muuh-gnu

> Where I'm coming from we have this saying: communism is all about fixing problems that it created in the first place.

As you will observe, HN is throughly infected with the communist delusion, commonly observed with atheist intelectuals. People like us, who escaped communist shitholes, after having to witness how it degenerates whole societies like a cancer and therefore being allergic to the false "but but but we have to help!" siren call, will be attacked by the infected often for merely loudly pronouncing the word "communism", which the rabid marxists are trying to cover up like the plague.

After escaping to the west precisely to escape the social trainwrecks caused by the communist fallacy, it is so sad having to watch the new home going down the same damn way as if they didnt have basically the rest of the planet as a cautionary tale.

Arguing with communists is a waste of time. Predator species always existed and will always exist. The whole "inequality" debate is beating around the bush. It is the classical grasshopper-ant situation. They simply want your stuff.

The same way you could ask why GNU Emacs still exists. Because there are people who for various tiny (rational or irrational) reasons dont want to switch the editor they've been using the last 20 years.

It is the same thing as asking why German is still used, now that English is a world language.

The decision to go either Common Lisp or Scheme was made based on RMS very personal reasons and conflicts with close-source Lisp machine companies during the first half of the 80s.

GNU has had two common Lisp implementations under their umbrella at least since mid 90s (CLISP (of Viaweb fame) and GCL (of Maxima fame)), but due to RMS' hate of Symbolics and Common Lisp, all of the effort was invested into making Guile run properly (which took them 25 years and still nobody is using it) and the two Lisps were basically orphaned.

The latest effort of guile-ifying Emacs is more pushed by the Guile guys, in order to attach themselves to an already existing killer app (emacs) and to basically force more and more people to use Scheme, because nobody is doing it voluntarily.

The Emacs guys, as you see from the post, are not _really_ excited about the idea of switching to another _language_. They want FFI, multithreading, etc, but they do not necessarily want Scheme. Actually they dont want Scheme at all, adopting Scheme would be just a price to get FFI, etc.

Of course the proper way would be to go Common Lisp. Elisp is and has always been a subset of Common Lisp, and they've had a Common Lisp compatibility layer for decades, and a lot of packages use it. The problem is simply highly political. You'd have to confront RMS, and you'd have to finally get rid of Guile's "official GNU extension language" status.

Ultimately, it is rule of man, since man can change the law.

However you call it, it is ultimately power (of man) that rules other men. Having to push it through the frictional and slow law process merely makes powerful men less powerful by the amount of the systemic friction. But the power gradients still exist and lead to the same consequences.

It merely prolongs a "i dont like him, behead him on the spot" into "i dont like him, make the state attorney accuse him of rape and murder, drag him through courts for 20 years and execute him". But the intimidating effect of power differences is the same. Rule of law is just the same ol rule of man cloaked into law.

It doesnt matter, because whiteknighting.

Objectfying a person is admissible when the person is selling itself as an object.

Rational thought is not necessarily an evolutionary advantage per se. Morons believing in gods will pretty likely outbreed, outendure and outsacrifice you.

There is no time left to debate any more, we now have to act or we're all gonna die.

Suppressing dissent by a Soviet style thought police is a small price to pay if the future of the human species is at stake.

I for one, fully and sincerely and deeply believe in climate change, and I welcome our new bolsheviks in lab coats overlords.

Journalists arent supposed to involuntarily spread goverment mandated propaganda. If the vast scientific consensus isnt able to make their point even to journalists and have to force them to print state mandated "truth", then maybe, just maybe their point isnt defensible in the first place.

It is hard to sell "we need global socialism or we're all gonna die!" when your whole argument amounts to "when I press this button, the computer predicts the future". Appealing to empty formalities like peer review, consensus and other social-engineerable groupthink mantras simply doesnt cut it if you want money, which is what the warmists are primarily after. They want insane amounts of money and the only way they prove it is by repeatedly asserting their authority to the point that now journalists have to be bullied into obedience.

European countries are not directly threatened militarily by the US, but Russia is. Europe is being merely exploited economically.

But even now that the Europeans are fully aware of being spied upon by the US, they can not do anything about it without hurting themselves in the process. Europeans are weaklings, and not willing to endure the smallest amount of pain, even to avoid bigger pain down the road.

> married the first person they dated

> the marriage being very successful

> I haven't quite figured out why that is

It is not about software engineers, it is a general correlation to the "numbers" of pre-marital dates.

The lower the number of partners before marriage, the more likely is the marriage to succeed:

> http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2010/09/sexual-partner-d...

> Can you quote that argument actually made by anyone in the thread you are responding to?

I can quote you quoting David Simon: "This is about sharing."

If "sharing" implies forcibly mugging those people who do not _want_ to share --and it of course does-- is is just an euphemism for outright communism.

> in this conversation you are one of the extremists.

It is extremism if and only if refusing to negotiate with muggers also is extremism.

> trying to frame it as the world threatened by the sword of communism

Whether the world at whole is threatened or not I dont know (people seem to survive in North Korea), but leftists like you certainly threaten my income and my freedom. If you scheme to force me to give a part of the products of my labor to you, it is the same thing as forcing me to work a part of my workday for you. In my eyes, wanting to force people to work for you against their will makes _you_ an extremist.

> signals a refusal to enter any kind of debate.

If you carefully observe, we're already debating right now. But you seem to be more preoccupied with labeling your opponents as extremist, refusing to debate, etc, than with debating itself. Refusing to play the "let's meet at the middle ground" game doesnt imply refusing to debate at all. It just means your argument (communism is good, so gimme your stuff) is too nonsensical to make me accept even parts of it as reasonable.

> One side thinks that it's vital to allocate resources fairly

It is actually capitalism that thinks that it is vital to allocate resources fairly. Communists, on the other hand, think that resources should be allocated _equally_ with no regard to fairness. "To each according to his need."

> this can be done efficiently if only people would be good enough.

And until people get good enough, which in reality will never happen, communists think that the use of force to take from those who have and give to those who dont is perfectly justifiable.

> The other side thinks that market forces are the only way

Nope. The other side thinks that central planing and big goverment are a source of abuse of power. A free market isnt a perfect solution, but it is the lesser of two evils. If nobody has massive power, nobody can abuse power massively. There inevitably will be some abuse in a free market, but not in the orders of magnitude of, say, North Korea, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and other central planning epic fails.

> deviating too far from this in the name of fairness

It is not done in the name of fairness, but in the name of equality. If fiarness was the goal, communism would be the side trying to not interfere and to leave everybody alone. But it is not. Communism is the side advocating maximum interventionism, of requiring (and enforcing) sacrifices for a centrally planed "greater good" etc.

> Extremists on both sides make it hard to have a sensible conversation.

In my view, the only way to solve it would be to create communist and capitalist zones, and make it legally impossible to change that economic basis of a zone. The "conversation" would then amount to fans of capitalism and communism moving to their preferred zone. Neither side would be trying to forcibly make the other side live under their economic religion.

The problem is that the left doesnt actually want to draw that border between takers and makers, because they _are_ takers trying to get total control of the makers in order to exploit their productivity.

As long as communists are able to get control of a whole state and then forcibly redistribute _other_ people's wealth, there will be a state of perpetual low-intensity warfare between the left and the right. Knowing that once you give communists a single finger, they will feel entitled to the whole hand and try to forcibly amputate it, is not in any way extremism, but knowlege of history paired with a sense of self-preservation.

What point does it make to have a conversation with people who are basically trying to legally mug you?

Lets set aside the fact that somebody has to build those robots and wants to profit for building them...

Once we have that hypothetical robot slave army feeding everyone of us, the discussion would be over by itself because there would be nothing left to discuss. Everyone would have all he needs and that would be it.

The only reason we do have the discussion already now, long before the star-trekian replicator utopia has been realized is because a lot of people are so impatient to stop working, that they want to engineer a system where not robots, but _other people_ are working for them, of course involuntarily.

Because taking from everybody and building common infrastructure _everybody_ benefits from is different than forcibly taking from one group of people (those who do work) and giving to another group of people who dont _want_ to work.

Like communism, basic income (which is just another word for communism) is outright slavery, where person A is being forced to involuntarily work to feed person B who doesnt want to work.

> As for why a basic income makes sense

Whether it makes sense for you or not, the discussion around this basic income nonsense regularly neglects the fact that in order for you to get money for not working, it has to be forcibly taken from somebody who actually did work and refuses to voluntarily share with people who dont work. Forced sharing (aka communism) is outright theft, and working people will fight you to stop you from taking the products of their labor.

> it's structural disconnection from labor opportunities.

Being "structurally disconnected" doesnt entitle you to forcibly take stuff from people who are not structurally disconnected. You can of course try, but then you got a war and people will fight you until you stop trying to take their stuff.

There is no such possibility.

> All this extra value floating around

All this extra value didnt fall from the sky, but has been produced by somebody elses labor. If you dont want to work to trade the products of your labor for the products of his labor, why should he share with you?

We can not remove the need to work, because there will always be a need to eat, and to be able to eat, you need to work because nobody will feed you voluntarily.

If somebody else has to work so you can eat without working, thats theft and your victims will try to kill you to stop you taking the products of their labor.

> we should strive

Who is "we"? There is no "we". Capitalism exists because different people have conflicting desires and unequal abilities. Capitalism is just another word for natural selection. Any attempts to get rid of capitalism as the "default" state of interhuman relations, will have to be accompanied by massive amounts of force, because you cant fight human nature without force. And even then, the only people willing to invest force and suffering to end the natural state of things are people who would personally profit from ending it, otherwise they would have no motivation to lift a finger, let alone lose one fighting to end capitalism, which then makes the attempt to violently end capitalism just another, more brutish form of natural selection.

You can not somehow "out-smart" natural selection and evolution and make people live happily together ever after without anybody exploiting anybody else. Inequality is a fact of life. By forcibly ending capitalism, the most humane form of natural selection to date, you can merely make the endeavour more bloody again.

Thats the consequence of wasting effort rewriting the screensaver app (and all other basic apps) over and over and over, instead of focusing effort on writing more important things like Adobe CS and the like.

Once they fix all embarassing bugs, they'll simply throw everything away and start rewriting everything from scratch again. The main reason Linux desktop is dead is because Linux desktop developers treat it like the latest fashion fad instead of a commercial product you have to live off and be responsible for.

> What are the definite benefits of Basic Income?

> It is the most efficient possible form of wealth redistribution

So it is just another deceptive label for outright communism, directly out of Marx/Mao/Stalin's playbook. Nice.

The main issue with Guile is the same issue as with any other Scheme, and that issue is that it is a Scheme. No single Scheme is widely adopted and the main reason for that is extreme balkanization. You dont write code in Scheme, you write Guile, Racket, Chicken, etc.

The Scheme philosophy, which was developed in opposition to batteries-included aka "bloated" Common Lisp, was to have a small core and emphasize simplicity, purity, etc. For years proponents of Scheme have emphasized how beautiful and simple the small standard of 50 pages is, compared with Common Lisps "bloated" 1000+ pages standard.

This had two consequences:

1. It was extremely easy to write a scheme implementation, soinstead of writing code _in_ scheme, people wrote _schemes_. Hundreds of them. And while other people spent the last 20 years writing thousands of useful libraries in C, python, java, scheme implementors spent reinventing the wheel, over and over and over and over again. Today there are more implementations of scheme than libraries in scheme.

2. The emphasis on "small core" might be cute for teaching SICP, but in order to be able to do anything useful with the implementation, it forced the implementors to reinvent the wheels for everything else. And each implementation did it their own way because standardization was considered "selling out" and aping the nemesis Common Lisp. This led to _extreme_ code unportability.

Nowadays they are somehow trying to standardize, but with the consequence that they are realizing that by doing that, they are becoming indistinguishable from their old nemesis Common Lisp, which went through the same balkanization phase 20 years ago, so the point of splitting off Scheme from Lisp is becoming questionable. Instead of wasting precious time writing 1001 scheme implementations, they could have spent the last 20 years writing useful common lisp libraries and competing with other batteries-included languages like java and python.

In short: Besides the social problems that every Scheme suffers from and the Lisp world suffered during the 80s, Guile on its own is doing quite well. Once it is integrated into Emacs, Emacs will become Guile's killer app, boost its popularity and set it apart from other schemes.

End users dont get their news from Wikileaks directly.

What Wikileaks does is breaking the ice by publishing something that everybody else wouldnt touch, and keeping it in the open.

Once Wikileaks took all the risk and blame, traditional risk averse media can jump on the bandwagon claming "It wasn't us" and serve the news to the end users.

Can somebody explain to me why an SI unit has the "kilo" prefix already in it, making other SI prefixes unusable with it?

1 kJ = 1000 standard units of energy.

1 kg = 1 unit of mass.

Was this just an unfortunate historical accident? But if the too that much care to make a unit system that makes intuitive sense, why would they let in such an annoying exception? Why didnt they just make "gram" the standard unit or just made up another name?

> the women's test is her looks.

No, a woman's test is her chastity. Nobody but the most desperate beta is marrying and having kids with the town bicycle, no matter how good she looks or how young she is.

By your logic it would be wrong to prevent your kid from taking drugs (or partaking in any other personally destructive vice) because all of their friends take drugs and would bully her if she doesnt.

Dont you see how taking the route of least resistance (negotiating with terrorists) can not work in the long term? The list of things she shouldnt be allowed to do but you have to allow to prevent bullying would grow day by day and make her life more and more miserable because she would be bullied into doing countless things she doesnt really even want to and instead of helping by preventing it, her parent indirectly helps the bullies by inaction.

The bullies have to be attacked directly, not indirectly. Appeasement never works and has never worked.

The anti-copyright activists in Europe had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make a dent, and they blew it. They wont get a second chance to give copyright problems a wide attention as they had 2009-2010, because loads of other problems are now shattering the EU and copyright pales in comparison.

The German Pirate Party essentially lost focus and self-destructed. After being founded by a bunch of physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, mostly males focused on copyright and surveillance, after the few first electional successes they forgot to screen who is joining the increasingly popular party. Because of that, they were mass-infiltrated by more tenacious leftists, humanists, feminists, genderists and other fringe political parasites, who increasingly drove out the well-intentioned but invertebrate STEM guys who founded the party in the first place.

The German Pirate Party of today is an unelectable, goalless, anarchist mess resembling the Pirate Party of 4-5 years ago only in the name.