That's a hard question, like any other question concerning human freedom. I suppose a good rule of thumb is "if you're not forced to subject yourself to it, you don't get a say in it".
That's were we disagree. I believe there are some human freedoms that nobody has the right to deny. I suppose I'm just an idealist.
> The current form of government in the United States is a representative republic that has a constitution that defines processes for dramatic change including a constitutional convention that allows for open-ended changes to the constitution itself.
I'm sure the goal of such openness of constitution was to protect the liberty of people, not to open doors for authoritarianism.
> I don't think it's productive to continue this conversation. Sadly, you've decided to take the position that Christians should have their right to vote curtailed
If that's all you took away from this conversation, then I agree - it's for the best to end it now. But I'll try to elaborate anyway.
I am not taking the position that Christians should have their right to vote curtailed, I'm taking the position that nobody, not even Christians, should have the right to impose their own standards upon others, unless they made sense outside of the Christian worldview. Abortion laws only make sense in the Christian worldview (and maybe a few other, equally intolerant, worldviews). The fact that Christians are the majority in the US only makes it de-facto a Christian state, while still pretending to be a secular democracy.
Here's a thought experiment:
If Talibans somehow became a majority in the US, would you still consider it "their right" to vote away the democracy and establish Sharia Law?
I think the point of that statement was that we should assume the worst case, for the sake of making code easier to deal with for everyone. If the code is easy to deal with for the meeting-ridden hypothetical person, it will definitely be easy to deal with for a non-meeting-ridden hypothetical person.
I understand and agree with your frustration, but I don't agree that the statement undermines the parent comment at all.
Functional programming languages often work that way. E.g., in Erlang, if you've already bound a variable X to a value, and want to compute another value of X, you cannot use the same variable name - you have to use X2 or something else.
Regret serves a purpose - it makes things memorable and makes them affect your decision-making. If you regret wasting time on pointless things, hold onto that regret and use it as a driving force to work now and in the future. That's the proper way to cope with regret.
In an alternative universe where you don't feel that regret, you could probably keep wasting time for the rest of your life without ever noticing.
> We see that as soon as people get some money and autonomy, what do they do? They isolate. People spend a huge premium, such as business or first class plane tickets, stadium box seating, vacation retreats, man caves, etc. to isolate from other people.
The low quality/safety of public infrastructure could be to blame. Why would anyone use unpleasantly hot and smelly public transportation, full of loud and potentially shady individuals, without any security around in case someone creates a commotion - when they could just pay a little bit more and not even worry about any of those things?
Why would anyone go to a public gym with a tiny shared space, number of subscriptions that far exceeds the capacity of the place, and deal with unpredictability of whether or not there will be room to train - when they can build a private gym and train whenever they feel like it?
Why would anyone stand around in the crowded "fan pit", having problems even moving because vendors sold more tickets then there is capacity, wait in the line for public bathroom, wait in the line for drinks, make yourself a target for pickpocketing, etc. - when they could just buy a VIP seat, enjoy their time, and go home?
People will stop isolating themselves when not isolating stops being so unpleasant.
Compile time/runtime dependencies often increase maintainence needs and resource usage.
In the context of programming languages, dependencies are a property of a programming language implementation. LLVM is not a small system, yet PicoLisp is a small language, which is why it might be considered a heavy dependency. There are scenarios like embedded where having a tiny implementation with little dependency pays off.
Ordinary programs can be very easily maintained by using only the language's standard library, as standard library is often maintained substantially longer than many third-party libraries.
And still, 2004 feels "a few years ago" to me. I don't know if I'll ever get used to it.