The problem with education is that existing ways of doing things are very strongly entrenched.
At the school level: teachers are trained, buildings are built, parents rely on kids being at school so they can go out to work....
At higher levels and in training it might be easier to change things, but IMO it is school level education that is the most important for most people and the one that can be improved the most (and the request for startups reflects that).
I can think of lots of ways things can be done better. I have done quite a lot of them as a home educating parent. As far as I can see my government (in the UK) is determined to do the exact opposite of the direction I think we should go in.
> The problem with education is that existing ways of doing things are very strongly entrenched.
Which is still a problem of educating humans. Just moved up the chain one step. Educators are often very hard to educate.
Even mathematics isn't immune to this. Calculus is pervasively taught with prematurely truncated algebra of differentials. Which means for second order derivatives and beyond, the "fraction" notation does not actually describe ratios, when this does not need to be the case.
But when will textbooks remove this unnecessary and complicating disconnect between algebra and calculus? There is no significant movement to do so.
Educators and textbook writers are as difficult to educate as anyone else.
This has always been the case, and not just the US either.
International law has no enforcement mechanism - it depends on willingness of countries to follow it or force others to. It does not have a proper system of courts to decide the law. Different bits of it can clash with each other.
International law has a number of enforcement mechanisms.
> it depends on willingness of countries to follow it or force others to.
All law depends on the willingness of its subjects to follow it, and failing that of its other subjects to force them to. This is not unique to international law.
Some systems of law (e.g., typical modern national criminal law) may have a particular group of people (usually with a formal heirarchy) who are expected to do the executive part of enforcement, and a similar (possibly the same or overlapping, but often distinct) group of people employed to do the adjudicative part of enforccement. International law has the latter (in several forms), but lacks the former. But anyone who is familiar with more than a narrow range of the most idealistic systems of national law will be aware that that that executive body can be a single point of failure—the real problem with international law isn't that it lacks such a single dedicated executive body, but that the important issues under it frequently involve significant conflicts of interest for any of the groups with the capacity to take on the executive role in the particular case, which is problematic under any system of law whether it has a single dedicated body for the executive part of enforcement or whether it relies on ad hoc case-by-case posses for that purpose.
> International law has a number of enforcement mechanisms.
That's rather naïve.
How do you propose to enforce the law when the offender possesses the greatest military/economic/technological might, even compared to the rest of the (law-biding) world combined?
US, for quite some time, is the international law.
> How do you propose to enforce the law when the offender possesses the greatest military/economic/technological might, even compared to the rest of the (law-biding) world combined?
Had you read the entire comment you were responding to, you would note that as well as pointing out that international law has enforcement mechanisms, that I pointed out how the executive part of those differs from what many national criminal law systems use (which is a real difference), and moreover the problem they have with conflicts of interests between any of the available executive agents with many important enforcement issues (a situation which also happens with national criminal law systems even where, unlike international law, they have a nominally-dedicated executive body for enforcement purposes rather than relying on the adjudicative/determinative body calling for an ad hoc posse the way that international law generally works.)
Article 6 of the United States Constitution says international law is United States law. US courts are the enforcement mechanism as far as the United States Constitution is concerned.
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land"
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-6/
Or what happens when crimes are committed by, or at the direction and with the protection of the President of the United States.
I think most people would not argue that “US federal criminal law has no enforcement mechanism”, they would argue that “US federal criminal law has a significant practical enforcement problem where enforcement of the law conflicts with interests of the chief executive”.
My point is, the powerful nations are the enforcement mechanism in international law. When they are the ones breaking the law themselves, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an enforcement mechanism, it just means it’s a possibly unjust one, just like with national enforcement mechanisms.
The difference is that in the national case, justice is expected; whereas in the international case, it must be understood that there is not supposed to be a "enforcement mechanism" that delivers justice.
In both case there are enforcement mechanism that deliver the will of the enforcers collectively which sometimes correlates with justice or at least a reasonable reading of the letter of the law; in both cases there are a wide set of failure modes from the perspective of law and even moreso justice, because law enforcement (and, in the case of concern for justice, also law making) rely on institutions ultimately composed of people, and the interests of those people is often not in the law or justice.
If you see the difference as being “in the national case, justice is expected”, you either have an extremely naive view of national law, or at a minimum of an extremely narrow and privileged one.
Sure, you can argue that "justice is expected" doesn't align with how the real world actually operates, but in the modern interpretation, national law enforcers are supposed to be subject to the same law they are enforcing (whether that is actually the case is another issue); they may break the law some times, but being a law enforcer does not exempt them from the obligation of obeying the law. In other words, law and its enforcement apply universally.
In the international case, it is understood that the "law enforcers" are not obliged to play by the same rule. The "enforcement" therefore only applies selectively. Then the law cannot really be said to have been being enforced, because they don't apply to the "enforcer".
> but in the modern interpretation, national law enforcers are supposed to be subject to the same law they are enforcing
That is true in the same sense for national law as it is for international law (that is, true in idealized theory, much less true in practice. Actually, its somewhat less true in many national law systems than of international law at the intermediate level between pure theory and practice of the concrete, on-the-books law, where law enforcers, especially at the apex, often enjoy on-the-books immunities from some or all of the law that they enforce.)
Yes, laws only matter if they are collectively believed in. International law just the same. This has always been the case, but largely speaking in the West, for the last century or so, the rule of law has been broadly believed in, including international law.
The story here is that the US seems to not currently believe international law is an effective tool for projecting its power. Whether correctly or otherwise, it has believed that up until now.
> This has always been the case, and not just the US either.
the difference is that the US used to pretend that international laws mattered - at least, they selectively only ignore some when it's advantageous, but pay lip service to it being relevant and claim to follow it.
Now, however, trump has blatantly disregard the norms without regards. While everyone knows that the US will get their way militarily even before trump, it used to be a negotiation with law and order at least being pretended to matter. After trump, the pretense is off. It leads to less trust, less negotiation and more hard-lining.
Within one term, trump has destroyed the trust that took more than a century to build.
For the United States of America, we ENSHINRED it into our Constitution in Article 6 to give it an enforcement mechanism in our country. Our court system is international law's court system as far as US related issues/enforcement.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-6/
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land"
Shoes have a lower environmental impact and cost than than steel, plastic, rubber tyres (which AFAIK use at least some synthetic rubber made from oil), etc. Walking does not use fuel so efficiency is not really relevant. It requires less physical extortion so is more efficient that way, but another way to phrase that is that it is less exercise.
Bikes require very little steel and the rubber tires end up lasting longer (typically) than the shoes you do.
> Walking does not use fuel so efficiency is not really relevant.
Ah, it is. You eat food, that's fuel. It's the major source of CO2 for both activities. Now, it can be insignificant. If the only food you eat is like oatmeal and beans that you grow yourself, then yeah it's going to have a non-existent impact.
However, if you have any sort of meat or imported foods, that CO2 budget can go up pretty quickly.
The actual energy for making the steel for a bike, which will outlast your children, isn't significant.
> Ah, it is. You eat food, that's fuel. It's the major source of CO2 for both activities.
That implies all exercise is a bad thing. i think you will find very few people are sufficiently keen to reduce CO2 that they will deliberately get less exercise and damage their health. I am certainly not doing that. At the moment I am trying to get more exercise.
> Bikes require very little steel
Compared to a car, certainly. Compared to shoes, an awful lot.
> a bike, which will outlast your children
The typical life span of a bike seems to be about five and ten year years. I really hope my kids last a reasonable multiple of the top end! The level of sales of cycles in the UK (well over 1 million a year) vs the number of people who cycle at least once a week (less seven million) implies a life of about five years. About half of that is leisure cyclists so not really comparable to people using transport to get somewhere.
Leisure cyclists want to get more exercise so by your argument about that being a bad thing they (and therefore half of all UK cyclists) are actively harmful.
> another way to phrase that is that it is less exercise
Biking is less demanding on some parts of the body that only can take so much stress. So you can push other parts more if that makes sense: top cyclists can do 400-600 W sustained or 1-2 kW in short sprints. That's not less exercise, that's several times more than a walker or runner can do. So in the same time as walking you can either be faster at your destination and save time and/or energy, or go further while spending the same or less energy, or output more energy. The choice is yours.
Anyway, from the CO2 perspective, biking vs walking is splitting hairs really.
> Top cyclists are doing it as a sport, not as a means of transport.
Well you were mentioning exercise, so I reacted to that. The point is everyone biking as exercise can push more watts than when walking, if they want to.
New EV vs used ICE will depend on how much you drive and in what conditions. I would guess what I do (in the UK) is uncommon in the US but it must be possible but working from home plus living in a town rather than a city means I only do low single digit thousands of miles a year and that almost entirely on clear roads.
People in much of the UK commute by public transport and use their cars lightly (e.g. for shopping on the weekend, trips, etc).
Biking has an energy efficiency of around 99%. Very little of the effort you put into biking ends up as waste heat. Walking, on the other hand, has a much lower energy efficiency. You are putting much more effort overcoming and generating friction as you move your legs. You are also doing it for a longer period of time since you are going slower.
It's one of my favorite counterintuitive facts.
> I would guess what I do (in the UK) is uncommon in the US
And that's for sure. In almost every US city if you want to do anything, you are driving. Where I'm at, everything is at least 10mi from my home. That racks up the miles pretty quickly.
Walking covers most of my journeys for which a bike would work. I am not going to bike a hundred mile, or even 15 and back. Nor is it practical to bike to the supermarket. On the other hand its easy to walk a few minutes to the local shops and pubs.
Transportation and exercise are linked. Walking kills two birds with one stone.
That is insane. Smaller vehicles are safer at a social level because they do less damage when they hit something - especially a pedestrian. Regulatory bodies should be encouraging them for that reason alone (let alone all the others).
The regulatory bodies aren't specifically discriminating against smaller vehicles, they're discriminating against vehicles that haven't proven safety to passengers in crash tests acceptable to the FMVSS. The vehicles may or may not also be missing mandatory internal safety features like airbags in all the right spots, etc.
If Chinese EV manufacturers put their vehicles through these tests, include all the mandatory features, and strip out the forbidden telemetry (certain manufacturers are banned in the US for reporting to the CCP- most notably but not exclusive to Huawei) then they too can be sold here.
If anything is preventing Chinese EVs from the US market, it's almost certainly their electronic components.
Manufacturers might prioritise the safety of their customers, and people are likely to care more about their own safety than that of others, but regulators should be looking at overall public safety which is definitely improved by encouraging small cars.
He is very odd. The name is presumably a reference to Peter Abelard who was not a nice man (very clever, of course).
Nothing wrong per se with citing what someone you are writing about said about themselves. He has some very odd historical, economic and political theories, but a lot of them are rooted in common misconceptions.
I wonder how good CLIs could have been if a fraction of the resources that have gone into GUIs had gone into making CLIs more user friendly. A sequence of words is a pretty natural way of conveying what you want done.
I often get my way through unknown CLI commands by just typing TAB and selecting the option that sounds like what I want. Works, most of the time, I don't think that is really an issue. For most CLI programs you also have a reference/cheat sheet, examples and an interactive hypertext systems of tutorials available.
Along with the "-h,--help" options, an option to show common usage examples would be useful. I find it much easier to learn from an example as you can modify and build upon it. Otherwise, it's a case of skimming through the man page and then switching back and forth between the man page and the command that I'm writing. (This is most common with tools that I don't use all the time, yet have expert features such as "ffmpeg")
> an option to show common usage examples would be useful.
That's what the man page is supposed to be (and most do contain example) and why GNU wanted to split it into info (tutorials and exhausting documentation) and man (reference and examples).
Why do you serialize and then deserialize the list of files? Even if you do disable the splitting on reparsing the list, why don't you just do this:
find . -type f -name '*.mp3' -exec some command {} ';'
That sounds just unnecessary and bug prune. Unless you target some odd platform where find doesn't support '-exec', but it is even in POSIX. I think due to your use of process substitution, your code has a higher chance of being unportable, so why do you want to complicate your code?
Stuff like that is why I personally prefer the man pages to random websites.
Honestly for something as complex as a shell (which describes both a language, an editor, and an implementation) the man page is surprisingly short. (6418 lines for me) I have just found the section on process substitution in <1min, without even using the search, just by reading. I looked it up, because I didn't knew the name of that syntax, so I needed to actually look for what I wanted and I do not use the man page of bash often.
It's to deal with problematic filenames (e.g. containing a newline) and enables setting of variables within the current process. Putting multiple commands into the "-exec" of find is possible, but looks horrible. To be fair, my example didn't use multiple commands, so your version is okay for simple processing.
Don't get me wrong, the BASH man page is great, it's just that I prefer to work with examples.
Yep, you can chain multiple commands with find's "-exec", but I'm not a fan of it myself. I suspect setting variables in the current process is trickier though.
(Very minor nitpick, it should be 'a\nb.mp3' to be included, but that does work fine)
Incidentally, ShellCheck isn't happy with that although I don't follow their reasoning:
find . -type f -name '*.mp3' -exec bash -c "
^-- SC2156 (warning): Injecting filenames is fragile and insecure. Use parameters.
I see, but now you are essentially operating on multiple files, at once, so the serialization makes some sense. Although for just this, I wouldn't write the operation in bash at all:
find . -type f -name '*.mp3' | wc -l
Honestly I don't really view the shell / filesystem interface as a security boundary. I use the shell mainly for (automation of) interactive use, so any screwup due to e.g. quoting issues is my own fault, maybe even of using stupid filenames. Shell is a great language to connect streams of different programs into each other, not so much for doing any work. If I do that, I would reach for C.
The serialisation is just to work around the fact that filenames can have any character except for \0 which is why the "-print0" is used. It doesn't by itself allow for concurrent processing.
You're right about just using "wc -l", but I was just trying to demonstrate how you can set variables. A real use would be doing more than just counting files as your example would likely be quicker (assuming that calling an external programme is quicker than running a naive loop in BASH).
I am guilty of using BASH for stuff that most people would use a different language for - I just find that for system admin work that BASH is just at the right level of abstraction for me and is ubiquitous.
Many GUI designers these days don't like discoverability and don't think it's important. They prefer to hide everything behind "gestures" that you just have to know somehow.
At the school level: teachers are trained, buildings are built, parents rely on kids being at school so they can go out to work....
At higher levels and in training it might be easier to change things, but IMO it is school level education that is the most important for most people and the one that can be improved the most (and the request for startups reflects that).
I can think of lots of ways things can be done better. I have done quite a lot of them as a home educating parent. As far as I can see my government (in the UK) is determined to do the exact opposite of the direction I think we should go in.
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