I'm sorry, I wasn't aware that the fact that JS also has some gotchas (many of which are not really gotchas at all, or only happen because of trying to break the language intentionally) means that C and C++ don't have any gotchas. C has a gotcha where a pointer to a freed object can lead to writing over other objects and only seeing the damage appear way later in unrelated parts of the program. There are few gotchas in JavaScript as pernicious as just that one. The JS gotchas in your page are all fairly local, at least.
It's so easy to stray into undefined behavior with C. The language is full of gotchas. Sure, the tip of the iceberg could fit on a notecard or two, but the messy details sure as hell won't. They have whole FAQs for that: http://c-faq.com/.
How is that different from our constitution, which was controversial at the time and had to be initially drafted in secret and defended publicly by anonymous letters to the editor? The people didn't get to vote on it either, as the state government's ratified it after long struggles between supporters and detractors.
Also something that would be computationally intensive compared to what they do now, and only of value in limited circumstances. It could be done, but probably isn't worth it.
Corporations would exist with or without the government. Are you really trying to argue that institutions can't exist unless some magical government fairy creates them?
I'm happy to support additional oversight. We must also recognize that sometimes things will go wrong. If we learn from those mistakes and do better next time, I think we should be happy.
No, it's not just a lot of nice things to say. A lot of nice things to say is "there really aren't any problems in the world today" and "anybody can be rich if they put in just a little bit of hard work". Those kinds of statements ignore reality. So do yours. It's easy to go around shooting the messenger and focusing on the ethos rather than the logos. You can always call someone biased or declare that they are in a position where "it's easy to say...". It's really really easy to do that. I could probably do the same to you. You are, after all, posting on a website (which requires internet access -- something a lot of people in the world don't have), in impeccable, idiomatic English, meaning that you've had access to halfway decent education in an anglophone country or perhaps some western European country. So I could easily charge you with being a hypocrite and making easy statements (it's also really easy for people in places of privilege to spend a lot of time playing oppression olympics and deconstructing identity politics and relations when they don't have to, you know, actually deal with it). But I won't do that, because we all live the lives we live and a lot of our state is determined by things out of our control, for better or for worse. And taking time to make those statements won't fix any of the problems that you claim I'm ignoring, nor will it do anything to make any sort of logically worthwhile case. It's just another way to pick at people. And yes, that's why I'm responding defensively.
And you live in a sad world where the fact that somebody is getting raped by coke bottles somewhere means the world totally sucks and nobody can ever say anything nice about it. Which is really a slap in the face to the large number of people who work tireless and thanklessly to bring about justice and peace, from grassroots agitators and rebellious populations willing to give up their lives to make things right to the variety of NGOs and other organizations that do real work to help real people, to say nothing of western democracies, shitty though they often are, that still have provided a rather significant chunk of the world's population with lands and markets where they can live and prosper in relative freedom and justice. A fucking slap in the face to all these people to say that nothing's helped, nothing is getting better, nobody cares, nobody's done any work to fix real problems and the only thing that matters is that it sucks somewhere for somebody, even if most people on this planet just go about their lives with neither extremes of poverty/injustice or undue wealth and power. And you're the one telling me that my head's up my ass.
Solyndra was one failure out of many many successes or break-evens. That's the market. The government didn't actively waste money on one bad idea, they've provided funded a whole range of companies, with the expectation (apparently lacking in conservative circles) that some would succeed and some would fail. They aren't picking winners and losers, they are picking a good area of the market that needs some help, and it's gotten some good help. Look at Tesla. It's going to be paying off its government loans early. And all of these companies have gotten considerably more in outside funding than from the government. The market thinks they are a good idea too, and the market probably understands that not all good ideas pan out for a variety of reasons.
The federal budget is huge for three reasons: medicare/medicaid, social security and defense. You take out those three and you have a vastly smaller federal budget, which has been shrinking and shrinking over the years as we keep cutting those "wasteful" federal programs (by which I mean the ones that actually do useful stuff as opposed to providing a stopgap against a mismanaged healthcare system or lining the pockets of defense contractors). More importantly, though, is that the right has successfully convinced the public that academia and the public sector cannot be a source of good in society, and so there is now a concerted effort to destroy the ability for the government to do one of the few things government is actually good at (NSF funding provides great bang for buck over the long term), leaving R&D up to the fickle and short-sighted market. That's not to say the market is bad, but rather that there's a valid role for the public sector to play by virtue of its being outside of the market and disconnected from the short-term fluctuations and the need to make money NOW that the market requires. Also, the idea that we can contribute to a *res public* which will be a common effort to effect positive outcomes for society as a whole as part of the common good is dying a swift death. Government is evil, government is bad, working together (if there isn't a price tag or contract involved) is bad.
Read the post again. He said that the disease is still a disease, but the onset of the symptoms is often caused by traumatic events, and the nature of those events may color the nature of the hallucinations.
This is a variant of the "no atheist in a foxhole" meme. What may be true for this or that person should not be the basis by which we judge overall quality of life in the world. There will always be people who get broken coke bottles up the ass. And there will always be people who live lives far more posh than they deserve. I see no point in saying the world is a shithole because it's a shithole for some people, nor in saying that the world is wonderful because it's wonderful for some people. We should judge it in aggregate and in "justice velocity", which still mostly seems to be going up, not down, despite all the shit that's out there.
If we put peace and fairness on a scale from 1 to 100, with 100 being perfect justice and no war/fighting, then if we go from a 15 to a 25, it's still an improvement, even if there's much left to be desired. Far more people in the world today do live safe and prosperous lives, lives that were once only for kings and clergy. A lot of people still don't, but it hasn't really gotten worse over the last 1000 years, say.
I'm not sure why you are laboring under the impression that it was ever different. I'd say that despite all the corruption we have now, we still have more in the way of fairness and peace than we've generally had during most of the agrarian age.
Do you think the general public has the knowledge and contextual awareness to do anything useful with those minutiae? Do you think it's actually helpful to the people doing the work to know that every little detail will be scrutinized by people who probably have no business scrutinizing their own business, let alone someone else's? And don't forget to add in a sensationalist media looking for the next scandal, and the opposition party, ready to denounce every little act that the party in power does, good or bad. Your proposal will create a massive boondoggle, and encourage the government to do almost nothing (which is, perhaps, your goal, but you can at least have the decency to come out and say it), or take no risks at all, and provide limited and poor public service. Not every project will be like that, of course, but enough will, as already happens with the degree of transparency that we do have.
We're talking about different things, as I figured. Pre-bid and auction transparency is great -- we agree there. Once the project is underway, does *every* detail of the project execution need to be scrutinized by a sensationalized public? I'm having trouble seeing the benefit in that. Regular reporting of progress and expenditures is fine. The latter, at least, needs to be done as part of normal accounting anyway, so reporting on it is not much extra work, if any, and certainly beneficial. But every single detail? That's all I objected to in the first place. You seem not to get that.
I think we're not too much in disagreement with each other. But what I said was not a strawman. You may agree or disagree with my argument that transparency has a cost, but I am in no way constructing an argument to knock down. Please get your fallacies in order.
I still maintain, though, that full, real-time transparency *is* a lot of extra work. Some degree of it is worthwhile, but absolute transparency is going to cost a lot and bring diminishing returns. Is the public going to be better served by knowing every word that was said between low-level bureaucrats and contractors? Doubtful. Meeting minutes and the occasional public hearing are probably reasonable, but those are not the same as real-time transparency. I mean, what do you actually want the government to produce for the public? Perhaps we ought to be more specific so that we aren't caught up in the vagueness of generalities.
You can only involve so many people in a project, and you can only expend so many resources on reporting on the progress of the project before the project grinds to a halt. There's a cost to everything you are proposing. Some degree of transparency is fine, but providing a window into every single detail for a large audience is costly and impractical.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, I wasn't aware that the fact that JS also has some gotchas (many of which are not really gotchas at all, or only happen because of trying to break the language intentionally) means that C and C++ don't have any gotchas. C has a gotcha where a pointer to a freed object can lead to writing over other objects and only seeing the damage appear way later in unrelated parts of the program. There are few gotchas in JavaScript as pernicious as just that one. The JS gotchas in your page are all fairly local, at least.
Recursion jokes never end.
It's so easy to stray into undefined behavior with C. The language is full of gotchas. Sure, the tip of the iceberg could fit on a notecard or two, but the messy details sure as hell won't. They have whole FAQs for that: http://c-faq.com/.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnut_the_Great
How is that different from our constitution, which was controversial at the time and had to be initially drafted in secret and defended publicly by anonymous letters to the editor? The people didn't get to vote on it either, as the state government's ratified it after long struggles between supporters and detractors.
Also something that would be computationally intensive compared to what they do now, and only of value in limited circumstances. It could be done, but probably isn't worth it.
You can use '-' on Google searches.
Corporations would exist with or without the government. Are you really trying to argue that institutions can't exist unless some magical government fairy creates them?
I'm happy to support additional oversight. We must also recognize that sometimes things will go wrong. If we learn from those mistakes and do better next time, I think we should be happy.
No, it's not just a lot of nice things to say. A lot of nice things to say is "there really aren't any problems in the world today" and "anybody can be rich if they put in just a little bit of hard work". Those kinds of statements ignore reality. So do yours. It's easy to go around shooting the messenger and focusing on the ethos rather than the logos. You can always call someone biased or declare that they are in a position where "it's easy to say...". It's really really easy to do that. I could probably do the same to you. You are, after all, posting on a website (which requires internet access -- something a lot of people in the world don't have), in impeccable, idiomatic English, meaning that you've had access to halfway decent education in an anglophone country or perhaps some western European country. So I could easily charge you with being a hypocrite and making easy statements (it's also really easy for people in places of privilege to spend a lot of time playing oppression olympics and deconstructing identity politics and relations when they don't have to, you know, actually deal with it). But I won't do that, because we all live the lives we live and a lot of our state is determined by things out of our control, for better or for worse. And taking time to make those statements won't fix any of the problems that you claim I'm ignoring, nor will it do anything to make any sort of logically worthwhile case. It's just another way to pick at people. And yes, that's why I'm responding defensively.
I, too, enjoy arguing with strawmen.
And you live in a sad world where the fact that somebody is getting raped by coke bottles somewhere means the world totally sucks and nobody can ever say anything nice about it. Which is really a slap in the face to the large number of people who work tireless and thanklessly to bring about justice and peace, from grassroots agitators and rebellious populations willing to give up their lives to make things right to the variety of NGOs and other organizations that do real work to help real people, to say nothing of western democracies, shitty though they often are, that still have provided a rather significant chunk of the world's population with lands and markets where they can live and prosper in relative freedom and justice. A fucking slap in the face to all these people to say that nothing's helped, nothing is getting better, nobody cares, nobody's done any work to fix real problems and the only thing that matters is that it sucks somewhere for somebody, even if most people on this planet just go about their lives with neither extremes of poverty/injustice or undue wealth and power. And you're the one telling me that my head's up my ass.
Solyndra was one failure out of many many successes or break-evens. That's the market. The government didn't actively waste money on one bad idea, they've provided funded a whole range of companies, with the expectation (apparently lacking in conservative circles) that some would succeed and some would fail. They aren't picking winners and losers, they are picking a good area of the market that needs some help, and it's gotten some good help. Look at Tesla. It's going to be paying off its government loans early. And all of these companies have gotten considerably more in outside funding than from the government. The market thinks they are a good idea too, and the market probably understands that not all good ideas pan out for a variety of reasons.
The federal budget is huge for three reasons: medicare/medicaid, social security and defense. You take out those three and you have a vastly smaller federal budget, which has been shrinking and shrinking over the years as we keep cutting those "wasteful" federal programs (by which I mean the ones that actually do useful stuff as opposed to providing a stopgap against a mismanaged healthcare system or lining the pockets of defense contractors). More importantly, though, is that the right has successfully convinced the public that academia and the public sector cannot be a source of good in society, and so there is now a concerted effort to destroy the ability for the government to do one of the few things government is actually good at (NSF funding provides great bang for buck over the long term), leaving R&D up to the fickle and short-sighted market. That's not to say the market is bad, but rather that there's a valid role for the public sector to play by virtue of its being outside of the market and disconnected from the short-term fluctuations and the need to make money NOW that the market requires. Also, the idea that we can contribute to a *res public* which will be a common effort to effect positive outcomes for society as a whole as part of the common good is dying a swift death. Government is evil, government is bad, working together (if there isn't a price tag or contract involved) is bad.
I, too, believe in magic.
Read the post again. He said that the disease is still a disease, but the onset of the symptoms is often caused by traumatic events, and the nature of those events may color the nature of the hallucinations.
This is a variant of the "no atheist in a foxhole" meme. What may be true for this or that person should not be the basis by which we judge overall quality of life in the world. There will always be people who get broken coke bottles up the ass. And there will always be people who live lives far more posh than they deserve. I see no point in saying the world is a shithole because it's a shithole for some people, nor in saying that the world is wonderful because it's wonderful for some people. We should judge it in aggregate and in "justice velocity", which still mostly seems to be going up, not down, despite all the shit that's out there.
Minified JavaScript is for convenience of transport. It's no different from compiled code, which GNU software happily produces.
If we put peace and fairness on a scale from 1 to 100, with 100 being perfect justice and no war/fighting, then if we go from a 15 to a 25, it's still an improvement, even if there's much left to be desired. Far more people in the world today do live safe and prosperous lives, lives that were once only for kings and clergy. A lot of people still don't, but it hasn't really gotten worse over the last 1000 years, say.
Right, because clearly my post was arguing that the world no longer has any problems whatsoever.
How is closed any better? It's just another metaphor.
I'm not sure why you are laboring under the impression that it was ever different. I'd say that despite all the corruption we have now, we still have more in the way of fairness and peace than we've generally had during most of the agrarian age.
Do you think the general public has the knowledge and contextual awareness to do anything useful with those minutiae? Do you think it's actually helpful to the people doing the work to know that every little detail will be scrutinized by people who probably have no business scrutinizing their own business, let alone someone else's? And don't forget to add in a sensationalist media looking for the next scandal, and the opposition party, ready to denounce every little act that the party in power does, good or bad. Your proposal will create a massive boondoggle, and encourage the government to do almost nothing (which is, perhaps, your goal, but you can at least have the decency to come out and say it), or take no risks at all, and provide limited and poor public service. Not every project will be like that, of course, but enough will, as already happens with the degree of transparency that we do have.
We're talking about different things, as I figured. Pre-bid and auction transparency is great -- we agree there. Once the project is underway, does *every* detail of the project execution need to be scrutinized by a sensationalized public? I'm having trouble seeing the benefit in that. Regular reporting of progress and expenditures is fine. The latter, at least, needs to be done as part of normal accounting anyway, so reporting on it is not much extra work, if any, and certainly beneficial. But every single detail? That's all I objected to in the first place. You seem not to get that.
I think we're not too much in disagreement with each other. But what I said was not a strawman. You may agree or disagree with my argument that transparency has a cost, but I am in no way constructing an argument to knock down. Please get your fallacies in order.
I still maintain, though, that full, real-time transparency *is* a lot of extra work. Some degree of it is worthwhile, but absolute transparency is going to cost a lot and bring diminishing returns. Is the public going to be better served by knowing every word that was said between low-level bureaucrats and contractors? Doubtful. Meeting minutes and the occasional public hearing are probably reasonable, but those are not the same as real-time transparency. I mean, what do you actually want the government to produce for the public? Perhaps we ought to be more specific so that we aren't caught up in the vagueness of generalities.
> What makes you think it doesn't?
You can only involve so many people in a project, and you can only expend so many resources on reporting on the progress of the project before the project grinds to a halt. There's a cost to everything you are proposing. Some degree of transparency is fine, but providing a window into every single detail for a large audience is costly and impractical.