wireprotocol

There are two separate issues: speaking ill of the dead at all; and speaking disrespectfully too soon after a death.

Speaking ill of the dead at all is generally not good because the person is no longer able to defend their reputation, and no remedy can be made. The dead is no longer in a position of power to be removed, nor can they improve themselves out of remorse. So of something ill is to be said, saying it after death is too late, not too soon.

"Too soon" is problematic because you are using a death as an opportunity to amplify your own message, and because it can amplify the grief of those left behind.

The article confuses me. Bloom thought both that Shakespeare invented humanity, but also that literature was primarily about the aesthetic pleasure for the reader?

I am not an expert in literature or criticism, but it seems like there's something missing from the article to explain that gap.

(I'm sorry to hear of his passing, of course, and I don't mean this as disrespectful in any way.)

Read The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. It's a well-researched book that goes over how all kinds of violence (at least the easily-measured kinds) have consistently fallen over time. This includes war as well as crime.

There are local maxima, of course, but over any significant time scale and area, violence is down a lot.

"The moral distance a society creates from the killing done in its name will increase the killing done in its name."

Then why is violence worldwide decreasing?

Can someone please explain the border and refugee system here? What exactly is he threatening to do? And if there are a lot of refugees, can't admission to EU be a separate decision?

Juries are not about accuracy. They are there as another line of defense against tyranny: it's harder to make up charges or convict people of ridiculous things when a jury can nullify it.

Nullification is rare and unfortunately that line of defense largely failed during the drug war. But I think that's largely because the government was able to successfully make it a racial issue. It's not always easy to take advantage of deep social divisions for all kinds of policies, and that's why dictators don't like juries.

Kind of like guns. How useful are they against tyranny really? Useful enough that tyrants try to take them away, and that's all I need to know.

Rights can, in theory, be had by everyone. Privileges are inherently for a select few.

Wouldn't the world be wonderful if all 7 billion people had free speech?

There is more to be done to protect, secure, and expand the rights of everyone. But they are still rights.

Privileges are things granted to you, often conditionally, by someone else. Using the word often sounds quasi-religious to me: "Thank Privilege for this meal we are about to eat, and our safe home, ...".

South Park would be a very strange kind of propaganda, if that's what it was. It marginalizes itself by being disgusting, whereas most propaganda tries to put itself in front of polite company (schools, etc.). It also has several levels of mockery, including mockery of itself, and propaganda doesn't risk mocking itself.

What are the alternative theories that are more plausible, in your opinion?

For those using the "password" or "md5" authentication method, this would be a good time to start using SCRAM instead.

First, set

    password_encryption = scram-sha-256

in postgresql.conf[1].

If setting up a new server, use auth method "scram-sha-256" in pg_hba.conf[2][3].

If upgrading an existing server, use auth method "md5" in pg_hba.conf, which actually allows either MD5 or SCRAM. Then, start updating the users' passwords to be encrypted with SCRAM by resetting the password (the "password_encryption" setting causes the new password to be encrypted with SCRAM). After there are no more md5 passwords in the system, you can set the pg_hba.conf auth method to "scram-sha-256" and you're done.

Note that this all requires connecting clients to support scram (version 10 or later of libpq).

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/runtime-config-connection... [2] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/auth-pg-hba-conf.html [3] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/auth-password.html

I use "soft" to mean that the measurements are more subjective, contextual, or open to interpetation.

Chemical changes are "hard", but "power pose" and "improvements to your abilities" may be "soft".

"We obviously have made no progress—lots of theory, but no progress—in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals."

Not sure that's obvious. Crime has steadily fallen. Particular practices may not stand up to scrutiny, but I'm guessing a lot of it does kind of work.

Historically, free markets and private property protections would give rise to capitalism. But it seems like, in modern times, those two same ingredients give rise to something else. This "something else" is partially capitalistic, but the word seems to fit less and less.

Traditionally, a capital investment means something like a tire factory. The right factory in the right place gives the owner an advantage until the market changes or a new supplier makes an even better factory.

Putting things like software, a set of customer relations, a brand, or other modern business advantages in the same bucket as a tire factory just seems wrong.

Or maybe: "Does someone who buys meat at the store respect individuals more or less than someone who hunts?"

Isn't politics the place we need to use the most restraint? Otherwise, it's just too easy to remove an inconvenient politician from play.

"Don't be reckless" is simply not good enough when there's no due process, no standards for evidence, and no standards for guilt.

You can be very careful, and still end up on the wrong side of a baseless claim. Could be anything from a lie, to a dream, to mistaken identity, to a drug dog sneezing. Without due process, anything goes, and being careful isn't enough, because suspicion becomes guilt and by the time you sort anything out the damage is done.

And artificial versus natural does matter. It's the difference between misfortune and injustice.

Innocent-until-proven-guilty is morally, ethically, and logically superior to guilty-until-proven-innocent.

The former is the high ground, the latter is the low ground. Full stop.

I have empathy for accusers and the accused. But I don't have any empathy for people pushing guilty-until-proven-innocent.

Using your logic: Drugs are dangerous. Your rights being violated, your stuff being taken, and getting thrown in jail are just a few more dangers. If you don't want those things to happen, don't do drugs.

The flaw is that you can't equate natural and artificial dangers. Natural dangers are equal-opportunity dangers. Artificial dangers can be used to oppress people.

Also, avoiding behavior X is not enough to avoid the danger. There's not much evidence that Brett Kavanaugh was ever alone with Christine Blasey-Ford, but he still faced serious danger from her.

How to deal with uncertainty:

If you are not in a position of judgement or power, give all parties the benefit of the doubt -- accuser and accused -- and show compassion. Especially if they are personally right in front of you.

If you are in a position of judgement or power, like a reporter, a judge, a prosecutor, or a juror; then use a fair and impartial process.

The evidence that any particular accusation was accurate was very thin.

Perhaps more importantly, the accusations were impossible to defend against.

None of this means the events didn't happen. They might have. But the process was fundamentally unfair, and we need a better way to deal with uncertainty.

Lining up on party lines -- a kind of "vote for the truth" -- is ridiculously unfair to the accused. We need to agree on a process, including standards of evidence. When that process plays out, we should be able to basically come together on the outcome.

True in the sense that it creates a "floor" for the depths to which people might sink. But this process can still sink pretty low.

Consider how women couldn't vote in the US until 1919 -- a half century after blacks.

And a more modern example that was on display for all to see: the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh. There were not a lot of facts available -- no date, no place, no witness that could remember. Yet millions were ready to brand him a rapist to the whole nation and pressure him out of political office.

You claim there is no legal obligation. But when it starts to look like an end-run around the First Amendment, the courts will intervene.

I don't see the point of talking about the $23T number, which doesn't account for unfunded liabilities.

I guess the thinking goes that we can it's easier to renegotiate social security and medicare benefits than to renegotiate the interest payments on a bond. Not sure that's true -- it seems like inflation is the only reasonable solution to either of those problems.

Why do you think this is limited to fearing other nations?

Say the word "drugs" or the word "guns" and watch the people rush to throw the Bill of Rights away.

I think a lot of people miss that federalizing things creates a monopoly, and it's less different from a private monopoly than we might like to think.

It is a democratic monopoly, but democracy among 300+ million people is a big hammer. Do you really, actually think that this will be a well-run service where mistakes are quickly corrected?

No. It will just be an extra layer of protection for any mistakes that are made. At least private companies have to fear the government at some level... who does the federal government fear when it does somethihn unfair? The voter? Hah.

That's ambiguous about whether demand for all AR-15s is down, or just for Colt's AR-15. Seems like just Colt's, which means this doesn't seem to matter a lot.

What is the real significance here? They are a single manufacturer of a standardized style.

Is this part of a trend of lower sales? Some kind of non-business motivation (politics, pressure, etc.)? Or just a business with a product that doesn't compete?

I'm not sure there's a lot of intellectual content here either. The AR-15 itself isn't much different from other rifles except it looks scarier. Which is largely because it's made of modern, mass-producible materials rather than wood.

"But a resource and its endpoint can be thought of as the same thing, in that the endpoint is the resource's canonical URI."

After reading your description, "a resource is an endpoint" still seems wrong. Perhaps just lazy, but laziness in technical docs gets confusing fast.

Yikes, tough crowd.

Quantum computers are a kind of "because it's hard" problem. Some useful discoveries might come out of it by accident even if quantum computers never become practical.

And, uh, it's not your money, nor is it mine, so why complain? In the grand universe of wasted resources, quantum computers are probably not where I'd begin making cuts.