Another finger on the monkey’s paw curls closed :(

Call the function from the if block.

Now your tests can more easily call it.

I think at my last job we did argument parsing in the if block, and passed stuff into the main function.

I do sometimes joke that in order to hold office you must be able to win a game of Civilization with 2 different victory types.

I know it’s not for everyone, but for me I feel like buying music I like directly from the artist/label or via bandcamp has been a better experience. Now I have a library of DRM free music, and I know the musicians got a better cut.

Less access to goods and services made it generally unpleasant.

Less access? what? What places are you comparing?

I live in a city and have never felt like I have less access than when I was in the car centered suburbs.

no different than taking a bunch of books you bought second-hand and throwing them into a blender.

They didn’t buy the books. They took them without permission.

This doesn’t seem like a good idea.

One, releasing should be easy. At my last job, you clicked “new release” or whatever on GitHub. It then listed all the commits for you. If you “need” an Ai to summarize the commits, you fucked up earlier. Write better commit messages. Review the changes. Use your brain (something the AI can’t do) to make sure you actually want all of this to go out. Click the button. GitHub runs checks and you’re done.

Most of the time it took a couple minutes at most to do this process.

I think Jane Jacobs talked about this in like the 1960s. People in cars are less likely to stop and shop. If you’re on foot (or a bike) it’s a lot easier to stop and pop into an interesting shop. If you’re zooming by at 45mph, or stuck in traffic with nowhere to park, you’re less likely to see if that bookshop has something interesting

They will accept any negative sum game, they will ruin their own livelihoods and their own lives, if only it helps sad little kings of sad little hills.

I’m reminded of that book about Authoritarian Personality Types. They did like a model UN / Civilization game kind of thing, where the players represented different countries and could make decisions about policy, war, and so on. There were two groups. Unknown to the players, the people running this experiment put all the people who scored high for authoritarian personality in one group, and everyone else in the other group.

The group with low authoritarian personality scores? Basically everything was fine. They solved the ozone layer crisis. They were solving world hunger. One guy tried to be a dick and the rest of the group brought him in line.

The high authoritarian guys? Nuclear apocalypse. They made them sit in the dark for five minutes to think about what they’d done, and let them have a do-over. They still did a shit job. Petty squabbling. Stealing. Out of control climate crisis.

I don’t think there’s an ethical way to do this in real life, but I do think if you just didn’t allow people with that kind of personality to have any real power, we’d all be much better off.

It’s also possible i mangled the story because I rewrote it here from memory, but I believe it was in this book: https://theauthoritarians.org/

Oh yeah. Cars are bad on like every metric.

Socially they isolate people. You don’t interact with anyone when you’re driving except to get angry. The micro interactions you have on the train matter. Seeing people that aren’t just like you, also annoyed that the train is delayed, or just having a nice time with their kids, matters. More than makes up for when other people are annoying.

Economically they hurt. It’s much harder to just pop into an interesting looking shop when you’re cruising along at 40mph. All the space dedicated to parking could be used for other stuff- housing, commerce, communal space, whatever.

They make spaces less safe. Other than the direct impact (no pun intended) of people getting hit by cars, or crashing into stuff, a space that has steady foot traffic is generally safer. If everyone was in their car instead, you’d probably be alone on foot with no one to help if something happened.

They’re bad for the environment. Air pollution, micro plastics, whatever.

Drunk driving is way more dangerous than drunk “riding the train”.

The more non-car options are built out, the better it will be for people who need to drive for whatever reason.

Cars culture is trash and if we ever escape from it, it’s going to take years.

Ed Zitron wrote a blog post I’ve been thinking about, where he said that a lot of decisions are made by “business idiots” now. People that don’t really use or understand the product, and don’t really understand the users or their needs. It’s an interesting read, even though the guy is rather verbose: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

I see what you did there and I’m not going to fully fall for it.

I feel like trump could completely destroy the economy and cause the US to split apart and fall into ruin, and people would still think the Republicans are “good for the economy”

They dont usually have benefits (eg: health insurance) or time off

I don’t think I know anyone who’s cheated. But I also hang out with a lot of polyamorous people, where cheating is possible but I feel like is less common.

Huh. I don’t think I know anyone who cheats so I guess I got lucky. Your post is plausible

Is there a name for the thing where you’ll make an argument with like 3 distinct points supporting it, and the other person will attack only one, and claim the whole thing is in their favor?

Like, “You can’t cast two leveled spells in a turn, and you’re silenced, and you’re out of spell slots, so you can’t cast another fireball”

“No, I have another spell slot from my ring. Fireball time!”

I mean, it’s win-win for the assholes.

People don’t fight back: they get deported. Win for nazis

People fight back: Nazis use it as justification for further escalation

At least defending yourself / the victims has a chance of saving them. Doing nothing won’t

I think a lot of people don’t get good information and then don’t connect the dots when they do.

There’s a lot of slop and mis/disinformation out there

Anyone entering through web development. If you’re self taught or did a “coding boot camp”, it might be the only language you’ve used. A lot of places use it for backend stuff now, too