partial_accumen

Ruby was the most approachable language I found and sheparded me from my limits of bash scripting and Windows batch file scripting into the next level.

The author derides Ruby’s easy readability and syntax because it has issues scaling to large enterprise applications. I don’t disagree there is a performance ceiling, but how many hundreds of thousands of Ruby projects never rose to that level of need? The author is also forgetting that Ruby had Rubygems for easy modular functional additions years before Python eventually got pip.

I don’t write in Ruby anymore, and Python has evolved to be much more approachable than it was when Ruby was in its prime, however if someone came to me today saying they wanted the easier programming language to learn that could build full applications on Linux, OSX, Windows, and the web, I’d still point them to Ruby with the caveat that it would have limits and they would be better served by Python in the long run.

The lemmy instance you choose (for example, you chose .ml) to join will have its own tone, flavor, rules, politics. You will find instances that are left, right, and center. Additionally you will find some that are VERY far-left or VERY far-right. If you are finding the tone for the lemmy community (equivalent of reddit subreddit) different that your position, it may be because its hosted and moderated on an instance with that particular bend.

You may also experience some judgment from others because of the instance you are coming from as it can communicate some of your positional bias. Some users have chosen to relocate to other lemmy instances once they get an understanding of what ideas live where.

All of that said, while lemmy and the fediverse has a much smaller userbase than Reddit, it is so much nicer here. My last post to reddit was over 2 years ago, and every post I hear about how bad it is getting over there confirms this is the better place here.

BTW you missed a colon at the end of your if statement on line 341. Also you used irregular whitespace on another line, but I’ll let you find that one yourself, as a treat.

Creating electricity is surprisingly easy. Copper and Zinc were widely available for centuries before electricity and the only other item you need is an acid. Nitric acid was being made back in the 13th century. Arrange a copper bar and a zinc bar separated from one another with an insulator (glass, ceramic, or even wood) in a glass or ceramic jar. Pour in the acid submerging most of the bars with some expose above the acid. You now have a battery with the anode and cathode (positive and negative terminals) being the top of the bars.

Barely slightly more sophisticated batteries than this powered telegraph offices for powering Morse code sending keys.

I have a small portfolio of space company stocks and keep them as a reminder to avoid active investing.

My boring old Total Market (essentially S&P500) index funds have done much better in the same time as my space stocks.

Wait till gold drops by into it.

Every time the market spikes for gold (as it is now), I run the projections to see if I would have been better off in gold than buying equities instead. Gold has never once shown to be the better investment as vehicle for appreciation.

For the purposes of framing your question, are you meaning:

• commit to a single person in a monogamous relationship long term?

or

• commit to a legal construct of a relationship such as marriage?

There are different answers for each.

The left begins at socialism.

If you’re talking about the political spectrum I would think the extreme far left would begin at anarchism and eventually graduate to socialism as you move farther right.

The scary part of this one is that previously, we had administrations that, while still being right-of-center (yes ML, I know), had at least enough sense to prop things up well enough to recover.

I’ll admit I haven’t cataloged all financial crises in American history, but I can’t think of any right-of-center administrations that have cleaned up a things for a recovery. Perhaps only exception might be the Oil Crisis under Carter, and the recovery under Reagan. Great depression, Black Monday, Great Recession, COVID recession, all happened under right-of-center Presidents and recovered under left-of-center Presidents.

I started another point-by-point rebuttable about my individual disagreements with your arguments, but I think we’re just too far away from one another for more meaningful discussion on this. Thank you for your discussion up to this point though.

Edit: I should have lead with this, but I’ll add it now after-the-fact. I really appreciate you taking the time to response and share your views and data. Even though I don’t necessarily agree with it. I want to thank you for talking.

Capitalists in the US, facing internal market saturation and steadily falling rates of profit, have had to expand outward, leveraging a strong overseas military to keep the global south under their thumb.

My point is that capitalism isn’t the only system susceptible to this. All governments in human history have fallen to a version of this if they rise to any substantial size.

The empire of Japan did the same thing for the same reason causing their start of WWII in the late 1930s. In China the Qing Dynasty collapsed in the 1910s under the weight of its expansion. Rome did the same with collapse in 98AD to 117AD. The Aztec empire fell because of contact with European explorers, but the Aztec society was certainly based upon strict social hierarchies mirroring much of Europe with an aristocracy on one side and serfdom on the other.

It isn’t about “discovering” new systems. History is not progressed by people randomly discovering new ideas, but is a gradual material process, and the ideas that rise and fall are secondary to that and support that process. Liberalism arose because of capitalism’s rise and need for ideological justification.

I disagree. We haven’t found a stable system yet, so more exploration, discovery, evolution (whichever euphemism you want to insert here) is needed to arrive at something stable for humanity. The alternative is we just accept we get a few generations or tens of generations before society falls and we rinse and repeat.

As for socialism, the easiest answer is the PRC.

That… was not was I was expecting as your exemplar of socialism.

This century is going to be marked by China’s undisputed rise. As they continue to develop, market mechanics will continue to be phased out

I’m not so sure about that. First, China has a lot going for it to reach what you’re describing. I don’t dispute that. However, there’s been a shortcoming I’ve observed of China’s path to growth over the last 50 years that I don’t see called out. They’ve reach market mature and economic success far faster than a nation like the USA given the same amount of time. They have been, and still are, on a speedrun of national growth. However, this means they’ve had multiple generations robbed of “the good times” during growth were the growth slower.

Compared against the rise of the middle class in the USA post-WWII we’ve had 3 or 4 generations gain wealth, education, health care and raise families of their own with good paying jobs and readily available resources. In the USA we have grandparents or even great-grandparents that can tell us about the national poverty of living through the Great Depression, and how that shaped their choices (and those of their line). In China, its many times, the parents that lived through that subsistence poverty and their (now middle aged adult) children are the first generation to experience a middle class lifestyle and resources. Two to three generations of generational wealth building simply didn’t occur in China because they’re moving and developing so fast. The problem with this is, the boom times of manufacturing wealth have already started to decline in 大陆. Commodity manufacturing is already shifting out of China to other nations in the global south. Vietnam, Cambodia, India, and others are getting new manufacturing work that was previously going to China.

China has some giant problems looming in the next 50 year. Its population decline (as a result of state-enforced controls of birth) overcorrected and set up China to possibly be worse off that South Korea or even Japan in the decades ahead. source

China is a large net importer of both energy and food. All of these things together give me doubts China will be a long term stable society.

Other countries, like Cuba, manage to maintain higher quality of life metrics despite being under intense embargo than peer countries.

Cuba has done decently given its circumstances, but its historically another authoritarian regime. Further, much of Cuba’s progress might be attributable to artificial support from the Soviet Union to maintain its ally so close to its largest opponent.

The USSR had, in its time, the most rapid improvements in economic growth and quality of life in history.

…for those allowed to live.

None of these countries have been perfect utopias, or anything,

Dismissing Stalin’s purges and the Holodomor against Ukraine, much less the brutal repression of culture in Eastern Europe is doing a disservice to your argument of not being “perfect utopias”. The Soviet Union was as much an empire as the USA was in its expansion into other nations and suppression the local populace for exploitation.

but all have surpassed the inherent unsustainability of capitalism.

The Soviet Union was both born decades to centuries after other modern capitalist nations, and collapsed before them doesn’t really lend credence to your statement here about surpassing unsustainability.

To circle back to my main point. I’m not saying the USA has this figured out. I could write pages on what we’re doing wrong and how its leading to our decline. I’m saying nobody in the world in recorded human history has figured out how to have a sustainable system of governance. All systems are exploiting another to sustain themselves, and when that exploited group is exhausted a cycle of exploitation repeats or the nation collapses.

If you live long enough, you’ve been through a number of bubbles. For me thats:

• Black Monday (1987)
• Dot com bubble (2000) which also bled into 9/11 economics impacts
• Great Recession (2008)
• COVID (2020)

The next bubble will just be another. Economy will slow, value of most assets will drop. Jobs will be lost, homes foreclosed on…and then the recovery will begin again. We’ll look in the mirror shocked we survived it then in a few years we’ll completely forget about it and be terrified of the next bubble.

So, prepare by living within you means, take care of yourself and your loved ones, and just be ready to weather the next storm. We’ll get through that one too.

Imperialism, however, is self-defeating, and the rate of profit is lowering while there aren’t really new markets to plunder anymore. This causes crisis.

Potentially yes, but empires can last for hundreds or thousands of years. Democracy is relatively young by comparison, and we’re already seeing large cracks in it in the USA, one of the older democracies.

The point being: humanity hasn’t yet found a long term stable form of government.

It’s not particularly outlandish to orient the economy around collectivized production and distribution based on need, rather than profit. Socialist countries already exist, and achieve good results compared to peer countries. They require working class organization, which is a difficult but possible process.

I’m interested in your perspective on this. Which socialist country are you using as an example of what you describe above?

Sadly I’m in the same type of land, but it is available in my library system. In my state, you are allowed to get a library card at any public library in the state. Even if your public library system may not have it, the next down over and if your state works the same as mine, you could get a library card there and use the service for free.

Texas:

Alabama:

South Carolina:

Free and ad-free music streaming (even with some limited local downloads!) supported through many public libraries:

Freegal Music

Create your account with your public library card and gain access to all the music unlimited ad-free streaming. I also get 5 free downloads of songs a week for local storage, but I don’t know if that varies by library. There is a web client and the Android app is pretty decent too.

I’m guessing starch.

I have never known anyone to associate Windows with a high performance Bugatti Veyron car.

People don’t choose Windows for speed, they choose it because its well known so it has a favorable learning curve for users to operate, has high compatibility with software & hardware available to consumers, and is generally inexpensive to buy.

Gotcha, you’re talking about a system that gives you unemployment benefits.

Even without your able to report it there, they are still aware you’re unemployed. If you were employed, the state would be receiving quarterly income tax withholding from your employer as well as FICA contributions at the federal level. You’ve also filed your taxes for 2024, and they see that the only earnings you had were prior to your employment ended.

“Won’t allow” you?

This. It would be mac and pc both begging the younger generation to use a laptop or desktop instead of a phone or tablet.

From you link:

While the commonly expressed aspects of the straight edge subculture have been abstinence from alcohol, nicotine, and illegal drugs, there have been considerable variations. Disagreements often arise as to the primary reasons for living straight edge.

Wouldn’t having to justify why you’re making a choice to someone be anti-punk in general? If someone is disagreeing with you for you choosing to be “straight edge” shouldn’t the punk response to them be: “Fuck you”?

Additionally, if someone that is “straight edge” is telling someone else they should also be straight edge, isn’t the response to them also “Fuck you”?