> your second paragraph is at odds with your third

Well, well. That didn’t take long.

The teenager was a carefully chosen comparison. The state’s authority over the citizen is similar to a parent’s authority over their child. This is quite humiliating and emasculating. And I agree with libertarians on one point: if the state is against you, you don’t stand a chance. A healthy approach to this has two components. (1) You make sure that the authority is benevolent or at least allows enough leeway for a good life. (2) You create enclaves of freedom. The teenager hides his weed and smokes it secretly, or smokes his cigarettes on the way to school. The citizen leaves some income untaxed and runs a red light now and then. What does the teenager who categorically rejects parental authority do? Run away and become homeless? The difference between them and an adult is that the latter should have enough sense to realize that the romantic notion of a life free from the burden of authority ultimately leads to sadness, coldness, loneliness, and misery—or, if it succeeds at all, merely re-establishes structures in which forms of authority are entrenched. Libertarians feel most oppressed by the state every time they have to wait at a red light or obey a speed limit. They fail to see that, in doing so, they are submitting to a principle of order that is necessary for road traffic to function at all.

> Is that a semantic difference, or do you think there's something substantive to it?

That is a very important point! Philosophers distinguish between the particular and the universal. Libertarians recognize only the particular and reject any notion of the universal, because it negates all particularities. For them, a group is always just an accumulation of individuals. A genuine community—which consists precisely in the participating individuals restricting themselves to some extent for the sake of the community—is inconceivable to them as something positive. Hence the infamous Thatcher quote: “... and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families ...” That is an ideological divide that cannot be bridged through discussion. I’ve gone over this enough times already.

I see it exactly the other way around. I want this to be clarified upfront, not after I’ve already cut my tongue. What I don’t understand is why market participants are being given special treatment here. There are laws, and they must be followed. That applies just as much in other areas.

> personal problems don't give one a moral claim on other people's labor

Which problem is personal and which isn't? You seem to be twisting this to suit your questionable argument.

> You have no idea what I do or don't hold in my mind

But I read what you write and interpret it. Just as you read what I write and interpret it. Here’s another ad hominem for you: in your worldview, there is no morality at all. At least, none that is consistent. People like you behave toward the state like moody teenagers toward their parents. You don’t want to be told what to do, but you wouldn’t survive a single month without the institution you so despise.

It is funny, and I really like the reference.

> ... , which I'm always surprised that the functional programming community seems mostly unaware of.

Oh, I should have clicked on the Hypothesis link in the first paragraph. Thanks for pointing that out!

Edit: And it makes me smile that there was a long thread about it.

Otherwise: Congratulations on the QuickCheck-style testing in Rust. At work, I’m always surprised that property-based testing is so little known and so rarely used outside of functional programming.

You can’t hide your limitations anyway. I know people who have a hard time thinking logically and critically. They often do and say things that strike me as rather thoughtless or impulsive. They often think and speak in clichés, relying more on emotion than facts, mostly opportunistically, and never in a complex way. I don’t think such people are capable of reflecting on their own limitations. And I suspect that my own limitations are just as transparent to a superior intellect. Assuming that the inductive step I'm using here is even valid.

That’s why I don’t get this perspective. It sounds as if using more foreign words or wearing a button-down shirt or something like that would somehow hide stupidity. But that’s not the case. To pick up on your quote again: For me, it’s more of a red flag when I notice that someone is making a special effort to come across as smarter than they actually are. To a certain extent, we’re all stupid. We should use the resources we have to get along together in life and in the world, instead of engaging in a dick-measuring contest.

In a work context, of course, things are a bit different: I want to move the project forward and not jeopardize my future paychecks. Authenticity tends to take a back seat there. However, I’d be more concerned about inefficiency. Is it really necessary to run every piece of communication through ChatGPT to refine the wording? Are you sure nothing gets lost in the process? Doesn’t that end up wasting a lot of work time without adding any real value?

And on top of that, it leads to alienation and frustration. If you talk to me as if you were an LLM, don’t be surprised if I talk to you as if you were an LLM.

I'll leave it at that because I don't want to write a novel. But when I look at your description, I don't see any plausibility at all. I only see projections. Like in The Flintstones or in old movies about Stone Age people, who have strangely short haircuts and go hunting the way people go to work today. What I mean is: the social dynamics you're assuming here may be primarily shaped by your experiences in the present and are far from as universal as you believe.

The language is so coded that the many places where the core statement must be negated stand out like a sore thumb.

> do you have a specific threshold where you'll do anything?

This conflict is not fought only once a certain threshold has been reached, but from the outset and continuously, in political struggles, in the struggle for social values and prevailing ethics, etc. Only when there is really no other option is it fought with fists and weapons. If you ask me specifically when the masses will storm the palaces of people like Musk with pitchforks, I can't answer that. For myself, I can say that I still see a lot of scope for political action within the legal frameworks that have been established (at least here in Europe). After World War II, there was a comprehensive redistribution policy throughout the Western world (especially in the US) that we could certainly repeat: top tax rates above 90%, enormous power for trade unions, a rapidly growing middle class, and historically low income concentration. The constraints are different today than they were then, but the only thing that is really necessary is the willingness to put things that are currently upside down back on their feet.

What do you mean? I have the day off today. I'm sitting here in my underwear listening to my washing machine in the background. The sun is shining outside. I went for a walk in the park next door earlier. In an hour (Germany time), I'll cook something for lunch and then go to the garage to put a new rear tire on my motorcycle. Tomorrow, sauna; Sunday, bike ride; and on Monday, back to the office. What I'm trying to say is: I'm not the protagonist whose decision determines whether Musk f*ks up the world or not. And that's not a question of my priorities, but of a realistic assessment of the real scope for action.

If you want to have a real chance of putting someone like Musk in his place, you need to join the largest possible political collective with the right agenda. But looking at the course of the conversation, my respectful recommendation (assuming you're not trolling) would be to focus on your own well-being first.