tachyoff

> Voting is easy. Participation is difficult. In most cases, the local political system has evolved to perpetuate the interests of those who have been in power the longest. Creating change is 100x more difficult than maintaining the status quo. And that built-in resistance to change is corruptible.

Yes, that's called "human organizations" and it happens wherever there are three or more people trying to do a thing. :) Politicking is messy and difficult because humans are messy and difficult. To be honest, it's amazing we've made it this far.

> It's a rejection of the established political system as the most efficient means of producing the desired effects.

And my argument is that people who think that we'd be better off with a "full rewrite" (and I know several of them) are ignorant of history and the civic structures that exist around them that are absolutely available to anyone willing to participate. It's not hard to get on a school board, or become a county commissioner. Those things aren't necessarily easy like microwaving a burrito is easy, but they're not necessarily difficult like getting a PhD is difficult. That is to say, yes, politicking takes work, but that shouldn't be unexpected or surprising.

> You can vote your whole life, and never see a speck of change until after you join a general strike or boycott.

It all depends on what you're trying to do. Zoning changes are probably better handled by voting for better city council members and attending meetings, for example; a strike won't particularly help there. And yes, part of democracy means losing. Sometimes you lose a whole hell of a lot. I think what people (particularly the left, as of late) tend to forget is that sometimes when you lose it's because the people in your city, district, etc. actually have a different enough point of view that they can get their changes enacted. In other words, it IS possible to lose fair and square. That's obviously super abstract, and the real world is messy, but it's easy to interpret every failed election as a sign that the system is broken, when in reality, you just couldn't convince enough people that you're right.

I guess my overall point is: at this point in time, I don't think it's fair to say "the system doesn't work, so I'm not going to participate". I think that is an unfair characterization of the hundreds of thousands of available political offices in the United States, and other various ways of getting involved civically. I once door-knocked for a city clerk candidate and one of my neighbors said that he'd vote for the guy just because he heard his name from me and that he'd remember my quick spiel. It doesn't take much to make a difference, and it's better than just shooting him. That doesn't mean the system is perfect, because it certainly isn't, but I don't think it's nearly to the point where we should scrap the entire thing (if we could even survive) and start over.

I’m blaming both: I’m blaming the humans who expect it, and the billion-dollar blob of JavaScript that enables it to be so.

Not only do we shape our tools, but our tools also absolutely shape us.

Everything old is new again. ;) Okay, that’s a bit flippant. Obviously Slack isn’t IRC (with several major differences), but I think as far as communicating with your coworkers goes, they both accomplish the task. It’s just a matter of how much you want to spend.

I know this was a joke, but do you by any chance know any shorthand? I tried to teach myself Gregg here and there years ago, but it requires more dedication than I was willing to put in to become fluent.

Which usability features are they? The 3 GB of RAM usage, the battery-draining, or the culture of “always-on” availability and interruptions?

I'm a big fan of Pinboard, personally. It's super cheap and the creator is committed to never selling off my data (obviously there's an element of trust there, but then again, all web services involve an element of trust). Oh, and the $25/year plan offers link archival too.

ISPs absolutely could, but having worked near this space previously, it really isn't as easy as it sounds, both the detection and the mitigation, and ISPs are not particularly equipped to handle it themselves right now. There's a lot of money to be made there, though.

Yeah, he's doing calligraphy (either Spencerian script or Copperplate, maybe?) for coding, which is absolutely not a good hand for it. I mean, I personally take notes in cursive, but they're typically prosaic (e.g. "Fix the VPN", "Ask Steve about those CSS changes", etc).

We need to stop giving people reasons to be miserable then. I know too many millennials working two or three crappy service jobs for peanuts, never going to the doctor because being a server or Uber driver doesn't provide health insurance, and constantly ha-ha-only-seriously joking about becoming alcoholics for it to be just a coincidence that so many people are depressed. Oh, and I'm sure our disgusting sugar-laden diets aren't helping anything either. But maybe some basic social safety is necessary? I'd be pretty miserable too if I were afraid a single ambulance ride was going to bankrupt me (as it all too often does to Americans).

> Few want to start anything, but many are willing to join in.

And yet, nobody votes. Everyone is apparently so willing to participate in violent revolution (which typically ends badly, if you read history), but nobody wants to head over to a church or school on a Tuesday in August. Nobody wants to go to city council meetings. Nobody wants to run for one of the many uncontested local elections in their area.

By the time you need your guns, you’ve already lost. It’s much easier, and much more likely, to change the system slowly and deliberately. That’s not to say you shouldn’t protest, or even strike, but there is so much unseized political power in America, and too much of it is simply because of apathy.

Not eliminate, but we should compensate service workers fairly to the point that they have basic health coverage and aren’t one paycheck away from being homeless.

As someone with depression, I thought the same thing!

You don’t have to bite the donut to know it’s sweet.

My point is that if those needs are met, then happiness becomes a question of what personally makes you happy and not just what you need to not be homeless.

I struggling with this constantly. If I have to fix another VPN issue caused by weird DNS server entries in OS X I’m going to scream. “Anybody else getting this error?” No, figure it out. I’m at a loss to explain how so many people wind up in software dev roles while lacking the most basic of problem-solving skills.

> Why should it be any higher?

Because it can be. Because we’re the richest country in the world and yet for some reason we force people into bankruptcy because they didn’t have health insurance on the day they had a medical emergency.

I want:

1. People not to have to worry about seeing a doctor because they can’t afford it.

2. People not to have to worry about having shelter.

3. People not to have to worry about where their next meal will come from.

4. People to be able to provide a solid, basic, decent life for themselves and their families.

5. People to be able receive an education without it being onerously expensive.

Among other things.

I don’t think these are intractable problems for a civilization that sent people to the moon, perform open heart surgery, and deliver energy consistently and safely to millions of people.

I thought that's what the middle class was supposed to be (not-materially-insecure, that is).

Not a Christian, but I spend a lot of time at church (long story). Anyway, self-sacrifice is one of the central tenets of Christianity, the idea being that Jesus Christ took on human form to suffer and die on the cross to save humanity from its grievous sins. As a result, self-sacrifice and martyrdom come up all the time in the Bible [1].

I'm not particularly good at actual theology, and I'm sure different sects of Christianity have different interpretations, but as I understand it, because of Christ's sacrifice, personal suffering is seen as something noble, or even venerable. I think it's easy to take this too far (e.g. people not accepting help because it's "noble" to suffer, or that they "deserve it"), but I digress.

[1] https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Self-Sacrifice

What a sad indictment of modern American life that our baseline for happiness is "not destitute". Really, I think that's telling, and as a millennial with lots of student loan debt and friends in a similar boat, it's not surprising one bit.

#1 is absolutely important. You can't just take valuable time and money from people to do "testing" that, in my opinion, wouldn't tell you anything anyway. It's insulting to all of the professionals involved, especially when they have a backlog of /real/ cases to get to.

But let's entertain the idea and say that you get the trial to happen, and your innocent person was found guilty, or vice versa. What do you do with this information? It doesn't help you because you know the outcome already, but in real trials, you don't know, a priori, exactly what happened (unless you were a witness to something, but even then). So a court messed up. What do you do? Real cases don't operate on some outside observer knowing, in advance, what's going to happen. It's why trials are, at best, a good faith attempt at figuring out what happened and dispensing justice appropriately. Everyone just tries, to the best of their ability (ostensibly; I'm ignoring things like biases and such), to piece together the truth, and render an appropriate judgement.

Which is interesting because in the Old Testament, "casting lots" was considered an appropriate way to divine God's will [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleromancy#In_Judeo-Christian_...

Way easier to pay them like $0.15/hour in prison than the federally-mandated minimum wage. (That number might be hyperbole, but prison wages, if they even exist where you are, are abysmally, illegally low. I believe some of them are indeed sub-dollar.)

> Come to think of it, why is the criminal justice system not "tested"?

I can think of a few.

1. That costs time and money. Even if it would help, I see it being very difficult to justify, essentially, "secret shoppers" for the court system. I think it also kind of underestimates how much time, money, and effort goes into trials. It's not like a quick batch of unit tests. It involves lawyers, judges, jury selection (if it's a jury trial), etc. And juries themselves are made up of people who have to take time off work, miss important events, etc. You can't just (somehow while avoiding detection) fake a trial, and then go "surprise, this was just a test!" At the very least it would just piss a lot of people off.

That's not to say that there's no way to make sure our legal system is functioning properly, it's just I don't think mock trials are the right approach. Currently, I believe, the rest of the court system is relied upon to police itself, with the help of the legislative branch. Different levels of courts, ostensibly, keep each other in check (e.g. if you disagree with a lower court ruling, you can appeal to a higher court, which then makes a decision, and if you don't like that, you can appeal to the Supreme Court, etc.) Congress also has the power to do things like create federal judgeships, so presumably they have other powers to regulate and manage the federal judiciary (state judiciaries are, I imagine, left to the individual states to oversee.)

2. Cynically, there are certain vested interests that want the legal system to function the way it does (e.g. people who own private prisons and people who profit off of minor drug offenders being put away for life). There's also good old fashioned racism and classism, helping keep the overwhelmingly poor, black prison population stuck where they are.

3. I don't think it would actually tell you much; there are too many variables: different lawyers, different judges, different jurors, different facts, etc. Even if you ran the same trial with the exact same people and circumstances, but on a different day or something, you could get wildly different results. The court system is not deterministic, not by a long shot.

The court system also doesn't deal in absolutes like that. It's not "is this person definitely guilty of a crime?", it's "are we sure, beyond a reasonable doubt, that this person committed a crime (based on all of the evidence)?" Because it's impossible to know the entire truth. Sometimes it's impossible to know much of anything at all, at least with certainty. Did OJ commit those murders? We'll never /know/ know in the sense that when I flip a coin I can see that it lands on heads, or in the sense that I know the earth is a spheroid (i.e. it's something that happened in the past and we're trying to determine exactly the series of events given limited information).

Eh, I tend towards “let’s not touch this if it works”. I’ve already had to upgrade from Webpack 1 to 2, and 2 to 3. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

It's certainly better than the 200+ lines of JavaScript something like Webpack spits out when you statr a new project. I had to debug some of our project's build files and realized halfway through that my teammates didn't write this Webpack config monstrosity, Webpack generated it by /default/.

Mens rea (i.e. intent) is part of common law criminality (along with actus reus, which is the actual doing of something illegal). The United States, having its legal system derived from that of England’s (and thus being a common law legal system), absolutely requires intent when considering whether or not someone or some organization has committed a crime.

I’m not familiar with the referenced Nintendo case, but mens rea is usually only considered in criminal cases. Unless you’re prosecuting someone for illegally downloading copyrighted material or some such thing, intent wouldn’t be considered (it can increase liability in civil cases, though).

I don’t believe Pinyin is particularly popular within China. Might make Wheel of Fortune tough, though.

> ...this sill fail every once in a while.

Nah, it rains in the desert once in a while. Coinbase seems to fail so much you could set your watch by it. Day in and day out I see the publicity nightmare unfolding and I ask myself: "Why on earth would someone still use Coinbase?" I'm fiercely curious to see what happens to them in the next few years because honestly, if they don't close up shop on their own, I kind of hope the SEC does it for them. Incompetence is not an excuse to screw up this badly.

I’ve even considered ditching my smartphone entirely here and there. I’m not convinced its utility outweighs its use as an ad-driven anxiety rectangle constantly vying for my attention. Combined with the steady loss of features, I’m wondering if this decide is really a tool or a burden. Something to ponder, I suppose.