Right - it's much more like Mussolini-style fascism, where the Corporations and Government form "partnerships", often with certain corporations given monopoly or defacto monopoly control in some markets.

Isn't that how America usualyl operates?

But Capitalism has been proven to lift millions of people out of poverty.

Capitalism made people so miserable it led to communist revolutions. The fear of more of them forced the capitalists to make some concessions to their "human resources". Then communism fell, after which the capitalists have been repealing those concessions. And so the history is repeating itself with social unrest on the rise again.

If a CEO gets the owner one million dollars per day, the owner can afford to pay that CEO $999,999 per day and still pocket $1 a day. It's not your business. The owner can decide if the CEO is worth it. The CEO can decide if the pay is worth it.

And the rest of the people can decide if it's in their best interests to support such as system or tear it down. The latter has happened before. Gartner seems to think it'll happen again and soon. You, apparently, think the current state of affairs is an unchangeable aspect of reality itself rather than a mere social compact.

Employees are free to sell their labor elsewhere. They have the right to order their affairs and sell their time as they see fit, finding the most advantageous deal they can.

And when the most advantegeous deal to the majority of people is to take to the streets and take a better one from the cold, dead hands of the CEO and the owner, what do you think will happen?

How about we point beginners to a simple imperative language with an interactive mode?

Because that works for some people and not others. I hate to leave anyone behind by suggesting one thing, and am not sure how to best find out which path of learning programming will be productive for any one student.

I would agree if most other things could be version controlled as well as code - but most things cannot be...

I could be persuaded that it's a more general skill that should be taught to everyone, not just programmers, but I don't know if people not inclined to be programmers would understand well or make effective use of version control. I suspect the answer is, they could not...

I really think it's better to live without version control while you learn programming so you can really appreciate it as one of the next intermediate steps you pick up. You have to interact with it anyway to make use of third party code so moving into it becomes natural as you become a more advanced coder.

The laws of thermodynamics are obviously wrong. Wrong in the same way that Newtonian physics is wrong. Meaning that it is close enough for anything I will ever get my hands on, but that it clearly does not explain everything that is happening, and it is clearly violated at some point.

Please give an example of such violation? Because I'm afraid I can't see this obvious flaw you posit.

Actually that's their after-their-first-lab-test photo.

So, it was a spectacular success?

Until you've programmed ASM for a micro controller, you really don't know what's going on under the hood, and you're almost certainly doomed to create bloated, slow-as-mud compared to what it *could* be, code.

Sit down with a 6809 system emulation and learn about stacks and heaps and PIC and addressing modes and registers and memory and IO and optimizing loops and etc. Then you've got a foundation. Then C and a linker AND a debugger, then something OO, then HTML, CSS, Python, PostgreSQL, follow the basic PostgreSQL with detailed DB stuff, make sure the math is there through at least algebra and geometry, explain 3D from acos() as pooltable reflection to the various lighting tech... this would be a good first year or possibly two.

You best learn to solve problems by... wait for it... solving problems.

Is it okay to torture fish?

I don't think so but millions seem to think catch & release is fine.

Lizards? Mice? Dogs?

I'd personally rather not But I also don't see any problems eating any of those things. Do you?

I don't really see that lizards and mice warrant much care about actions taken with them, just given how they fare in nature. If we aren't doing anything crueler to them than they would otherwise experience then I am OK in the abstract with someone doing something with a creature.

Can you really not see a problem with that?

With a roach? No. In fact, Hell No.

I can tell you live north somewhere.

Half of those things are NOT things I would "recommend to a kid who wants to become a programmer".

Version control, UNIX philosophy, software testing - it's too much! Someone who wants to be a programmer should start to learn programming first, and then they can explore the wild twists and ideas that surround the thing once they have a grasp of what programing means to them.

I would say even starting languages to recommend depend on the person. If a programmer likes some languages and not others later in life, why should that not be true from day one because of how they like to think? What if you are recommending a language that will turn them off programming forever?

It would almost be best to develop a kind of programming sandbox, that would let them use a variety of languages and concepts (like functional or OO or even, yes, procedural!) and see the path they take most naturally.

If anyone is worried about these slight actions turning kids into psychopaths, they would be AGHAST at what kids normally do with insects when they catch or find them...

Fire, pliers, rocks, etc. All are involved.

If no glass plate this thing would be scratched to hell and back in a couple minutes.

Flexible materials in general tend to not scratch easily; what would scratch a harder material just pushes it out of the way.

Want to live by the "don't snitch rule" in your part of society, then fuck you, the police should just let your neighborhood rot.

It's not the "don't snitch" -rule, it's the "everything you say can be used against you" -rule. So if you say anything, no matter the circumstances, you risk yourself - you never know if you'll make a convenient scapegoat for some cop or attorney. So does risking harm to the society rather than harm to yourself make you a "piece of shit"? Perhaps. But it might be more effective to analyze the reasons why things have deteriorated to this point and work to fix them rather than judge people who aren't willing to take one for the team.

And I do understand not being cooperative if police are just power tripping and/or going on fishing expeditions.

And how do you know they aren't on a fishing expedition when they talk to you? Just looking for some excuse to cast suspicion on you so the attorney can then blackmail you with a plea bargain, since they need to convict someone to please the tough on crime -crowd? Do you have psychic powers than can detect malicious intent? Can you infuse your fellow citizens with them? Because if you don't, you're taking a terrible risk talking to cops, and if you can't, you're demanding others take this risk. And that's not very just.

This is one of the ironies of a police state: it actually makes police work harder, since they're everyone's enemy.

I hope they resolve it soon, because playing chicken with a US default isn't something that anyone wants to see.

Which rises a question: will the US credit rating be downgraded again? Because at this point, I think a default is just a matter of time - if it doesn't happen this time, there's always the next, and the next, and...