iamatologist

This factoid keeps getting discovered in the comment sections on the Internet. I guess the Scandinavian centre-right think tanks have got some reach.

They are also quite pleased with how supposedly socialist America already is. It seems almost like a reverse psychology trick.

Freedom in this context always effectively means the freedom to make a profit. Are people getting addicted? Well who are you to infringe on the tobacco industry’s right to make a buck?

But after all the cigarette butts we don’t make a fuzz about the tobacco industry’s agency any more; they were just vessels for the lifestyle choices of the smokers.

Weed is still illegal in a lot of places. I guess because you can make less of a profit off of it compared to certain pharmaceuticals. Things are opening up though, perhaps in the US in particular.

Billionaires would absolutely not pay a lot in sales taxes, you are correct. Especially the sweatervest billionaires who are almost conspiciously frugal (at least in public). And even the ones who flaunt their wealth won’t buy one yacht for every day of the month or something ridiculous like that. Or terraform the Ghobi Desert in order to turn it into their own personal mega golf course.

I don’t understand why individuals make posts about grand topics like overhauling a whole tax system. It’s not like anyone is going to listen to them.

In any case. It seems to me that tax systems are complex (if they are) because you can use money (the thing that is ultimately being taxed) in order to get around regulation. If you can pay some people 10,000 USD in order to save yourself 200,000 USD, then obviously you are gonna want to do that. So then if you already have high wealth inequality you would have to device ever more clever schemes in order to truley tax the rich more than the poor.

So can you really create a simple tax system under these conditions?

I don’t know if overconsumption is really what should be disincentivized, if the author wants a good economy. It’s a consumption-driven economy. Does the “economy” want every household to get a vacuum cleaner, a television set, a washing machine, a stove, and not much else? Probably not since that creates less economic activity. Sure, that leads to environmental problems and to “poor people hating us” (though I don’t see how that matters), but those are “externalities”.

Fair enough.

Does an application need to prove it can do what it claims to do before it can be ported to OpenBSD? Seems like a high bar. :-)

The thread topic is now: top the linked email’s exaggeration and make a programming language’s community sound even more like a revolutionary force. Go!

Sebastien Marie wanted to make Zig work on OpenBSD. I don’t know why Raadt then respondend by saying that Zig hasn’t proved that it can do what it claims to do. But maybe I don’t understand this mailing list’s culture (or what “import Zig” means in this context other then to port to OpenBSD).

Maybe he needed to get that off his chest. Maybe that’s part of what people do on mailing lists, public or not. I don’t think everything that one posts is supposed to be rigorous, even though anything a person with a certain amount of fame writes in public can draw the ire of the whole internet against them with one off-hand sentence or paragraph.

There’s not much to discuss here. Just accusations of propoganda.

This is not really an abstraction.

Upcoming website from Klabnik: www.arewedoneyet.rs

It must be hard to design a zero-cost abstractions language. It seems that there are more and more terms and concepts that come up in order to support more directly-pragmatic PL features.[1] Reminds me a bit of how Haskell comes across to me from the outside with all its GHC extensions. Haskell is a research language but other more specialized functional languages have the luxury of being able to theorize and implement more orthogonal and perhaps more “elegant” concepts and approaches. (Again, merely an impression from the outside.)

Consider the design effort behind parametric memory allocators. That seems like a pretty cutting-edge problem. And yet I bet the Rust folks knew that they would want/need to do this way before they started doing that work in earnest, because people from C++ seem to want the same thing (if they don’t have it already?).

I idly wonder if one could, if one was in a similar position as Rust was some years ago, just go ahead and design a full-on unapologetic type-level programming language from the start. Because you know that your type-level terms will be worthy of the moniker “language” eventually (and it might not be a compliment as such).

Just a nice, high-level language that doesn’t bother with the “bare metal” concepts that Rust the value-level language has to deal with. (Can it even be done? Don’t ask the peanut gallery about that.)

Either that or you accidentally build an emergent language that Gankro can write an article about one day titled, I don’t know, Shitting Your Pants With Higher-Order Unsafe Unwind Type-Level Allocator Escape-Suppressing Storm Cellars.

[1] In this case: you have more use for compile-time integers than something more general like being able to describe that two nat-indexed lists are of the same length, like you can in Idris.