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Interestingly enough, in the linked text, B is referred as a "language", follow by "the generated code is quite good", presumably referring to the resulting Assembly code.

Late Douglas Adams noticed this phenomenon decades ago:

> The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.


There's that, but even he didn't note "now, soon nearly everything is going to be in that category of things that can't possibly go wrong"

Given a choice, a vast majority of children (and people in general) would choose to have a life, even with arguably uncertain future prospects, over not getting to live at all.

The real reason you're postponing parenthood is probably that you choose to prioritize your comfort and financial independence at this moment. And there is nothing wrong with it, but I do miss honesty.


This is an insane framing.

What's insane is that there's seemingly an account made just to post this useless comment, in a thread buried several levels deep, under an, for HN standards, old post.

Somewhere at the very beginning of my career, the second year I think, I was part of the team that visited a location of the company we were selling our SaaS solution to, in a branch that was back then still dependent on Excel sheets.

The owner of the company lead us to a large open office with about 30 people working in there, mostly women, and whispered to us that he expects he'll only need three of them after subscribing to our product.

That's when I realised the brutality of what we are doing, and the sales guy I was with realised we should be charging significantly more.


As much as it would suck to be one of the 27 unemployed, I don't think the answer is to throw away our calculators and start doing our bookkeeping by hand again. I don't think you need to feel too bad about this. The accountants didn't all disappear when Excel showed up; they just got to work on the more interesting parts of the job, instead of rectifying arithmetic.

We could create economic systems that prioritized workers over immediate profit.

In this case, a system that aided the displaced workers in finding new positions and acquiring skills that are not simply doordashingfor rent (and still counting that as 'full employment').

In this latest disruption, highly skilled workers are being underemployed in low skill labour and we all lose out. PhD and JD to baristas and uber driver economy.

The federal funding and employment disruption alone will take decades to fix, if ever.

Anywho, you should notice when you participate in creating a massive disruption in many people's lives (to create super-profit for a couple of already wealthy men).

You are never just following orders, don't close your eyes to what you are doing with your life.

And before you 'what about' me. I have refused orders and lost jobs because of it. My only regret is not organizing with other workers beforehand.


Heck, a good start would be ensuring displaced workers still get food and shelter as long as we want.

Those coal miners? They carried the industrial revolution. We should be treating them as retired heroes when we replace the plant with a solar field, not as disgraced losers!


There are many things that could've happened to those 27 people. The company might've decided to reinvest savings into expanding business, and shift those 27 into different roles. Or may have just plain fired them. We can't tell in every case.

But it is worth remembering that the latter is a probable outcome, and that is what our business is, overall. Automation. As in, automating work so it doesn't need people to be done.


What's the evidence for that? Did the horses get to work on more interesting parts of the job when the automobile showed up?

You're right. I said "the accountants didn't ALL disappear" but surely, some of them had to endure a career change. But what's the alternative?

I once built a product that optimized waste. I was so proud of myself, it was going to save so much money. Did a site visit to a beta site and was talking to staff. One woman asked me if I knew what happened to that waste. I answered no. She told me it was bagged up and sent to third world countries where it saved lives. That is how I killed people to save money. Yes, if you are dependent on that waste it is very precarious. Doesn't change the reality for the people who it no longer went to save. I don't know the lesson to take from it. Still haunts me. Saving the money kept services in underserved communities in the US and touched tens of thousands of lives. But it also cost lives. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I've just accepted that there is no action which has the intended effect in full.

Kinda like how entropy forces mechanical energy to not be transferred in full to the form desired. Electrical to light? Some transfer will be heat. Optimize to be more light than heat? Light bill goes down, heat bill goes up in winter.

That's a disconnected parallel from real choices that have much more drastic effects. I don't think what you did was wrong, but it did have unintended consequences. Every new technology brings opportunities for both good and evil intents too, but the outcome is judged by those effected, regardless of the intent of the agent.


And you didn't say "cool, after they are no longer needed for this task, what other exciting oppurtunities will you be able to employ them pursuing that will grow your company?"

It would be nice, but it's too high a bar to set, as the visa policies differ significantly between the three.

There is a real danger the Schengen agreement itself will collapse in the upcoming years - Germany is already ignoring both the Schengen agreement and its own courts by keeping border controls.


Commodore 64 was by default in overwrite mode.

When I switched to PC being in insert mode took some getting used to.


> Deep down, we're an annoyingly arrogant little country with delusions of grandeur salivating at the thought to prove to our EU neighbors how strong we meant it when we said we would accept to oppose the US in case of military attack and I think they knew we may actually mean it and not back down when it start (see also: Denmark leak about how France was essentially willing to provide whatever to help defend Greenland).

And the rest of Europe loves you for that! But we're also very worried if that'll all remain so if Le Pen or Mélenchon win next year.


Believe me, I'm even more worried than you. I think Melanchon would actually do more damage, as crazy as it seems, Le Pen is incompetent and a sellout, Melanchon actually believes the BS he vomits.

Macron finished the traditionnal left and right wing parties, which were too large and rotten to the core, but it's left us with a large center and two extremes, it's high time we have the normies left and right come back.


If the extremes are unelectable, the center party should split eventually. They'll find something to disagree about.

As long as they are more terrified of losing to the extremists they'll try to keep it together as long as they can. I hope they don't become too corrupt in the process.


If Mélenchon wins it will evolve to an even stronger stance against imperialism. He is labeled "anti-american"


The imperialism Europe suffers from in reality is not American and he's entirely on board with that.


...Against US imperialism anyway. His credentials when it comes to other empires isn't spotless.


From the website:

"Your repos never leave the EU"

That's clear enough I think.


You can do all that with a driving license, but a driving license is not a proof of citizenship and thus of your eligibility to vote.

In Europe, you can't get a regular ID without being a citizen. So having an ID automatically means you're eligible to vote.


> In Europe, you can't get a regular ID without being a citizen. So having an ID automatically means you're eligible to vote.

Nitpick: E.g. Norwegian ID cards can be had by any legal resident. The card will say that you're not a citizen though, so your point about that stands.

Re driving license: Driving license is a valid form of ID for voting here. All eligible people are on the voting rolls automatically (unlike the absurd american system), and the driving license is merely used to prove you are who you say you are.


This is not true. For example not every citizen can vote (people under guardianship or criminals) and not citizens can vote in local elections in the EU, if they came from another EU country.


Yes. There are all kinds of edge cases.

The point I tried to make is that with the system we have here it's much less of a hassle to prove you're eligible to vote. The system wants you to be able to vote, and to be able to do that easily.


Yes, but a driver's license can be accepted as ID.

Just because a driver's license isn't proof of citizenship doesn't mean that it isn't sufficient, since it will have some identifier connected to the identity of the voter. You would show the driver's license, then the registrars would find your name on the list, strike it out, give your voting envelopes, and then you go wait for a private booth to become free and then you go into that booth and put your votes in those voting envelopes.

A Swedish driver's license doesn't mean Swedish citizenship. It can still be used to check somebody's identity. Citizenship is checked by seeing whether the person is on the voter rolls, not by their identity card.


Some of the Republican proposals would require a proof of citizenship at registration time. You would still be able to register without a passport but you need to take your birth or naturalization certificate. Not everyone has them at home so you might need to go to your parents place in another state or risk getting it mailed. Good luck.

The point is not making registration impossible, just harder and more complicated. When you combine it with voter roll purges the play is clear.

Get a biased commission to remove everyone named Jackson or Hernandez a couple months before the election because "there's too many people with that last name and officials might confuse them" or purge a whole district that just happens to be an opposing party stronghold based on a single voter fraud conviction.Do it silently without informing voters, and when they realize they need to register again they have to go through a complicated process designed to make them give up.

Rejecting IDs at the poll booth is actually pretty rare because it's so obvious. Real schemes are a bit more creative.


> Yes, but a driver's license can be accepted as ID

So what would that accomplish? The Trump playbook asserts that there is a massive conspiracy involving noncitizen voting. Their proposals involve proving citizenship to vote. And now your argument is to use ID that doesn't prove citizenship. Brilliant.


In my state government issued ID is used to verify who you are. You are then issued a ballot if your name is also in the poll book.

Your eligibility to vote and have your name entered into the poll book is determined by providing a Social Security number or birth certificate.

So yes, a driver’s license is sufficient ID to vote in many states.


> So yes, a driver’s license is sufficient ID to vote in many states.

At the moment, yes. Under Republican voter ID proposals that require proving citizenship, no. Having an SSN does not imply US citizenship.


The last concrete attempt was blocked at Dutch and French referenda, not the lobbyists.

That was in 2004. Since then, basically any referendum about anything related to the EU anywhere returns a negative result, with a couple of small exceptions like a Danish defense opt-out.

So the money doesn't really go to the lobbying, more to the population-wide propaganda.

And the money is available, as it's in the interest of both the major state actors as the major corporations for the EU to weaken and dissolve.


This is not exactly, both french and dutch referenda were


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