I should have better health care than a 25 year old unemployed schmo who sits on his parents' couch and plays video games all day.

You both should have health care. Because if that 25-year-old gets tuberculosis -- or gets infected by something truly nasty in a bioterror attack -- it is your interest, my interest, and his interest that he can see a doctor immediately.

We also need him to be healthy to serve in the military in case Canada invades.

National healthcare is at least as much part of the national defense as the interstate highway system is.

Now, if you believe that you "should" have better health care -- to demonstrate your wealth or whatever -- I'm sure you'll be able to find a doctor who uses solid gold tongue depressors or whatever.

Education is a different matter -- not everyone belongs in college, any more than everyone belongs in a trade school. Education should be available to those who can use it, but lowering college admission standards is not helpful.

If Wx isn't that large, I might take a stab at porting it... who knows. :)

You will have to tell me how:

^10000.grep( *.is-prime).say; # Retrieve prime numbers from 0-10,000

Is incomprehsible bullshit and:

given $value {
    when Str { ... Do string handling ... }
    when Int { ... Do integer handling ... }
    when Bool { ...Do boolean handing ... }
    default { ... Fallback handling... }
}

Is mind wanking....

If you've really tried the language, why not give it a comprehensive review?

Math is used all over in computer science

No. Programming needs basic math, like understanding binary.

He didn't say programming. He said computer science.

Programming is to computer science, as sawing and nailing boards is to designing a building.

A computer science class is a math class, sure. A programming class without a substantial CS component is a skilled trade class.

If Facebook -- a communications service -- has any "responsibility to protect our democracy", it includes not censoring the communications of political candidates.

That, BTW, is orthogonal to the idea of breaking FB up, which I would favor. But no one ever expected ABC/NBC/CBS/FOX to act as an arbiter of the truth of TV ads (political or otherwise); no one should expect FB to do it either.

Warren thinking that Facebook should be an arbiter of truth, demonstrates what a problematic technocrat she is.

He actually serves a useful function as the evangelist for the open source software movement...

HEADDESK

A perfect display of why RMS is still important and his work remains undone. if you identify him as an "open source" rather than "free software" evangelist.

In so far as it's "going by" on a race to the bottom, let it pass.

The economy is supposed to be a system for meeting human needs and wants by exchanging labor with people roughly equal in power, not a race to be won by a ruling class.

That authoritarian fuckwit Plato is why we have a republic instead of a democracy: the founders bought his anti-democratic BS and gave us a republic modeled on Rome (and thus doomed to the same sort of collapse) rather than a democracy like Athens (which was conquered from outside but did not collapse on its own).

Essential reading: Fuller's Beasts And Gods.

When someone in Vietnam will do work for 1/3 the price of an American, wages will stagnate. There is nothing to be done.

Sure there is: stop having a "global economy".

Trump isn't competent to do it, not by a long shot, but he is right that we need to restore our manufacturing base and stop outsourcing it to authoritarian rival nations like China.

Heâ(TM)s always seemed to live just on the outskirts of crazy-town...

Visionaries often do.

And that would be different from what we have now how exactly?

You ask that, then you point at Saudi Arabia, so you've answered your own question.

Is sexism a problem here? Sure. Does it rise to the level of patriarchy? Of course not. Is such catastrophizing corrosive to discourse? Yes.

You might try actually reading the stories RMS was linking to before you choke yourself clutching your pearls.

In 1976 the National Council for Civil Liberties, the respectable (and responsible) pressure group now known as Liberty, made a submission to parliament's criminal law revision committee. It caused barely a ripple. "Childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in with an adult," it read, "result in no identifiable damage ⦠The real need is a change in the attitude which assumes that all cases of paedophilia result in lasting damage."...There is, astonishingly, not even a full academic consensus on whether consensual paedophilic relations necessarily cause harm.

Many people are not interested in hearing your very specific, technically-correct bullshit.

Many people are not interested in hearing your "I'm not interested in whether statements are correct or not" bullshit.

Even if you're technically right, you can still come off as being an asshole

RMS was not speaking for public consumption. He posted to an internal MIT mailing list -- to an audience which, one would hope, would be concerned with correctness. Looks like at least one member of that list was not, however, and misreported his comments.

RMS was not the asshole here.

It's about control and forcing civilization back to the 1700's.

Encouraging decentralized photovoltaic power is about "control and forcing civilization back to the 1700's"? Interesting take, that. Didn't know solar panels were a colonial era technology...