which is what you'd get with absolutely unregulated governance-by-contract set up by those who have the assets that everyone needs to live and won't let them borrow or even buy it from them without agreeing to such dictatorial terms.

It's not so much that the value of their work is being taken by their employers (though it is some of that, but that's a consequence of unequal bargaining power due to what I'm about to say), it's more that so much of what they do make it taken by people who already have enough assets that they can afford to lend them out, as a fee for the poor people to use those rich people's assets. I mean rent, including rent on money, better known as interest.

If such a huge chunk of the income people do make didn't have to go toward servicing the assets they have to borrow from the people who have enough to lend them out, the income issue wouldn't be nearly such a big problem. I make twice the median income and consume quite comfortably, and if it weren't for rent and frantically saving for a big enough down payment so I can eventually stop renting and not pay even more in interest, I could consume at my comfortable level on an income about 2/3 of minimum wage.

As a bonus, if people weren't all one paycheck away from losing everything if they can't make one month's rent on time, they could tell shitty jobs to shove it up their ass, and actually get paid more for their work as well.

All monetary transactions involve one party wanting to charge as much as possible and another wanting to pay as little as possible.

But most of them don't involve negotiation.

Instead the just involve the threat that if the offer/price isn't good enough, the applicant/shopper will go elsewhere.

What's backward in the labor market vs the grocery market (etc) is that in most cases the seller sets the price and the buyer takes it or leaves it, while in this case it's the buyer setting the price and the seller can take it and possibly cut costs or accept losses if they do, or else go out of business.

The labor market right now is like a grocery store where every customer walks in, picks what they want to buy, offers some money for it, and just walks out if the store wants more than that, so the stores for the most part just have to take whatever customers will offer for their goods (and if they can't afford to stay in business like that, tough shit for them eh?)

I've been under the impression that the two groups largely coincided, and conveniently defined their activities as "not bullying" because it's "for a good cause", i.e. the ends justified the means.

Exactly. There are two orthogonal issues at hand here:

- Should there be laws regulating what kind of software can control vehicles on public roads?

- Should there by laws regulating whether the owner of a vehicle can look at and modify the software in his car?

It's perfectly analogous to existing hardware modifications. There's no laws saying you can't modify you car in any way you damn well please. There are laws about what kinds of cars can be operated on public roads. There's a possibility that some modifications you make (hardware or software) may make your car unsuitable to operate on public roads. But that doesn't mean you are preemptively prohibited from making those changes — just that you can be liable for operating such a modified vehicle on public roads.

I don't consider myself a programmer at all. The languages I know, I consider scripting languages, not programming languages, and I'm so uncomfortable with them that I try to avoid having to use them unless there's some problem I just can't solve without scripting something.

However I have held jobs with the title Software Engineer.

I feel like an embarrassment to real programmers everywhere.

Full sentences harder. They verbs.
That why liberal arts and humanities important, otherwise sentences would no verbs.

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NEW SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY!
For n equal to one million, an O(n^2) algorithm is slower than an O(n) algorithm. Even when the O(n^2) algorithm is run in RAM, and the O(n) algorithm is disk writes being buffered and optimized by the operating system.

I'll take my Nobel Prize now, thank you.

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Mulder and Scully didn't so much represent "supernatural" vs "logic, science, and reason" as they did paranormal vs mundane. A whole lot of the things Mulder thought were happening were things that could have had a naturalistic explanation that you could do science to understand if they actually were happening at all —they were just extraordinary things the likes of which would require extraordinary evidence to accept. Scully was rightly hesitant to accept such things without extraordinary evidence, but then, she also accepted supernatural things that are widely accepted and considered mundane, normal beliefs by society — her religious beliefs.

That was actually my favorite thing about the show and something I thought, around (I think it was) the season seven finale, they were going to shift to exploring: the paranormalization of religion. Looking at religious beliefs as just as weird and extraordinary as the aliens and monsters Mulder was always on about, and possibly actually connected to those very same things, but at the same time all of it still rationally, naturalistically, scientifically explainable. But of course that would never fly, especially on Fox, and they chickened out and ignored it aside from some vague allusions to Mulder being Alien Jesus or something in the terrible last two seasons.

Or
French butthurt in the third degree; glad the Germans admit their Nazi past, won't admit their own scandalous anti-semitism or their own rampaging murderer.

If this magma reaches the surface it could result in lava flows.

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What I find even more impressive than the awesome Four Chords is Rob Paravonian's Pachabel Rant, which shows how those same four chords show up in everything from classical music to punk rock over a span of hundreds of years.

I don't know about any later intent of Tolkien to finally publish the Silmarillion alongside the LOTR, but the bulk of the material that was eventually published posthumously as "The Silmarillion" was written long before Tolkien ever scribbled down "in a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit", much less wrote a whole book around that phrase, much less the obligatory sequel that got so big it became a trilogy connected to his old mythopoeia about the Eldar and their history.

Also, the LOTR is internally structured into six "books". Each published volume contains two of them. I'm not sure how many volumes Tolkien intended it to be published as, but at first glance that would suggest six.

Or.........
as a computer scientist you could look into the field of evolutionary algorithms, discover that evolution is an applied science used by half of Fortune 500 companies, discover how evolution does work, and write your own code and witness first hand that evolution works.

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