> ... the important thing isn't the exact language but the intent behind the question ...

If we're not going to assume the input state is known then we definitely can't say what the intent behind the question is - for many engineering applications the compiler is deterministic. Debian has the whole reproducible builds thing going which has been a triumph of pragmatic engineering on a remarkable scale. And suggests that, pragmatically, compilers may be deterministic.

No, it is censorship. IP protection would be punishing the pirates after they do something illegal. I think what you're sensing is that it is censorship in support of intellectual property rather than censorship aiming at political repression.

There's something similar in RealityVoid's comment where it is identified that EU law promotes censorship, but that is discounted because the understanding is it in aid of privacy rather than politically motivated. Although given Europe's rich history of sliding into authoritarianism that does seem like an optimistic take on where the European elite are heading. A part of political censorship is making it hard for people to realise that popular political viewpoints are being censored and providing cover by claiming the censorship is for some good cause would be pretty routine.

> It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that.

Blatant lies have to be legal. Firstly because it isn't philosophically possible to tell if someone is lying, it can only ever be strongly suspected. Secondly because it is a bog-standard authoritarian tactic to accuse someone of telling a blatant lie and shut them down for challenging the authoritarians.

Banning "blatant lies" is pretty much a textbook tell that somewhere is in political trouble and descending into either a bad case of group-think in the political community or authoritarianism. The belief that it is even possible to ban blatant lies is, if it has taken root, itself a lie people tell themselves when they can't handle the fact that some of the things they believe and know are true, aren't.

> if some women absolutely can't find something in their size from a specific brand, that makes the brand even more exclusive, like it being "for fit people only"

The elephants in the room from the raw data is it is very clear some brands do not want average middle aged women wearing their products. Anthropology seems to be the most clear about this in that they have a literal gap between their standard and plus-sized ranges that excludes the adult median woman.

Now some brands might do that out of snobishness, but I expect there is a feedback loop here:

1) Young, attractive women want to make fashion choices that signal they are young, attractive women.

2) They buy from fashion lines that don't fit average adult women.

3) Average adult women detect that the fashionable choice is these brands and feel left out, because a fair number of them would also like to be young and attractive again. And a small but significant fraction feel really left out if some clothing brand calls them a size 20 waist / fat / shaped like a rectangle. Clothing brands detect this in their customer studies and respond appropriately.

4) People who just want clothes buy from H&M or wherever and don't write articles about how hard it is to fit clothes.

"Women" isn't really a homogeneous category when it comes to clothing, there is ongoing fierce competition between lots of different sub-groups of the female population to signal lots of different things. Men have it a bit easier because there is basically a 4-quadrant choice between upper & lower class, formal & casual with a lot of intricacy for people who care a lot about what brand of black leather shoe they own. Young girls are closer to men in that they aren't really trying to signal anything at that age, so clothing fits are a lot easier to manage.

> Clothing brands detect this in their customer studies and respond appropriately.

Respond how?

> lots of different sub-groups of the female population to signal lots of different things

Signal what?

> Respond how?

By destandardising sizes. It isn't that hard to standardise if an industry thinks it'll help them; the article suggests there is already a relevant standards body. These companies are probably doing it for a reason. My guess would be maybe someone doesn't want to be an XXL 18 at J Crew so they can go to Reformation where they are more of a Regular 14.

> Signal what?

Age, health and status for women. Group membership too although that is generally to a lesser extent.

> By destandardising sizes

Oh. I thought there was an outside chance you intended a positive response. Ah well.

> Age, health and status

I can understand age. But wouldn't everyone want to signal good health and high status?

> I can understand age. But wouldn't everyone want to signal good health and high status?

Yeah, but generally not with fashion. Male fashion tends not to go to the same sort of lengths to showcase legs/torsos/arms/chest that women's fashion does. For men if they want to signal status they tend to buy a car they can't afford or something.

And male health is one of those areas where it is very complicated. A fat, balding man who smells funny can make up for that with a high income. A fat balding woman who smells funny might be able to do the same thing but I can't help feel sceptical at the idea.

Anyway, long story short, the people who aren't using fashion as signalling can just buy a shirt that fits and move on. It's a shirt. They aren't complicated.

There's also the fact that most men aren't very healthy - you'll often see very fit men wearing "revealing" and tight-fitting clothes that show off their muscles etc, whereas everyone else wears less revealing clothes because whatever they may reveal isn't very flattering.

The same is true for most women of course but a lot of them seem to wear revealing clothing regardless of how flattering it actually is.

People with bad health, low status being able to wear the same clothes as young women with good health and status removes the signalling benefit of those clothes.

> But wouldn't everyone want to signal good health and high status?

The thing with people is that they are all different. There are a lot of people who don't want to be of high status or signal it. There's lots of people who don't really care for health and value other things higher.

Definition of "high status" vary by demographics.

Some want to carry X sportswear with prominent branding, others take pride in high-price tag items without any explicit branding.

The "I identify with this athlete", "I identify with this musician", "I dgaf what you think of me" groups probably don't intersect much, with brands and offering catering to these and multiple others...?

It is also worth noting that US management is notoriously bad at the actual management. Toyota v. US car manufacturers did not look like a fair fight when Deming was in the ascendant, and it is hard to tell given the scales involved but it looks a lot like the US has been outmanoeuvred in all aspects of industry by the Asians.

US companies are generally a better bet though, because despite the handicap of being run by Americans, they are hosted in a country that generally believes in freedom and rule of law which means they have an unfair advantage even if they do a sub-par job of making the most of what they have.

Exceptions abound in the details.

The thing is, the Toyota methods relies on people on every level to work to improve processes. If you're an employee and know you'll be there 10 years down the line or even until you retire, you have an incentive to improve said processes.

Now check most Western companies: since the 70 / 80, everything is about reducing headcount. Lay-offs, outsourcing, offshoring, now the concept of spending your whole working life at the same company feels like a fever dream. So why would an employee try to improve things for the company when they know there is no future for them there? Better improve their own career and future prospect. So yeah, things like Kaizen are doomed to fail until things change.

> Lay-offs, outsourcing, offshoring, now the concept of spending your whole working life at the same company feels like a fever dream

You are missing something here imo, very few companies actually increase pay (or to be more clear, show a clear way to get there) enough to make it attractive enough to stay there for long periods of time.

From my experience here in Germany the people staying at companies for a long time are those who don't focus on their career.

Moving around distributes knowledge making for a healthier economy overall. The alternative looks like Korean chaebols.

This is rather like my observation about British car companies in the late 20th century:

- large factory of British workers + British management: strife, strikes, disaster, bankruptcy (British Leyland)

- small factory of British workers + British management: success, on a small scale (lots of the F1 industry, McLaren etc; also true of non-car manufacturing)

- large factory of British workers with overseas management: success (Nissan Sunderland, BMW era Mini, etc)

Where does someone like Rover fit in to your matrix? If I can respectfully recommend. If you can go have a read of "We sell our time no more" by Paul Stewart.

Tory governance and fiscal policies had all the responsibility for Leyland, Hillman and more importantly Rover.

I have to admit it's not that deeply researched. That book sounds interesting.

For Rover in particular, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Venture_Holdings stands out. Similar to Maplin and Toys R Us, an example of the owner-management taking a large amount of cash out of a business that was declining.

What's particularly interesting here is that one of the success cases (BMW era Mini) was built on a Rover design. They picked it up and ran with it - basically gutted the electrics and power-train to match their existing systems and supply chains - but it was already in flight when BMW came on.

That factory was fascinating to work in, looking back on it I saw a lot of Deming-compatible stuff going on that I wasn't equipped to recognise at the time. There was strong German representation in factory management, lots of interaction with people coming and going from Munich all the time. But the production line staff had a large agency contingent so it didn't have the "job for life" ethos that the Toyota Way would say is essential.

It was the electrics and the power train that were the problem. Oh, that and process.

... do you think Japan doesn't believe in freedom and rule of law?

Fortunately, once we impose a wealth tax on corporations we can solve this. Billionaire corporations should not exist.

That's too arbitrary, and you say that as if a billion dollars is a lot of money.

It's not.

There was a time when millionaires were considered 'rich'. Now that's just a retiree, in most housing markets, who's paid off a house. Or even a townhome... and in some places, a condo!

It doesn't matter "whether it should" cost that much, that's irrelevant for my example. The point is, being a millionaire isn't a big deal. It's common. It doesn't mean wealthy.

Likewise when a company is large, and has infrastructure all over the world, and is worth much of a T, a B is nothing. Cash reserves in the billions is really not all that much, just fiscal prudence.

An alternate is that "banks should get free money, by forcing all companies to borrow money for capital projects". Because if you tax companies for "wealth", then they'll just spend all that capital on loan payments.

I feel people have such weird ideas about taxation. People see "oh no, someone has free money!" then get excited and want to tax. What? The goal of taxation isn't "take money from anyone we can", nor is it 'wealth redistribution', it's instead 'how to pay for joint projects' that all of society benefits from.

Losing track of that last bit, is when people stop asking "should we tax" and instead say "they have money, so tax"

You write: > The goal of taxation isn't "take money from anyone we can", nor is it 'wealth redistribution', it's instead 'how to pay for joint projects' that all of society benefits from.

But I think the author of the comment you were replying to had a different goal in mind. I think their goal was "prevent corporations from getting too big".

We can and should debate whether that is a goal we should be trying to achieve, but if it is then progressive taxation for companies might be a way to achieve it.

We might presume that was the goal, yet it wasn't explicitly stated. And many have a goal of generic wealth redistribution, and will inject such into any conversation about large companies.

One might note the unrestrained concern about fluid capital acquisition, in the post I replied to. It's not having billions in infrastructure that was cited, nor having a large number of employees, both metrics of size, but instead having fluid, unused capital.

If we wish to constrain upon size, there needs to be nuance, conjoined with the specific industry, and even sub-industry. Some capital equipment costs can be enormous. Should we work to prevent financing such via stored profit? Should we work to force companies to finance, then pay off, just to feed the banks, rather than store and then spend?

Should we tax so that "big ideas" may never occur?

I think far more would be gained by ensuring taxation just stays fair between smaller and larger company structures. There's a lot of book-keeping that can be done as a large company, to hide profits, that cannot be done when you're a small mom and pop.

Tax is not only that, it's a way of incentivizing growth in the "correct" areas (areas that build long-term value), and correcting inevitable distortions in the market. One of the problems with money is that it's both extremely important for some people (on the edge of poverty) and a complete plaything for others (investor class).

> For every dollar over median wealth they should face a 10% wealth tax so that we can fund universal healthcare.

A ten percent wealth tax would put most investment returns into the red. Savings and investment would plummet. Capital would flee the US, interest rates would skyrocket, the US dollar would become worthless, the housing market would collapse. You wouldn’t be able to fund roads, let alone universal healthcare.

Yeah, all that's true but I noticed you didn't mention inequality. What would happen to inequality?

I don't think the problems of US corporations are due to being over-capitalized, they're all to do with interactions with the political and media sphere plus unnecessary conflict with the staff.

If no corporation is allowed more than 1 million dollars (10 years of median income) then 10 average people can counter a single corporation. That’s a good ratio.

It's also impossible to have a larger business than a restaurant, or almost any kind of technological or manufacturing industry. The limited liability corporation has existed for hundreds of years for a very good reason.

Heck, even things like shipping, the oldest insured industry, become impossible. Corporations used to have minimum capital requirements that were roughly in the region of a year's average income. https://www.doingbusiness.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/medi...

("corporation has too much money" and "individual has too much money" are different problems; Elon Musk is a problem in the way that Apple isn't)

> And has life gotten better in those years?

Almost immeasurably better

In the 1800s almost no one lived in their cars. These days thousands of people do.

"You see we leased this back from the company we sold it to and that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account."

~ Monty Python, Meaning of Line (1983), on The Machine that Goes Ping.

> My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent, but after thinking on it more I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?". Everything I thought of would have some way or workaround that could be found...

This doesn't solve the problem though - the enforcers still have to come up with a standard that they will enforce. A line has to be drawn, letting people move the line around based on how they feel today doesn't help. Making the standard uncertain just creates opportunities for corruption and unfairness. I haven't read the actual EU stance on the matter but what you are describing is a reliable way to end up in a soup of bad policy. There needs to be specific rulings on what people can and can't do.

If you can't identify the problem, then you aren't in a position to solve it. Applies to most things. Regulation by vibe-checks is a great way to kill off growth and change - which the EU might think is clever, but the experience over the last few centuries has been that growth and change generally make things better.

And what they actually seem to be doing here is demanding that sites spy on their users and understand their browsing habits which does seem like a terrible approach. I don't see how their demands in that statement align with the idea of the EU promoting digital privacy.

> If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around.

I dunno, I have difficulty seeing how the dating sites could singlehandedly pull that off in the average case without the site users really leaning in to help. It would seem to run into the basic reality that men and women historically pick the best match from a fairly small pool of people. A dating sites can't do worse than that even if they're trying. If people are willing to use the same standards as all their ancestors then they'd pair off quickly.

It seems more likely that there is just a natural dead-sea effect because of that where the people on the sites over the long term are not the sort of people you'd settle down with, and there is also this subtle idea that the dating site is there to find someone a perfect match (probably doesn't exist to start with). Those are design issues that go a lot deeper than any algorithm the sites might be using.

That's because "matches" are the wrong criterion to look at. In aggregate, matches don't matter. What matters is the population of marriageable (or otherwise amenable to long-term relationships) people. And that's what the dating app calculus works against. Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline. As it drops, the concentration of "serial daters" goes up.

In a high concentration of serial daters, no one wants to pair off because there isn't anyone worth pairing off with around.

> If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline

That seems to be extremely unlikely, people have finite lifespans and are only in the marriage pool for a small fraction of that. More importantly your website could easily be targeted to an even smaller pool say 25-45 and ignoring deaths and divorce your already ~10% turnover per year if you own 100% of the market. Actual numbers depends on what percentage of the pool starts married, becomes a widow etc but their’s plenty of new people to make up for any couples. Further, happily married couples are great advertising.

1 The number of people using these apps. 2. The age group using the apps 3. the type of people using the apps 4. the culture that it has replaced and infiltrated 5 It is the social norm by now to be asked if your on TiXXXr or some other app

The modern interaction have eroded, it is awkward or weird to be approached in public, every middle aged woman or elderly woman has her purse on while shopping at a grocery store, locking the car 6 times and looking back while doing it as if its a James Bond movie. I live in middle class neighborhood and this is the things i see on a daily bases. it is sad.

> Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people

But there is. It's all the people aging into the dating apps. That's how it works. The rate of people leaving is balanced by new people arriving.

No, they aren't. If you're in your 40s you aren't looking to date people in their 20s. Where's the influx of other people in their 40s to date?

> If you're in your 40s you aren't looking to date people in their 20s.

My building is full of divorced 40-somethings dating younger. You see it all over media too. Leonardo DiCaprio is famous for this, and he's hardly the only one.

Women date younger too. My wife's TikTok is full of women empowerment videos; the number of videos on her feed that talk about this is not inconsequential.

Plenty of people to date.

What do you mean? From recently divorced people, of course, if you want to look at that age bracket. But it's the same principle.

Younger women wanting older mature partners is as old as time.

There is even a subgenre of romance writing with this as a theme .. age gap.

But where’s the growth?

It's just a reinforcement loop where the more of something you have the more it accelerates. It happens in many places: bank runs (as soon as people start taking money out, more start doing so), the dead sea effect (where the best people leave and people start leaving as the median quality of coworker drops), hiring (where the more capable you are the more likely you are to get hired, so it gets harder and harder to hire the later you are to the game - most obvious with when you're interviewing interns or whatever), and so on.

> The bookkeeper is still there, still needed, but now they're doing the part that actually requires judgment.

The argument might be fundamentally sound, but now we're automating the part that requires judgement. So if the accountants aren't doing the mechanical part or the judgement part, where exactly is the role going? Formalised reading of an AI provided printout?

It seems quite reasonable to predict that humans just won't be able to make a living doing anything that involves screens or thinking, and we go back to manual labour as basically what humans do.

Even manual labor is uncertain. Nothing in principle prevents a robot from being a mass produceable, relatively cheap, 24/7 manual worker.

We've presumably all seen the progress of humanoid robotics; they're currently far from emulating human manual dexterity, but in the last few years they've gotten pretty skilled at rapid locomotion. And robots will likely end up with a different skill profile at manual tasks than humans, simply due to being made of different materials via a more modular process. It could be a similar story to the rise of the practical skills of chatbots.

In theory we could produce a utopia for humans, automating all the bad labor. But I have little optimism left in my bones.

By what logic are the "manual labor" jobs available? And if you're right and they somehow are, isn't that just another way of saying humanity is enslaving itself to the machines?

But the RFC language clearly anticipates there are situations and good reasons leading to a message that does not include a message-id. Google therefore would be rejecting RFC-compliant emails, and they are the ones who have to justify themselves.

Theoretically, anyway, I expect in practice they'll just ignore the issue or have their own good reason. But they should accept emails with no message-id; there it does strain the imagination to see why lacking an ID would make a message unreadable or undeliverable.

There are indeed such situations. Two situations AFAICR, and neither of them apply to when you connect to someone else's MX.

Gmail rejects the vast majority of compliant messages, I think they've stated in public that they reject >99.9% of messages, and hearsay has it that the percentage for with minor errors like this is even higher.

There are good reasons why a message might be unreadable. For example, message-id is often used by the threading algorithms in MUAs and IMAP servers, and many don't test whether their threading code handles ID-less messages. I use one that deduplicates by ID, what do you think it does when the ID is empty or missing? I don't know, I haven't tested and I'm not going to.