wtbob

But Ptolemy's formula's aren't completely wrong, either: they're actually very effective at predicting the movements of the planets and stars — just not good enough, it turns out, and rather more complex than they need to be.

> A good public schooling system is incredibly important for a functioning democracy, because a functioning democracy relies on a well educated citizenry.

A good schooling system is necessary, but must it be public?

> My child goes to daycare and it is infinitely more stimulating than anything we could do for her at home even if we've "given our best effort".

Is stimulation the most important thing in childrearing?

> What is the spouse who stays home supposed to do in ten years when the child is much more independent and at school or activities much of the day?

Volunteer? Find self-fulfillment in something other than a career?

Plus, I think you may be begging the question: while older children require less immediate attention than younger ones, they still require plenty of care. It just tends to be more planning and less direct interaction.

Plus, why do you assume only one kid? My mother spent more than a quarter-century with children at home. She certainly was never bored.

> And what are two spouses supposed to do when they both deeply enjoy their work and the value it brings them as individuals?

Maybe work from home? Ultimately, though, parents today must sacrifice for their children, just as parents have done for millennia. Kids aren't expensive status symbols: raising them well is a duty, not a lark.

How is that chilling? Were those ads false?

Swaying votes away from one's opponents is the definition of running for office.

Back in 2008 the Obama campaign ran a very successful information shop and was widely lauded for it; why is it now chilling when a different candidate does the same thing?

N.b.: I did not vote for President Trump.

> In this election, dark posts were used to try to suppress the African-American vote. According to Bloomberg, the Trump campaign sent ads reminding certain selected black voters of Hillary Clinton’s infamous “super predator” line. It targeted Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with messages about the Clinton Foundation’s troubles in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

How is this suppressing the vote? It's giving potential voters accurate information about your opponent. Frankly, how is it any different from Mr. Biden shouting, 'they're gonna put y'all back in chains!' — other than the former being true and probably in good taste?

N.b.: I did not vote for President Trump.

> "Making every contact count", a UK initiative to make sure that doctors[1] use every opportunity to promote smoking cessation, alcohol use reduction, weight loss, and other lifestyle adjustments.

Wow, that's truly the nanny state at work. I like tobacco, I enjoy smoking and I'm working on my weight. I hate it when I go to a physician's office and get offered the standard blurb about how smoking tobacco is apparently only slightly less lethal than mainlining cyanide with an arsenic chaser.

Frankly, that's a major reason why I don't bother going to see one. My body's working well enough, and while it'd be nice to know that my organs are in good condition, I don't want to deal with someone who doesn't respect me.

> Our Constitution spells out in very clear terms that blacks are to be considered 3/5th of a white man for the purposes of representation in Congress. If that term itself isn't an example of how wrong it is to be a strict textualist I don't know a better example.

No, it doesn't; it states, 'Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.'

It doesn't say a word about blacks or whites (although it does mention untaxed Indians).

And that clause no longer applies, because it was removed by a later amendment. So: a) the Constitution does not and never did say that blacks count as 3/5 of a person; and b) the clause not counting slaves and those serving life prison sentences for purposes of representation has been deleted.

> I wouldn't make the mistake of pretending that the Constitution is a perfect document.

Of course it's not perfect. It's a damn sight better than what we've got now though.

> To not beat a dead horse: every single decision made by the Supreme Court is effectively in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

> Any part of the Constitution can be interpreted, modified, or nullified by a decision of the Supreme Court.

Say what? I don't recall that the Constitution gives the Supreme Court the right to change or delete any part of itself. It does very clearly lay out how it can be amended — and the Supreme Court is not part of that.

Moreover, Supreme Court decisions really only set a precedent, which can of course be overturned by another decision at another time. They're just decisions in particular cases (although it's highly likely that courts will rule similarly in other cases).

Legislators write the law; executives execute it; judge apply the law to the facts of a case.

> But the bag was on my shoulder rather than on the floor by my feet so the dog just walked straight past me. There's a hack to remember.

I've been asked to take my bag off my shoulder so the dog could sniff it. I wouldn't recommend this 'hack' — seems too likely to fail.

Of course, that also means that you can only customise once.

I use separate Firefox profiles in order to have different add-on configurations, e.g. in my daily driver NoScript is set to whitelist mode, while in my special JavaScript-permitted profile it's in blacklist mode.

> For anything where I want to log in or have a persistent identity (stackoverflow, gmail, etc), I set up separate Chrome profiles and manually open each site in the appropriate profile.

FWIW, this is also doable in Firefox: try 'firefox --new-instance -ProfileManager'; you can also directly open up a new profile from the command line (and hence do the same from scripts, desktop entries, or whatever else your platform supports).

I have one profile for my finances, one with NoScript in blacklist mode, and then my normal profile.

> If you choose the first one, your client has to preserve spaces, tabs, linebreaks, and everything else byte-for-byte intact.

An email client which doesn't do that is broken; why would one use a primary email client which is broken?

(Yeah, it's a rhetorical question: I'm using an app client these days like everyone else, but I hate how broken it is)

I guess I should have mentioned that Lisp is my language of choice. I like the ease with which I can implement anything. But it does have a cost: everyone else implements everything himself, too.

I actually think Quicklisp has helped. It's even easier to do (ql:quickload "foo-lib") than it is to write my own foo library.

This illustrates the power & the problem of Common Lisp: the power is that it really is easy to add channels (and pretty much every other feature) to the language yourself; the problem is that it's generally easier to write your own code to do this than to use (or fix …) someone else's.

I've experienced exactly this: I too looked at ChanL. In my case it had a bug for one of my use cases, and it was honestly easier to roll my own channels (with, of course, their own bugs) than to understand & fix ChanL's bug.

The problem is that this leads to a proliferation of different libraries, all doing similar things. The power is that one really can write just about anything, and it will work well enough for your use case.

> But lurking behind every statement was an existential dread that Donald Trump would either pull the plug on one of the great achievements of the last eight years, or worse — he might order the best and brightest to work on projects that violated their moral codes.

Certainly there are other people who have had the same concern that President Obama, Mr. Bush, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Reagan, Mr. Carter and so on all the way back to Mr. Washington would order them to work on projects which violate their moral codes?

For that matter, surely any employee must have at least some concern that his employer will order him to do something unethical?

I think we're talking about after-tax money; unless you live somewhere that has a wealth tax, once you've paid all your taxes on income (wages or capital) then you're free and clear.

That right there is genius! I'm adding it to my .sig file.

> while the increasing dominance of sophisticated traders begs the question of how long the juiciest arbitrage opportunities will last.

Raises the question, not begs it. Begging the question would be to say, 'Bitcoin always generates profit, therefor it will always generate a profit.' Begging the question is assuming the consequent of the argument; raising a question is, well … raising one.

This is pretty deep, and pretty smart, since it deals with the things a firm is about: its customers, what it gives those customers, and itself.

One could do worse than to consider those three areas in any decision.

> Consider being able to take a couple years to try a business without freaking out about health insurance.

Trying a business in a much more challenging business environment? There's not exactly a plethora of French tech startups, after all, despite the state health care.

> Consider being able to go get a PhD in some interesting subject without having to get a full scholarship.

Will universities accept some random fellow in his 30s who wants to earn a Ph.D.?

They could, for example, sign the new cert with the old one.

> We all kind of know that we're well beyond sheer domination of all things earthly and bestial. There's not much to revel in, and it's not valuable to teach your children to revel in such displays.

I certainly don't know that, and I do think it's valuable to teach a child to how to wisely and kindly exercise authority over the world and the animals in it. Were circuses a vehicle for doing that? I don't really know — it's been decades since I've seen one, and I can't remember any of it now.

If you have to revisit your projects to ensure that they work properly, then you wrote them improperly in the first place.

> Second hand smoking puts others in risk too.

No, no it does not. So-called 'second-hand smoke' (a genius marketing term for smoke) is no more harmful than any other smoke. It is, however, a wonderful excuse for the sort of people who like controlling other people to … control other people.

Of course, a vehicle can still go around those road blocks, currently — a car _can_ drive across grass or dirt, just not terribly well. That's very different from an area-denial killswitch.

Yeah, I think we can ensure that V2V receivers receive what transmitters transmit. What worries me is that the transmitters will lie. How difficult would it be for someone with a high-power transmitter — or many high-power transmitters — to drown out legitimate signals and present a false picture to receivers?

Could an anti-social person cause a bunch of cars to crash for kicks? Could someone with an axe to grind cause a bunch of cars to crash in order to further his goals?

My experience with Perl was that me-a-week-ago counts as someone else. That's not flippant — it's an accurate reflection of my experience that Perl tends to be write-only.

There are some people who do write beautiful Perl, but they are few and far between (again, in my experience).

Thanks, all I see is 'Please turn JavaScript on and reload the page,' which makes me want to comment, 'the web is dead, and we killed it' — but that's not fair.

I don't know about that. Nearly every adult American drives nearly every day of his life, and only about 30,000 die each year. That's still too high, of course, and I look forward to autonomous cars, but it does mean that while many of us know of folks who've been in fatal accidents the vast, vast majority of us won't.

> I'm worried that if I started using Emacs, I'd start hacking the Elisp (which I'd be terribly good at), and hate the lack of lexical scope, etc.

emacs has lexical scope these days:-)

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LexicalBinding

elisp still isn't nearly as good as Common Lisp, but it at least has lexical scope now.