China has one proletarian party. The US has two bourgeois parties. One might think the ideal would be to have one bourgeois party, and one proletarian party, but that hasn't seemed to work out anywhere.
The two parties couldn't be more different today. Republicans are basically an authoritarian party that would be more at home in a place like Russia - or China - today.
That being said, democracies are about generating consensus between factions with otherwise irreconcilable differences.
There should be overlap on many fronts - that's kind of a feature, not a bug - at least in many cases.
No, but believing our so-called "democracy" (quotes intended, read: "21st century western systems") is how you give people "a choice" is the moral high ground. That is your axiom, but it's often touted as a tautology.
The name says "demos" and "kratos" but names are names, not facts.
There are many ways to give people a choice and this one has proven to be quite ineffective at that, as it slowly devolved into a plutocracy/oligarchy. Iron law of oligarchy, yadda yadda.
What they are very effective at though: crushing dissent, calming the masses with a reassuring illusion of choice, and touting itself as the "one true way".
When I look at the outcomes I don't see any semblance of democracy, only a ritual dance/theatre show every 4 years. A farce as big as the "democratic" instruments on the PRC.
There's a reason this "democracy" is very diligent at discouraging association and unionizing. Those give actual power to the people (and with power comes choice). That's dangerous. People might start believing they can actually influence the outcomes.
> our so-called "democracy" (quotes intended, read: "21st century western systems")
Do not conflate the broken American political system, the semi-broken British one, and the whole rest of the "west". Each country has its own political system, and they are wildly different.
> crushing dissent
Democracies are good at crushing dissent? Compared to other political systems? That's just not true. All other political systems rely on universal truth and unwavering trust in a person / religion / clique of people, who can do no wrong and can never be criticised.
> There's a reason this "democracy" is very diligent at discouraging association and unionizing
What? You are probably talking about a specific democracy, and the most broken one at that.
As someone from the "whole rest of the west", no, they're not different at all. Very minor details change, but the net outcome is the exact same and suffer from the exact same problems.
You can't escape the iron law of oligarchy.
> Democracies are good at crushing dissent?
They're not only good: they are the best. You don't need to curb dissent by violence if you discourage dissent by social manipulation. It's the cheapest and most effective tactic: keeping the populace docile.
If you manage to equate "democracy" (again, quotes intended) with democracy (lack of quotes intended), most of the work is already done.
"What are you, antidemocratic!?"
"Don't blame me - I voted for Kodos"
There's a reason my country's system trembled when the bipartisan system was challenged as new parties emerged... but it was curbed within two legislatures without a single shot fired and now we're back to an even stronger bipartisan representation. Quite the fine job, actually.
We even have a name for this: "the state's sewers". They're very effective. There's a reason the state's armed forces routinely infiltrate unions and other citizens participation platforms.
> As someone from the "whole rest of the west", no, they're not different at all. Very minor details change, but the net outcome is the exact same and suffer from the exact same problems.
Such as? There are countries such as Poland with a political duopoly, but in most European countries, there are multiple parties that work with or against each other. There are different coalitions with varying compromises between them.
> They're not only good: they are the best. You don't need to curb dissent by violence if you discourage dissent by social manipulation. It's the cheapest and most effective tactic: keeping the populace docile.
Nonsense, because autocracies do both, and the threat by violence is very real and makes sure that social manipulation is more effective.
> There are different coalitions with varying compromises between them.
They all failed and were subsumed by the two (read: one) big groups in Europe. Far left and libertarians were crushed in the past two legislatures.
Now it's PfE's turn but the antibodies are already in the bloodstream (the two big groups are already signing their covenants to protect the oligarchy) and Trump did them dirty (they're now scrambling to distance themselvesb from USA's and Israel's ties) so they're DoA and will fail too.
This said: I understand your points, and thanks for the civil discussion.
> The difference is that electricity wasn't being controlled by oligarchs that want to shape society so they become more rich while pillaging the planet and hurting/killing real human beings.
Yes it was. Those industrialists were called "robber barons" for a reason.
> Should I be familiar with every step of Dijkstra’s search algorithm and remember the pseudocode at all times?
Somehow, I think you already know the answer to that is "no".
I've been working as a software engineer for over 8 years, with no computer science education. I don't know what Dijkstra's search algorithm is, let alone have memorised the pseudocode. I flicked through a book of data structures and algorithms once, but that was after I got my first software job. Unless you're only aiming for Google etc, you don't really need any of this.
You should know the trade-offs of different algorithms, though. Many libraries let you choose the implementation for a spcific problem. For instance tree vs. hash map where you trade memory for speed.
Antibiotics don’t stop you suffering from poison ivy. At all. In other posts you say you had a broken skin barrier that’s vulnerable to infection, so you presumably know that this is not the same as actually having a bacterial infection, and that antibiotics are only a prophylactic, not a treatment. So stop making out that people are dying to deny you treatment.
But you are going to imply it by bringing it up at all.
> They didn't kill him, they failed to save him.
The post does not say otherwise.
Please give this, of all topics, the respect it deserves, respond to the article as it is actually written, and don't use this, of all things, as an opportunity to get on your high horse about some other article you have problems with.
Me. I'm a backend developer who occasionally wants to make a web frontend for a side-project but knows essentially no CSS. The solutions are not "well understood" by me because I know no CSS.
In that case I'd say the problem is exactly what you state
> knows essentially no CSS
The solution is quite obvious then too: learn some. It's not hard. Understanding the basics is a afternoon job. Diving a bit deeper a day, and learning about some often-used more in depth features like "responsive" or flexbox, another day. For a software developer/engineer that builds backends, CSS really isn't that hard.
That's not to say a basic CSS set and some explanation like in TLA, isn't useful.
It's my pet-peeve that in software development, I'm convinced we should understand the stuff that we work with. Not all, and certainly not everything in great detail, but enough to know where to find the info and details when working with it. From sysadmin to the concepts of cryptography and from accessibility to how an OS writes stuff to disk. Even if that means constantly learning.
> The solution is quite obvious then too: learn some.
That’s the whole point of this article. CSS is a huge language. Where do you even begin? This article is a perfect response to that very natural question.
It really isn't a huge language. It's not even a language. There are some basic principles, but it's pretty much a bunch of pick-and-choose attributes for HTML that you can wrap up into "classes". I've worked heavily with it for 25 years and I still basically just screw around until something looks good.
There is no point to this article. This is the most common kind of trash you can find if you type in "minimum css"... it's not even that. Come on. Have integrity in your work and learn how to do it.
It's a declarative language, not an imperative/functional language. You describe the desired end result, the browser figures out how to lay things out to fit all the constraints.
And this:
> but it's pretty much a bunch of pick-and-choose attributes for HTML that you can wrap up into "classes".
indicates despite using it for 25 years, you haven't even tried to learn it. This may have been partially true back when it was first introduced and all people knew were things like "font" and "[text-]align", but it's been a horribly inaccurate description of CSS for decades now.
C'mon. I'm a full stack dev but this is like me saying I just want to code something quick in C++ but don't know anything about it. Maybe I don't know how to tell a pointer from a shared_ptr or what a destructor is. Even if I don't know how to do them, I'm pretty aware that these things are very well understood and documented by a huge community, to the point that I probably wouldn't rely on some AI-written article with almost no useful information to show me how to do what I wanted to do... I'd want to actually learn what was going on under the hood... and if I did somehow find such an article useful to explaining pointers in the most vapid way possible for my use case, I certainly wouldn't post it to HN. And if I did post it to HN and it suddenly ranked to the top, I would think something had gone completely wrong with the universe.
It's an objectively terrible article. It gives a bunch of arbitrary things to copy without really explaining them, and it is completely useless for building anything real. It is probably written by an AI. It's trash. What on earth makes you think it deserves more attention than the other million useless articles on this subject?
The article, and especially much of the discussion here, is about how privatisation has led to this situation. Privatisation of a public utility which _even in many other developed liberal capitalist countries_ is not privatised. Yet to you this is not evidence that we are an extreme example of neoliberalism, but somehow “defacto socialist” and your solution is throwing fuel on the fire with more privatisation. You’re living on a different planet, mate.
Fruiter Aero is a term that retroactively applies to the style of a certain time. Look at Windows Vista. Windows Vista's design is what we now call Fruitger Aero. Windows Vista came out in 2007. It's a retroactive term, yes, but how can you claim the thing it refers to didn't exist before 2007, when Windows Vista is a shining example of it?
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