cderwin

> because far too many people vote against their own interest

You don't get to decide what other people's interests are, and you certainly cannot make an empirical case that the interests of all individuals would be better served by voting one way or the other. This sort of reductionism and failure to interact with people you disagree with in good faith ought to have no place on a professional forum like this.

HR Block is free if you just file a 1040, the "professional" version is $40. If you're paying $100, either you are seeing a tax professional in person or you are vastly overpaying. Presumably you would only meet with a tax professional if your situation is significantly more complicated than most.

Development tools often are, but almost never exclusively using ruby gems and it's certainly not a universal practice. ANd of course non-dev tools can't be distributed this way.

Sure it is.

If you (or anybody else) wants to count casualties, approximately 8 million Chinese dies in the Chinese Civil Wars. Surely the life of a Vietnamese person is not more valuable to America than a life of a Chinese person is to China.

And we also ought to include the lives of the between 15 and 45 million who starved to death in Mao's "Great Leap Forward."

It is also worth noting that China was largest foreign backer of North Vietnam, providing "both financial aid and the deployment of hundreds of thousands of military personnel in support roles" (quote from wikipedia), so it is untrue to say that the United States in uniquely culpable for the war's casualties.

Not parent, but it seems irresponsible to call someone that is ignorant about the domestic policies of a country half the world away "dangerous." It's not dangerous until national policy is based on that ignorance, which is several as of yet uncrossed bridges farther than even a majority of Americans being ignorant of Chinese domestic policy.

That said, parent is just as wrong to call the original comment "dangerous" as well.

Why would you think that any particularly intrusive forced medical practive is ethical? Is such a policy really all that much more acceptable than mandating abortions?

There is good and bad, but you certainly must be blind if you think the progress of technology has been relatively stagnant since the introduction of unix. Just a couple things that come to mind:

* The internet (early 90s)

* Wireless networking (early 2000s)

* Highly portable, small, and lightweight computers (early 2010s)

and all the software that supports them. These "follow-up systems" are certainnly better than their predecessors, and there are literally countless more examples (no, everything shouldn't be written in asm and c).

It certainly ought to be uncontroversial to suggest that the general arc of progress tends upward, and that software is no exception. That has been a constant refrain for millenia.

Saying that they lacked imagination is diminuitive and self-serving but certainly we can do better than those who came before us, and those who come after us will do better than us.

You're right that non-scientific pressures existing isn't sufficient to support the position that scientific research is inaccurate. However, it certainly is solid ground for exercising a bit of skepticism about scientific research -- particularly when it is well documented that the political distribution of scientists does not reflect that of the greater population and the scientific issue at hand has become political.

Moreover, there seems to be a knee-jerk reaction among non-experts to discredit this skepticism as being "anti-science" or being the work of climate-change "deniers." For example, see here[0]. The commenter laments that non-experts might suggest a criticism of peer-reviewed work without being an expert themselves on that criticism. He or she even accuses them of arguing in bad faith ("They'll put on all the plumage of reasonable dissent") and suggests that anyone who has not undergone the rigor of peer review is not qualified to have an opinion ("peer review or STFU"). I fear that if there were valid criticism to be heard, it would at best only fall on deaf ears.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13739382

I think the problem is that the introduction of the p-adic metric was poorly motivated. It's not clear why we would want 1+p+p^2+p^3+... to converge to -1, and introducing the p-adic metric to do so doesn't show why the p-adic numbers are useful in general (all it's really saying is that the partial sums are 2^(n+1)-1). I'm sure you can derive all sorts of weird metrics so that various weird identities are true; that alone fails to make them interesting. Based on this video alone it's not clear that either the identity or the p-adic norm are interesting in any non-trivial sense of the word.

The result is that the introduction of the p-adic metric is hard to follow and the resulting identity seems arbitrary, even if you manage to follow the bit about the metric.

(And these combined with a lack of rigor where it's needed seem to be recurring problems in 3Blue1Brown videos.)

Perhaps it's internal tooling/libraries? I wouldn't be surprised if derivatives of projects from back then were used in more recent games.

This case already happened, specifically in reference to immigration, 70 years ago: see Knauff v. Shaughnessy[0] (1950).

> The exclusion of aliens is a fundamental act of sovereignty. The right to do so stems not alone from legislative power, but is inherent in the executive power to control the foreign affairs of the nation. When Congress prescribes a procedure concerning the admissibility of aliens, it is not dealing alone with a legislative power. It is implementing an inherent executive power.

[0]: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/338/537/

I definitely wouldn't say gitlab is slow in the empirical sense, but browsing repos is definitely a bit more sluggish than github. Maybe it's just more noticeable since it's an SPA.

I say that as a someone who uses gitlab for all of my personal projects.

Presumably America? Almost everyone I know regularly eats dinner between 5:30 and 7:30.

Is LaTeX actually impressive to the average business client (i.e. someone without technical knowledge)?

I would wager a solid 3 minutes.

It's a significant possibility that Github the company will die, but github the site will not, at least not immediately. For example, github could be bought, in which case there would be no immediate reason to think the site would cease to exist immediately. On the other hand, I find it hard to imagine that github the company could fail (i.e. die off) without github the site becoming extraordinarily less popular, in which case we shouldn't really care if github the site is still around. Of course there's also the option that code hosting becomes an inherently unprofitable business, in which case we're sort of screwed all around.

Trying to figure out which of these scenarios (or a different one!) is going to happen sure looks like optimizing prematurely to me, in particular so long as there does exist some fashion of a backup repository.

It is most certainly not contradictory. For example, one could make the argument that the allied effort against the Nazis in WWII was tantamount to "saving the world", yet the allied forces certainly didn't treat everyone in the most humane way possible -- see Japanese internment in the US, or the presumable "war crimes" that Allied forces committed in WWII. Yet that doesn't mean Allied forces weren't capable of destroying the Axis, which obviously is what happened.

A similar argument could be made about the Cold War and McCarthyism. It is simply nonsensical to mistake the goal of "saving the world" with the goal of "don't ever treat anyone slightly questionably ever again".

I don't think this is true.

Of course, most students do just memorize equations and follow orders. But in my experience the most successful students are always the ones who understand the material on a fundamental level and memorize very little (on some level, memorization is all but required by even the best).

Honestly I don't think you'd see a partisan ruling on this. There is an originalist argument that Congress has no power to regulate immigration and that it is the sole duty of the executive, but there are myriad ways the justices could get around that if they so desired. I'm no expert on the court, but I would imagine it would break 6-2 or better against the EO.

In that case, no injunction would be necessary. The orders would be utterly powerless if they relied upon bits that the court previously found unconstitutional.

Those orders would not hold an legal water. Any court that saw them would throw them out on precedent.

As an equivalent example of this, if the court rules a particular law unconstitutional and congress passes the same law under a different name, that law would be utterly powerless as well. In general, Changing the name of something doesn't change its legality.

Moreover, because this strike was inherently political, should taxi drivers who actually support the immigration EO (or at least don't feel compelled to protest) be forced to partake in the strike? That sounds like an utterly indefensible position to me.

It's lonely to consider the other side these days. Dare to consider Trump's side? You're a fascist. Dare to consider the progressive side? You're a communist. It's no wonder nobody does it anymore.

To be clear, Uber did not break the strike. Uber drivers, who apparently did not feel compelled to take part in the strike, broke it. Strikes are not composed of companies, they are composed of workers. Would you expect Uber to have refused to let its drivers operate (against their will) during the taxi strike? That's absurd on its face.

It's important to remember that no part of the order has been deemed illegal yet. The NY court just granted a stay so that people affected would be able to proceed with the case on American soil.

Executive. It is part of the Department of Justice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Marshals_Service

Such an injunction would be without any basis in law whatsoever, the constitution instructs the President to "take care that laws be faithfully executed". Individual executive orders need to have their own constitutional reasoning, but since executive orders are really the means by which the president fulfills that clause, a court could not prohibit them altogether.

It certainly would not get to the Supreme Court unless a lower court ruled against Trump and Trump decided to appeal. However, that's probably the most likely scenario anyway.

I don't personally know anything about Uber, but I would be very surprised if it wasn't against company policy to provide such a figure (if it's even internally available) given the divisive and intense political climate that Uber operates in.