Saying that other people are worse than is not a valid argument. It doesn't improve our score one bit. It just adds to the list of people we should be disappointed in.

Our treatment of refugees is disgusting. I don't care who does it even worse. It doesn't make what we do any better. It most definitely doesn't make it acceptable.

It gives companies who pollute less an advantage, and it gives businesses an incentive to look into renewable energy.

For example:
Electricity prices would go up but only until it became cheaper to get solar, and at that point the price war resumes. Customers will not pay higher prices if there is a cheaper alternative, and so a carbon tax opens up an advantage for technologies that cause less polution.

Besides, the stats in Australia show that the carbon tax was working.

I would like to see a world where Foxconn is free to do this but is forced to find equivalent/suitable work for any employees that are made redundant. If a company is "hiring" robots specifically to save costs, and human jobs are made redundant in the process, then the company should be responsible for those humans.

But alas, I'm probably dreaming and it'll never happen :(

Greed and profits always seem to win out over basic humanity...

Fair enough.

It fails to do anything useful backwards as well :)

Remember your previous state...just keep on running...

Are you kidding?

Yes they are different, but they are related, as follows:

If you need a debugger but don't use one, you're an idiot.
If you use a debugger but don't need to, you're just wasting time.

You've yet to demonstrate that anyone ACTUALLY doesn't need to use one (as opposed to just thinking they are so good they don't need one)...but that's another issue I think.

suppose everyone did that...?

consider that the "leaving early" solution only works because less people actually do it.

Is this misidentification of jerks a fairly recent problem? I wonder what steps we could take to rectify this issue...

Ever heard the phrase "let me put my thinking cap on" ?

This kind of makes that a real thing.

Thinking on a much bigger scale - can this kind of technique be used to raise the limit of human intelligence? Can the world's brightest minds benefit from this? Is there potential for this kind of research to eventually aid in driving humanity further than we could otherwise have gone?

Fascinating possibilities if this is true...

Suppose another programmer capably issued the same challenge to you...

I think the analogy is flawed.

Software development is probably more like engineering and building a bridge.

You need to compare with something where not everything is known at the outset.

I'm sure that bridges sometimes have "bugs" - problems that were not though of in the planning phase. I'm sure no one fixes those for free.

Is the construction of the bridge equivalent to the software development? or the software release and implementation?

I think you could perhaps design a model where developer fix their own bugs on their own time, but don't expect the model to look like the current one. Developers will want more, and the work will take longer, as testing now takes a higher priority (in my experience many companies only give lip-service to proper software testing because it's difficult to quantify how much money it makes).

It's a valid question, but let's not expect we can just stop paying developers for bug fixing and have the world continue on otherwise unchanged...

Something is fucking wrong with this situation...

It's no use, I looked in your box there and your cat is dead...

These things represent enjoyment, and fun. If your life is about anything else, then you can keep it. No one cares about your superiority when you're dead.