hackyhacky

I never said that you can't disagree with him. I said you can't defy him.

You have a right to your opinion. You don't have a right to apply your interpretation of doctrine in place of the Holy See's. That's heresy.

If you're a Catholic, then the choice of interpretation is clear: you must accept the Pope's interpretation. That's what it means to be Catholic. The Pope is God's representative on Earth. To defy him is to defy God.

The alternative would be to declare him a False Pope and to select an alternative divine representative. Of course, that would make you a heretic. If you ditch the pope as soon as he says something you don't like, you're not much of a Catholic. The Church is not a democracy.

As I pointed out above, that's not the API that would be exposed in an actor model. See in particular the timestamp-based update condition, if you're principally concerned with end-user-caused races.

Less relevant, but message queues in Erlang and related languages are typically in-memory, no DB transaction required.

No, this is an article about immutable thespians.

> You wouldn't implement the "plus 2" program in an actor system this way, because of race conditions.

Can you explain how a serially-executed "increment" message in an actor system, as I've described above, would cause a race condition?

In an OOP system you could do the same, you'd just have to build the thread-safe message queue yourself. In actor languages it's built in.

There are cases where you can get race conditions in actor languages, but I'm pretty sure this isn't one.

That's not how you would implement mutating messages in an actor system. Instead you could do either of these:

* Have an "increment" message that adds n to the current value and returns the old value.

* Have separate "read" and "write" messages, where the "write" message is parameterized by a timestamp returned by the "read" message. If the owner detects that the timestamp sent by the write is older than the most recent timestamp, it's rejected.

Because messages are handled serially, it's easy and safe to create messages that behave sanely event without explicit locks.

The key feature of Erlang-style actors is that messages are enqueued and processed serially, thus eliminating race conditions of this type.

Your pointless cynicism (about a man who turned down many opportunities to make money) is not instructive about the question of whether or not his work is "Catholic."

Then you aren't trying very hard or (more likely) pretending to not know history.

Every feudalist society began with the accumulation of capital. That's what land ownership is. It happened in mainland Europe and Britain, it happened in Russia, it happened in Japan. Any society with land-owning "lords".

How do you think they got to be lords? Hard work?

How much of this is AI-generated?

Your juvenile insult is not appropriate here.

The world population has been increasing steadily and shows no sign of slowing down.

The dog whistle in question is the inordinate concern that certain groups show for the population of the "western world" specifically, which is not-so-secret code for white babies specifically.

Correct. All language is subjective, but not all language is equally subjective.

> Tolkien was a devout Catholic.

There are many Catholic authors. Not everything they write is necessarily a "Catholic work."

> The ring is a metaphor for sin.

You are welcome to your Catholic interpretation of his work, but Tolkien himself famously said that "There is no 'symbolism' or conscious allegory in my story."

As a piece of symbolism, the ring doesn't make any sense. Is he saying that elves helped make sin? And that it can be destroyed in a volcano? In context, it's incoherent and inconsistent with Catholic dogma.

Even if we buy your view that the ring is a symbol for sin, that hardly makes it specifically Catholic. Many religions have a concept of sin, including other branches of Christianity.

If you were to make a case that LOTR is a Catholic work (not an Evangelical, or Lutheran, or Hindu, or Jewish work) you would need to include some specifically Catholic references, such as that scene where the Orcs worship Sauron's mother. (/s)

> Many of his arguments are summarized in this interview: https://youtu.be/HKqvCRc0wWU?si=CPY3SpvRsZ_ZK-Tw

I was excited until I realized that the interview is not with Tolkien, but with some random bozo pushing a religious-nationalist agenda. What makes his interpretation of Tolkien's work more valid than that of Tolkien himself?

Also, you did say that it's not unusual for popes to cite Tolkien. I'm still waiting for your supporting evidence in this matter.

Yes, but no one is really complaining about "not enough kids." They are complaining about not enough kids of their preferred skin tone. So they see immigration as an exacerbation.

Feudalism is the end-state of capitalism, as I've already commented: it is the consequence of all capital (typically, arable land) ending in the hands of a select few (lords), who then derive income by renting it out (tenant farmer system). As a result, the lords themselves never contribute labor and exist only as parasites on a system dependent on laborers who have no opportunity to acquire capital.

Until recently, gambling was illegal in most of the United States.

> What price will Bitcoin hit in May?

Quick reminder that POTUS has power to strongly influence Bitcoin price [1]

> SpaceX IPO closing market cap above ___ ?

Quick reminder that SpaceX gets most of its money from the US government [2]

To say nothing of oil and other commodities affected by war [3]

In short, an insider is literally anyone who knows what the president is going to say tomorrow.

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/04/20/five-times-presi...

[2] https://spacenews.com/spacex-wins-2-29-billion-space-force-c...

[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/betting-on-iran-war-insider-tra...

> The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally Catholic work

That's a bit of a stretch. I've read the whole thing and I can't recall any mention of Christianity at all.

> So it is not unusual for an English-speaking Pope to quote from it.

Interesting. How many other popes have quoted Lord of the Rings in an Encyclical Letter?

> “Filled with immigrants” will always be a subjective term.

An encyclopedia is no place for subjectivity. [1]

> Canadian residents,

I don't care. I'm not here to discuss immigration. We're talking about Wikipedia and its standards. You can like immigration or be against it, but it's not Wikipedia's job to allow you to express your opinion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Ali Khamenei was recently murdered, at a price tag of several tens of billions of dollars, so far. His more radical son now occupies his former position. As a result, is the world a better place?

> you can’t say some politician filled a country with immigrants from the third world.

You can absolutely say that, if it's true. As it stands, I don't know of country "filled with immigrants", so it's possible your edits are getting revoked for being incendiary hyperbole.

I'm also not aware of any politician described as racist in the first paragraph of their article. Can you indicate who you have in mind?

More realistically, controversies about racism and immigration are likely to be mentioned in a section of the given article, not in the first paragraph. That strikes me as a very fair way to handle it, which conveniently disarms accusations of bias against Wikipedia.

You've been so busy straw manning with the ridiculous and unstated claim that journalists are the "most moral form of human being" that you have conspicuously failed to answer my question.

Which is more likely: CNN commits murder to increase viewership; or any one of billions of people commits murder to win a bet?

I honestly cannot fathom the relevance of your comment. Can you please explain how any of that relates to a discussion of the value of capitalism?

> Since Marxism never works, there's something definitely wrong with the tenets.

Are you familiar with the idea of a thought-terminating cliche [1]?

You have given yourself permission to ignore everything associated with Marxism because you've been taught that it's "wrong." If you actually thought about your statement, you'd realize that you are quasi-intentionally dismissing ideas without consideration.

1. What does it mean for Marxism to have been "tried"? Do you consider the Soviet Union to be Marxist? I don't.

2. Even if Marxism had been "tried" and failed, so what? Do we dismiss capitalism because of failed capitalist states?

3. Even if Marxism in practice was futile, does that mean that very idea espoused by Marx is necessarily wrong? No, it does not. Newtonian physics is "wrong" in light of relativistics but there is still very much right about it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

> Before capital investment it was coercion,

Huh? You think that before investment, people didn't trade good and services of their own free will? You need to re-examine history. Commerce predates civilization.

If you think that slavery isn't needed under capitalism, how do you explain the extensive use of slavery under capitalism?

> Even under capitalism you can still volunteer, donate and create community orgs to build things

That's true, and is completely irrelevant to our conversation, because we're not discussing volunteering, we're talking about the distribution of profit. If there is no profit, there is nothing to distribute.

> Gambling is zero sum, so it does follow from your statement.

My statement was "long enough time line, all the money ends in very few hands." That has nothing to do with zero-sum. Even if we assume that your premise of "rich billionaires make everyone else richer too", it does nothing to contradict my statement.

> The rise of the wealthy in the 19th century corresponded with scores of millions of people rising out of poverty into the middle class and beyond.

The decrease in poverty in that time period stems principally from industrialized farming techniques, increasing available food resources. There is nothing in that process that requires super-billionaires.

> Creating value does not make the poor poorer.

That depends. If all the created value is in the hands of rich, it gives the rich the power to buy more things, including things that the poor people need, e.g. housing. That drives up prices for the poor, and effectively decreases their buying power. That's how supply and demand work.

> Consider the wealth in America today. Compare it with the wealth in America in 1800.

Now consider the wealth distribution in America now versus the wealth distribution in America 60 years ago. At that time, the difference between the rich and the poor was much smaller. It was also a time of great economic expansion, opportunity, and innovation. So clearly super-billioniares cannot be necessary for economic productivity.

> Capitalism creates wealth only when people are able to keep a decent amount of what they make. As a thought experiment, if you tax people at close to 100% under capitalism and "distribute" it to people that don't work, what do you think will happen?

That's one approach, but not the only one, to eliminating capitalism.

> Surely there is a disincentive to working hard as taxes approach high levels while resources are increasingly provided for free if one doesn't work. The Laffer curve and all that.

So in the US in the 1950s and 1960s, when the highest marginal tax rate was around 90%, did people suddenly stop working? Or did the US enter its highest period of productivity and income equality?

> As of 2013, two-thirds of Chinese graduates set their sights on a government position or a role at a major state-owned firm,