You are missing the key quality for which industrial scale produce has been selectively bred over the past century: shippability. The ability to be placed in a box and moved thousands of miles without falling apart is the paramount quality of mass produced produce. Go to a farmer's market, be anything but delicate with a large heirloom tomato and you will understand what I mean.
Since growing myself, I have found a whole new appreciation for vegetables. For all these reasons the stuff you buy in the shop can never be as good (at a reasonable price anyway). It takes very little expertise to grow vegetables yourself, that are better than 90% of the stuff you can buy in the shops.
Rust has support for both of these, though the arithmetic overflows are effectively opt-in. Rust does define exactly what happens in overflow situations, and allows you to use different functions for controlling overflow options in others.
It's a little glib, but Python 3 (and Ruby, I believe) both has checked array access and vacuously has overflow checking given integers can't overflow (by default).
Seems to be at runtime so, so almost every language for bounds checking.
Overflow checking is a bit more rare:
* Swift has it by default (error)
* So do Python, Ruby, Erlang (promotion to arbitrary precision)
* C# has an optional Checked Context though I don't know how common it is
* Rust has checked operations (opt-in, both error and saturating), will check (error) by default in debug mode, it can optionally check (error) in release mode
The big difference here is that states can simply buy access to, e.g., a Cisco Nexus and attack it from inside and out until they find a vulnerability in NX-OS, let's say, a malformed CLI-via-HTTP call.
Whereas, what software does a Google switch even run? What's the architecture, the APIs? You basically need someone inside Google, or for one of these things to fall off a truck. Way more involved and expensive than the 10k you might spend on a Nexus to throw it your lab and set your hackers on it.
Actually, Google has published papers and have presented talks (many of which are available on Youtube) on the type of gear they have developed. I don't know what their latest versions are, but recently they were using OpenFlow style infrastructure to provided fine-grained control (security, balancing, analysis) over flows through out their network. OpenFlow style constructs also provide a micro-segmentation style control (ie distributed firewall) over ingress/egress of traffic at the individual container/vm port level.
Slightly away from topic, but my new burn is "this is so web 2.0." Because that was like 10 years ago. Personally, I think AWS feels pretty "now" with UX only a developer could love (said as a sometime developer).
This is technically true, which is the best kind of true. Swap in nationalist, chauvinist. It's utterly clear what was meant by racism above, in spite of your semantics.
I want to write and name a macro after you! Anytime I want, I can just append -obe or -ist to any word in any document I'm writing...regardless of context or meaning! As a bonus, it will recognize file-extension-neutral files (all 822 of them!).
Yes we understand, racist is the liberal catch all for anyone you disagree with. The problem is that it dilutes the value of the word, so when someone deserves to be called racist, it people don't know if they really are racist, or are just opposed to outsourcing jobs.
Racist is the laziest argument ever and it's diluting the word. If people were more accurate about describing problems, their criticisms wouldn't be dismissed to easily.
A perfect example is Donald Trump. Every argument about Trump became "he's a racist!!11", which caused people to ignore and focus on the wrong problems with him! There was a lot of negatives to Trump, and yet everyone just said "Racist, boom I don't need to argue any more!"
People started ignoring completely legit arguments because the racist angle was so overplayed. I'm sick of hearing racist as the end-all be-all argument. It doesn't work anymore, the card is overplayed. The only place it still works is in liberal bubbles. (Note I'm socially liberal, fiscal conservative moderate, no dog in this race)
That's true. That's why there's also the umbrella term, "bigoted", when referring to bias stemming from ignorant prejudice. The watering down of "racist" to equal all forms of bigot is indeed a problem, and you have brought up a valid concern.
Most reasonably popular languages will have platform-independent open source read-write libraries for Excel. I've used the Python version of this with minimal pain.
Prove it. Let's see some tax returns. In the absence of evidence, it is reasonable to assume that he is heavily in debt with no liquid assets and effectively poor.
He paid a 7 dollar boy scout fee for his son from his "charity."
His personal plane is a 757, and his office is in his own skyscraper...
He obviously has a lot of wealth. How much is liquid isn't really relevant, his 'income' isn't relevant, with the ultra-rich all that really ever matters is 'net worth'.
You think someone in debt would be smart enough to prod half the country as sheep into voting for him? Ha. America got trolled and was given the middle finger. We get it, you're upset. But listen to what the Democrat thought leaders are saying: stop dividing the country with your continued rhetoric in your comment.
- Software engineer at Google in Mountain View, California
Trump has been bankrupt four times and relies heavily on debt to finance his real estate ventures. It's well documented that he took on hundreds of millions of debt in the form of "junk bonds" (so called because of the high risk of default and the resulting high interest rate - 14%) in order to pay for his casinos in Atlantic city, for example. He defaulted on many of those obligations, in some cases ultimately paying only pennies on the dollar. This is what Trump is talking about when he says things like "I love debt." Because of some tax loopholes for real estate investors that existed at the time (they were closed in the 90's under Clinton, actually), he was also allowed to claim the losses as his own, rather than those of his creditors - that's how he managed to claim nearly a $1 billion net operating loss in a single year.
Piecing together information from his financial disclosures (total revenue) and leaked documents (revenue net expenses), it appears at least one of his properties in NY has been modestly successful in recent years - but that property had well below $5 million in profit in 2014 and was losing money before that. We know nothing at all about his personal obligations to creditors. That lack of information, along with his refusal to release his tax returns, is what has lead to so much speculation about what may be in those returns.
> Several of Trump's corporations have been bankrupt 4 times...
FTFY.
> relies heavily on debt to finance his real estate ventures
Real estate has high start-up costs but holds lots of value. Debt is the perfect vehicle to finance real estate, ever wonder why most people take out mortgages to buy homes, but give up equity to fund tech start-ups? You use the investment vehicle that makes sense for the type of business.
> It's well documented that he took on hundreds of millions of debt in the form of "junk bonds" (so called because of the high risk of default and the resulting high interest rate - 14%) in order to pay for his casinos in Atlantic city, for example.
Of course, casinos are high risk. Bond rates depend on risk. Also, most business debt requires a higher rate than say, sovereign debt.
> it appears at least one of his properties in NY has been modestly successful in recent years - but that property had well below $5 million in profit in 2014 and was losing money before that.
And? With real estate you don't need profit, you just need to build equity.
Tl;dr: Real estate isn't like other businesses, it has its own set of rules, accounting and financial practices, etc... Just like tech companies are different from factories which are different from restaurants, real estate is (gasp) different...
I was responding to the parent comment which claimed Trump was unlikely to be in debt. I don't think I criticized the use of debt as an investment vehicle for real estate, per se - my goal was to lay out a few facts about Trump's past business practices and the reasons why people are interested in his tax returns and concerned about possible conflicts of interest. You're right that debt is an excellent vehicle for real estate investment. I have a mortgage - it would be pretty hypocritical of me to disagree.
The vehicle for the conflict of interest isn't what's interesting. I would still be concerned if a tech founder with a bunch of unknown private investors were to be elected to public office. More concerned if that founder refused to release any information about those investors, the amounts invested, or cap table. Even more concerned if that founder refused to put their stake in the company in a blind trust.
Many of our laws and the powers we grant our public officials rely on the assumption that someone who is in high public office got there for reasons other than to enrich themselves. In Trump's case, he may have other motives, but he's flaunted historical precedent in not releasing his tax returns or even attempting to remove the appearance of conflict of interest. Whatever you think of Clinton's relationship to the Clinton Foundation, we have the data because it was all publicly disclosed. We know nothing about Trump.
I think if you give an unconscionable liar a megaphone and don't challenge him on his lies, he can get the poorly educated to buy into those lies. I also think that if you get told repeatedly that there's a terrorist threat just waiting to kill you and there are poor migrants waiting to take your money and your culture, that you might be inclined to just take that at face value after a while.
The onus is on him to stop inciting (and personally inflicting) violence against women, Muslims, Latinos, and more. That's what's dividing the country. I'm not going to rely on Democrats to lead any kind of thought until they grow a backbone.
Care to be specific? What do you consider to be "inciting violence"? Actual, explicit endorsement of violence; or just something interpreted as sexist/racism, that might then embolden people to commit these acts?
That's odd, what kind of decent conversations are based on fatuous speculation on facts that are a google search away?
I'd much rather have real conversation about politics, whether "The 100" is good TV, social issues, or just about anything really, than an argument about facts that could just be googled.
It's called having fun!! lighthearted mindless conversation. Joking. Laughing! Using our imaginations.
No arguments.
I'd rather do almost anything else than "talk politics." Especially with people who like "talking politics." Playing in traffic seems much more appealing.
I think there's a big benefit in finding out that you're often wrong. It's easy to look something up and go "yeah I knew that" when really it was just one of the things you thought might be true. Regularly seeing that what you were really, really sure about is actually completely wrong after having to try and justify what you're saying is wrong (e.g. that X was in film Y, etc). Similarly, realising you don't understand something too well when trying to explain it to someone else.
Also, mistakes and weird misconceptions form bits of jokes that grow and change over time.
Ah, I see. I have lots of discussions that are fun, light hearted and meaningless. They just are rarely based on speculation on fundamental facts that could be googled.
There seems to be a lot of reaction to "talking politics". Maybe my perspective is coloured by being Canadian and living where the politics aren't so polarized and gamed?
The interesting part of the conversation are the arguments (not the debate, but the specific chains of reasoning people present to support their belief about the correct answer.)
Also, the tangents that are spawned based both on some.of the specific answers people propose and elements of the arguments for those answers.
I'd rather talk about literally nothing than have another political conversation where I am either preaching to the converted or shouting at a stone wall.
"But our engineering strength is also our social weakness. Countless times as engineers you will find yourself interrupting someone telling a story, an anecdote or a joke to correct a false assumption, provide an extra fact that the narrator overlooked, give a bigger perspective on the problem or point out that the joke premise is actually flawed.
You can identify this behavior because the person interrupting usually starts with the phrase "Well, actually...".
As a kid, I thought this was my strength. I knew a little bit more than my sister. So whenever she would say something, I would quickly interject something like "Well, actually, the origin of the word Shih Tzu means Lion Dog and has nothing to do with the dog's digestive patterns".
Yes, I was really fun to hang out with.
Whoever pulls a "well, actually" almost always shifts the conversation to himself. And now we are no longer following along with your friend's joke, we get to learn how much more you know about the limitations of the Sun Protection Factor scale in sunblock products.
Even the most rudimentary of the well-actuallistas is able to spoil even the best Ricky Gervais material.
But instead of rolling with the punches and participating in a brainstorm of ideas and exploding humor, they contribute interruptions, facts and details that merely produce stop energy on an ongoing discussion. They turn the center of attention towards them."
-----
Similar with "talking politics."
When people want to "talk politics" they usually really mean "Let me show you how right I am and how wrong you are if you disagree. Let me show you how smart I am."
But, what does ANY of this have to do with me? I learned to avoid (well, mostly avoid :-) the "well actually" trap almost two decades ago and have spent the intervening twenty years mentoring younger engineers out of that habit.
What I was actually responding to was the idea it was better to "speculate" about who played Snape, or why is the sky blue, or is vim BSD or GPL licensed rather than look it up.
I'd rather have conversations about Alan Rickman portrayal of Snape or what impact the sky being blue has on our emotional reactions to blue or why vim is clearly better than emacs.
Also, Canadians, in general, don't tend to discuss politics in that manner, at least not in mixed company. We have more political parties and our views are more fluid. I have, for example, voted for 4 different political parties in my life time at the federal level alone.
As an American, I find this attitude disturbing as well. It's like there's a cultural repulsion to talking about anything of consequence. And we wonder why US politics is in the state that it's in...
I dunno, I find Googling-enabled conversation to be just different, not necessarily better or worse then pre-Google convos. This might have more to do with me growing up with them though
(also, I misclicked the upvote button and downvoted you instead, sorry!)
I'm gen Oregon Trail as well, and I prefer fact-checking in conversation. It drives me nuts to see people run down a rabbit-hole for an hour over an obvious misconception. Online fact-checking doesn't really ruin conversations in my view, and it helps stop spread misinformation.
With people I know, that's usually the prompt to jump to a related topic. Long conversations tend to end up looking like collaborative Wikipedia link surfing.
Heh, are we embracing the "Oregon Trail generation" name then? This may be the first time I've seen a reference to it outside of a discussion of the group itself.
It's approximately 1978 though '82. Basically the last generation that has a living memory of the before time, but grew up riding the crest of the wave of everything that happened over the past 30 years, technologically.
Or, people who played Oregon Trail on Macs and Commodore 64s in grade school.
The dates don't match the description; from the (last, more specific) description, you'd need to drop back at least about 5, maybe closer to 10, years earlier on the start date for that "generation".
Really, just thinking of it as "members of Generation X with an early and lifelong interest in technology" would probably work better than trying to carve it out as a narrower subset of Gen X by age.
Meanwhile, the first really popular version of Oregon Trail came out in 1985[2].
Ultimately I just meant it as a jaunty shorthand for the intergenerational window in which I was born. If you were also born then and this does not jive with your experience, it's going to be okay, eventually.
It says something bad about us as a species if we can only enjoy a conversation when most or all of the participants are making large numbers of errors.
I don't think there's anything wrong with speculation. But if speculation is more interesting than actual knowledge about the same subject then I think there's something wrong with that.
You make a lot of sense...but I'm afraid I must run into the "wrong" category.
The thing is, the topic under question is usually pretty pointless (see "deceased" example above, or my musing about how the first time bread "raised" must have been freaky, or any such thing).
While learning a piece of trivia is _nice_, it's rarely as interesting as the act of speculation. Because I'm not really (all that) interested in the question at hand, I'm teaching myself (and regularly exercising the ability) to NOT KNOW, to DESIRE KNOWLEDGE, and to ACCEPT THAT SOME THINGS ARE BEYOND MY GRASP. It's good to find that somethings ARE in my grasp (answer someone gave about about "deceased" was the first time I've had that question answered!), but I get that lesson a lot in life.
When I wrestle with the "big" questions (What should I do with my life? Am I happy right now? Why did this terrible thing happen to me? Does existence care about me? Why do I care if it does?) some comfort with the unknowable is good. When I'm dealing lesser "big" questions (Am I actually good at this, or am I just faking it and haven't be caught yet? Am I an insensitive ass to people around me? Can I really buckle down and get this project completed? Why the heck do people vote for <INSERT POLITICIAN HERE>?) I likewise want to have experience with both being able get answer as well as NOT being able to get answers.
Learning is awesome. I love it. But I also need to be good at dealing with wanting to know, or dealing with being unable to know. Around me I see too many people of many ages that aren't interested in things they can't easily learn.
There's a deeply sarcastic culture of fake rules at my company, in which groove this fake rule fits precisely. Lunch time is generally understood as a time of bullshitting, conviviality and foosball. Every time we have to wait 30 seconds to find out, e.g., how many apple seeds you can eat without killing yourself, we are all richer for it.
To pick on one paragraph, it's not that the left thinks "The Market" is evil. It's neither good nor evil (amoral, not immoral), so it's irrational to count on it to be a force for good in the world.
Amorality in an economic system is a good thing. It means that participants impute their values within the institutional framework. An economic system actually designed to be "moral" (I can't think of anything other than Marxism-Leninism, everything else is hypothetical cost-the-limit-of-price, anti-usury, Social Credit and mutual aid arrangements) would be not only inflexible, but such a morality would necessarily emanate from a top-down institution that is immoral itself.
But are the values of the participants really the goals of a free market economy and what it leads to? I think absolutely not - it's earning as much money as possible.
The things we actually see as good are just side effects. Free market systems work well, seem fair most of the time and have lots of positive side effects. However they also have negative side effects and I don't think participants alone can really avoid them. There are some cases of executives later on regretting that they couldn't act in another way because they had to keep shareholder value in mind.
That's why we have regulation in our actual economic systems. Of course views on what has to be regulated and how widely differ, but this is where our morality comes into the economic system (and all the other rules that act as a counter-measurement for the cases where free market economy isn't working).
Profit maximization is one goal among market participants, though not the only one, since the market also encompasses modes of organization embarked on for communal and personal reasons as well.
Profits are a motivation to act, but they may be nonpecuniary and psychic. Nor is "earning money" the ultimate goal in any sense, insofar as holding nominal money balances as a store of value becomes intractable with greater capacity. Now, subpar monetary and financial arrangements may distort savings-investment decisions, but this is not an intrinsic market deficiency.
Regretting your decisions ex ante is inherent to humanity, not to economic systems.
Regulation is and has emerged endogenously. Guilds, unions, standards agencies and other quality assurance bodies arise without state action.
I'm not clear how that would be different to the top-down economy and moral pretensions of bankers and investors that we have now.
When phrases like "moral hazard" are used to describe gambling risk, "amoral" is hardly the most apt description of a system that actually tries to define social and political morality for the entire world of work and business.
The reality is that mainstream economics has always been more a branch of moral philosophy than of empirical science. It's a tool of persuasion that tries to propagate its values through rhetoric and the use of economic, political and physical force.
That's quite close to the usual definition of a priesthood. It's only "amoral" in the sense that the ethics of the priesthood are quite alien to those of many adult humans.
This is what I'm saying, only if you think unfettered free marketeering is an unalloyed good would you propose that the antithetical position is that the market is evil.
If I say I want restrictions on the market so that our planet is still liveable in 2100, I am not saying the market is evil. I'm merely stating my moral (in that there is a value judgment) position in contrast to the "free" market moral position. If I say that unfettered markets lead to evil, I'm merely contending with that value judgment, not whether there should a market in general. There's an incredible amount of space between a rampant libertarian market and Communism. It's childish to pretend otherwise.
>I'm not clear how that would be different to the top-down economy and moral pretensions of bankers and investors that we have now.
To be fair, the economy is both so heavily regulated and so stagnated that it barely counts as a free market anymore.
Part of the problem is that nobody is willing to fight the "priests", as you put it. Why try to beat those massive banks? They have far too much money for you to ever defeat them. But having that much money and nobody to make them work for it is precisely why we need new banks to compete with the old ones.
I disagree. Amorality in an economic system encourages things like Martin Shkreli, and ignoring externalities like pollution, making life worse for everyone else for the benefit of a few.
"Making life worse for everyone else for the benefit of a few" is the inevitable result of any policy that places upper bounds on consumer preferences and transaction opportunities in a market. It is the imposition of a morality that leads to fragility, since the morality in question is almost invariably in favor of the statesman and the businessman.
