That Left vs. Right is only or mostly a distraction is a Leftie/Libertarian tactic. They are of course highly distinctly opposing philosophies, even if the extreme divide between the philosophies is not fully represented in Congress.

I don't know about the banks, but corporations are only trying to buy favor in regulations and subsidies, so that they can be more successful. This is tyranny in that it's anti-competitive and hurts the average citizen, but is nowhere near where the vast majority of the tyranny we're experiencing nowadays is coming from: The GOP's progressivism towards more and more perfect national security, and the Left's progressivism towards more and more perfect outcomes in almost everything in general.

TL;DR: That cartoon pushes the standard commie line that the institutions of capitalism are our biggest problem.

p.s. What it does get right is that, since neither major party cares one whit about libertarianism, in that sense it's meaningless which one you vote for, because neither will advance that cause. (But then that's hardly the only meaningful factor, whereupon there becomes a huge difference between the parties.)

Another thought is this: I've written my share of T-SQL in the same spirit as this. And that is, what I have come to philosophically consider to be doing too much on the database side. An RDBMS's strong suit is retrieving data, not string manipulations. And your requirements for the data to be built into a string and of a certain format is really a business rule, where even if you're not doing a tiered architecture physically, it isn't a best practice to mix business layer concerns into what is logically the data layer.

I'm to the point where I consider the T-SQL language's non-DML/non-DDL stuff to be only as a last resort, such as needing to send already formatted data into say SQL Server Reporting Services, where you might not have middle tier(s) and the luxury of processing the data via any other means before it gets presented. But for application work, I want to start using the database to do just enough calculating to identify what data I want retrieved, and then the rest of the crunching that needs to be performed being done in C# or whatever (which will typically be more expressive and efficient for this).

Then in your case you wouldn't have the recursion going on in the database side to construct the string.

p.s. Over time the DBA's can alter the indexes on tables, and the SQL Server query analyzer can adopt different cached data access plans depending on the amount of and distributions within the data. So timings can change, so if you were already close to a limit...

In SQL's order of operations, ORDER BY is done after SELECT, where in that 2nd query the string is built up, and then somehow some sorting is supposed to happen. It could be harmless or fouling things up, and it might not be what you want judging from the 1st query where the string is built in Sequence order.

...scientist Chen thought his results were fake but accurate?

And therefore, in his mind, and according to popular thinking, would still be worthy of dissemination. That is, if he felt it was an important enough truth, that needed to be gotten out.

IOW, in a world where the mindset of "the ends justify the means" has taken over, can he be blamed? If the world tells him that that's nothing to be ashamed about in other cases, why would he and other scientists see it as unethical in science?

I hold him less culpable, and society more culpable. And even more than society, I hold people of integrity, however few there might be left, culpable for this aspect of modern society.

As a libertarian-minded Conservative, people have a right to do what they want, but they don't have the right to not be called out as the unwise that they are. We let those who are morally, spiritually, and intellectually compromised, who flock to (or rather who are driven to, re: RG's mentioning of who is ultimately behind the degradation of the human conscience) positions of influence over society, have their says without it being answered.

I blame the silence of the good. Imagine if every stupid and/or dangerous idea, that started to get traction, was swiftly followed up by people pointing out exactly how ridiculous and wrong it was, and thoroughly debunked it. Doesn't mean there still wouldn't be casualties, as far as lost souls and lost moral compasses and lost reason. I just don't think there'd be so many, if we didn't let B.S. prevail.

Well, as Lefties say, "we're all in this together" now, and we gotta cut costs for the collective, because it's the system that's important, and not individuals' lives. So, breathing is optional. (I.e. you may have to take one for the team here.)

It occurs to me, Lefties decry capitalism in part because of the unfairness of the "survival of the fittest" aspect of it. Yet that aspect is only absent in socialism in pie-in-the-sky theory. The Left is just offering a trade for a different kind of "some do well and some get screwed".

In capitalism, your wealth determines the quality of your care. In Leftism, Leftists determine the quality of your care. I'll take the impartiality of it being a factor of my earning potential.

IIRC they were paying their full-timers a minimum of double the minimum wage, and even part-timers were getting 30% more than the state's arbitrary minimum. Probably not even due to market forces, per se; that surely enables it, but I assume it's the Christian outlook of its closely-held close-holders*.

An organization that values its workers and voluntarily pays them good wages; something the Left ought to approve of. Except for the fact they're a corporation (evil!), in the private sector (more evil!), non-union (super evil!), and pay for the 16 out of 20 birth control methods that aren't abortifacients (like conservation, taxes, and regulation, it's never enough**).

*Sorry for the dribblage, but Lefties are making a federal case out of the phrase "closely-held" lately.

**Progressives are like Wall Street analysts/company growth obsessed. It's never enough to progress to a good place, and then maintain that. There always has to be more, more, more.

But what if I don't sell to foreign nations, to other states, or to Native American tribes? Then according to that, the feds at least, have no grounds to get involved in my commerce.

I suppose then your idea of communities is that they be what I'll call right now "trade immunity" zones, where as long as it's intra-community, it's sans regulations (besides things like fraud laws)? And only trade outside the community would be where, in a sense, "foreign policy" considerations would come into play/get factored into trade regulations?

Too much acknowledgement lately of Leftie assertions that they don't even believe so are not worth (semi-validating by) acknowledging...

...beyond groups and individuals seeking unfair advantage through government, are necessarily Leftists' goals for America. Crony capitalism because capitalism unmolested is horrifically "unfair". And oligarchy because the unwashed masses can't be trusted to make the right decisions, so they need them to be made for them by a more enlightened elite guard.

Movement of wealth up out of the middle classes, moving us into the lower classes, in conjunction with our illegal^Wundocumented immigrant policy, is exactly what the Left needs to upend this evil economic system and convert America into supporters of a much more "fair", socialist future.

For "unnecessary" treatments or procedures?

Today we hear, from all media outlets, that annual pelvic exams are no longer necessary for most women. Shazam! Gee, that little gamble should save the government a bunch of money (in the short term).

Kind of like the story of some years ago about how women no longer need annual mammograms beginning at age 40. Some "U.S. Preventive Services Task Force", an "independent panel of experts" you see, declared they can wait until age 50, and then only get it every other year. Because:

Ya, that's much worse than being sure you don't have something that can frickin' kill you.

But it's worse for the collective, and that's what's important now. Expect more occurences of widely-disseminated news reports of treatments and procedures that we're all used to, being declared unnecessary as we progress further with DemocratCare*.

*(No Republican voted for it.)

MH42 said something similar recently, that with his social positions he couldn't get elected to a water board. So anyone who's socially Conservative shouldn't bother running for office/we should only have the morally misfiring to choose from?

(And you disdain wielding power over people, but you'd do it to enforce your social views? That's not much disdain then.)

How odd. I suspect a lot of my pessimism comes from my faith, from knowing why things are the way they are, and that they could only be that way, and that they're supposed to be that way.

And you would have a problem casting Right-wing votes if you ran on that and won a majority in your area of representation? That's not tyranny, that's representative democracy. Very odd.

You have the optimism necessary in a politician. I wish people who had their good sense intact would run for public office. Except for the clergy, what could be a more important job in times like these where America is in shambles and Americanism is crumpling fast.