You guys make me literally laugh out loud every time you say "assault weapon". It's a joke on people who don't know anything at all about firearms.
The term does have a definition, defined by federal law. You can look it up if you want to. If you don't know what any of the words mean, what a "receiver" or "magazine" is, or "semiautomatic", here's a summary for you: An assault weapon is one that looks scary.
It could be a plinker, a.22 like kids used to use to shoot cans in the backyard, if it's shaped like an AK and it's black than it's an assault weapon.
> Nissan, Renault, and Mitsubishi are three, independently traded, separate companies
Not exactly. If you were able to post a link that worked, you could have clicked on your link, and without even scrolling down past the first screen, seen that Renault controls Nissan, owning more 40% of it, and Nissan controls with Mitsubishi, with majority ownership. The Renault board therefore controls all three companies, and buying Renault stock ("traded") means you are also buying Nissan and Mitsubishi. Additionally Nissan owns a significant percentage of Renault, meaning Renault is part Nissan, which is again part Renault again, further cementing the companies together.
Next time you're about to post a link, you may wish to read it first.
> was only built in limited quantities from 2008-2012
They are still a boutique manufacturer. A footnote.
> the combined efforts of three long-standing industry giants trying to sell electric
Since we agree Tesla isn't anywhere near the same ballpark as Nissan-Renault as a company, perhaps you'd like to explain why their stock is valued as if they were quite a bigger and more successful than Nissan-Renault? Also GM, Ford, Toyota, etc. The stock is priced as if they were biggest, most successful car company in the world, while their actual production isn't even in the top ten.
> believe Tesla has a chance to become a dominating car brand
There is certainly a chance. Currently their stock is valued the same as the company that ALREADY IS the biggest car company in the world. The current stock price assumes Tesla will beat all the big companies, with 100% certainty, and soon. In fact Tesla isn't even in the top 5, probably not the top ten.
> It's a gamble, as buying stock always is. I'm planning to buy some
At the current stock price, it's not really a gamble. Long term, you can either lose your money or get really, really lucky and they grow a thousand times as large so you break even. (Except you'd still actually lose money due to opportunity cost). It's virtually impossible for an investor to make money on Tesla in the long term - they'll have to be amazingly successful, one of the most successful companies in history, in order for you to just break even.
> Note that Nissan reports its sales by month, per region, so one has to add up the Leaf sale figures for Japan, Europe, and the US across the January through March 2018 production and sales PDFs, all found here.
Or on your first link, you may notice they've sold 540,623 electric vehicles. It's buried in the article since electric is kind of a footnote for Nissan-Renault. Still almost twice as many as Tesla, but not a particularly significant part of their business.
Exactly, their job is to spy. There are a few people (out of billions) that need to be spied upon, too. Bin Laden and his compatriots, for example. The ideal is to make it very difficult or expensive to spy on people, so they only spy on the few people they need to be spying on.
Tesla as a company is valued similar to the world's largest car companies, who sell millions of cars every year, and have for a long time. Tesla sells thousands - and loses money on every one. In order for the price people are paying for Tesla stock to be justified by the business, Tesla would need to:
Grow over a thousand times bigger Be making money rather than losing money Do so consistently, predictably
Nobody has made money on Tesla as a business, Tesla loses money. Lots of people have made money on Tesla, though - how? By getting the next sucker down the line to pay even more for the nearly worthless stock. That's a pyramid scheme.
This is where the Tesla fanbois jump in and say "Tesla is going to be the biggest car company in the world!". Maybe so. Maybe 50 years from now Tesla will be as big, and as profitable, as BMW or Honda. Heck, there's even a tiny chance they could be as big as Nissan and Toyota put together. IF and when that happens, the company will be worth $300 / share. Right now, the company is worth about as much than the guys who make seatbelts for Toyota. The business is worth about 5-10 cents / share, people are paying nearly $300. The difference between it's value as a business and what people are paying, in hopes that they can sell it to another sucker for more before it comes crashing down, is the pyramid scheme.
I had a typo at the end. That should be European OR Christian history. Pretty much every European monarch had a Jew at court to handle the banking, and other related financial matters.
We're not talking about some theory about a one-time event, such as 9-11, nor any secret. You can very, very easily check any of Christian literature over a period of a thousand years, or any history of the court of any European monarch. To claim that a thousand years of open public policy never happened is as ridiculous as claiming the United States never existed. It's not like it's a secret - just open any book of European not Christian history written above the 4th grade level.
Have your ever noticed that when you're downtown, near big buildings, your GPS sometimes goes to shit? That's with nine transmitters TRYING to help you with location, constantly broadcasting signals specifically designed for location information. Triangulation in an urban environment is a bitch because radio signals bounce between buildings and bridges and such, so the same signal comes from five different directions.
Put a transmitter in a car in Washington traffic and it becomes almost impossible.
If you're an intelligence agent, you can turn on your device right when the chairman of the foreign intelligence committee walks out the door, rather than transmitting constantly.
What the competent spook should NOT do is drive the same circle around the Capital building over and over and over every day, without ever changing their route. If you do that, you can eventually get caught.
If the spy agencies of China, Russia, India, etc AREN'T doing this, they aren't doing their job. If the heads of their intelligence agencies have neglected to do this, they should be fired.
They reasoned that it was perfectly fine to kill half the individual people, if doing so improved things for the nation as a whole. Their respect for individual rights was literally non-existent - torturing individual people was fine, for the benefit of the whole.
It was collectivism, putting the group over the individual, in by far the most extreme which has ever happened in all of human history.
Did you know there are more or less objective sources where you can read about history, and look up actual facts, rather than believing whatever crap some activist
blogger spews at you?
Did you know that the United States in 2018 isn't historical Europe?
For a THOUSAND YEARS the Roman Catholic Church taught (and fought) that banking, loaning money at interest, was a sin, usury. Until the fourth century it was looked down upon by most Christians, by the fourth century the Church started making church laws against it in various ways. In the eighth century under Charlemagne, they declared usury to be a general criminal offence for you could be imprisoned.
During all this time, the European monarchies shared power with the church. If you were a king, a good way to end up mysteriously dead was to piss off the church. Yet they had wars and huge infrastructure projects to finance, and I between wars the monarchies sometimes had huge amounts of gold and other treasure they'd love to make interest on. Running a country requires banking, but banking is a crime for Christians. Islam similarly taught that interest was usury, sin, and prohibited. What to do? The solution was to enlist Jews as bankers.
The European monarchs didn't have the modern financial system to run up a trillion dollar national debt in times of trouble. In times of trouble, such as war, they had the bankers to go to in order to borrow money to rebuild and supply their armies. Jewish bankers, because Christian bankers would face criminal action. With two sides at war, both asking the banks to finance their armies, the bank was in the position to decide which army got fed and equipped and which army didn't. If you were a European monarch, being friendly with the bankers was a really good idea.
That's the history of why the oldest, largest, most powerful European banks are Jewish.
Dealing with nations, like loaning to monarchs, the bankers, notably the Rothschilds, also were early to expand internationally, with different family members running affiliated banks in different countries. At the time, most businesses were local. Being smart about establishing multinational business before almost anyone else enhanced their size and power, while reducing their dependence on the local monarch.
It's time for me to go do other things now, but if you spend a few minutes learning the facts about anything else you parroted, you'll find it's all just as contrary to fact.
The National Socialist German Workersâ(TM) Party, aka Nazi party had some leftist ideology, a lot of leftist rhetoric, but can't be accurately classified on the left-right spectrum at all. It was primarily nationalist.
The name, "Socialist German Workersâ(TM) Party" fairly accurately represents much of what they SAID; like all politicians what they said isn't what they did. There was a lot of anti-capitalism and especially anti-banker stuff, but Hitler directed that into very different actions. For several hundred years, due to Christian religious teaching and kings using loopholes, most banking concerns were run by Jewish people. Hitler used the anti-banker (essentially anti Wall Street) rhetoric and sentiment to go after the Jews, as most bankers were Jewish.
Leftists are known for identity politics - rich vs poor, gay vs straight, black vs white, etc. The Nazis very much focused on race. Leftists generally talk about race a lot, but not to the extent the Nazis did.
Leftists are socialist / communist, saying the factories and such should be owned by the people, and unlike the conservatives believe people should not be given a CHOICE buy stock in companies they choose, but instead must own all or most of the big companies, whether they want to be owners of an oil company or not. Because a million people can't individually vote or otherwise have a hand in running a company, the government must do that for them, the leftists say. So left says the workers ideally own the company, but in practice the government does, with the politicians in control. Nazis mentioned the government running everything on behalf of the people, but the emphasis was on the nation (government), not on the people. It was about making Germany strong as a nation, as opposed to focusing on individual success and happiness.
That ties into another aspect. Conservatives and US Republicans tend toward individualism, the left is about collectivism. Nazis were an extreme version of collectivism, to the point that individuals didn't matter at all. Germany, the German people mattered, not each German person.
Because it was Germany that mattered, not each person, the state's power was far more important than individual rights. Those on the left and those on the right argue about limited government. Naziism was unlimited government, the government was the nation, and only the nation mattered.
As heads of the only thing that mattered, the nation, politicians / rulers had essentially unlimited power. Particularly there was a cult of personality around Hitler himself.
So Naziism had these major characteristics: Socialist, class-based rhetoric Hatred of the bankers and capitalists Identity politics based on race Extreme collectivism Extreme nationalism Near-absolute power for leaders
Some of that is similar to the modern left, but it's also significantly different in some ways.
It's not useful to me have an app that uses my CPU. It's useful to me to have an app that loads web pages (a browser). Any app that's useful to me must use my CPU, of course.
It's the "why" that's useful to me, not the "how". Knowing my location is HOW a useful app tells me where to find inexpensive parking nearby.
"Didn't want to forecast further actions" - because what are they going to do, block the Apple app store in Russia? That would punish Russia as much as it punishes Apple (modulo what the haters think).
Trump didn't insult Xi Jinping's mother. What he said is that he's not going to let us be screwed over by unfair trade practices. I don't think the car dealer salesman is necessary, but if one insists in that analogy it would be more like letting the salesman know that unlike the last guy, you don't intend to lay sticker price.
What the timing does is it frames the negotiation, allowing US negotiators to "give" something to China during the negotiations, to relent on something, by easing the tariffs and restrictions. We can give them something they want, and get something in return, simply by going back to the same policy we had last month!:)
Now the *starting point* of the negotiations is that China wants something from us - easing that policy. Otherwise, the starting point was we wanted something from China - their help pressuring North Korea. In a negotiation, it's always better to be on the side being asked for something, rather than be the one asking for something.
Rather than have your entire 200-line body three levels deeper than it needs to be, putting some blocks 6 or 8 levels deep. If course actual exception handling is another conversation.
Indeed. Just the other day I "adjusted" one of my co-workers pull requests just like that. That got rid of two single-line conditional blocks which put the rest of their 200-300 line function two levels deeper than it needed to be.
You got me thinking, I just might seriously do a vim plugin to add and remove curly braces from Python code. I've coded in a lot of languages over many years, most of which use curly braces, so my eyes/brain process them somewhat automatically. I also block-based operations in vim, which work based on curly braces. I might find it easier / faster to parse Python that had braces inserted temporarily.
This wouldn't be needed if my co-workers didn't write blocks that are FAR longer than any coding standard recommends, but I've had limited success changing their habits. Instead of functions that do one simple thing, they like to write an entire 800-line program as one "function", except it's still not actually a function because it uses global variables from another file. Within their faketion they like to do this:
if can work
200 lines
eight levels deep else
return error
The only problem with writing such a plugin is that there are a lot of gotchas to finding the beginning and end of Python blocks. Other people have tried to write plugins to delimit Python blocks, but they all fail on real-world Python because a change in leading whitespace doesn't NECESSARILY mean a new block. Only sometimes.
> Let me guess, it's probably because "artists" nowadays use some computer algorithm to generate music which appeals to a wide audience
Almost is that, and has been for a long time. Pop songs have a very well-defined structure or formula. To some extent, that makes sense because that's what makes it a pop song, not blues, not country, not hip hop, not gospel, but pop.
Programmers have a formula for sorting, called quicksort, and lots of programmers do quicksort with very minor variations. Bakers have a pretty standard recipe for bread, with different people doing minor variations, there are a couple formulas for lipstick, with the ratio of colorants being the only thing that changes, and there is a formula or recipe for a pop song. Music majors can tell you the formula or pattern for a pop song.
Nothing wrong with using a well-proven formulas. The only thing is, as a consumer don't expect a pop song to B original, and don't expect paying $80 for lipstick is going to get you anything different than paying $8. When you buy lipstick, you're going get wax (mostly carnauba wax), oil, and pigment. When you buy a pop song, you're probably going to get intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus (or refrain), verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge ("middle eight"), verse, chorus and outro.
When I was doing SEO for a living there were a dozen search engines were analyzed the and worked to get good rankings on. Google wasn't in the top three. In fact, Excite, who had exclusive distribution agreements with Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, declined to buy Google for $1 million, because Google was nothing compared Excite, Lycos, and Hotbot.
Google did two major things that causes them to become THE search company, beating out many far larger, more established competitors. One was Google Page Rank - ranking the importance of a site based on which sites link to it, recursively. The other difference was they jealousy guarded their viewer data, keeping it in-house, and developed sophisticated new algorithms for using it. They didn't sell it off to marketing companies as magazine publishers always had and Excite and Lycos did. That made them a ton more money, which they were able to re-invest.
If selling off the data were as profitable as keeping it in-house and developing your own advanced advertising algorithms, Lycos would be a trillion dollar company today and Google would be a hobby Sergey had in college.
Aside from that, Chevron is the company that employs most of the people in the city. They could sue Texaco or Shell over climate change and get the same points for political theater. Instead they decided to target the company that provides jobs for most of their constituents with this frivolous law suit.
Note to companies - if you choose Texas for your next expansion which hires a bunch of people, you'll find a bunch of good, hard-working employees here, from roughnecks to graduates of the best petroleum engineering program in the country, Texas A&M. You'll find reasonable costs for land, taxes, and other expenses. If you choose California, they'll target you with frivolous lawsuits as a political stunt. Your pick.
Slashdot Mirror
You guys make me literally laugh out loud every time you say "assault weapon". It's a joke on people who don't know anything at all about firearms.
The term does have a definition, defined by federal law. You can look it up if you want to. If you don't know what any of the words mean, what a "receiver" or "magazine" is, or "semiautomatic", here's a summary for you:
An assault weapon is one that looks scary.
It could be a plinker, a .22 like kids used to use to shoot cans in the backyard, if it's shaped like an AK and it's black than it's an assault weapon.
> Nissan, Renault, and Mitsubishi are three, independently traded, separate companies
Not exactly. If you were able to post a link that worked, you could have clicked on your link, and without even scrolling down past the first screen, seen that Renault controls Nissan, owning more 40% of it, and Nissan controls with Mitsubishi, with majority ownership. The Renault board therefore controls all three companies, and buying Renault stock ("traded") means you are also buying Nissan and Mitsubishi. Additionally Nissan owns a significant percentage of Renault, meaning Renault is part Nissan, which is again part Renault again, further cementing the companies together.
Next time you're about to post a link, you may wish to read it first.
> was only built in limited quantities from 2008-2012
They are still a boutique manufacturer. A footnote.
> the combined efforts of three long-standing industry giants trying to sell electric
Since we agree Tesla isn't anywhere near the same ballpark as Nissan-Renault as a company, perhaps you'd like to explain why their stock is valued as if they were quite a bigger and more successful than Nissan-Renault? Also GM, Ford, Toyota, etc. The stock is priced as if they were biggest, most successful car company in the world, while their actual production isn't even in the top ten.
> believe Tesla has a chance to become a dominating car brand
There is certainly a chance. Currently their stock is valued the same as the company that ALREADY IS the biggest car company in the world. The current stock price assumes Tesla will beat all the big companies, with 100% certainty, and soon. In fact Tesla isn't even in the top 5, probably not the top ten.
> It's a gamble, as buying stock always is. I'm planning to buy some
At the current stock price, it's not really a gamble. Long term, you can either lose your money or get really, really lucky and they grow a thousand times as large so you break even. (Except you'd still actually lose money due to opportunity cost). It's virtually impossible for an investor to make money on Tesla in the long term - they'll have to be amazingly successful, one of the most successful companies in history, in order for you to just break even.
> Note that Nissan reports its sales by month, per region, so one has to add up the Leaf sale figures for Japan, Europe, and the US across the January through March 2018 production and sales PDFs, all found here.
Or on your first link, you may notice they've sold 540,623 electric vehicles. It's buried in the article since electric is kind of a footnote for Nissan-Renault. Still almost twice as many as Tesla, but not a particularly significant part of their business.
Exactly, their job is to spy. There are a few people (out of billions) that need to be spied upon, too. Bin Laden and his compatriots, for example. The ideal is to make it very difficult or expensive to spy on people, so they only spy on the few people they need to be spying on.
While Nissan sold a 100 MILLION.
They've sold more Nissan Leafs than Tesla has sold total cars, and the Leaf is just a footnote for Nissan.
In any recent period, if Tesla sold X thousand, Nissan sold X million. Nissan isn't one of the top most valuable car companies. Why is Tesla?
Oh btw Nissan (and BMW and Chrysler and all the others) make money when they sell cars.
Tesla as a company is valued similar to the world's largest car companies, who sell millions of cars every year, and have for a long time. Tesla sells thousands - and loses money on every one. In order for the price people are paying for Tesla stock to be justified by the business, Tesla would need to:
Grow over a thousand times bigger
Be making money rather than losing money
Do so consistently, predictably
Nobody has made money on Tesla as a business, Tesla loses money. Lots of people have made money on Tesla, though - how? By getting the next sucker down the line to pay even more for the nearly worthless stock. That's a pyramid scheme.
This is where the Tesla fanbois jump in and say "Tesla is going to be the biggest car company in the world!". Maybe so. Maybe 50 years from now Tesla will be as big, and as profitable, as BMW or Honda. Heck, there's even a tiny chance they could be as big as Nissan and Toyota put together. IF and when that happens, the company will be worth $300 / share. Right now, the company is worth about as much than the guys who make seatbelts for Toyota. The business is worth about 5-10 cents / share, people are paying nearly $300. The difference between it's value as a business and what people are paying, in hopes that they can sell it to another sucker for more before it comes crashing down, is the pyramid scheme.
I had a typo at the end. That should be European OR Christian history. Pretty much every European monarch had a Jew at court to handle the banking, and other related financial matters.
We're not talking about some theory about a one-time event, such as 9-11, nor any secret. You can very, very easily check any of Christian literature over a period of a thousand years, or any history of the court of any European monarch.
To claim that a thousand years of open public policy never happened is as ridiculous as claiming the United States never existed. It's not like it's a secret - just open any book of European not Christian history written above the 4th grade level.
Have your ever noticed that when you're downtown, near big buildings, your GPS sometimes goes to shit? That's with nine transmitters TRYING to help you with location, constantly broadcasting signals specifically designed for location information. Triangulation in an urban environment is a bitch because radio signals bounce between buildings and bridges and such, so the same signal comes from five different directions.
Put a transmitter in a car in Washington traffic and it becomes almost impossible.
If you're an intelligence agent, you can turn on your device right when the chairman of the foreign intelligence committee walks out the door, rather than transmitting constantly.
What the competent spook should NOT do is drive the same circle around the Capital building over and over and over every day, without ever changing their route. If you do that, you can eventually get caught.
If the spy agencies of China, Russia, India, etc AREN'T doing this, they aren't doing their job. If the heads of their intelligence agencies have neglected to do this, they should be fired.
> You might be overstating the collectivism here.
They reasoned that it was perfectly fine to kill half the individual people, if doing so improved things for the nation as a whole. Their respect for individual rights was literally non-existent - torturing individual people was fine, for the benefit of the whole.
It was collectivism, putting the group over the individual, in by far the most extreme which has ever happened in all of human history.
Did you know there are more or less objective sources where you can read about history, and look up actual facts, rather than believing whatever crap some activist
blogger spews at you?
Did you know that the United States in 2018 isn't historical Europe?
For a THOUSAND YEARS the Roman Catholic Church taught (and fought) that banking, loaning money at interest, was a sin, usury. Until the fourth century it was looked down upon by most Christians, by the fourth century the Church started making church laws against it in various ways. In the eighth century under Charlemagne, they declared usury to be a general criminal offence for you could be imprisoned.
During all this time, the European monarchies shared power with the church. If you were a king, a good way to end up mysteriously dead was to piss off the church. Yet they had wars and huge infrastructure projects to finance, and I between wars the monarchies sometimes had huge amounts of gold and other treasure they'd love to make interest on. Running a country requires banking, but banking is a crime for Christians. Islam similarly taught that interest was usury, sin, and prohibited. What to do? The solution was to enlist Jews as bankers.
The European monarchs didn't have the modern financial system to run up a trillion dollar national debt in times of trouble. In times of trouble, such as war, they had the bankers to go to in order to borrow money to rebuild and supply their armies. Jewish bankers, because Christian bankers would face criminal action. With two sides at war, both asking the banks to finance their armies, the bank was in the position to decide which army got fed and equipped and which army didn't. If you were a European monarch, being friendly with the bankers was a really good idea.
That's the history of why the oldest, largest, most powerful European banks are Jewish.
Dealing with nations, like loaning to monarchs, the bankers, notably the Rothschilds, also were early to expand internationally, with different family members running affiliated banks in different countries. At the time, most businesses were local. Being smart about establishing multinational business before almost anyone else enhanced their size and power, while reducing their dependence on the local monarch.
It's time for me to go do other things now, but if you spend a few minutes learning the facts about anything else you parroted, you'll find it's all just as contrary to fact.
> If the Nazis HATED Capitalists so much then why did they use so many of them to build their Military?
They used the Jews to produce a significant portion of their war materiel too. So Nazis didn't hate Jews?
Internally, Hitler was primarily about power for himself. Externally, his sales pitch was a blend of KKK and Occupy Wall Street.
The National Socialist German Workersâ(TM) Party, aka Nazi party had some leftist ideology, a lot of leftist rhetoric, but can't be accurately classified on the left-right spectrum at all. It was primarily nationalist.
The name, "Socialist German Workersâ(TM) Party" fairly accurately represents much of what they SAID; like all politicians what they said isn't what they did. There was a lot of anti-capitalism and especially anti-banker stuff, but Hitler directed that into very different actions. For several hundred years, due to Christian religious teaching and kings using loopholes, most banking concerns were run by Jewish people. Hitler used the anti-banker (essentially anti Wall Street) rhetoric and sentiment to go after the Jews, as most bankers were Jewish.
Leftists are known for identity politics - rich vs poor, gay vs straight, black vs white, etc. The Nazis very much focused on race. Leftists generally talk about race a lot, but not to the extent the Nazis did.
Leftists are socialist / communist, saying the factories and such should be owned by the people, and unlike the conservatives believe people should not be given a CHOICE buy stock in companies they choose, but instead must own all or most of the big companies, whether they want to be owners of an oil company or not. Because a million people can't individually vote or otherwise have a hand in running a company, the government must do that for them, the leftists say. So left says the workers ideally own the company, but in practice the government does, with the politicians in control. Nazis mentioned the government running everything on behalf of the people, but the emphasis was on the nation (government), not on the people. It was about making Germany strong as a nation, as opposed to focusing on individual success and happiness.
That ties into another aspect. Conservatives and US Republicans tend toward individualism, the left is about collectivism. Nazis were an extreme version of collectivism, to the point that individuals didn't matter at all. Germany, the German people mattered, not each German person.
Because it was Germany that mattered, not each person, the state's power was far more important than individual rights. Those on the left and those on the right argue about limited government. Naziism was unlimited government, the government was the nation, and only the nation mattered.
As heads of the only thing that mattered, the nation, politicians / rulers had essentially unlimited power. Particularly there was a cult of personality around Hitler himself.
So Naziism had these major characteristics:
Socialist, class-based rhetoric
Hatred of the bankers and capitalists
Identity politics based on race
Extreme collectivism
Extreme nationalism
Near-absolute power for leaders
Some of that is similar to the modern left, but it's also significantly different in some ways.
It's not useful to me have an app that uses my CPU.
It's useful to me to have an app that loads web pages (a browser). Any app that's useful to me must use my CPU, of course.
It's the "why" that's useful to me, not the "how". Knowing my location is HOW a useful app tells me where to find inexpensive parking nearby.
"Didn't want to forecast further actions" - because what are they going to do, block the Apple app store in Russia? That would punish Russia as much as it punishes Apple (modulo what the haters think).
Trump didn't insult Xi Jinping's mother. What he said is that he's not going to let us be screwed over by unfair trade practices. I don't think the car dealer salesman is necessary, but if one insists in that analogy it would be more like letting the salesman know that unlike the last guy, you don't intend to lay sticker price.
What the timing does is it frames the negotiation, allowing US negotiators to "give" something to China during the negotiations, to relent on something, by easing the tariffs and restrictions. We can give them something they want, and get something in return, simply by going back to the same policy we had last month! :)
Now the *starting point* of the negotiations is that China wants something from us - easing that policy. Otherwise, the starting point was we wanted something from China - their help pressuring North Korea. In a negotiation, it's always better to be on the side being asked for something, rather than be the one asking for something.
A single return is good if you write 4-20 line functions, which is common in many communities, and I favor that style.
If you're going to have a 200-line function, it's better to do your input validation and "exception handling" up front like this:
if (denominator == 0 ||
denominator == null ||
numerator == null) {
return error
}
Rather than have your entire 200-line body three levels deeper than it needs to be, putting some blocks 6 or 8 levels deep. If course actual exception handling is another conversation.
Indeed. Just the other day I "adjusted" one of my co-workers pull requests just like that. That got rid of two single-line conditional blocks which put the rest of their 200-300 line function two levels deeper than it needed to be.
You got me thinking, I just might seriously do a vim plugin to add and remove curly braces from Python code. I've coded in a lot of languages over many years, most of which use curly braces, so my eyes/brain process them somewhat automatically. I also block-based operations in vim, which work based on curly braces. I might find it easier / faster to parse Python that had braces inserted temporarily.
This wouldn't be needed if my co-workers didn't write blocks that are FAR longer than any coding standard recommends, but I've had limited success changing their habits. Instead of functions that do one simple thing, they like to write an entire 800-line program as one "function", except it's still not actually a function because it uses global variables from another file. Within their faketion they like to do this:
if can work
200 lines
eight levels deep
else
return error
The only problem with writing such a plugin is that there are a lot of gotchas to finding the beginning and end of Python blocks. Other people have tried to write plugins to delimit Python blocks, but they all fail on real-world Python because a change in leading whitespace doesn't NECESSARILY mean a new block. Only sometimes.
> Let me guess, it's probably because "artists" nowadays use some computer algorithm to generate music which appeals to a wide audience
Almost is that, and has been for a long time. Pop songs have a very well-defined structure or formula. To some extent, that makes sense because that's what makes it a pop song, not blues, not country, not hip hop, not gospel, but pop.
Programmers have a formula for sorting, called quicksort, and lots of programmers do quicksort with very minor variations. Bakers have a pretty standard recipe for bread, with different people doing minor variations, there are a couple formulas for lipstick, with the ratio of colorants being the only thing that changes, and there is a formula or recipe for a pop song. Music majors can tell you the formula or pattern for a pop song.
Nothing wrong with using a well-proven formulas. The only thing is, as a consumer don't expect a pop song to B original, and don't expect paying $80 for lipstick is going to get you anything different than paying $8. When you buy lipstick, you're going get wax (mostly carnauba wax), oil, and pigment. When you buy a pop song, you're probably going to get intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus (or refrain), verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge ("middle eight"), verse, chorus and outro.
When I was doing SEO for a living there were a dozen search engines were analyzed the and worked to get good rankings on. Google wasn't in the top three. In fact, Excite, who had exclusive distribution agreements with Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, declined to buy Google for $1 million, because Google was nothing compared Excite, Lycos, and Hotbot.
Google did two major things that causes them to become THE search company, beating out many far larger, more established competitors. One was Google Page Rank - ranking the importance of a site based on which sites link to it, recursively. The other difference was they jealousy guarded their viewer data, keeping it in-house, and developed sophisticated new algorithms for using it. They didn't sell it off to marketing companies as magazine publishers always had and Excite and Lycos did. That made them a ton more money, which they were able to re-invest.
If selling off the data were as profitable as keeping it in-house and developing your own advanced advertising algorithms, Lycos would be a trillion dollar company today and Google would be a hobby Sergey had in college.
Aside from that, Chevron is the company that employs most of the people in the city. They could sue Texaco or Shell over climate change and get the same points for political theater. Instead they decided to target the company that provides jobs for most of their constituents with this frivolous law suit.
Note to companies - if you choose Texas for your next expansion which hires a bunch of people, you'll find a bunch of good, hard-working employees here, from roughnecks to graduates of the best petroleum engineering program in the country, Texas A&M. You'll find reasonable costs for land, taxes, and other expenses. If you choose California, they'll target you with frivolous lawsuits as a political stunt. Your pick.