crashfrog

I mean, I was going through college when GW Bush was elected, and here's what I remember:

1. Everyone lying about GW Bush being the "first Spanish-speaking President" (he spoke no Spanish at all), the first of many lies meant to cover up his manifest incompetence and intellectual incapability

2. Republicans shutting the government down for weeks at a time

3. A maniac, entirely fictitious scandal invented solely to hamper Al Gore's election prospects (the White House phones scandal)

What was different about that day's Republican Party than today's? We knew less about it, was all.

You're not going to like it, but the way you get over and past something like this is forgiveness. You have to forgive the pretentious twat who had the temerity to speak to you that way; you forgive him because that's how you eliminate his power over you. You forgive him because that's how you pull out the hooks. You forgive him because the alternative is, what? Carry this around in you forever? Find him and beat the shit out of him?

Just forgive him. Ultimately, he didn't have your gifts - the gift of grace, the gift of the expansive generosity of spirit that leads a person not to construe literally every social encounter as "which one of us is coming out on top? It better be me." The gift of not reflexively being a shithead to people, maybe. Whatever. You almost pity him. Almost.

Forgiveness is how you get past it. People don't like to hear it, but it is.

Once a week is fine. You're clean when you get out of the shower, and the towel air-dries as you're not using it. Even where I live - 65% humidity year-round - we only wash the towels once a week.

I think if you want to understand racism, you can't understand it as the failure to have certain pieces of knowledge. Racists generally aren't unaware that people experience suffering when they're held down or held back from their appropriate station in life.

What racists generally believe, if you're trying to be maximally charitable to the views of racists (ugh), is that human suffering also comes from pushing people into societal roles that are above their station. The individual so pushed suffers, and society suffers for having "the wrong people" in important roles. For instance, that's the view that held that slavery for Black Americans was good for them.

I think a racist in that strain would play the Detroit game and not be convinced, since the game likely doesn't address that position at all.

They don't, though. Check. They can't. No independent body can operate freely in Gaza, it's under Hamas control. They know that Hamas can rescind whatever meager access they have, and so they figure that humanitarian purpose is better satisfied by preserving access by not angering Hamas.

But they don't have access to strike sites, they don't have access to morgues. Islam requires the dead be buried by nightfall, so there's simply no opportunity for independent observers to actually verify body counts. They're just demographically "verified" - "oh, we know about that many people lived in the apartment block, so X is a plausible figure for deaths." But that's not confirmation.

None of the Palestinian prisoners released today had been imprisoned for "stone-throwing." One woman stabbed several Israelis with a knife.

The terrible managers were the ones Romney put in! That's the whole way private equity works - they bought the company when the share price was depressed, then loaded the company with debt, paid themselves the proceeds of the loan, then liquidated the company in bankruptcy so they didn't have to pay it back. The whole private equity scheme is to operate a fraud against lenders.

This evidence should give you a strong prior that it's not just a job.

No, they're still doing it. The flyers have been on social media, even.

I don't think you can really argue that the war in Afghanistan was "unnecessary." We were attacked by terrorists from that country, remember?

We were never going to let OBL do 9/11 and then just walk away.

I don't really follow this. If he actually doesn't want Twitter to be a thing, there's a button in the data center that turns off all the servers. He can just push that. There's no law against it and he's the majority shareholder - what's he going to do, sue himself?

I suspect "you'll fail the test if you use break" is more of a joke by your teacher than an actual grading rubric, although if you used it more than twice in the same test I wouldn't award you better than a B.

Is there a benefit to not using breaks or continues?

The benefit is that you learn to write non-branching code. That's important for beginners, who tend to write very complicated and complex code with lots of branching, which they then discover they're not able to test and debug. Barring you from using break and continue forces you to write more abstract code to achieve the same level of function with less complexity, and that's how programmers advance in skill - simpler, more abstract code.

Ultimately it's an effort to kick a crutch out from under you. Whether you think that's appropriate for a teacher is up to you, I guess - I'm inclined to think it is, but many students don't respond well to being challenged.

(however, I don’t get why more loops and ifs makes a function harder to test, I’m just going to trust you and that I’ll find out later.

Well, it's fairly easy to explain - each branching statement in your function doubles the number of discrete paths through the code. If there's one if statement, there's two paths through the code. (The one where the if predicate is True, and the one where it isn't.) If there's two if statements, there's four paths through the code. If there's three if statements, there's eight paths through the code.

In order to test a function completely, you have to test every possible path through the code. If you used three if statements, that means you have to devise and write eight tests just for the different code paths, plus testing various exceptional cases of the function's input ("what if all inputs are 0", "what if all inputs are null", "what if the integer is a string", etc.) That's a lot of tests! You might even have to write tests for exceptional cases combined with different code paths, so now you're writing eight times the number of tests you otherwise would have had to.

Whereas if your function doesn't branch at all, there's only one path through the code to have to test. That's a lot fewer tests which means you'll probably actually write them instead of saying "well, it looks like it works, I won't spend the time on tests right now." Which is how bugs make it all the way through to the end of the project.

What would be an example where you need different logic based on a number's parity? Why wouldn't you write logic that ignores the number's parity?

Part of getting better as a programmer is realizing which stuff doesn't matter, and writing less code, as a result.

Good luck

Spies on the side of the guys who rape 13-year-old girls with knives aren't the "good guys" in any fucking universe.

Sure, you can definitely argue that the war in Iraq was unnecessary.

Russia is a shithole because it threw out all of its Jews. Too bad, they all moved to Brooklyn; our gain and your loss.

Sure, if that's what OP is grappling with. I didn't read a lot of self-recrimination into their message, but if I was mistaken, then sure - the most important forgiveness is what you offer yourself.

They're "found reliable", but not actually checked. Like, nobody actually checks Hamas' numbers; they just "confirm" them.

Anything's possible, but if you really want to make money off a life insurance policy, you need to insure someone who has a high-paying job. The actuarial value of the insured's life depends on the income they're deprived of when they die. Children don't have jobs, so their actuarial value is pretty low.

You mean, lying to yourself?

Who will pay the debt when I die?

Your estate, via the value of the securities at sale, whose value will have increased in the intervening time. What do you think is the downside, here?

Did you reply to the wrong comment? Or something?

I think it's bad when people who claim neutrality in a conflict are actually aiding one side of the conflict, and lying about it. Israel would be justified, in this situation, in treating them as spies.

Well, no; if medical personnel are taking affirmative, supportive actions for one of the combatants - as its been proved many medical staff are doing on behalf of Hamas - but are doing so under the false guise of neutrality, then they're spies under the Geneva Conventions and can be shot when captured.

"We had to work with Hamas in order to have access to their civilians" isn't a sufficient defense to that. There are already rules about access to civilians that Hamas can be demanded to follow; you don't actually have to join Hamas in order to access Gazan civilians.

Now all of that value truly is gone. Sucks to be my kids I guess.

Why do you think it sucks to be your kids? They inherit a free fancy house and any of your securities that weren't sold to pay the note.

I mean, it sucks for them that their cool dad is dead, but maybe they take comfort in the fact that you went out doing what you loved (raw dog nutting into bitches.)

Well, this took a turn for the stupid

Twitter's always been a non-profit (-making) business

I've never understood how dropping a flyer on someone's house letting them know they're going to be bombed stops Hamas.

You can't move a tunnel entrance. Hamas can run away, but they're still going to get a building collapsed on top of the tunnel entrance.

Kind of like no independent journalists can investigate in Gaza about Israeli-built tunnels under a hospital under IDF control, right?

Kind of the opposite, in fact? The IDF brought in independent journalists to the tunnels, proving that they'd been right about them all along.

But it only moves the problem.

Yes, it moves the problem until after you're dead, and it moves the problem into the future when the value of your securities will have substantially grown, thereby reducing the real cost of your house. Both of those things are good!

If I borrow against the securities, I get cash. I use that cash. I now have zero cash (again).

You have zero cash plus a property asset. The value of that asset will grow as well. Both the asset and your securities are, in fact, growing in value at an interest rate that's greater than the interest you're paying on the loan.

So you're getting free money. It doesn't come from nowhere, of course; it comes from the future people who buy your securities. They essentially paid you in the past to buy a house, and they'll be paid to have done so by people who need to enter the securities market later on (by buying securities.)

But they don't have to drop flyers at all! Indeed they probably shouldn't, in the hopes of catching Hamas by surprise. But even after Oct 7th they're trying as hard as they practically can to keep civilian casualties to a minimum even though they could end the war against Hamas a lot faster, and with fewer Israeli casualties, if they didn't.

Israeli Jews are bleeding in the streets to keep Gazans safe, and their repayment is unabated, universal antisemitism among Gazans. Incredible. Is there a more ungrateful people in existence than the Palestinians?

They don't have any new products to sell you

What? No, Coca-cola has new products every fucking year. Several times a year. Literally two months ago they launched "Coca-Cola Y3000 Zero Sugar", a flavor supposedly created by "AI". And just knowing that Coca-Cola launched it, you probably have an idea what it tastes like. That's what branding does. But Twitter doesn't do any of that, because again, they don't launch new products. They have one product and they'll always have one product.

Does it need those companies? I don't think anyone ever used Twitter because it's where they could receive little ads from Apple and Disney. The interesting people on Twitter are just people, not faceless PR flacks for massive brands.

Every society has its cowards

Nothing's "wrong" with me. I'm telling you what is obviously true. Israel is fighting to preserve human life against enemies that completely disregard it.

No thinking person can look at what's going on in Gaza and disagree. I don't see how that's even possible.

They do it so that you'll carry over your positive impressions with the products you've used, to the new products they want to sell you. You like the Apple Mac, so you think you'll like the Apple iPhone.

But Twitter just has the one product and it'll always have just the one product. They're not making a second product, ever. There's nothing to transfer a favorable impression to. So what's the "value" of Twitter as a brand, distinct from Twitter as an app? All Twitter is is an app.

My point, which I though was obvious, was why does Coca-Cola advertise their main product that they never change except for one ill-advised try in the 1980s?

So that they can sell you all of the 20-odd other flavors, based on your favorable impressions of the Coca-Cola brand as a whole. Have you just not been fucking listening at all?

I think the point you are missing in both cases is that the so-called customer is not who they are advertising to. In Coca-Cola's case, they are advertising to investors.

You just keep saying different things and then acting like that's what you've been saying "the whole time", but this is literally the first time you've introduced "investors" into it.

But that's also nonsense. Coca-Cola doesn't need to buy ads during the Superbowl to talk to their investors; they already have a mailing address for literally every Coca-Cola shareholder. Every publicly-traded company does. When Coca-Cola wants to tell you, the shareholder, something, they just host a phone call and, like, tell you with their mouths. They do this once a quarter, in fact, if not more frequently.

Aren't you embarrassed about being wrong all the time?