Good grief.

The shutdown is a temporary budget squabble in a stable democracy; a banal political stunt that has happened every few years for the past few decades.

Rome’s dysfunction meant civil wars, assassinations, generals seizing poWer, private armies, and uprising (in a fundamentally different society where, incidentally, over 25% of the population was slaves.)

There has been over 2000 years of history since Rome… when a the only analogy a person can come up with is some half-baked allusion to the Roman Empire/Republic it’s a good bet said person lacks a sense of history, knowledge of current events, and common sense.

Sorry to be harsh.

We’re seeing deliberate attacks on: Fair elections Rule of law Independence of courts Checks and balances

I expect if you don’t think this is going to get bad you’re not paying attention.

No one’s panicking but you pal.

I made an observation that the present day is rhyming with history. You’re now raising Godwin’s law.

Good job.

Assassination & attempted assassinations have all happened within 12ish months.

You’ve got an executive branch stacking all open positions in judicial and legislative branches with their political appointees. And the executive is interpreting the law to gather as much power as possible to the head of state.

It’s not hard to see the parallels but you keep on trucking dude.

> You’ve got an executive branch stacking all open positions in judicial and legislative branches with their political appointees.

The judicial branch is composed of Judges who are confirmed by the Senate… not the executive branch.

And there are no ‘Legislative branch’ appointees.

I assume you mean the executive branch is making appointments to the executive branch? Who would you prefer to make such appointments? The Postal Serice?

> Who would you prefer to make such appointments? The Postal Serice?

At this point, I’d even prefer the Girl Scouts.

I understand Trump nominated and congress/senate approved the last couple of Supreme Court members?

I’d classify things like FDA/FAA as legislative parts of the governments but maybe that’s wrong.

Also I don’t see other governments shutting down regularly with a cheer squad saying yeah this is nothing to worry about, our democracy is 100% A OK.

What’s so ‘new’ about it?

In C++, I’ve noticed that ChatGPT is fixated on unordered_maps. No matter the situation, when I ask what container would be wise to use, it’s always inordered_maps. Even when you tell it the container will have at most a few hundred elements (a size that would allow you to iterate their a vector to find what your are looking for before the unordered_map even has its morning coffee) it pushes the map… with enough prodding, it will eventually concede that a vector pretty much beats everything for small .size()’s.

> (a size that would allow you to iterate their a vector to find what your are looking for before the unordered_map even has its morning coffee)

I don't know about this, whenever I've benchmarked it on my use cases, unordered_map started to become faster than vector at well below 100 elements

I agree with chatgpt here

isn't std::unordered_map famously slow, and you really want the hashmap from abseil, or boost, or folly, or [...]

> it's just hard to go up.

Eh. Going up is easy. A Frenchman, a sheep, duck, and rooster solved the whole ‘up’ thing over two centuries ago.

But going DOWN? That’s far more difficult. What wonders may lie beneath our feet: vast caverns, ore, underground oceans… hard to get to though.

If memory serves well, Frenchmen solved the problem of going up in two ways, and the one you quote seems like a lot of hot air to me. I mean, if you follow that line of thought, the literature says an American would get to the Moon in 19 days or so.

The other French method included two dogs, a bunch of chicken, and a very large cannon, which had quite a bit more showmanship.

Very cool

Are you suggesting the scriptures do not obligate church leaders to protect the flock from heresy?

1 Timothy 6:20–21 – “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding the profane novelties of words and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called, which some professing have erred concerning the faith.”

2 Timothy 4:3–4 – Warns of people turning from truth to myths, implying leaders must protect them from such influences.

Titus 1:9–11 – Bishops must “stop the mouths” of those teaching error, which includes preventing their works from spreading.

Acts 20:28–31 – Paul warns the Ephesian elders to guard the flock from false teachers who will arise “speaking perverse things.”

2 John 1:10–11 – “If any man come to you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into the house nor say to him, God speed you.”

Romans 16:17 – Mark and avoid those who cause doctrinal divisions; a list of banned works is a formal way of “marking” them.

Acts 19:19 – New converts in Ephesus publicly burn their occult books after coming to the faith.

Deuteronomy 13:1–5 – False prophets and their influence must be eradicated from the midst of the people.

Etc, etc, etc.

Are you giving a list of things that support what I said?

Perhaps there was some ambiguity in your post. The verses speak for themselves. If they support your views, good.

> There is no disadvantage to being able to synthesise vitamin C, and no advantage in dropping the trait.

So why did the trait of that mutant primate spread throughout the entire population? There should instead be a mixture of those who can and those who can’t synthesize vitamin C.

(Indeed, one should perhaps not so blithely assume that there was sufficient fruit for everyone and so C didn’t matter… for it is precisely the ability to survive in times of drought and scarcity that drive evolution, and there id no reason to suspect a population that could synthesize their own vitamin C was less fit than a population that couldn’t. The issue of vitamin C is far from simple…)

There is no reason for it to spread, but also no reason for it not to. Presumably there was another (completely unrelated) trait, and it happened to spread because of that.

> There should instead be a mixture of those who can and those who can’t synthesize vitamin C.

Probably was for a long time. All of this happened about 60 millions years ago. It's been a while.

It's more likely that a mutation in the gene/pathway arose multiple times independently, instead of one spreading through the population.

The way things work is that if the judge oversteps you appeal, but you are still bound by the ruling unless higher court overrides it.

You can't just say you don't like the ruling and ignore it.

Exactly. And just because it's not a perfect system doesn't mean it's not a good system.

It's the best system that has ever existed.

The executive.

Full udders are painful. For humans too. If mom starts breastfeeding and then abruptly stops, the boobs will swell up and ache horribly for several days (until lactation stops due to lack of stimulation.)

You don’t need to train the cow. After it’s milked once with the machine, it associates the thing with pain relief (plus a little snack to reinforce.)

Even with a key it is breaking and entering