thomasfoster96

Having an income tax doesn’t make a country socialist.

How many Democrats or Republicans would win election as independents? I doubt many would. While party discipline is looser in the US Congress, party affiliation is still very important.

Additionally, there’s no reason why government auditors have to do things annually like auditors for companies do - government auditors could quite easily audit smaller parts of the government at shorter or longer intervals.

I’m not sure moving committees, such as that one, to anther branch of government would achieve much. In the end, these committees are intended to allow the legislature to make better decisions - moving their functions away from the legislature doesn’t help.

Then again, the US system of government is not exactly a model for the 21st century.

That sort of situation has never existed at the national level (except maybe back when only white male property owners voted).

Even with almost 10k representatives in Congress, representatives would still have 30k constituents each to deal with. It would be almost impossible to meet 30k people in a year, let alone give each of them time to discuss issues and fit in actually being a legislator.

So an auditory branch of government [0]? It’s not that uncommon outside the Anglosphere.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers#Typical_b...

There is a new edition which was published this year (2016). I was able to get it via Amazon - maybe the review is a bit old? I haven’t read much of it so far as I have a few other books on the go but the internet and mobile phones are certainly mentioned.

Edit: Revised edition still has the original author.

Edit 2: Amazon link (not affiliate link): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674737261/ref=oh_aui_deta...

Right, but I don't see how top level await makes the current situation any worse. Web developers already have to think about the order of script loading and execution.

Yep, I probably would.

However, the argument against allowing await in top level code doesn't make much sense if all of these bad side effects already exist.

> The problem with top-level await is that any modules depending on a module with a TLA cannot execute until it's done – the effects cascade and magnify throughout your app, rather than being confined to an explicitly async function.

Can't I already do this by putting a fs.readFileSync call or a synchronous AJAX call in my code?

True, but I interpreted the OP as criticising any execution of code on module load (other than declaring exports).

Unless loading a file is a bottleneck, which I doubt.

> Top-level async would make asynchronous IO no different from synchronous IO! It's the worst of both worlds.

No it's not. Synchronous IO blocks everything. Asynchronous IO with top level await would still allow things queued in the event loop to execute. Plus, top level await + Promise.all would allow you to do operations concurrently, something that synchronous doesn't.

I know that the argument that "silly developers shouldn't be allowed to do silly things" is a valid one, but I don't see a convincing argument that top level await is worse than what developers are currently doing, which is use synchronous functions to do IO at the top level.

If anything, top level async would be an improvement, as it would give developers no reason to do synchronous IO.

Edit: Additionally, ES6 modules are already imperative. There isn't any way to make them declarative.

It appears I didn't know everything about the Dawkins incident - disregard my comment.

I read that as being 50% sarcastic.

> Perhaps you associate a lack of politeness and deference with being a jerk, but it really isn't the same.

I would certainly associate those two attributes with being a jerk.

The major difference there is that they actually identified the particular action that got him uninvited - and to Dawkins’ credit, (as far as I know) he deleted the offending tweets.

> I don't want to see a sexist talk (as opposed to a-sexist talk), but an 'objectionable' speaker really shouldn't be a problem if their talk would otherwise have merit and they can be reasonably expected not to be objectionable on stage.

I agree, you’ve worded that better than me.

I’d really like to know how a decision like that is made. In Nodevember's statement on the matter[0] (which the parent link doesn’t mention, a rather glaring omission), they quite openly admit that they “...aren't professional organizers or PR people. We are still learning, and will make mistakes.” So why not admit a mistake?

I certainly don’t want to see sexist speakers at conferences, but this decision seems to have been made with almost no evidence and almost purely based on unsubstantiated rumours.

[0] http://nodevember.org/statement.html

"often subjective" != "always subjective"

It's pretty clear that COBOL would be a bad choice to write a multiplayer online game, and that JavaScript would be a bad choice for an operating system.

As for the far far more common scenario (the one I had in mind) of choosing whether one of Ruby, Python or Node.js might be better for a certain project, the choice between the three is often going to be fairly subjective. You could solve a lot of problems in all three quite well. Trying to decide which one is objectively the "best" is often a waste of time that could be spent actually solving the problem at hand.

> Nothing about the scenario you speculate about invalidates good discussion about programming languages and I don't know what about the scenario makes you think it does.

I agree - nothing invalidates good discussion on this topic. My point is that trying to decide the best programming language for a particular task (or trying to decide why one programming language is ill-suited) isn't something that always needs a perfectly objective answer.

I agree that the metaphor was partially useless (perhaps poorly worded) - but it's not much better to think that the issue of choosing programming languages is purely objective. You could spend a very long time arguing whether Ruby or Python was better for a particular task, when the important thing is either of them will do a relatively good job for the task at hand and be a better choice than COBOL.

I think the point of the metaphor was that 'the best programming language for the job' is often rather subjective.

Hence why it was a metaphor.

Cost of living doesn't increase linearly with the number of people in a residence - usually it's logarithmic (so two people per house is cheaper than one, which is more expensive than three).

It's all part of the 'Pacific Solution'[0], the main component of Australia's policy of nobody reaching the country without a visa (including asylum seekers).

Australia essentially pays Nauru to host an immigration detention centre, and sends asylum seekers who tried to reach Australia by boat there, regardless of age or legitimacy of claims or anything else.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Solution

The youth detention centre issues in the Northern Territory are completely unrelated to the immigration detention centres on Nauru.

> Singlish is not a unique or separate langauage, or even an actual language.

As far as I know, Singlish is widely regarded as a creole language. Yes, a large part of the vocabulary is English words, but it is very different when it comes to grammar and it uses a lot of loan words from east Asian languages that aren't in English dialects around the world.

The idea that Singlish is just uneducated Singaporean English is purely a political one.

> An American English speaker will likely have much better chance of understanding a Singaporean than understanding some of the U.K. dialects.

I've seen a few dozen sentences of Singlish and I would understand it about as well as I'd understand any other English based creole - I'd understand the English words and not much else.

The problems that different English dialects have when trying to understand each other are accents and local slang - but the grammar and written language are largely the same. On the other hand, large parts of the Singlish vocabulary differ from English, and the grammar is substantially different, even when written.

These five languages didn't 'come' or evolve solely from English - rather they are all English-based creoles[0]. Many of them are grammatically quite different to English, but they've all had heavy influences from other languages as well.

On the other hand, French, Romanian and Portuguese aren't Latin-based creoles - they're separate languages which have evolved from Latin (although you could make the argument that Portuguese and French are two ends of a dialect continuum[1]).

Really, the relationship between Tok Pisin and English is very different to the relationship between French and Latin. English hasn't had the time and geographical spread to diverge into different languages that Latin has had.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-based_creole_languages [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum#Romance_lang...

Yep, Safari doing the same for me. Although I'm seeing it as an image with type "text/html", which is odd.