Less documentation means more job security.

My issue with this is that it works well with sample code but not as well with real-world situations where maintaining a state is important. What if rider.preferences was expensive to calculate?

Note that this code will ignore a rider’s preferences if it finds a lower-rated driver before a higher-rated driver.

With that said, I often work on applications where even small improvements in performance are valuable, and that is far from universal in software development. (Generally developer time is much more expensive than CPU time.) I use C++ so I can read this like pseudocode but I’m not familiar with language features that might address my concerns.

called for Hamas to be ousted from Gaza “through diplomacy”

How do they envision this could happen?

I can’t listen to an hour-long podcast right now, but I want to clarify that by “mistake” I mean a war of choice that that USA started but did not win. I think this is a definition that does not require subjective judgements of intent or justification, because if future defeat had been common knowledge then the public and the government as a whole would not have chosen to go to war. (There may have been those who wanted war for their own reasons which did not depend on victory, but their ability to steer the country towards war depended on convincing others that the war could be won.)

A shared commitment to American supremacy.

They say that like it’s a bad thing. Obviously American voters would be fools to oppose it, but even for the third world the alternative to Pax Americana has never been local self-determination and economic success. In the past, it was dominance by the Soviet Union. Now there is no other country able to exert power on a global scale (although China is working hard to get there) but still plenty of tyrants capable of dominating their region of the globe. The USA does not always act to prevent that. When it does, it usually acts in its own self-interest. It has made serious mistakes. (Thanks for that, Cheney.) The alternative is worse.

Pointing this out isn’t clever.

Software piracy satisfies the colloquial understanding of theft as the act of obtaining something without paying for it, but not the colloquial understanding of theft as the act of depriving someone else of the thing you’ve obtained. Purchasing a software license satisfies the colloquial definition of ownership as the right to do something after having paid for that right, but not the colloquial understanding of ownership as the right to do anything you want with what you have purchased. Software piracy isn’t theft in the legal sense, and purchasing a software license is not a transfer of ownership in the legal sense.

Memes like this are just pointless quibbling over words (barely more sophisticated than “You’re a doodoohead!” “No, you’re the doodoohead times a thousand!”) and contain zero insight into the morality or legality of software piracy or software licensing.

No because that would imply that Welsh is not just as valid a language as English and I don’t want to be wedi’i gywiro’n gwrtais.

I prefer names like these to names that are common words. Even the name of the language is annoying because the letter C isn’t exactly uncommon in other contexts. I can’t blame the people who named the language because they did it long before search engines were a thing, but what excuse do people now have?

The problem is that the Houthis are effectively irregular Iranian troops. You don’t win a war by hunting down every band of irregulars, because that wastes a lot of time and resources for little gain. You win a war by destroying the immobile assets that enable the enemy to supply the irregulars. The Houthis wouldn’t be firing Iranian anti-ship missiles if Iranian munitions factories were bombed, but the USA chooses not to do that.

IMO treating any attack by Iranian-made missiles as if it were launched by Iran would be a reasonable policy, but thanks to GWB’s Iraq adventure the USA is still too tired from that counterproductive war to vigorously defend its interests in the Middle East. (We did Iran a big favor by overthrowing a strong centralized government in Iraq which was quite hostile to Iran and replacing it with a weak government over which Iran wields a great deal of influence.)

Note that the retraction happened in 2015. I had heard of the original study but not the retraction. (I expect that I would have heard of neither the study nor the retraction if the study wasn’t about a politically charged topic).

People who left the study were actually miscoded as getting divorced.

At least it was a stupid mistake rather than poor study design.

What we find in the corrected analysis is we still see evidence that when wives become sick marriages are at an elevated risk of divorce … in a very specific case, which is in the onset of heart problems. So basically its a more nuanced finding. The finding is not quite as strong.

This on the other hand… I haven’t read the corrected study but I suspect this does not account for the fact that four different classes of illness were looked at, both because that’s a common mistake and because it makes no sense to me that men would divorce women with heart disease but not with cancer, stroke, or lung disease.

(The probability that at least one study out of four would have significance > 95% simply by chance is 1 - 0.95^4 = 0.18549375.)

Edit: Now I’m scared that I didn’t do the math correctly. That tends to happen when I try to be pedantic. Also there were eight categories, not four. (They also looked at women divorcing men.)

I don’t think that’s self-evident. In practice private companies can often be a lot more efficient than the government, but there’s a more fundamental objection too: taxpayers can choose to invest the money they save from paying lower taxes into the private utility company and by doing so they get the same amount of “free money” that they would have saved by paying more taxes upfront for a government-owned utility. In other words, if owning a utility company is so great, you can do it yourself via the free market rather than via the government.

The article is rather one-sided but this isn’t actually as silly as it sounds. Utility company expenses don’t go down to zero if people stop using electricity because power plants and electrical grids cost a lot of money just by existing. It’s also possible that these efficiency improvements don’t actually decrease peak loads much in which case utility companies might not even be able to shut down power plants. I think it’s common for utility companies to add a constant fee just for being hooked up to the grid to cover such costs (for example, that’s what California is doing) and because these companies are so heavily regulated, they need government permission to do that.

What’s with the sensationalist headline? Trump is angry but there’s no reason to think he’s “panicking”.

Who would win?

An entire Secret Service security detail?

Or one slopy boi?

I think being unable to handle a gently sloped roof makes the Secret Service look even worse here.

On the contrary, one can commit or compile credentials quite simply… Maybe Boromir isn’t the right person to ask.

Note that the song is banned by at least one festival. It isn’t illegal.

The use of the song by the far right is thought to have begun in late 2023

Is that really so long ago that it even counts as a song associated with them? This reminds me of Pepe the hate symbol…

I spent those years in dll hell.

This isn’t a proposal to have the government pay for medical care. It appears to be a proposal to have nobody pay for medical care.

So, uh, who will actually be paying for medical care?

Hah, I always knew my political beliefs were proof of my genetic superiority.

But seriously, this isn’t necessarily saying what some people assume it’s saying. I don’t have much confidence in “controlling for socioeconomic variables” so I think membership in an intellectual class and therefore adherence to the beliefs common among that class may be the explanation for this phenomenon (rather than “smart people can figure out what the right answer to politics is”).

Edit: I’ve thought about it and I think it’s unfair for me to cast doubt on the study’s controls without listing specific objections. I withdraw my comment, at least until I have time to read the full study carefully.