The value of a lambda is greatly reduced in a language like python (though it supports them) where functions are first-class objects - when you can store functions and pass them around as variables the benefits of named functions hugely improve and much of what a lambda does can be done more cleanly by using data structures.
So, for example, by storing functions as values in a dict you can build complex structures of execution without using any conditional codes . A long cluster of nested if-statements can be reduced to a single dictionary accessor. This is one of the standard ways to the common python-challenge of implementing Conway's game of life without using any if statements.
This, in fact, was what I found most annoying working in Ruby as opposed to python - the fact that functions are not first-class objects force you to use things like lambdas even where more elegant solutions may otherwise have been available.
fundamental difference between a map or an iterator in terms of how they execute. So the question becomes one of aesthetics - and that must, inevitably, have a subjective aspect to it. Those who love the functional approaches will find them more pleasing, those who prefer the OO approaches will prefer those instead. And some, like me, will mix and match them according to what looks better for the piece of code I'm currently writing - much as I choose between a for-loop or a list-compression based mostly on how long the list-compression is. Anything over about 60 characters and a for-loop is simply more readable and easier to debug.
The capital expense for solar is significantly lower than coal - and it is much quicker to build. If you start building a coal plant and a solar plant of equal capacity at the same time -the solar plant will be done in 2 years, the coal plant is a minimum of 7 and 10 is more common. The solar plant will also cost a fraction. Every coal plant in Africa was built by the government - most solar plants were privately funded (because it's a much more sensible investment for a private investor).
And of course, solar can be done economically at any scale - people stick it on their roofs to produce for one family. And to really hammer how cheap it is - my dad is an electrical engineer and he did the math, if you BORROW the money to do that, the money you save on power bills will be enough to pay back the loan AND the interest before you even need to replace the batteries - and in fact will pay for the replacements and STILL make a profit.
But those are two sides of the same coin. In this scenario - both parties are guilty and victims - the most sane thing is for the law to take a hands-off approach, much like Romeo-and-Juliet laws do for statutory rape when both parties are below the age of consent. The reason this doesn't happen in this scenario is because the male rape part of the equation isn't taken seriously.
That's an argument in favour of GMOs - which I already support, not evidence in contradiction of anything I said - and even then it's not even true - it has created specific variations humans wanted, that is not nor is in anyway even vaguely similar to any definition of "advanced".
Evolution has been around for 4 billion years, even the most rudimentary processing for just a few thousand - that alone makes natural better in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
Absolutely it does - and I said nothing to contradict that. But since starving in winter is no longer a significant threat - that math is no longer valid.
Companies do not own the atmosphere. Citizens do. If they want to put things in our property we have every right to charge them rent by means of a tax.
You're ignoring that a great many of those past processes DID in fact significantly shorter human lifespans- it's just that there were so many OTHER things shortening it that we rarely lived long enough to find that out.
The problem with taking this as your default position is that it pretends evolution never happened. There is a REASON why natural is, as a standard rule of thumb, more likely to be good for you - four billion years of evolution - and throughout all this time our bodies have been adapting to benefit from the resources available to them in their environment (a process that began long before our ancestors even had limbs). That is- natural isn't good because IT is natural, natural tends to be more likely to be good because WE are natural. We have adapted to what exists in nature. We've not evolved for what comes out of factories because it hasn't existed for long enough for us to do so.
Now, as the parent correctly pointed out, the rule of thumb is not universal and it's a fallacy to pretend it is. There are natural things which will kill you, there are completely processed things which are actually quite good for you. The rule of thumb should only be used in the absence of available scientific evidence. Where evidence exists - use the evidence instead.
The big deal is lying to your customers about what you're selling them. That is a crime - specifically - fraud. If you bulk up your chicken with soy - that's your free right as far as I'm concerned. If you do it and say you didn't - you've become a criminal.
If they do that, McDonalds will have to rebrand themselves as a vegetarian restaurant - which would not require changing the recipe at all (they'd fall short of vegan though on account of treating their employees slightly worse than the average factory farm treats animals).
>You did dispute this twice higher up in this thread, when you stated that CEOs are "never" held accountable and then softened up a little bit by changing that to "they aren't held accountable as much"
No, you thought my statement was false since we were using very different definitions of "accountable" - mine was based on the fundamental principle of equality before the law. I clarified the terminology as I used it - and within my use my statement is true, even Madoff wasn't held accountable by my definition (and he wasn't a corporate CEO either for that matter - he was somebody who pissed corporate CEOs off).
>Because wether or not CEOs are held accountable sufficiently strictly to satisfy you, is not relevant. It was never about satisfying me - it was about whether they are held accountable enough to prevent disasters being inflicted on third party civilians - who may be citizens of entirely different countries.
>What is important is that they are held accountable better than government officials No it isn't. What's important is whether they are more or less likely to harm innocent people - and the limited evidence we have suggests MUCH more.
> I cited evidence of this being true You found a few rare examples of CEOs who actually got punished for crimes - in all cases against either government or other rich people. But the concern is whether a CEO will face appropriate punishment for killing the three year old of some bum in hicksville who can't read.
> you made no claim, which you obviously did make. I never said I made NO claim - I said I didn't make the SPECIFIC claim you accuse me off because I don't consider the topic it was on to be relevant to the discussion - it has no place whatsoever in either my or the GP's concerns. We are not worried about it because the government's track record regarding this concern has in fact been fantastic - decades without a single incident. We do not actually KNOW how accountable a government official would BE in the scenario we fear - since no such scenario has ever happened.
>Truth matters, and you keep lying, which is why I'm unlikely to engage with you in further conversations. Run along and remember to logout. And I only spoke the truth. What I refused to do is engage the same topic you were insisting on talking about because it had nothing to do with the subject we were discussing. I still refuse to engage it - and I still haven't so much as TRIED to look up if anybody got punished in the cases you mentioned because frankly I still don't care. If an astronaught dies - it's tragic, but they knew the risks, they chose to be there and they accepted the risk. If a civilian not involved with the project dies - that's a fucking travesty.
>They may have accepted the risk, but it still illegal to recklessly endanger them. None of the examples you cited had any evidence of recklessness that I know about. But nevertheless there is a fundamental difference between harm coming to somebody who was part of the project, had accepted and agreed to the risks - and harm coming to an unwitting third party. The latter is significantly more severe - which is ironic since our legal system tends to treat it as less so. Externalities hardly ever lead to prosecutions or even civil suits - the chain of evidence is difficult to establish, proviing the exact cause of harm can be virtually impossible in a court setting, and you tend to be one small guy up against an army of 2000 an hour lawyers. This is one reason why regulations are better than the court system - because preventing the problem doesn't have come with the difficulty of proving which coal plant specifically released the particulates that are now killing you.
>I explained in detail, why it is relevant. And I explained in detail why I do not agree with your assessment of relevance. The discussion was about harm to third parties, there is no example I'm aware of any government space program yet harming an unaffiliated civilian - which is quite impressive considering how many government run space programs there are. Even appartheid South Africa had launch capabilities (in fact the country technically still does though it hasn't done launches locally since 2012 as it's now cheaper to pay other countries to do it) and managed to avoid that one.
>Ah, so you do agree, that space-exploration should be done by Capitalist enterprises, good. Wootery's comment was against that — and it was his anti-Capitalism stand, that I criticized. Nope. I just don't think capitalist enterprises should be EXCLUDED from it. I think space exploration should be done by every entity with the means to do it. We need government to it for pure-research no-profit-motive science reasons, and capitalist enterprises doing it for money is likely to have it's own benefits - but only if it's done, as all capitalist enterprises should be, under the rule of law. Which requires that stringent laws must exist, and be strictly enforced - in an 'equality before the law' level - which you'll know we have when CEO's are actually earning their exorbitant salaries by sheer virtue of the extremely high risk of going to jail - indeed when that's what happens to 6/10 or so of them, which would be less than the number who are guilty but at least on par with the odds of an ordinary person getting convicted for the same crime. Of course, there's a good chance that won't last - if that happens for a year or two - convictions may very well go way down, CEOs are way too arrogant to get any less criminally minded -but suddenly shareholders will become a LOT more stringent about who they hire and ready to fire you at the merest whiff of impropriety - because it's expensive to keep having to replace CEOs because the last one is serving a 600 year sentence for poisoning the air.
>Now, this really is irrelevant. As long as you do not dispute, that the CEOs are more accountable than the government officials, we do not need to continue arguing in this thread. I neither dispute nor accept your claim. I never did either. Which is why I refuse to give citations about government officials - since I neither know nor care about them, and I don't know or care how accountable they are. The discussion was about the risks capitalist space exploration may hold for the public - and my response about how to mitigate those risks. Nothing more. Nothing less. The issues that may or may not surround government programs, of which I have no knowledge or interest in acquiring it right now, are an entirely different matter. If government officials are being held as above the law that's a problem. if CEOs get to be above the law that's a problem. But they are not the SAME problem and they don't have the same causes or solutions and only ONE of those
Dude - for quite some time we Gen-X'ers were known as the slacker generation, famous for listening to Nirvana in underwear we haven't bothered to change in the past three weeks. That was how we were seen. Our great cultural artifacts were Grunge and Trainspotting and KIDS.
Now as it happens those are all pretty great things, but they were not flattering.
But it would still BE rape to have sex with somebody unable to consent. That we don't take rape of men as seriously is a whole different problem - no less serious - but quite unrelated in causes and best responses.
Marital rape was always rape - it didn't magically turn into it when we finally started recognizing that in law - the law just took rather long to catch up with basic decency.
There's a better version. Take a lump of something (A) with m = -1 and chuck it at a lump of something (B) with m = 1. B is attracting A due to gravity, but A is repelling B due to gravity - and you have perpetual motion because B keeps being pushed away from A as fast as A falls toward it.
But personally my bet is that they would simple bounce around a bit until they reach a point where the repellent effect of B and the attractive effect of A cancel out and then stop in a dead balanced state there - not all that different from magnetic levitation except that instead of gravity being cancelled by magnetism you got two cancelling gravitational forces.
The law cares. The police cares. Judges care. Cyclists from Sweden care - enough to tackle your arse and hold you down until authorities arrive. It seems rather a lot of voters care. In fact... it would seem that your assessment of "nobody" is based on an exceedingly small and unrepresentative sample size.
If you have sex with a woman who is too drunk to drive, and did not get consent while she was still fully sober, you deserve to go to jail for a couple of decades -where you will get to experience the same crime you committed toward her on a daily basis and hopefully come to understand why this is not something that anybody should ever experience.
That may well be true of America, and it would reduce the ROI there somewhat - though things like MinCome study results (the number one reason young people on UBI dropped out of the workforce was to pursue further study they couldn't previously afford) gives me some doubt.
It's decidedly not true in South Africa where I did the analysis in light of the current huge demand and protests for free higher education. Here, it probably applies to at least 80% of the people who could potentially get a degree. Because some 80% of the country live in abject poverty - and relieving that poverty by every means available is going to be fundamental requirement to our longterm viability as a nation to survive. The level of inequality in the country right now is simply unsustainable - not least because the middle class 20% of the population simply CANNOT pay enough taxes to sustain the other 80% indefinitely - and the one percent of truly rich contribute almost no taxes at all - if you think it's easy to seek tax havens when you're American and rich, it's ridiculously easy if you're African and rich. In fact a few years ago the AU made an official request at the UN to end all aid to Africa but also pass laws to prevent Africans stashing profits in Europe and the USA to avoid local taxes. It would be a smart policy too -the taxes not paid in Africa by the rich would be worth about 20 times what the entire continent receives in foreign aid
Slashdot Mirror
The value of a lambda is greatly reduced in a language like python (though it supports them) where functions are first-class objects - when you can store functions and pass them around as variables the benefits of named functions hugely improve and much of what a lambda does can be done more cleanly by using data structures.
So, for example, by storing functions as values in a dict you can build complex structures of execution without using any conditional codes . A long cluster of nested if-statements can be reduced to a single dictionary accessor. This is one of the standard ways to the common python-challenge of implementing Conway's game of life without using any if statements.
This, in fact, was what I found most annoying working in Ruby as opposed to python - the fact that functions are not first-class objects force you to use things like lambdas even where more elegant solutions may otherwise have been available.
fundamental difference between a map or an iterator in terms of how they execute.
So the question becomes one of aesthetics - and that must, inevitably, have a subjective aspect to it. Those who love the functional approaches will find them more pleasing, those who prefer the OO approaches will prefer those instead.
And some, like me, will mix and match them according to what looks better for the piece of code I'm currently writing - much as I choose between a for-loop or a list-compression based mostly on how long the list-compression is. Anything over about 60 characters and a for-loop is simply more readable and easier to debug.
The capital expense for solar is significantly lower than coal - and it is much quicker to build. If you start building a coal plant and a solar plant of equal capacity at the same time -the solar plant will be done in 2 years, the coal plant is a minimum of 7 and 10 is more common. The solar plant will also cost a fraction. Every coal plant in Africa was built by the government - most solar plants were privately funded (because it's a much more sensible investment for a private investor).
And of course, solar can be done economically at any scale - people stick it on their roofs to produce for one family. And to really hammer how cheap it is - my dad is an electrical engineer and he did the math, if you BORROW the money to do that, the money you save on power bills will be enough to pay back the loan AND the interest before you even need to replace the batteries - and in fact will pay for the replacements and STILL make a profit.
But those are two sides of the same coin. In this scenario - both parties are guilty and victims - the most sane thing is for the law to take a hands-off approach, much like Romeo-and-Juliet laws do for statutory rape when both parties are below the age of consent. The reason this doesn't happen in this scenario is because the male rape part of the equation isn't taken seriously.
That's an argument in favour of GMOs - which I already support, not evidence in contradiction of anything I said - and even then it's not even true - it has created specific variations humans wanted, that is not nor is in anyway even vaguely similar to any definition of "advanced".
Evolution has been around for 4 billion years, even the most rudimentary processing for just a few thousand - that alone makes natural better in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
Absolutely it does - and I said nothing to contradict that.
But since starving in winter is no longer a significant threat - that math is no longer valid.
Companies do not own the atmosphere. Citizens do. If they want to put things in our property we have every right to charge them rent by means of a tax.
You're ignoring that a great many of those past processes DID in fact significantly shorter human lifespans- it's just that there were so many OTHER things shortening it that we rarely lived long enough to find that out.
Also - defamation is not the same law as libel and slander - though the latter two are often the means by which the former happens.
The problem with taking this as your default position is that it pretends evolution never happened. There is a REASON why natural is, as a standard rule of thumb, more likely to be good for you - four billion years of evolution - and throughout all this time our bodies have been adapting to benefit from the resources available to them in their environment (a process that began long before our ancestors even had limbs). That is- natural isn't good because IT is natural, natural tends to be more likely to be good because WE are natural. We have adapted to what exists in nature. We've not evolved for what comes out of factories because it hasn't existed for long enough for us to do so.
Now, as the parent correctly pointed out, the rule of thumb is not universal and it's a fallacy to pretend it is. There are natural things which will kill you, there are completely processed things which are actually quite good for you. The rule of thumb should only be used in the absence of available scientific evidence. Where evidence exists - use the evidence instead.
The big deal is lying to your customers about what you're selling them. That is a crime - specifically - fraud. If you bulk up your chicken with soy - that's your free right as far as I'm concerned. If you do it and say you didn't - you've become a criminal.
If they do that, McDonalds will have to rebrand themselves as a vegetarian restaurant - which would not require changing the recipe at all (they'd fall short of vegan though on account of treating their employees slightly worse than the average factory farm treats animals).
It's not an 'argument' it's the law. If you don't like the law - then get politically active and convince your representatives to change the law.
Good luck with that.
>You did dispute this twice higher up in this thread, when you stated that CEOs are "never" held accountable and then softened up a little bit by changing that to "they aren't held accountable as much"
No, you thought my statement was false since we were using very different definitions of "accountable" - mine was based on the fundamental principle of equality before the law. I clarified the terminology as I used it - and within my use my statement is true, even Madoff wasn't held accountable by my definition (and he wasn't a corporate CEO either for that matter - he was somebody who pissed corporate CEOs off).
>Because wether or not CEOs are held accountable sufficiently strictly to satisfy you, is not relevant.
It was never about satisfying me - it was about whether they are held accountable enough to prevent disasters being inflicted on third party civilians - who may be citizens of entirely different countries.
>What is important is that they are held accountable better than government officials
No it isn't. What's important is whether they are more or less likely to harm innocent people - and the limited evidence we have suggests MUCH more.
> I cited evidence of this being true
You found a few rare examples of CEOs who actually got punished for crimes - in all cases against either government or other rich people. But the concern is whether a CEO will face appropriate punishment for killing the three year old of some bum in hicksville who can't read.
> you made no claim, which you obviously did make.
I never said I made NO claim - I said I didn't make the SPECIFIC claim you accuse me off because I don't consider the topic it was on to be relevant to the discussion - it has no place whatsoever in either my or the GP's concerns. We are not worried about it because the government's track record regarding this concern has in fact been fantastic - decades without a single incident. We do not actually KNOW how accountable a government official would BE in the scenario we fear - since no such scenario has ever happened.
>Truth matters, and you keep lying, which is why I'm unlikely to engage with you in further conversations. Run along and remember to logout.
And I only spoke the truth. What I refused to do is engage the same topic you were insisting on talking about because it had nothing to do with the subject we were discussing. I still refuse to engage it - and I still haven't so much as TRIED to look up if anybody got punished in the cases you mentioned because frankly I still don't care.
If an astronaught dies - it's tragic, but they knew the risks, they chose to be there and they accepted the risk. If a civilian not involved with the project dies - that's a fucking travesty.
>They may have accepted the risk, but it still illegal to recklessly endanger them.
None of the examples you cited had any evidence of recklessness that I know about. But nevertheless there is a fundamental difference between harm coming to somebody who was part of the project, had accepted and agreed to the risks - and harm coming to an unwitting third party. The latter is significantly more severe - which is ironic since our legal system tends to treat it as less so. Externalities hardly ever lead to prosecutions or even civil suits - the chain of evidence is difficult to establish, proviing the exact cause of harm can be virtually impossible in a court setting, and you tend to be one small guy up against an army of 2000 an hour lawyers. This is one reason why regulations are better than the court system - because preventing the problem doesn't have come with the difficulty of proving which coal plant specifically released the particulates that are now killing you.
>I explained in detail, why it is relevant.
And I explained in detail why I do not agree with your assessment of relevance. The discussion was about harm to third parties, there is no example I'm aware of any government space program yet harming an unaffiliated civilian - which is quite impressive considering how many government run space programs there are. Even appartheid South Africa had launch capabilities (in fact the country technically still does though it hasn't done launches locally since 2012 as it's now cheaper to pay other countries to do it) and managed to avoid that one.
>Ah, so you do agree, that space-exploration should be done by Capitalist enterprises, good. Wootery's comment was against that — and it was his anti-Capitalism stand, that I criticized.
Nope. I just don't think capitalist enterprises should be EXCLUDED from it. I think space exploration should be done by every entity with the means to do it. We need government to it for pure-research no-profit-motive science reasons, and capitalist enterprises doing it for money is likely to have it's own benefits - but only if it's done, as all capitalist enterprises should be, under the rule of law. Which requires that stringent laws must exist, and be strictly enforced - in an 'equality before the law' level - which you'll know we have when CEO's are actually earning their exorbitant salaries by sheer virtue of the extremely high risk of going to jail - indeed when that's what happens to 6/10 or so of them, which would be less than the number who are guilty but at least on par with the odds of an ordinary person getting convicted for the same crime. Of course, there's a good chance that won't last - if that happens for a year or two - convictions may very well go way down, CEOs are way too arrogant to get any less criminally minded -but suddenly shareholders will become a LOT more stringent about who they hire and ready to fire you at the merest whiff of impropriety - because it's expensive to keep having to replace CEOs because the last one is serving a 600 year sentence for poisoning the air.
>Now, this really is irrelevant. As long as you do not dispute, that the CEOs are more accountable than the government officials, we do not need to continue arguing in this thread.
I neither dispute nor accept your claim. I never did either. Which is why I refuse to give citations about government officials - since I neither know nor care about them, and I don't know or care how accountable they are. The discussion was about the risks capitalist space exploration may hold for the public - and my response about how to mitigate those risks. Nothing more. Nothing less. The issues that may or may not surround government programs, of which I have no knowledge or interest in acquiring it right now, are an entirely different matter. If government officials are being held as above the law that's a problem. if CEOs get to be above the law that's a problem. But they are not the SAME problem and they don't have the same causes or solutions and only ONE of those
Heh, back when I went - there was no such thing as google :)
Dude - for quite some time we Gen-X'ers were known as the slacker generation, famous for listening to Nirvana in underwear we haven't bothered to change in the past three weeks.
That was how we were seen. Our great cultural artifacts were Grunge and Trainspotting and KIDS.
Now as it happens those are all pretty great things, but they were not flattering.
But it would still BE rape to have sex with somebody unable to consent. That we don't take rape of men as seriously is a whole different problem - no less serious - but quite unrelated in causes and best responses.
Marital rape was always rape - it didn't magically turn into it when we finally started recognizing that in law - the law just took rather long to catch up with basic decency.
There's a better version. Take a lump of something (A) with m = -1 and chuck it at a lump of something (B) with m = 1. B is attracting A due to gravity, but A is repelling B due to gravity - and you have perpetual motion because B keeps being pushed away from A as fast as A falls toward it.
But personally my bet is that they would simple bounce around a bit until they reach a point where the repellent effect of B and the attractive effect of A cancel out and then stop in a dead balanced state there - not all that different from magnetic levitation except that instead of gravity being cancelled by magnetism you got two cancelling gravitational forces.
That, however, is an entirely different and in fact entirely unrelated problem.
Perhaps - but the law has to draw the line somewhere, that's one of the reasons we HAVE laws.
>Yeah, well, I'm in America
So were those cyclists from Sweden. They were exchange students - and the heroes of the Brock Turner case.
The law cares. The police cares. Judges care. Cyclists from Sweden care - enough to tackle your arse and hold you down until authorities arrive. It seems rather a lot of voters care. In fact... it would seem that your assessment of "nobody" is based on an exceedingly small and unrepresentative sample size.
If you have sex with a woman who is too drunk to drive, and did not get consent while she was still fully sober, you deserve to go to jail for a couple of decades -where you will get to experience the same crime you committed toward her on a daily basis and hopefully come to understand why this is not something that anybody should ever experience.
That may well be true of America, and it would reduce the ROI there somewhat - though things like MinCome study results (the number one reason young people on UBI dropped out of the workforce was to pursue further study they couldn't previously afford) gives me some doubt.
It's decidedly not true in South Africa where I did the analysis in light of the current huge demand and protests for free higher education. Here, it probably applies to at least 80% of the people who could potentially get a degree. Because some 80% of the country live in abject poverty - and relieving that poverty by every means available is going to be fundamental requirement to our longterm viability as a nation to survive. The level of inequality in the country right now is simply unsustainable - not least because the middle class 20% of the population simply CANNOT pay enough taxes to sustain the other 80% indefinitely - and the one percent of truly rich contribute almost no taxes at all - if you think it's easy to seek tax havens when you're American and rich, it's ridiculously easy if you're African and rich. In fact a few years ago the AU made an official request at the UN to end all aid to Africa but also pass laws to prevent Africans stashing profits in Europe and the USA to avoid local taxes. It would be a smart policy too -the taxes not paid in Africa by the rich would be worth about 20 times what the entire continent receives in foreign aid