Did you consider that it might have something to do with Angela Merkel? Probably not.

There is a certain irony to the fact that a U.S. billionaire is paying to handle a bridge here in the Netherlands (for his half a billion yacht), while in his home country bridges are collapsing. Seems priorities towards taxation and maintenance of common infrastructure are somehow unbalanced.

It is not "survival of the fittest" Never has been. It is "survival of those who are fit enough to procreate".

I live in The Netherlands. No troubles here. Building materials have risen in price, but that is a global thing. No problems with petrol, no empty shelves in supermarkets. No bad news coming in from France or Germany, only bad stuff about the UK.

I should not have taken a sip of my beer while reading your reply. Combining laughing and drinking makes for an uncomfortable reminder that beer should not be expelled through the nose.

What happens when they find the ideal location and that location contains an ark-like structure with millions of eggs, spores, and whatever in it?

Exactly this. In the extreme right, economic power and state power are merged by corporations taking over the state. In the extreme left, state power and economic power are merged by the state taking over the corporations.

There isn't really any proof that Waymo vehicles are driverless, only that the driver isn't in the vehicle. If you compare a dozen dubiously driverless vehicles to a million collecting data every moment and already doing a pretty good job at autonomy, which do you think will succeed?

The fact that the driver is not in the vehicle does not mean that there is no driver.

Violence is bad. I hate violence. But I will kick the shit out of anyone who hurts my children.

With BLM you have violence that was related to racism, a form of oppression.

The recent violence was related to trying to stay in power.

There is a huge difference.

Yes, push people, and they react. Push a large enough group hard enough, and enough people within that group will react with violence. That is a human trait. I do not like it, but it is a fact.

Now look at the pushing. In one case it is racism. That racism exists in the US has been proven. In the other case, the pushing originates with one man, with unproven claims of a stolen election. Unproven in courts of law. Unproven by science. There is a big difference there that should be addressed first. Rioting because of being oppressed is quite different from rioting in order to stay in power.

After that has been addressed we have to acknowledge that we cannot change that people react when pushed. But we can change the stimuli they get. Give them broad and objective information for example. Not propaganda. Give them equal rights and equal chances in life.

So if you are serious about getting civilized behaviour, address the stimuli. In one case: stop racism. In the other case: reform your political system and your propaganda media. A two-party system is almost as much as a joke as a communist one-party system. And the media in the US suffer from the same idiocy. In communist systems you see one side in the media. In the US you see two. In China you get one type of propaganda, in the US you get two. Problem is, there are not just one or two sides. There are many. Having just two leads to narrow news reporting, polarisation, and inherent instability like you see now. You are also pushed into one camp, judging from the 'us and them' statements you make. Fortunately you still reach out to 'the other side'. Unfortunately more and more people are being brainwashed: about half of the voters are. Which half depends on what side you are on. The only way out is to see that both sides have been brainwashed. Both sides are being played.

So please, do your best to reform both politics as well as the media. They have both been corrupted. The courts have not yet been corrupted, but the process has already been started.

Correlation and causation are two different things.

I agree. From a personal point of view I found that the Latin lessons I followed around the age of 15, 16 had the most impact in my coding skills that any other thing I was taught in school. In order to translate a complex sentence in Latin text, you need to break it down into parts and subparts, find out wich words are referencing other words or (sub)parts, and then construct the whole thing again in your own language. That is the same pattern as in programming: you need to break functionality of a domain in (sub)parts, and then connect them all in a programming language.

REST is an architectural style for distributed hypermedia pages. You know, web pages that are primarily read by humans. Using REST for APIs that are primarily used by software (and NOT humans) is one big anti pattern. It's like screws and hammers. Nothing wrong with either, but don't use 'em together.

You can create millions of new web sites overnight, and change the shit out of all existing web pages, without needing any new software. Your browser does not need to change. That is one of the powers of REST. If you create a new API or change an existing one, you MUST change software to adequately use that new or changed API. Your client software MUST change. Totally different use cases.

The name does not even apply: the representational state (RES part of REST) is about a web page and that all state is contained in that page. And you click on something and get a new page and a new state. That is the 'transfer'. Not anything like using an API.

And don't get me started on how the lessons from the OSI model are totally thown away with 'REST' APIs. REST for APIs is yet another example in the line of the article. We are stuck, or even going backwards.

Could not agree more. This is one of the manifestations of the problem that most people do not understand or remember the 'goals', but they do remember the 'means'. So the solution to a different problem is used on a new problem.