The coloring is not the concrete argument (Io implementation) that is passed, but whether the function has an Io parameter in the first place. Whether the implementation of a function performs IO is in principle an implementation detail that can change in the future. A function that doesn't take an Io argument but wants to call another function that requires an Io argument can't. So you end up adding Io parameters just in case, and in turn require all callers to do the same. This is very much like function coloring.
In a language with objects or closures (which Zig doesn't have first-class support for), one flexibility benefit of the Io object approach is that you can move it to object/closure creation and keep the function/method signature free from it. Still, you have to pass it somewhere.
> Whether the implementation of a function performs IO is in principle an implementation detail that can change in the future.
I think that's where your perspective differs from Zig developers.
Performing IO, in my opinion, is categorically not an implementation detail. In the same way that heap allocation is not an implementation detail in idiomatic Zig.
I don't want to find out my math library is caching results on disk, or allocating megabytes to memoize. I want to know what functions I can use in a freestanding environment, or somewhere resource constrained.
> Performing IO, in my opinion, is categorically not an implementation detail. In the same way that heap allocation is not an implementation detail in idiomatic Zig.
It seems you two are coming at this from opposing perspectives. From the perspective of a library author, Zig makes IO an implementation detail, which is great for portability. It lets library authors freely use IO abstractions if it makes sense for their problem.
This lets you, as an application developer, decide the concrete details of how such libraries behave. Don't want your math library to cache to disk? Give it an allocating writer[0] instead of a file writer. Want to use an library with async functionality on an embedded system without multi threading? Pass it a single threaded io[1] runtime instance, implement the io interface yourself as is best for your target.
Of course someone has to decide implementation details. The choices made in designing Zig tend to focus on giving library authors useful abstractions thst give application authors meaningful control over important decisions for their application.
The problem with function coloring is that it makes libraries difficult to implement in a way that's compatible with both sync and async code.
In Python, I needed to write both sync and async API clients for some HTTP thing where the logical operations were composed of several sequential HTTP requests, and doing so meant that I needed to implement the core business logic as a Generator that yields requests and accepts responses before ultimately returning the final result, and then wrote sync and async drivers that each ran the generator in a loop, pulling requests off, transacting them with their HTTP implementation, and feeding the responses back to the generator.
This sans-IO approach, where the library separates business logic from IO and then either provides or asks the caller to implement their own simple event loop for performing IO in their chosen method and feeding it to the business logic state machine, has started to appear as a solution to function coloring in Rust, but it's somewhat of an obtuse way to support multiple IO concurrency strategies.
On the other hand, I do find it an extremely useful pattern for testability, because it results in very fuzz-friendly business logic implementation, isolated side-effect code, and a very simple core IO loop without much room in it for bugs, so despite being somewhat of a pain to write I still find it desirable at times even when I only need to support one of the two function colors.
My opinion is that if your library or function is doing IO, it should be async - there is no reason to support "sync I/O".
Also, this "sans IO" trend is interesting, but the code boils down to a less ergonomic, more verbose, and less efficient version of async (in Rust). It's async/await with more steps, and I would argue those steps are not great.
From a performance perspective, asynchronous IO makes a lot of sense when you're dealing concurrently with a large number of tasks which each spend most of their time waiting for IO operations to complete. In this case, running those tasks in a single-threaded event loop is far more efficient than launching off thousands of individual threads.
However, if your application falls into literally any other category, then suddenly you are actually paying a performance penalty, since you need the overhead of running an event loop any time you just want to perform some IO.
Also, from a correctness perspective, non-concurrent code is simply a lot less complex and a lot harder to get wrong than concurrent code. So applications which don't need async also end up paying a maintainability, and in some cases memory safety / thread safety, penalty as well.
The beautiful thing about the “async” abstraction is that it doesn’t actually tie you to an event loop at all. Nothing about it implies that somebody is calling `epoll_wait` or similar anywhere in the stack.
It’s just a compiler feature that turns functions into state machines. It’s totally valid to have an async runtime that moves a task to a thread and blocks whenever it does I/O.
I do agree that async without memory safety and thread safety is a nightmare (just like all state machines are under those circumstances). Thankfully, we have languages now that all but completely solve those issues.
You surely must be referring to Rust, the only multithreaded language with async-await in which data races aren't possible.
Rust is lovely and all, but is a bad example for the performance side of the argument, since in practice libraries usually have to decide on an async runtime, so in practice library users have to launch that runtime (usually Tokio) to execute the library's Futures.
Sure, but that’s a library limitation (no widespread common runtime interface that libraries such as Tokio implement), not a fundamental limitation of async.
Thread safety is also a lot easier to achieve in languages like C#, and then of course you have single-threaded environments like JS and Python.
Exactly, there is nothing wrong with function coloring. It's a design choice.
Colored functions are easier to reason about, because potential asynchronicity is loudly marked.
Colorless functions are more flexible because changing a function to be async doesn't virally break its interface and the interface of all its callers.
Zig has colored functions, and that's just fine. The problem is the (unintentional) gaslighting where we are told that Zig is colorless when the functions clearly have colors.
As mentioned, the problem with coloring is not that you see the color, the problem is that you can't abstract over the colors.
Effectful languages basically add user-definable "colors", but they let you write e.g. a `map` function that itself turns color based on its parameter (e.g. becoming async if an async function is passed).
I think talking about colouring often misses the point. Sync & async code are fundamentally different; languages without coloured functions make everything async. Everything in go (for instance) is running in an async runtime, and it's all preemptable.
> I don't want to find out my math library is caching results on disk, or allocating megabytes to memoize. I want to know what functions I can use in a freestanding environment, or somewhere resource constrained.
On that vein, I would often like to know whether the function I can is creating a task/thread/greenlet/whatever that will continue executing, concurrently, after it returns. Making that be part of the signature is approximately called “structured concurrency”, and Zig’s design seems to conflate that with taking an io parameter. This seems a bit disappointing to me.
> A function that doesn't take an Io argument but wants to call another function that requires an Io argument can't.
Why? Can’t you just create an instance of an Io of whatever flavor you prefer and use that? Or keep one around for use repeatedly?
The whole “hide a global event loop behind language syntax” is an example of a leaky abstraction which is also restrictive. The approach here is explicit and doesn’t bind functions to hidden global state.
Is that a problem in practice though? Zig already has this same situation with its memory allocators; you can't allocate memory unless you take a parameter. Now you'll just have to take a memory allocator AND an additional io object. Doesn't sound very ergonomic to me, but if all Zig code conforms to this scheme, in practice there will only-one-way-to-do-it. So one of the colors will never be needed, or used.
That's where the post-scarcity society AI will enable comes in! Surely the profits from this technology will allow these displaced programmers to still live comfortable lives, not just be hoarded by a tiny number of already rich and powerful people. /s
Wow, I just checked the doublespeed website and it is comically evil. The footer says — verbatim, and in huge letters — "never pay a human again." (I'm not selectively quoting; it's a full sentence, despite their weird capitalization.)
If Neal Stephenson tried to write a villain this on-the-nose, his editor would tell him to tone it down.
> A blanket ban on LLM-generated code is at least arguably a reasonable policy.
No, I don't think it is. There's more nuance to this debate than either "we're banning all LLM code" or "all of our features are vibe coded".
A blanket ban on unreviewed LLM code is a perfectly reasonable way to mitigate mass-produced slop PRs, but it is not reasonable to ban all code generated by an LLM. Not only is it unenforceable, but it's also counterproductive for people who genuinely get value out of it. As long as the author reviews the code carefully before opening a PR and can be held responsible, there's no problem.
Banning all LLM code doesn't mean they see things in binary terms like that. There is nuance between "all code must have 100% test coverage" and "tests are a waste of time", for instance, but that doesn't mean a project that adopts one of those policies thinks the middle ground doesn't exist.
A blanket ban is really the only sensible thing to do so that no time is wasted for both sides (contributors know upfront that there's no point trying to get an AI-generated PR accepted - so they won't waste time creating one, and project maintainers don't waste time reviewing what might be broken AI slop - even if some AI generated PRs would be acceptable from a quality point of view).
When there's a grey zone then there will be lots of pointless discussions like "why was this AI-generated PR accepted but not mine" etc etc...
Perhaps you misunderstood my comment. I'm not advocating for vibe-coded AI-generated PRs, and I do think that blanket banning them is pretty reasonable for the reasons you stated.
However, I don't think that banning all AI-generated code is reasonable. Having an LLM generate a couple of functions or a bit of boilerplate in an otherwise manually coded PR should not invalidate it from being accepted if it's helpful.
> Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not.
> Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.
One absolutely does not follow the other; there are all sorts of things that are legal only if done for certain purposes, only below a certain scale, etc. The idea that we must permit both or neither is a false dichotomy.
Observing and recording is a difference in kind. Recording and processing is a difference in kind. Processing and selling is a difference in kind. And quantity has a quality all its own.
> Observing and recording is a difference in kind.
Not if you believe in a right of general-purpose computing. Your brain records everything you observe. If you can use a computer for any purpose you choose, then you can use it to record what you can see and hear.
...I mean, sure, I'll argue that copyright laws are illegitimate on this basis. And it's beyond obvious at this point that the internet doesn't abide by this "law".
> Not wanting laws to reflect a difference does not mean a difference does not exist.
The point is: the difference is a legal fiction which necessarily prohibits general-purpose computing. If I can capture photons with my eyes, but then I try to do it with a machine, and you say, "hey, you can't use a machine for that!" then you are telling me that I can't engage in general purpose computing.
> What law? Copyright? Why the punctuation? And what did you intend this to imply?
Yes, I don't think copyright laws are a legitimate role for state power in the information age. And if the argument is, "well, look copyright laws require prohibitions on collecting or copying data or any other general purpose computing process", then that only makes the case stronger, not weaker.
If a law requires the state to intrude into your personal, intimate computing process - whether the biological process in your brain or an electronic one in your computer - then that's a very strong indication that the law is not a legitimate intervention on behalf of the rights of others.
> If I can capture photons with my eyes, but then I try to do it with a machine, and you say, "hey, you can't use a machine for that!" then you are telling me that I can't engage in general purpose computing.
Observing, recording, and processing are different words with different meanings. Repeating your assertion they are the same did not make it more persuasive.
> Yes, I don't think copyright laws are a legitimate role for state power in the information age. And if the argument is, "well, look copyright laws require prohibitions on collecting or copying data or any other general purpose computing process", then that only makes the case stronger, not weaker.
Copyright laws regulated copying always.
There are arguments for copyright abolition worth considering. It is impossible to separate activities almost everyone but you can separate and separates is not.
> If I can capture photons with my eyes, but then I try to do it with a machine, and you say, "hey, you can't use a machine for that!" then you are telling me that I can't engage in general purpose computing.
You can capture photons with your eyes, and you can use an image sensor to capture photons. Seems pretty equivalent.
But your brain cannot store images or recall them in the future (even for yourself, it is a very lossy recall), or transmit them to another person, etc. That is all completely separate functionality that is not equivalent to what your brain can do.
So if I have an implant that encodes and digitally records impulses on my optic nerve, allowing me to replay and share things I have previously seen, then can the law justly require me to avert my eyes as the emperor walks past? Obviously not.
And what of the martian who uses a very powerful telescope to record public activities of earthlings - do our laws extend to her? Do we own the photons that bounce off of our skin unto the ends of reality? Obviously, totally not. That's not how any of this works.
You're allowed to capture photons. You are built with devices that do just say. And you're allowed to build other devices to do that.
> can the law justly require me to avert my eyes as the emperor walks past?
Given that you chose to get the implant, I'd say the answer is yes. What you have done is no different than walking around with a camera and taking pictures of everything your eyes point at. So it can be regulated the same way.
> And what of the martian
If she sets foot in our jurisdiction, then she's toast.
> What you have done is no different than walking around with a camera and taking pictures of everything your eyes point at.
Exactly! So what is the distinction between capturing photons with your retinas vs. with a camera sensor that, in your mind, suddenly gives the state authority to intervene?
> If she sets foot in our jurisdiction, then she's toast.
I don't know what "our" jurisdiction means on the internet. If she sets up a streaming server and makes it available to all earthlings, then what?
> And what of the martian who uses a very powerful telescope to record public activities of earthlings - do our laws extend to her? Do we own the photons that bounce off of our skin unto the ends of reality? Obviously, totally not. That's not how any of this works.
Martians don't exist, so yeah, of course that's not how anything works!
> Not if you believe in a right of general-purpose computing
Uh, sure. If we make up a right, there is a problem.
Currently, this right doesn't exist. We make plenty of laws without presuming it exists. Plenty of people are trying and failing to pursue voters that it should exist, and I generaly commend them. But it's weird to the point of bordring on intentional distraction to try and pot this specific issue on the basis of a demand that doesn't apply to anything else.
If you can look at the world and conclude that a right to make something and use it as you see fit, in private and without harming others, does not exist, then I guess we just have a dramatically different perspective of the world in which we've arrived.
> But it's weird to the point of bordring (sic) on intentional distraction to try and pot this specific issue on the basis of a demand that doesn't apply to anything else.
You've assumed bad intentions and... I don't know what else to say. If I can see something with my eyes, save it in my brain, recall it later in a drawing, but can't do those same things with a computer, then the implications for the right of general-purpose computing (and for that matter, free thought) are just absolutely obvious.
We are commenting on an article where the process you describe leads to harming others, are we not? You can make it sound as robotic as you'd like, but at the end of the day we're still talking about corporations surveilling people on a massive scale and selling the data to be used against them.
It's sort of like saying "what, so I can't assemble a simple contraption of metal and explosive powder, and use it as I see fit?" to elide the fact that what you're actually talking about is shooting a gun. The details matter!
If the case is that the movements of people are plainly observable, but that observing them advances the ability of an organizing like CBP to victimize them, then it seems to me that the logical conclusion is to abolish CBP. Which I think is actually a far more logical position and also a far more popular one among Americans, though many are now afraid to say it out loud.
> It's sort of like saying "what, so I can't assemble a simple contraption of metal and explosive powder, and use it as I see fit?" to elide the fact that what you're actually talking about is shooting a gun.
Shooting? Or building? Of course you have a right to fabricate a gun in your own home. Is this in dispute (at least, in the USA)? Equally obvious, you do not have a right to discharge it in a way that endangers others.
I mean, I am not your enemy with regard to abolishing CBP. But the harms go beyond that. There are many studies that show how being surveilled can affect our behavior and negatively impact our mental health.
With regard to guns, restrictions abound on how you can use them (even in the privacy of your own home) — you need a license to carry them in public, you must lock them up around children, etc. Even though you might believe in some sort of "right to generalized mechanics", in practice most people believe your rights should actually be strictly limited.
First of all, in much of the US, you don't need a license to carry a gun in public. I'm not saying that's good or bad - I don't love it, but it's the current state of things.
But... is there a right to generalized mechanics in the same sense as general computing? General computing is the right to think - is your right to think limited to what your brain is capable of right now? Is it OK to exercise to increase your capacity? Is it OK to take supplements and drugs for this purpose? Is it OK to offload some thinking to a device you own?
Of course. These are fundamental, bedrock needs of a free information age society. You can think _anything_ you want. Thoughts, perhaps by definition, don't harm or imperil others.
But can you arbitrarily craft any machine you want? I mean, no. Like the right to your thoughts, you can craft what you like as long as it doesn't harm or imperil others. Unlike thoughts, some machines do certainly do this.
We have long had a legal and philosophical distinction between arms and ordnance for this reason. We recognize that the right to bear arms create a decentralization of the capacity for violence. But the right to bear ordnance does not. Also, in practical terms, manufacturing ordnance in secret is often difficult (and in fact, it is relieving to know how difficult it is to make nuclear weapons in secret - so much so that it seems to be _less_ possible with each passing year - in part due to the proliferation of eyes/cameras!).
So yeah, I think you can have totally philosophically and legally consistent limits on manufacturing without also having to limit thought / computation / perception.
In much of the US, you can't do the "general computing" you're describing either. Many states don't allow you to record audio without the consent of all parties, for example. You can't record or even possess child sexual abuse material. So it turns out the right you're talking about doesn't actually exist.
You're spending a lot of effort and well made points arguing against a person who isn't trying to see where you're coming from. Their take is pure libertarianism where a concept of freedom outclasses any real consequences. Like most of these pure-freedom arguments the whole thing pivots on a carefully contorted definition of "harm" - your clear examples of harm being discussed apparently don't count and there isn't a good faith conversation about why, they are just being hand waved away.
I think your attention is better spent on other commenters.
I'm not sure what I can do to recognize and steelman this position. There is no way to justify telling someone far away that they aren't allowed to capture photons which have bounced off of your skin that doesn't amount to a position of maximum egotism.
A person's existence does not entitle them to control and authority over every particle that interacts with them.
I'm allowed to see you. If you are in a place where I can see (ie, in public), then I can see you without even telling you I can see you. If I can see you - regardless of whether the technology I use is the result of biological evolution or electronic innovation - and you never even realize you've been seen, then by definition I have not harmed you with that act.
So, let's identify the _actual_ acts of harm. Trying to limit what CBP is allowed to see - when we can't even verify what they've seen - is not a path to relief from their tyranny.
I don't think that's hand-wavy. I think it's consistent. And unafraid to speak truth to power.
If you think you can summarize what I'm missing, I'd love to hear it.
Messaging can be co-opted. I think you're genuinely arguing for general-purpose computing. But that functionally serves to preserve Flock and the CBP's ability to illegally, in my opinion, monitor and harm Americans.
Well, there are two clear things to be teased out here:
* What Flock does is _not_ consistent with the use of a camera in a fashion that is identical to an eyeball - they are not standing and watching cars go by, or even recording them and logging it. I think it's essential to support the right of individuals to to this. But putting a camera on a fixture? That's a little different. But even if we support that - and I think I can be convinced...
* The custody of this data in secret, and the sharing of it with criminal elements in society, let alone those committing crimes under color of law like CBP, is the harmful part.
Imagine if there were a network of cameras covering all the commons across the land (ie, every street), and there were a way to view their perspective in real time. This gives every person the ability to record and follow any other.
Is this, in itself, an affront?
What if an alien on mars has such a powerful telescope that they too can follow someone in this way. Is this criminal? Do the rights of a person to police how certain photons - those which bounce off their skin - can be captured... extend to the ends of the universe?
I hope the answer is 'obviously not'.
The problem here is that CBP exists in the first place. We need to complete the incomplete struggle for abolition that fizzed in the middle of the 19th century. We need to rid the land of the power structures wherein some people can exact violence under color of law and others cannot even defend themselves, even as all the cameras in the land capture this injustice.
_That's_ the problem, not that somebody saw it happen.
Of course. But seeing is not illegal. It's the violent kidnapping part that it's illegal. But for some reason we're afraid to hold CBP accountable for that, so instead we want to make it illegal for everyone to see.
Seeing with your eyes is not, but recording might be. Using technology to see might be. And that doesn't necessarily infringe on your general computing rights, at least as understood by law, should there be any that grants you such.
But that's literally the question I'm asking. Where do you draw the line in a way that stops what we consider to be abuses, but doesn't stop what we think of as legitimate uses by journalists, academics, etc.?
E.g. city employees who need to better understand traffic patterns originating from one neighborhood, to plan better public transit. Journalists who want to expose the congestion caused by Amazon delivery trucks. And so forth.
Is it database size? Commercial use? Whether license plates are hashed before storing? Hashed before selling the data to a third party? What about law enforcement with a warrant? Etc.
> But that's literally the question I'm asking. Where do you draw the line in a way that stops what we consider to be abuses, but doesn't stop what we think of as legitimate uses by journalists, academics, etc.?
I think the wrong assumption you're making, is that there is supposed to be a simple answer, like something you can describe with a thousand words. But with messy reality this basically never the case: Where do you draw the line of what is considered a taxable business? What are the limits of free speech? What procedures should be paid by health insurance?
It is important to accept this messiness and the complexity it brings instead of giving up and declaring the problem unsolvable. If you have ever asked yourself, why the GDPR is so difficult and so multifaceted in its implications, the messiness you are pointing out is the reason.
And of course, the answer to your question is: Look at the GDPR and European legislation as a precedent to where you draw the line for each instance and situation. It's not perfect of course, but given the problem, it can't be.
Generally, you do want the general principle of something like this to be explainable in a few sentences, yes.
Even if that results in a bunch of more detailed regulations, we can then understand the principles behind those regulations, even if they decide a bunch of edge cases with precise lines that seem arbitrary.
Things like the limits of free speech can be explained in a few sentences at a high level. So yes, I'm asking for what the equivalent might be here.
The idea that "it's so impossibly complicated that the general approach can't even be summarized" is not helpful. Even when regulations are complicated, they start from a few basic principles that can be clearly enumerated.
This is not how things ever work in practice in representative democracy. The world is too complex, and the many overlapping sets of political groups in a country/provice/city have different takes on what the policy should be, and more importantly, each group have different tolerances for what they will accept.
Because everyone has different principles by which they evaluate the world, most laws don't actually care about principles. They are simply arbitrary lines in the sand drawn by the legislature in a bid to satisfy (or not dissatisfy) as many groups as possible. Sometimes, some vague sounding principles are attached to the laws, but its always impossible for someone else to start with the same principles and derive the exact same law from them.
Constitutions on the other hand seem simple and often have simple sounding principles in them. The reason is that constitutions specify what the State institutions can and cannot do. The State is a relatively simple system compared to the world, so constitutions seem simple. Laws on the other hand specify what everyone else must or must not do, and they must deal with messy reality.
This is not just unhelpful (and overly cynical), but it is untrue.
Courts follow the law, but they also make determinations all the time based on the underlying principles when the law itself is not clear.
Law school itself is largely about learning all the relevant principles at work. (Along with lots of memorization of cases demonstrating which principle won where.)
I understand you're trying to take a realist or pragmatic approach, but you seem to have gone way too far in that direction.
Emphasis on casual, IMO. It is perfectly reasonable to decide that past norms which evolved in the absence of large scale computing power, digital cameras, and interconnected everything do not translate to the right to extrapolate freedom of casual observation into computer-assisted stalking.
License plate numbers are generally considered PII in their own right. A tuple of make, model, color, and year range is getting awfully close to an equivalent on its own as well.
no they're not. PII has to be able to identify an individual.
anyone can in theory be driving a car. is it my wife, or me, or my kid taking the station wagon out this weekend?
it's also why red light cameras and speed camera send tickets to the registered owner, not necessarily who is driving. my sister in law borrows the car and I get the ticket
Generally "I wasn't driving then" is actually a defense to the automated cameras. The registered owner things is just the first pass like any other lazy investigation.
In the broader context PII is a looser concept, and can be thought of like browser fingerprinting. The legal system hasn't formalized it nearly to the same degree, but does have the concept of how enough otherwise public information sufficiently correlated can break into the realm of privacy violations. I. The browser fingerprinting world that's thought of pretty explicitly in terms of contributions of bits of entropy, but the legal system has pushed back on massive public surveillance when it steps into the realm of stalking or a firm of investigation that should require a warrant.
PII isn’t limited to SSNs. By your logic, First name can’t be PII, and last name with no accompanying info wouldn’t be PII. Different types of data have different risk profiles. When multiple records about an individual are collected the risk grows exponentially. Location is absolutely PII when combined with other risky data, like license plate.
One big easy line to draw is personal+individual versus commercial+corporation. There should be sweeping privacy laws that individuals can use to prevent information about them (including government issued identifiers) from being recorded, processed, and stored. Then for private vs private, a de minimis exception for individuals doing it noncommercially on a small number of people.
Delivery trucks are operated by corporations so don't have privacy protection (although the individuals driving them would from things like facial recognition). Traffic patterns can be studied without the use of individual identifiers. Law enforcement is moot because the juicy commercial surveillance databases won't be generated in the first place, and without them we can have an honest societal conversation whether the government should create their own surveillance databases of everyone's movements.
These aren't insurmountable problems. GDPR gets these answers mostly right. What it requires is drawing a line in the sand and iterating to close loopholes, rather than simply assuming futility when trying to regulate the corporate surveillance industry.
This is literally what private detectives do when they tail someone. So yes, this is legal as long as it's not harassing or there's a restraining order or something. Did you think it was not?
Not OP, but yes, I think it is not. At least, not legal in the same expansive way that you are implying. AFAIK private detective work is very much regulated, most likely because it is otherwise known as stalking.
stalking implies harassment, threats, and real or perceived potential for danger
it is illegal because it means the stalker will attack / rape / otherwise damage or harass the victim.
however watching or tracking someone in public is plenty legal, and actual PIs have ethical and legal obligation to weed out stalkers and dubious behavior
So I know you're saying that's too much, but honestly even if the bar was set at that level it would fix mass surveillance. If it takes one hour of labor to track one person for an hour, things work out fine.
> Donald Trump pulled off a stunning political comeback because of … young men.
If you break exit poll data down by race [1], Black men 18-29 supported Harris by a whopping 55 percentage points. So even though Scott pays lip service to Black male educators being particularly underrepresented, he can't explain why this alleged phenomenon affecting young men is so vastly different between demographics.
Only 55 percentage points? Did you mean "whopping" in an ironic sense? I expected that stat to be higher. This speaks to just how bad of a candidate Harris was.
Oh.... I couldn't stay interested to read the whole article. Yes, that is indeed a male demographic that voted for a woman as a whole.
Men as a whole didn't reject Kamala because she was a woman. Her entire party embodies anti-man, anti-white policies. She had no definite principles and would have said anything to get power. Our best guess at her actual principles is that she is a communist. The Democrat machine basically forced her on voters, which says a lot about the party as well.
That is untethered from reality and still has nothing to do with what I'm saying. Maybe actually read the article before joining a discussion about it?
That's not a tautology. You said "programs are the most reliable, though far from 100%"; they're just telling you that your upper bound for well-made programs is too low.
You seem to forget that all the people on public transit essentially get their time back. It's so much more efficient than everyone having to use their own time to all individually make that effort.
I made some calculations like a year ago using public data from Finland in the year 2023, the people lost collectively 55k years to driving cars. If we could take all that time back by doing minimum wage work in Finland, that'd add 4,841,511,500.55€ to the GDP and add approximately 164,006,202.08€ of taxable income to the state.
Of course that's just an approximation which presumes everyone could do their jobs while commuting and that you could get 100% efficiency. (But many of the values in the data were rounded down, so this is technically just a lower bound on the value ROI)
> You seem to forget that all the people on public transit essentially get their time back.
Can I use the time in subway while commuting to work to get groceries or to get my child to a doctor's appointment?
> I made some calculations like a year ago using public data from Finland in the year 2023, the people lost collectively 55k years to driving cars.
Now do that with transit. Keep in mind, that transit is typically 2-3 times slower than cars in well-designed cities (i.e. not Manhattan-style hellscapes). It absolutely is true of Helsinki. Try dropping 100 random points on the city map and plot the routes between all of them, for both cars and transit. You'll find that cars are typically 3x faster.
> Can you use the time in a car while commuting to work to do the same?
Yes. In a well-designed city, a car trip will give you more time to do that.
> What makes a city "well-designed" in your eyes?
Not large, at most 300000 population, and designed for the needs of people, not for bike-lanes. So wide roads, plenty of parking (including parking lots), low density, large houses providing plenty of space, etc.
I live in NYC. Less than 1% of our population works on supporting transit (when you add in tourists and commuters, it's ~0.7%). And it's very often faster to get somewhere by subway than it is by car.
Plus, parking is simultaneously way too cheap (~3 million free parking spaces on some of the most valuable real estate in the world) and way too expensive for most people (garages by me start at $350/mo). So in order to keep a car, I'd either need to waste thousands of dollars on a garage or hundreds of hours driving around trying to find free parking.
Why would that be the case, if not for Oracle's litigiousness?
reply