I'm even seeing tiny firmware moving to Rust.

An awful lot of firmware moved over to C++ yonks ago, too before Rust was on the cards. There have been a few hold outs where reasonable C++ compilers didn't exist, usually on platforms so small you really can write it in C or even ASM without that much penalty.

Last time I wrote C in anger was on some 8051 base bluetooth controller years ago. The compiler was IAR Embedded C/C++ 9 I think (2010 ish?). Eventually after trying to write C++ I kept bumping into so many missing things I gave up trying to figure out what passed for C++ in their minds an wrote C instead.

Still, no allocation, some basic logic and a few FIR filters. It was fine.

All of them? How do you know?

It is very typical of an American to pick the worst instance of anything they can find in order to prove they're better than the very worst thing you can find! Good for you!

Meanwhile you have roads that are more dangerous than anything in Western Europe. I look forward to your excuses as to why this is the case.

Do you claim to write no bugs?

Unfortunately not.

All programmes write bugs, not all programmes believe they do.

The OP was giving you facts.

In other domains when performs keep happening, the solution is process improvements, to mitigate the fallibility of humans.

Programming isn't special here and neither are programmes. We don't yell at pilots that they suck, we now have extensive process improvements and planes are pretty safe. In much of Europe, if a road is dangerous, we generally try and fix the road to be less safe, not the road users which is why much of Europe has much safer roads than America which does not fix the process.

Etc and so on and so forth.

It is not, it's what is lived with in a codebase, C has nothing to do with it. Also, there is nothing about an approach mandated by one language that cannot be implemented in C, Rust creators have not made anything that kernel developers cannot otherwise do.

Broadly speaking, no this isn't correct.

From a very narrow perspective there's some truth: C is Turing complete so you can do anything in it you can do in another language. But that's also an argument in favour of writing the kernel brainfuck, Malboge or if you prefer a language designed with a purpose outside of esoterica, sed.

From a slightly wider perspective C is a "proper" language, not an esolang, (or a DSL with an accidental Turing tarpit), so it's not quite so horrible.

But otherwise, no, not really.

All code has bugs. C lacks basically any kind of automation to relieve the programmer of the burden of doing stuff by hand.

I like watching Eoin Reardon hew an oak log into a beam with an adze and hatchet to keep the old ways alive, and do period restorations of old properties. But for building at scale and for performance, a bandsaw, or heck stressed concrete does a heck of a more efficient and consistent job. Would you build a house with all traditional hand tool woodworking today? Clearly yes for some people, but would you personally want to live in a house of that size and expense?

Beautifully crafted C code is quite fun. But it's error prone, and needs a ton of effort and skill and also effort to make it good. OpenBSD manage, with strict rules and repeated code re-reviews. The result is secure C code, but it does a lot less than Linux (kernel wise). SEL4 managed even more, with correct C code (a step beyond what Rust can do entering into Ada/SPARK levels) but they had to do new maths to get that to work and it does less than OpenBSD.

But beautifully crafted C code doesn't scale and that's why the kernel has bugs. The choice is to either do less or to automate away as many bug checks and repetitive code as can be automated away. C++ does a lot, Rust does more, Ada/SPARK does even more. I personally think they'd have been wise picking C++ 20 years, but today, especially since the kernel is heavy on the irregular threading, Rust is probably a better choice here. Not enough people know Ada/SPARK and it ain't fashionable enough :)

What C can't do is much by the way of automated code generation or automated checking for potential bugs. The kernel developers have finally decided that those are good ideas. Torvalds has mellowed in the last 30 years and AI tools have made bugs more visible. C isn't up to the task they are trying to achieve any more (one may argue it hasn't been for a while).

This choice is not unique to Linux. Few of the large scale open source projects are C anymore. Linux is going rusty. GCC moved to C++, LLVM/Clang started as C++, KDE is in C++, Firefox is in Rust and C++, Chrome in C++, Blender in C++, KiCAD is, FreeCAD (especially the OpenCASCADE kernel), kdenlive is in C++, LibeOffice and so on. I can't remember the last time I encountered a commercial project in C other than tiny firmware.

You can still make smaller stuff effectively in C, but making big projects in it exacerbates all the problems it provides no assistance in solving.

Your's aren't either.

You're the one trying to "debunk" my arguments with opinions-as-facts.

But mine are at least rooted in observations and logic.

They're not though. You keep making claims about what will "obviously" happen except in related cases it hasn't. It's not an opinion that the welfare state will not be quickly forced down to starvation levels: this we can observe.

I'm actually baffled that you felt UBI and labor pool linkage was only an opinion, for example.

Hmm baffled about something that isn't actually true! Interesting! All you did was state one opinion, which I disagreed with, but that's the only thing I wrote about in that case, because I've got finite time to type long replies.

There are forces that pull the labour pool in different directions, but you're ignoring half of them. That's why it's not obvious to me that UBI simply means less work done, vs the existing benefits system.

Florida

Yeah florida isn't the world, it's also a basket case and subject to some unusual pressures.

Please discuss this in good faith. [etc]

Piss off. Me not accepting your opinions as gospel truth isn't bad faith. You whining and insulting when I tell you that means you're not someone worth discussing any further with. I'm going to stop reading here.

I am stating the obvious: that the government is NOT going to set UBI to an amount people can live on permanently.

Your opinions aren't facts. The government already makes benefits and pensions broadly livable (well just about, opinions vary as to what livable is). UBI won't be a great income, but what evidence do you have that UBI will be WORSE than they money they're already handing out.

I'm literally stating the obvious.

No you're sating opinions that you think are obvious facts but aren't actually facts.

You think that if you reduce people's ability to live on UBI alone, they're just going to say "Welp, time to go bankrupt and die"? Please do tell, how does reducing UBI not cause more people to seek work?

Same way it works with benefits, really. We as a society don't generally like people starving in the streets so we don't have a complete starvation level welfare state.

People who work will consider it a subsidy on those that don't,

People bleat endlessly about welfare queens too. I do understand that people are thick and inefficient and that may be enough to sink UBI. I work. I support having a welfare state. UBI also looks interesting to me.

and many would argue they'd be better off if their taxes were reduced and those lazy scrounging (etc) people who rely on UBI were forced to work or get higher paid jobs.

Many would, may wouldn't. That's why we have elections.

I'm glad you accept that it's not a panacea and that some means-tested/situational benefits will still be required, because most promoters of UBI seem to refuse to accept that.

That sounds like a straw man. I don't think I've ever discussed UBI with someone that extreme.

the question here is what happens when inevitably, for the reasons I explained,

You explained the reasons and having read the reasons, I disagree. They apply equally to the existing benefits and yet that broadly has not happened.

and just noping me to death

I mean you're just asserting it will with arguments that don't hold up to scrutiny, so.....

Because there are no positive forces to keep UBI high.

Why do pensions exist? What positive forces keep the triple lock in the UK?

If there's something we've learned about humanity and the government and so on, it's that people prefer "low taxes" to safety nets,

That is also not true. Maybe in your country.

UBI Is unsustainable because there are more forces to keep it too low than to be high enough to be a viable replacement for benefits, which in turn means UBI means the end of the safety nets and protections against unemployment.

Those forces apply equally to existing safety nets. You haven't explained how they don't.

This ideal state sounds good but it is prohibitively expensive for all but deep pockets.

Yeah, but it sounds like GP understands the implications of that, and you don't.

No, you've again fundamentally misunderstood what UBI is and its implications.

The government can, and will, vary the level of income from time to time. There will always be an incentive to lower it, but almost never to increase it.

What's that got to do with UBI specifically? The government already does that with tweaks to benefits and to taxes. If you simplify benefits and taxes with UBI the government will still do it from time to time, but nothing fundamental has changed.

Increasing it reduces the number of people in the labor pool

You're stating an opinion as a fact.

It also will feel victim to the current prejudice against those who do not work.

That's more likely because most of the population is irrational. Man people would rather spend money on punishment and suffering than a smaller amount on prevention with better outcomes. Such is life. But with that said welfare states are generally accepted to some degree.

That means anyone reliant upon UBI to live, such as those currently receiving social security/pensions, disabled people (who frequently need far more money than most to live on because of the costs of maintaining their disability) or other benefits (unemployment etc) will end up with an unlivable quantity even though they have no other sources of income.

The main difference between UBI and what we have now is you don't lose any benefits if you start taking on work so it's always a benefit financially to do so. Also, I left disabled people out of the discussion because some do require more benefits, and so UBI is not the only solution.

So instead of UBI being a way to eliminate these benefits in favor of some means-test-free utopia

what are you babbling on about? Utopia? Are you actually reading anything at all?

what it actually is is a scheme to remove benefits from those who need it most, forcing the disabled and the elderly to work, and ensuring there's little or no safety net for those who lose their jobs.

It's the SAME safety net as exists now with a different name and with the holes patched.

There is nothing about the existing one that prevents the government from making it so bad you're fcuked.

Heck you want to get your local council to come and do a waste pick-up from your street - DigiD login.

The Netherlands is one of the most digitised countries in the world,

With my local council (UK). You (entirely online) book a collection and pay the fee without logging in. I suppose without the login, you could pay for the council to go to random house (for a fee) to fail to collect large items which aren't there. This does not appear to have been a problem so far.

Nah it's the defeningly clicky freewheel mechanism that makes bikes fast.

Ultimately the stock market trades pieces of companies. You might be "gambling" with your finances, but if the value of your 1 share of a company drops to zero, you still have 1 share of the company. Not gambling. Prediction markets are much closer to, say, fantasy sports. Educated guessing, but still guessing. If you get it right, your wager pays. Wrong, and the wager is lost.

Saying these markets aren't gambling is weasel-language. It's not even as honest as casinos. Imagine you had to play roulette but instead of playing against the house, you played against your table mates, and some of them already know the outcome before the marbles is tossed.

When the pace of bug discovery overwhelms the capacity to patch, and the discovery tools are available to... well, everybody... doing any business online is fraught with peril. You can't even triage trust by the integrity of the company. You might trust that "Valerie's Dog Treats" is legit, but their payment dependancy might be using compromised packages.

How in hell are we going to hold this thing together?