Doc Avid Mornington

The scriptures, if one believes these things, were fulfilled, right? If the reason given not to fight was so that the scriptures would be fulfilled, doesn’t that logically leave Christians free to commit any violence, now?

Github != Git

Bringing up his actions in a different job doesn’t really seem to have bearing on comparing administrations. Biden has a pretty bad history prior to his presidency as well.

But also, and more importantly, judging progressiveness just by final results, without referent to the era, is not useful. By this logic, the Biden administration could literally be rolling back progress, and as long as they don’t go too far, we’d still have to call them “more progressive than FDR”. The only useful way to judge progressiveness is as progress made - or at least progress worked for - from the starting baseline.

I think it’s reasonable to say Biden has had the most progressive administration since LBJ. I was really surprised by how good he’s been, relative to my expectations.

That’s how you talk?

If your SQL model has nulls, and you don’t have some clear way to conserve them throughout the data chain, including to the json schema in your API contract, you have a bug. That way to preserve them doesn’t have to be keeping nulls distinct from missing values in the json schema, but it’s certainly the most straightforward way.

The world has more than three languages, and the way Java and Python do things is not universally correct. I’m not up to date on either of them, but I’m also guessing that they both have multiple libraries for (de) serialization and for API contract validation, so I am not really convinced your claims are universal even within those languages.

I am not the other person you were talking to, I’ve only made one comment on this, so not really “hellbent”, friend.

Yes, I am pretty sure I read the comments, although you’re making me wonder if I’m missing one. What specific comment, what “case specified above” are you referring to? As far as I can see, you are the one trying to say that if a distinction between null and a non-existent attribute is not specified, it should universally be assumed to be meaningless and fine to drop null values. I don’t see any context that changes that. If you can point it out, specifically, I’ll be glad to reassess.

Oh, they can read, they know exactly what they are doing. The Republic has had enemies within from the start, and now they control the most powerful branch of government.

But who, who is “you” in this scenario? Who do you think can just tell the court “no”? Let’s be specific.

Thanks for sharing this, it’s quite interesting. I found a Wikipedia article on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system

Apparently, as you did suggest, “base 1” is a name that is used, but is somewhat a misnomer.

The article mentions that Church encoding is a kind of unary notation, which I would not have thought of, but I guess it is.

Enjoyable little rabbit-hole to zap my productivity for the day.

You seem to have missed the important phrase “in source code”, as well as the entire second part of my comment discussing that runtime functions that parse user input are different.

At the (SQL) database level, if you are using null in any sane way, it means “this value exists but is unknown”. Conflating that with “this value does not exist” is very dangerous. JavaScript, the closest thing there is to a reference implementation for json serialization, drops attributes set to undefined, but preserves null. You seem to be insisting that null only means “explicit omission”, but that isn’t the case. Null means a variety of subtly different things in different contexts. It’s perfectly fine to explicitly define null and missing as equivalent in any given protocol, but assuming it is not.

Closer to tally marks without clustering

Who calls it that? Who even uses that enough to have given it a name? Seems completely pointless…

It’s been a long time, but I’m pretty sure C treats a leading zero as octal in source code. PHP and Node definitely do. Yes, it’s a bad convention. It’s much worse if that’s being done by a runtime function that parses user input, though. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that somewhere in the past, but no idea where. Doesn’t seem likely to be common.

Between fascist Republicans and liberals pretending to be libertarians, I think it’s a pretty clear choice. We vote to live another day.

It’s better to have useful comments. Long odds are that somebody who writes comments like this absolutely isn’t writing useful comments as well - in fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen it happen. Comments like this increase cognitive overhead when reading code. Sure, I’d be happy to accept ten BS useless comments in exchange for also getting one good one, but that’s not the tradeoff in reality - it’s always six hundred garbage lines of comment in exchange for nothing at all. This kind of commenting usually isn’t the dev’s fault, though - somebody has told a junior dev that they need to comment thoroughly, without any real guidelines, and they’re just trying not to get fired or whatever.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/popular-information/

I never heard of it, either, but sounds reliable.

Your comment was, as I stated, nearly non-sequitur because you only responded to one word of the first sentence of givesomefucks’ comment:

I wish the Dem party compromised as much with Dem voters as they did with trump supporters.

You responded to the word “compromised”. You responded as if you were responding to a general senseless rant against the very idea of compromise at all, a position which is not even present in that first sentence, and has nothing to do with the rest of their comment, or the overall point they were making about the belligerent and dismissive attitude Biden takes toward Democratic voters, and what different approach would actually win elections - I’ll quote the rest so you don’t have to scroll back:

That’s the best way to get Biden the votes necessary to prevent Trump.

Not the current strategy of:

Fuck you, you’ll vote for me or get the fascist again

Like, this should be an easy victory for any halfway decent candidate. Instead we get an 82 year old that won’t stop shit talking his party’s voter base for not wanting to fund a genocide rather than social services.

In my comment, I attempted to clarify and expound on what would work, what they are actually doing, and the great gulf between these, trying to bring it back to givesomefucks’ actual comment, rather than what you imagined to respond to. Instead, you’ve responded, again, to a comment not actually made - accusing me of somehow “demanding” something. Where did I demand anything?

And yeah, the filibuster isn’t real. A simple majority of the Senate can pass anything they want. They can drop the filibuster as a rule; they can carve out a general exception; they can even just choose to suspend it for that single piece of legislation. If a simple majority can pass any legislation they want, given that they actually choose to, then the filibuster is absolutely not real. It’s smoke and mirrors so they can blame the other guys. In fact, it’s probably not even constitutional - there’s no constitutional support for it, and the founders were explicitly against including any kind of supermajority requirement.

This is nearly a complete non-sequitur to the comment you are responding to. If Biden laid it out like you have, said “look we’re in a bad position here, we need to compromise with the fascists even though they are wrong”, if he presented a strong platform with goals people could get excited about, and make it clear who and what are the obstacles voters have to overcome to get there, he could bring out the voters to get those overwhelming and consistent majorities. The same goes for every Democratic president you named. Instead, Biden is absolutely obstinate about it. He acts like the fascists are decent and reasonable people, like the only hope the left can have is to slow down the slide to the right, and like we’re the problem - not the Republicans, not the right-wing Democrats, no, the only problem is that some of us would like less murder and more food, housing, healthcare and education. That’s exactly why the Democrats have only had control for four of the last twenty-four years.

And the filibuster isn’t real. It’s literally just a made up rule they all agree to pretend matters. It can be ended at any time by a simple majority. Doing so at the beginning of a session would look more legitimate, but frankly, the so-called “nuclear option” is far more legitimate in itself than the routine abusive use of the filibuster. They choose to let it restrain them specifically so that they can blame inaction on it.

Shilling for the status quo? I’ve got a whole laundry list of changes I’d love to make, some much more significant than term limits, to make legislatures more responsive to democratic oversight. Please see my response to Zaktor for just a few.

There’s this claim, probably kinda BS, that it takes ten years of practice to get really good at something. I’m always suspicious of nice neat numbers like that. But I think it gets repeated a lot because, ultimately, anybody who has become an expert at something kinda squints at it and says “yeah that sounds maybe right” - because it’s close enough, it’s on the right order of magnitude. Expertise takes time. Laws are complicated. If you have a twelve year term limit, and become an expert at year ten, you get two years to do something about it - but only a small fraction of the legislative body left has your level of expertise to work with you.

Always demand more democracy, never less.

So I did some digging… USTL is one of several shady, fake-grass-roots organizations operated by Howard Rich, a wealthy libertarian, and funded by his collection of wealthy libertarian friends, who clearly want to reduce the effectiveness of government, and make it more susceptible to their influence. The lobbyists investigated the lobbyists and found that they don’t support the thing they are saying you should support.

If you look deeper at the specific bills highlighted in that article, neither one is about term-limits versus no-term-limits. They’re both about restructuring existing term limits. We had a similar ballot measure where I live. It’s a fairly complicated issue, and not a good example.

Perhaps the most famous term limit in the US is the Presidential one, imposed because FDR was doing too many good things. By actually doing things to help people, he had become insanely popular, and won a fourth term - democratically, because the voting citizens approved of his actions, as it’s supposed to work. That’s when the corrupt capitalist wing of Congress decided to put a limit on democracy, and honestly, that might be one of the most significant “beginning of the downfall” moments we can point to in US history.

Another big supporter of term limits is the Heritage Foundation. If you can judge somebody by the friends they keep, how about legislation? It’s always the right pushing for this idea.

There’s a lot, and I mean a whole lot, we should be doing to reduce the influence of money on politics. Fully publicly funded elections; banning many current shady lobbying practices; improving our electoral systems to be more democratic; making it illegal for legislators to take bribes, no matter how subtle. Lots. But taking the choice away from the voters is not a good option. It’s a generally good rule of thumb: if your solution to a problem is to reduce democracy, you’ve got the wrong solution.

EDIT to add: https://hartmannreport.com/p/how-term-limits-turn-legislatures-6b2