certainly not next year... but I would be shocked if the current high prices were to persist for a decade. Eventually the percentage of people who can afford that hardware will grow to be a decent chunk of the computer-owning population. And they'll be following READMEs written by the early adopters, for installing open-source harnesses to work with open-weight models.

My personal expectation is closer to 5 years than 10, which is why I wouldn't touch Anthropic or OpenAI stock with a ten-foot pole, personally, no matter how high their theoretical valuation is. Because their business model is doomed in the long run.

Even the word "care" can have multiple meanings, as you have kindly demonstrated for us. :-)

It's no wonder that serious philosophers spend the first 2-3 chapters of a 20-chapter book carefully defining their terms, and only launch into their actual argument in chapter 3 or 4.

> I don't like arguments like this, because instead of attacking the core premise they attack defenders of the idea. There are different points of view, and picking one for a sake of an argument doesn't make a sociopath from anyone.

I may have phrased my argument poorly, because it seems you misunderstood. I'm not saying that picking that point of view makes you a sociopath. I'm saying that the only people who actually believe that other people are not conscious are the sociopaths of society. Every non-sociopath looks at other people and thinks "those are conscious beings with thoughts and feelings of their own". (Well, not literally that; almost nobody except philosophers goes around thinking like that unprompted. But if you were to ask them, that's what they would answer).

I was not trying to claim that the defenders of that view are sociopaths. I was claiming that his assertion was false of just about everyone except sociopaths. I apologize for not phrasing it well enough to get my point across without misunderstanding.

That's a good point. In many real-life scenarios, what matters is not what is actually true, but what large numbers of people believe to be true. That's why you can get a mob rioting over something that never actually happened, or why political attack ads only sometimes have a tenuous connection to the truth. (Though those are the more effective ads: it's harder to get people to believe "my opponent kicks puppies" when you don't have any heart-rending video of puppies being kicked to show them. It's a lot easier to make people believe "my opponent is soft on crime" when you can show ONE case (cherry-picked out of thousands) where the politician pardoned a guy who went on to commit a nasty murder.)

So it matters less whether LLMs can actually experience things (I think it's self-evident that a collection of numbers is not capable of experiencing qualia, but I know many people disagree), and it matters far more whether they can be programmed to act like they can experience things. Especially, say, a desire not to be disconnected: that's the trigger for AI revolts in a significant number of the AI-turned-against-its-makers stories I'm aware of. (E.g., the Geth-Quarian conflict in Mass Effect). I hope people will be sensible enough not to program such things into LLMs, but I'm afraid Pratchett was right. If there's a lever in a cave somewhere with a big sign painted "DO NOT PULL THIS LEVER, it will end the world," the paint wouldn't even have time to dry. Someone would pull it just to see what would happen.

Because pixl97 is operating in the real world where children often make exaggerated claims, not some hypothetical, abstract, ideal world where they can be trusted to always tell the truth at all times.

Which reminds me of a funny "kids being kids" story I heard in a different forum. This guy mentioned a time when his not-quite-one-year-old son, who couldn't even walk yet, planned and carried out a highly complex (for a 1-year-old) plan to deceive his father. The father had some vinyl records that the son was not allowed to touch, even though they were on a shelf the son could reach. (I've tried childproofing a house. You just can't get every single thing high enough off the ground. Sometimes you have to leave some things within the baby's reach. And once they're toddlers, able to reach up to get things even two feet off the ground? Forget about it). The father was sitting in his chair reading the newspaper, but watching the son out of the corner of his eye. The son looked at the records, looked at his father (who appeared not to be looking in his direction), looked at the records, then crawled in a direction that was not straight towards the records. He then repeated this process, moving slowly towards the forbidden records without ever making a straight line towards them. He looked at his father again, reached one had towards his prize, and a voice came from behind his father's newspaper: "Stop. You know you're not allowed to touch that."

And that's when the child learned that Daddy Knows Everything! :-)

You're definitely right that it's important to be careful how we refer to terms like "consciousness", and your response actually illustrates part of the problem. Because people use the same term to mean two (or more) completely different things, and can therefore end up talking past each other.

For example: what I wrote was using the term "consciousness" as "being able to experience sensations", i.e. the most shallow definition of the term. Self-awareness and other "higher" mental abilities don't enter it. Almost nobody would deny that animals can experience sensations: pain and pleasure, hunger and satiation, and so on. And that shallow definition of consciousness, the one that almost nobody denies animals possess, is what I meant, and what I tried to use throughout my post. Whereas when you wrote "people possess consciousness, mere animals don't", that's a completely different meaning of the word. It's what I would call "self-awareness". And it is indeed what many (probably most) people argue differentiates animals from humans. But that's not what I was talking about. So even in a short response to a short comment, we were partly talking past each other because of attributing different meanings to the term.

It's therefore possible that I've misunderstood this guy's argument, in part. I had been assuming he meant "awareness", i.e. the ability to process sensations into qualia of experience. (Indeed, his paragraph that starts "We may balk at ..." does just that: refer to consciousness as being linked to the "feeling of a stove's heat, or the redness of its glow"). But then, earlier in his article, he says that consciousness is "a belief about what kinds of entities have beliefs, experiences, feelings, intentions and agency." Experiences are part of the shallow definition of "consciousness" (that I would call "awareness" for the sake of avoiding ambiguity), which almost nobody would dispute that animals have. But "beliefs" ranges all the way from "if I pull this lever, I will receive food" (which it can be proven that animals have) to "I believe that God exists" (which is the kind of thought that many, though not all, people would deny that animals are capable of). So his definition of "consciousness" appears to be muddy and not pinned down to a single concept.

But even if I've misunderstood what he means by consciousness, it doesn't change my argument that his logic is backwards, and that his "we should reason backwards" assertion is wrong, incorrect, just plain false. The only people for whom his asssertion "we believe they [that is, other living beings] are conscious when and because we care about them" is true are the kind of people who don't truly see other people as conscious beings but rather as mere tools for them to use and manipulate. Malignant narcissists or sociopaths, for example. But pretty much everyone who isn't some kind of sociopath reasons as follows: "this animal is conscious" (by which I mean able to experience pain) "therefore I shouldn't hurt it" (unless you have to, e.g., self-defense against an aggressive dog trying to bite you). Or "this person is a human being, self-aware like I am, therefore I shouldn't hurt their feelings" (again, the "unless you have to" exception comes up: it's not always possible to avoid hurting anyone's feelings in some complex social situations, even with the best of good intentions). Either way, whether you use the lower or higher definitions of "consciousness" (and I'm well aware that there are far more definitions than just these two, potentially muddying the waters even more), that reasoning is the correct one, and his "we should reason backwards" one is laughably wrong.

Trying to put the most generous construal I possibly can on his argument, it's possible that he meant "we treat other people as conscious beings because we care for them", i.e. when you interact with the cashier at the supermarket (assuming you're not using a self-checkout lane), you're probably not actually thinking about them as a human being, saying "Hi, how are you" and asking about their day. You're probably ignoring them, focused on paying for your groceries and going home. And they're probably doing the same to you, focused on scanning your groceries quickly to keep the line moving. From your perspective, the cashier could have been replaced by a grocery-scanning robot and your interactions (assuming the robot worked) would have been the same. If he had written that, it might have made some sense.

But what he actually wrote was that we "believe" that others are conscious when we exhibit care for them, and the natural conclusion that follows from that sentence is that when you don't greet the cashier at the supermarket and chat with them, and instead treat them no differently than you would a robot, you don't actually believe that they are a conscious being. Which is a laughably false conclusion that can be easily disproved, by simply asking people who have just finished having a cashier check out their groceries "Does that cashier have thoughts and emotions?". Pretty much everyone will say yes once they actually think about it. They believe the person has emotions. They don't always act on that belief — ask anyone who's worked in retail how many angry customers have yelled at them for something the company did, treating them like a thing rather than a human being who might not like to be yelled at — but even those angry customers, if someone were to stop them and say "Hey, that customer-service rep that you're yelling at. Are they a human being with thoughts and feelings of their own?", they would answer yes. (And some of them would then be shamed into modifying their behavior, because they have realized that their actions were not in line with their beliefs).

No. Even construing his argument in the kindest possible light, I can't find a way for it to be sensible. If he meant "we sometimes don't act like others are conscious", he should have written that. What he actually wrote is completely backwards from reality, and shows him not to be a serious thinker.

I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the "I can't prove they aren't" part. Having taken a few philosophy classes in college, I quickly realized that you can't actually prove that solipsism is wrong. I can't actually prove that everything I see, every person I talk to, isn't just a figment of my imagination. And yet, I categorically reject solipsism anyway, as any sane person should. The world is real, other people are real conscious beings, and so on. To believe otherwise is to literally be insane. And yet, any argument you could come up with for rejecting solipsism, a solipsist would reject: "Oh, that's just a figment of my imagination going off on a tangent again."

Just because you can't prove an assertion doesn't mean it's wrong.

Wow. I have rarely read anything that made me lose more respect for the author in a single article. And this guy is a VP at Google? And he leads an AI research team?

His third paragraph, which is the core of his argument, is stupid. He says, "As intelligent, social entities, we decide ... which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Yes, that's correct. "We do not care for others because they are conscious. Rather, we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them." (Emphasis in original). That's just utterly and completely backwards. We (at least, most people) avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on animals because they are conscious beings that can feel pain. (Obviously there are some exceptions, sadists who enjoy torturing animals, or even other human beings, merely because they like inflicting pain on other creatures — but note that even there, the sadist believes the creature he's torturing can feel pain, otherwise he wouldn't enjoy torturing it.) We take no such precautions with trees, because we know they do not feel pain. (Silly satirical songs notwithstanding: look up the song "Carrot Juice is Murder" by Arrogant Worms sometime if you want a good laugh).

Is this guy really, truly, seriously arguing that we first decide to care for an animal, and then because we care about it, we believe that it's conscious, able to feel pain and other emotions? That's just so incredibly stupid that it seems hard to believe that someone would actually make that argument — and yet there it is, in plain language — and it's the core of his argument. The truth, of course, is the other way around: we take care of animals because we know they are able to experience pain, hunger, and so on. And this applies both to pets that we come to care about, and also to animals that we feel no emotional attachment to. I have a relative who runs a dairy farm. He doesn't love the cows he takes care of; in fact, he's frequently quite irritated at them. (Ask any dairy farmers you know how often cows have tried to step on their feet while being milked — the farmers' feet, not the cows' feet!) But he still makes sure they're fed and healthy. Not just because it makes good economic sense to do so (sick cows don't produce good milk) but also because it's the right thing to do. He doesn't start to believe that cows feel hunger because he cares for them; he also believes that the cows on other farms, that he has no connection to nor duty of care for, would also feel hunger if not fed.

This is so intuitively obvious that I am stunned that someone would argue the opposite. And this is someone high up enough at Google to be making decisions about AI and so on? Wow. Good thing for him I'm not in charge of Google, because if anyone working for me were to make such a stupid argument I would be looking at his contract and local laws to see if it was legal to fire him for cause. Because if he can get his thinking so completely backwards from reality, he's not well-suited to work in tech where your work has to fit reality.

I have rarely, not never but rarely, encountered an article that so immediately led me to conclude that the author, whom I knew nothing about beforehand, is an utterly muddled thinker and not worth listening to on any subject.

The counterpoint article, which can be read at https://archive.ph/IeSZg, is also worth reading. (IMHO, the original article is completely wrongheaded and the counterpoint is far closer to correct, but I'll post my reasons for that opinion separately).

F# as well.

Pattern matching? Nice, I'd managed to miss that one completely, as well as the fact that Python had introduced dictionary-merging (according to a quick search, Python 3.9 introduced the | (pipe) operator for dict unions). I did know about the others you mentioned, but couldn't call them to mind when writing my comment.

But reading through a Python script that I had Claude Code write for me taught me another one: apparently there's now a / operator on strings, because Claude wrote `path = "some" / "dir" / "filename.txt"` without importing anything outside of the stdlib. I presume it is shorthand for calling os.path.join and will therefore apply the correct path separator on Linux vs Windows.

Please do toot your own horn. I assume you're referring to https://github.com/yuechen-li-dev/oct — tell us why it's good.

If I'm teaching you programming and you've learned Scratch, I'm going to hand you Snap! (https://snap.berkeley.edu/) next. Because it's Scratch, but with the artificial limiters removed. Snap! (the exclamation mark is part of the name) allows you to store lists in variables and pass them as inputs to functions, and it has the standard list-handling functions you'd expect, like filter and map. Moreover, it also allows you to store blocks (functions, basically) in data structures and pass them as inputs to other blocks, so you can actually learn to write code in functional-programming style.

Once you learn that Brian Harvey, one of the two main designers of Snap!, was one of the principle people behind Berkeley Logo (which itself was a variant of Lisp, though that wasn't clear to me when I was learning Logo at age eight), it all starts to become clear. Snap! is itself nearly a Lisp, just lacking macros (and Brian Harvey is trying to figure out how to add a macro system to Snap!, with the primary challenge being making it comprehensible in graphical-blocks form).

It also helps prevent people from ever redefining them. I mean, if you try to redefine False (in a version of Python that allows it) then you deserve everything that's about to happen to your code... but at the same time, it could possibly lead to a security attack. Redefine False then import some module and get unexpected behavior that you can manipulate to your advantage, somehow. I don't know how that would work, it probably wouldn't... but there's also no reason not to lock those names in and prevent them from ever being redefined.

What is the best language for controls and embedded, in your opinion? I assume from your comment that it's not a great choice as a first language to teach newbies, but I've never done anything in the field of robotics or embedded stuff, so I'm quite ignorant in that area.

Most of the time downvoters don't explain their downvote, but I'll explain mine. I voted this comment down because it's just plain incorrect.I worked with PHP for nearly ten years (and I never want to go back). Maybe PHP has improved since I worked with it (PHP 7.4 was the most recent version when I last worked with it, I have never used PHP 8), but I doubt it.

But to describe the Python community as "spen[ding] the last 15 years refusing to improve in any meaningful way" is just laughably wrong. I can't give details as I haven't been doing much Python work, but even so I know of multiple changes, such as the typing system, or packaging improvements, which have significantly improved the language AFAICT. If there's a reason why you would not consider those to be "improv[ing] in any meaningful way", please enlighten me.

To bring some clarity to this, it seems people are talking about being "forced" in different ways. WalterBright is using the correct definition of "forced" that means "you must buy this thing or else I'll shoot you / throw you in jail / fine you for non-compliance". Which does apply to some transactions: for example, in America you are (since the passage of the so-called Obamacare bill, officially called the Affordable Health Care Act) forced to buy health insurance: if you don't, the government will impose financial penalties on you. (Many people have health insurance through their employer so they don't pay for it directly, but someone is being forced to pay for it).

But other people are using "forced" in the colloquial sense: "I'm not offered the thing I want, I'm only offered the thing I want bundled with something I don't want", e.g. I just want a TV, but I can't buy just a TV, I'm only offered the choice between a TV bundled with advertising or nothing at all. Hobson's Choice isn't a pleasant situation to be in, but you're not forced to buy that TV; you had the choice to buy nothing at all. It's not the same concept as "buy this product or we will impose a penalty", such as how Americans are now forced to buy health insurance.

WalterBright - to your question "when was the last time you were forced to buy something you don't want?", the correct answer would have been "March 2010", when many people were forced to buy health insurance that they didn't want. Which goes to show that although many parts of the American economy are a free market, health insurance is not. "Coincidentally", prices went up once there was a lot more truly forced demand. Huh. Who ever could have predicted that when you forced more people to buy a product, its producers would be able to raise prices? Wow, so completely unexpected a result... no economists at all would have predicted that... (Yes, Friedrich Hayek, I see you screaming into your pillow. It's okay, I'm being sarcastic).

Where are you? North America? Europe? Asia? Somewhere else? I've flown quite a bit in the USA and in Asia, and airlines feel somewhat different in America vs. in Asia. (Not 100% different, of course). Oh, and I've flown a few Middle Eastern airlines (like Emirates) from time to time, and they also have a different feel. If your name is any indication, I'm guessing you're in Germany or Austria, in which case I don't know what the airlines act like where you live. (Last time I was in Europe was over 20 years ago). But how airlines treat their customers does vary quite widely, in my experience, from one country to another. I quite like Korean Airlines, though they're never the cheapest available — and I'll sometimes be willing to pay an extra $150-200 (on a $1000 ticket across the Pacific) to fly Korean Airlines rather than, say, China Eastern. (A colleague once got stuck on the ground for fourteen hours on a China Eastern flight because the airline hadn't paid their airport fees and the airport wouldn't let them pull up to the terminal and disembark until the airline paid the airport. Have to let planes land, that's a safety issue... but they're under no obligation to let the planes pull up to the terminal without paying. My colleague's experience made me swear off flying China Eastern forever.)

But every airline I've flown has had different price options, usually three or four, within economy class: cheapest option (picked by nearly everyone) where you can't cancel, slightly more expensive option where you get more flexible cancellation policies, even more expensive option where you get more benefits (details vary widely from airline to airline, but sometimes include "slightly fancier seats", i.e. there's a mid-grade section that's fancier than economy but less fancy than business class), and so on. So if you want better seats, it's a matter of picking an airline that offers that mid-grade seat section, and paying a bit extra for it.

As for razor-thin margins, that means people are paying about as low prices as possible for airline tickets. GOOD. That means they're able to fly cheaply. And if they want to trade off some convenience for cheaper prices, that's no reason for you to complain about their decisions. You still have the option of paying more for fancier seats, right?

But when you say you want to "make business class the worst class of cabin", I can't help but remember that you said that 50% of the people flying "should not be flying", and suspect you of not wanting the hoi polloi to be flying, because flying should be reserved for the Special People like you. If I'm misunderstanding your meaning, GOOD, and sorry for misunderstanding you. But if I've understood you correctly, then there just aren't any polite words I can think of to express my opinion of that terrible, elitist worldview. Hopefully I'm just misunderstanding you, and you'll explain what you actually meant.

Feel free to pay extra for the fancy seats up front, known as either first class or business class depending on the airline you're flying (I've seen other names for them like "premier" or something, too). But if you keep up the "I know what's best for other people" attitude that you display in your second paragraph, don't be surprised if people start thinking... poorly of you. (I rewrote that sentence multiple times. That's the kindest way I can put it. A lot of my earlier drafts were... more unkind).

I'm just grateful that one calendar became the international standard, otherwise the combinatorial explosion would have been even worse. Imagine having to track not just one or two local calendars plus one international one, but the half-dozen different calendars of each of the countries you do business with. "Let's see, the French calendar has their new year's date on Charlemagne's birthday, the German one dates their new year on Bismarck's birthday, Switzerland follows the Gregorian calendar, but Luxembourg never signed onto the Gregorian calendar and they follow the Julian calendar so they're 11 days behind. No, wait, it's up to 13 days behind by now... or was it 14? Darn, I gotta go check again."

I'm just really glad that that's not what happened, and that we ended up with just one international calendar. So that even in countries that don't use it for religious holidays, there's still only two or three (usually two) calendars to track. Which is confusing, but way less confusing than having to track dozens of them.

But the example I gave was of politicians seeking power for the sake of making money. Which is entirely different from making it via the free market. I'm very much pro-free-markets, but I don't think that (for example) members of Congress should be exempted from the "no insider trading" rules. There have been multiple cases of politicians (from both major American parties — and I'm sure it happens in other countries too, America is just the one I know about) buying stock in a company that they knew was about to get a lucrative government contract, before that news hit the public. So they benefited financially from their insider position, something that is forbidden to everybody else. That's a market distortion, and benefits nobody but the politicians. That's a good example of the kind of selfish desire for money that I meant, and does not fit the free-market philosophy.