Try going outside and attempt to honestly express your opinion of the current President or Israel or immigrants or ${current_political_thing}. Maybe you live in a political monoculture, but most places are not.
Are the majority of people who make these types of complaints thin-skinned right-wingers? Also yes.
In my experience, people who actually experience intimidation for their views, like you know, the view that being gay is fine actually, don't go around making these types of complaints. They're out protesting and fighting.
Well, there's currently this little conflict going on that had the president call on the National Guard. And a certain governor apparently sided with the rioters and decided to... sue?
... and reading this probably just made steam come out of your ears and think I'm an enemy? Well, there's your war zone ;)
A government that runs the richest city in the country (SF trades this spot with NY every few years) and makes it look the way it does is the definition of dysfunction.
And Detroit... well, I guess now that they've bulldozed all the abandoned buildings it looks less like a post apocalyptic hellscape and more just abandoned. An improvement I suppose.
California also has easily solvable housing, education, transportation and mental health crises that are entirely driven by mismanagement by the state government. They haven’t done anything meaningful to address these issues in 25-40 years depending on the issue.
Heck, they ignored the water crisis for twenty years, and what they’re doing now for aquifer replenishment is still less than what makes sense.
I say they are easily addressed because simply reverting to California’s policies from ~ 1975 would greatly improve the current situation.
The biggest root problem with California governmental structure is harmful constitutional features added by public referendum, especially Proposition 13 (1978). I guess you can blame "government" for that, but it doesn't seem like quite the right target.
The water crisis is a difficult problem because water rights are complicated and central valley farmers are an influential political group very focused on short-term preservation of water access and not as concerned with long-term sustainability.
> easily solvable housing, education, transportation and mental health crises
I submit that these are much less "easily solvable" than you claim. (What have you personally done to work on these problems, if they are so "easy"?) Legislators don't get to wave a magic wand, but need support of a wide variety of stakeholders who have contradictory demands and expectations (some of which are fairly unrealistic, but anyway..).
Education for example has competing goals of local funding vs. inter-city equity. Should the wealthiest towns get to spend arbitrarily much local property tax money on their own children's public schools while the poorer town next door is running out of toilet paper, or should the state try to equalize funding between schools to give every child the best opportunity? There's not really a "correct" answer to this, and every possible choice has some serious disadvantages.
Well, this is a very one-sided take. Imagine being a dev tasked with evaluating a product that makes you look redundant and also costs the company license fees in perpetuity. Whereas building a homegrown solution ensures that you keep your job, and get to look like a rockstar who saved the company money. Gee, I wonder which one the devs picked.
> Will you, as this author has described, find a comfortable position in life, be able to afford whatever you need? Absolutely.
Only when the times are good, as many of us had to learn the hard way.
When times are tough and there aren't enough resources to go around - there is no substitute for being the one allocating the resources, or at least close to them.
It's most likely not C/C++ per se, but rather the eleventy billion ways different projects build these libraries.
Bazel for example builds everything in a well-contained sandbox and it all works, but only for the C/C++ libraries it builds natively. The magic ingredient is RPATH, but most Makefiles do not set it. However, one can add an extra build step with patchelf and inject an RPATH.
Self-reflection seems to be a more computationally expensive task than decision making.
The human computer increases its power differently than the accepted mythology suggests. First, the human computer it not an individual brain, it's the entire society with its structure and inter generational transfer of knowledge. The communication between individual "nodes" is part of the structure and the intelligence of the system.
We are largely past the myth of intelligent design, will soon be past the myth of unique sentience, and at some point will realize that the myth of individual exceptionalism is also largely a myth. A genius placed outside of society would be unable to achieve anything.
The way we seem to get past these myths is simply acquiring more computational power through population growth and better communication. Once a certain threshold of computational power is reached a new transformational idea will appear. It's pretty much accepted that if Marconi wasn't around to "invent" the radio, someone else would (indeed, almost every country has a claim to such an inventor). These things are part of the zeitgeist, and it seems that "zeitgeist" is sort of similar to "next token prediction" in many ways.
I am sure that these thoughts will be deeply unpopular, but I am starting to see them more and more. Our working model of the world is shifting.
So it makes sense then: there are two parties. The center is the imaginary line in the middle. One of the parties is center-left, the other is center-right. Logic! :)
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