Randgalt

"you'd never get a super majority to agree to such a stupid bigoted rule and it conflicts with other parts of the constitution" - oh really? Please open a US history book.

"You can't divine rights out of some fundamental logic" - of course you can. This is the role of philosophy.

How can you logically have a right to the services of someone else? Health care is a product - doctors, hospitals, medicine, etc. These must all be produced by people.

"Do you have an example in mind of when and where we've come especially close to this ideal?" The USA of course - though it's quickly moving away. Hong Kong (though China is ruining it). England before the Fabians took over. Japan after the war. There are many others.

"I'm having trouble figuring out how this doesn't still boil down to people making judgement calls on what is and isn't a right" - at the end of the day we're ruled by people. But, there should be a standard by which decisions are made other than "whatever the majority decides".

It depends where you live. I know many Canadians who've had different experiences. This points to a major problem with socialized products - how they perform depend not on merit or ability to pay, but where you live, how good your representative is, etc. That is much worse.

"What is the alternative?" - a system of rights based on the nature of human beings. Human beings survive by producing the things we need to survive. We need governments to protect others from initiating force against us in opposition to our primary needs of living.

Will we ever see this in reality? No. But, the closer humans have gotten in history the better off they've been.

So, if the majority votes to take away the rights of, oh I don't know, Japanese citizens -- that's a world you want to live in? You're not thinking clearly about the issue.

"'Rights' are basically just freedoms we've decided we like a whole lot and want the government to guarantee" - as I said below, the logical conclusion of that argument is not a world you'd want to live in. -- "is there any such thing as a government that does not force people to do things they wouldn't voluntarily do?" - no there isn't. That's why it should be limited to protecting other people's rights.

"The purpose of government is about whatever the governed of the current day decide that purpose is" - I believe you can see that the logical conclusion of that point of view is not a world you'd want to live in. In the US, at least, we have a Constitution that prevents the worst uses of government (though not as much as it used to).

That's an excellent point. Medicare and SSI are equally bad programs that should be phased out.

Where's your evidence that most private school is paid for by rich people? Anecdotally, the people that I know that use private schools are middle class. Also, if there weren't public schools there would be more varieties of private schools.

"As a healthy person I'd rather take a two percent annual increase in insurance premiums for lower quality of care since I do not have much need for services." -- And I wouldn't. Why do your views trump others who disagree?

1. Try getting an MRI in Canada. Canada rations care via wait lists.

2. Your argument implies that there wouldn't be low cost schools in the absence of public schools. The evidence is overwhelming that the opposite is true.

3. I live in Panama. When I need something mailed here I use FedEx or DHL. The USPS is unreliable and takes far too long. If there weren't laws against private first class mail in the US they'd be undercut in that market as well.

The purpose of government is not to require the most efficient option. Government isn't capable of it anyway. Government is force - nothing more. The purpose of government is to protect our rights. "Single payer" (a euphemism for socialized medicine) by definition violates rights by forcing people to do things against their will. For example, in Canada (until recently) people were prohibited from using private health care even if they want to.

The health systems in Europe are not radically different from the US system. The efficiencies of each are difficult to quantify without context. For example, the US invents most of the drugs and medical technology used by the world. Would this still happen if there was more invasive regulation? We can't know.

Besides all of this, think of every other area of the market where the government insinuates itself. Are public schools better than private schools? Almost never. Is the US postal system better than FedEx? Of course not. The government is not a commercial entity. The incentives and influences on it are not conducive to producing quality products at good prices.

That's a fair point. Ant's XML usage is closer to a DSL than not. But, it's still much simpler than the various Gradle DSLs I've seen.

My view on the subject, FWIW: https://rule1.quora.com/Use-Maven-Not-Gradle

I'm actually a bit worried about this. Function keys had better be "functional". :D

Developers use Function keys - yes.

Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world and they still failed. That's a special kind of insanity.

Failed at what exactly? Killing people? Various forms of Socialism are responsible for approx 100 million deaths in the 20th Century. Capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than any other system in human history. After all, Capitalist countries have to build walls to keep people out while extreme Socialist countries build walls to keep them in.

Socialism - the plague that keeps on killing. They'll keep trying it until they kill everyone. I remember when hipsters were praising Chavez's miracle. Where's Sean Penn now? Disgusting.

I assume there's a Java API for etcd? If so, it would be interesting to try to port Curator.

Are there high level APIs for etcd like there are for ZooKeeper? I'm the main author of Apache Curator and I know that writing "recipes" is not trivial.

ZK is zab - similar to Paxos but not Paxos

etcd is a key value store that has features of ZK. ZooKeeper is strictly distributed coordination. Apples and oranges, no?

I had a number of problems doing it - which took about 3-4 weeks:

* Erasure/generics - it's a huge burden working around this * Scala documentation - trying to understand how Scala does things is very difficult. You can find tutorials and such but getting a true reference is hard. * Trial and Error - what I ended up with is pretty simple but I tried much more complicated things to try and work around missing functionality in Java. In the end, I compromised.

Javascript is fine. It's the fact that the ecosystem changes every few months and devs post things like "look how ridiculous this old way of doing things is" when the old way was just last year (or 6 months ago) when _it_ was the new hotness.

The real joke is how screwed up client side programming is. Here's a library that's an insider/hipster joke but it's only obviously a joke to hipster/insiders.

Most likely Bearer Shares: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bearer_share.asp