[-] mcherm@lemmy.world 43 points 5 days ago

If two states disagree, what alternative would you suggest? "Flip a coin and move on" or "Just give in to the other side" are solutions that are likely to be abused: one rogue state can wreck havoc by making unreasonable demands. Going to war over it seems worse than spending millions in court. The courts ARE our inexpensive, fair way of resolving disputes (even if they aren't as inexpensive as we might like).

[-] mcherm@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago

This article starts off as a response to another article, but doesn't link to the article it is talking about! I found that frustrating and poor form, community-wise.

[-] mcherm@lemmy.world 15 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Yes, that is exactly what he is saying. Yes, it is completely absurd and would undermine the bedrock principles of our legal system. However, apparently somewhere between 3 and 6 members of the US Supreme Court may be seriously considering it.

(To be fair, he does claim that this absolute immunity would go away if half of the House and 2/3 of the Senate decided to impeach the President.)

[-] mcherm@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago

Yes. The average cost of cancer treatment is around $150,000 USD here and expensive cases can be much more.

[-] mcherm@lemmy.world 10 points 5 months ago

Here is my perspective on the answer to your question:

Our government is not functional. It is not that it doesn't "want" a healthy work force, but that it isn't capable of setting any sort of a policy.

The last time the US made any meaningful change in healthcare policy was under Obama. My impression of what happened is that there was a brief (2 yr) moment when the Presidency, House, and Senate were all controlled by the same party. The Democrats passed "health reform" which was basically the Republican health care reform package from 4 years earlier.

In the 13 years since then, the only Republican position on health care has been that Obama's "ACA" law is "bad". There is literally no suggestion of what else would be better. (I'm not counting the anti-abortion laws as "health care" -- they are seen here as a moral issue, not a health care one.) The Democrats' position has been a mix of "we shouldn't let the Republicans take us back to something WORSE!" and "the whole system is broken and needs to be replaced".

We have two problems. First, our government is structured so that it cannot easily accomplish anything, at least without cooperation between the two opposed parties. Secondly, one of the two parties is insane and wants to destroy the government (and has enough electoral support to win almost half the time).

[-] mcherm@lemmy.world 28 points 6 months ago

How concerned should I be?

What are the unspecified policies the developer claims that the company has failed to uphold? Who is this particular developer, and how much should I trust them? (I don't follow nginx development at all.)

I celebrate the fact that open source licenses exist specifically to allow people to make a fork like this when they have disagreements! But I don't know enough about this particular case to decide how it should affect my own plans.

[-] mcherm@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago

On my profile it says "redditor for 18 years".

[-] mcherm@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

Under the government's theory, in this case, I cannot understand how the Google App Store is a monopoly, but the Apple App Store is not. Can anyone explain that to me?

[-] mcherm@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

My approach was something like this: for a few years (maybe until all my kids were at least age 3 or 4) I simply didn't try to push my career forward.

When I was at work I put in plenty of effort, but I didn't work much overtime, I didn't do my own software projects outside of work, and I didn't even spend much time reading programming blogs.

Young children are really overwhelming, if you are going to really parent them!

My career was fine. Career advancement is a marathon, not a sprint. Mmmm... that's not true -- I've seen people sprint through the career ladder. But if you want advice on how to do that you'll need to ask someone else. MY approach to career advancement has been a marathon; keep improving until I am so ready for the next level that it's really obvious, briefly do enough politicing to secure a promotion, then go back to the self-improvement. For me, the approach worked (I'm a "senior director" level non-manager-track software engineer today.)

When my kids were young I really just focused on them; these days they are in highschool and college and they work WITH me on my outside-of-work person programming projects.

[-] mcherm@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

It really needs a fourth block that just says "Python".

(For those who don't get the joke, in Python the way that one exits a loop over an iterator is to keep going until the iterator throws an exception. It sounds dumb at first, but in truth, that's only if you think that exceptions are incredibly heavyweight compared to other operations.)

[-] mcherm@lemmy.world 32 points 1 year ago

Wait for a passing blimp. Project the bat signal on the blimp.

1

For the past ~2 weeks or so I've stayed away from reddit (which used to occupy one to two hours a day of my time). I stopped by today for one final nostalgic use of RIF.

[-] mcherm@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

I like the way you express this. "Cis / Trans" isn't about your gender, it's about whether your gender has CHANGED. (Although it may not be your GENDER that changed, but what people THOUGHT your gender was.)

In a similar way, I (a cis male) usually call myself "straight", but that's not really accurate. I don't feel like I'm attracted to whatever gender is different from mine (which happens to be women); I feel like I am attracted to women (which happens to be the gender that's different from mine).

Putting it differently, if some magical spell were to transform me into a woman, I don't imagine that I would then be attracted to men, I imagine that I would be attracted to women. So instead of calling myself "straight", I should probably be saying that I am "gynosexual" (attracted to women).

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mcherm

joined 1 year ago