> Israel was actually attacked

I was responding to your claim that Iran was defending itself... Whether or not Israel responded disproportionately to October 7 (it did), I don't think it's fair to say Iran's actions are "self-defense" in the same way that Israel's war was self-defense.

How on earth did you get that from my comment? Can you think of a more charitable way to interpret what I said?

Edit to add: Also, Israel was actually attacked, and civilians were raped, kidnapped, and murdered. Did any of the protestors in Iran kill, rape, or murder any of members of the regime who subsequently slaughtered them?

Example of actions: Gaza invaded Israel and killed, raped, and kidnapped civilians on October 7. Ukraine had no such triggering event that caused Russia to invade.

Example of rhetoric: Gaza's political leaders have said they want to destroy Israel. I don't think anyone in power in Ukraine has said they want to destroy the Russian state.

Don't threaten me with a good time! Ordered.

But then we have this in your post:

> That tells me that you are writing from ignorance, as for starters that's a truly pathetic test

and

> I had an actual poke around the parser code, in contrast to your superficial experimentation.

Perhaps you really did intend for these lines to be helpful and informative? If so, I encourage you to have a moment of empathy for your interlocutor and ask yourself if talking this way is actually the best way to communicate and pass on this hard-earned knowledge.

> ad hominems, straw men, insults, and vilification

I didn't see this from the other poster. I did see it from you. As a disinterested third party, I'm just telling you, you come off way worse in this exchange. Good luck out there buddy.

Tilford: We don't dictate shipping costs. That's railroad business.

Plainview: O-oh! You don't own the railroads? Course you do. Of course you do.

The author seems to think that there should be some way for Shopify to avoid jurisdiction while still offering services in California, but I don’t really understand why he thinks so.

What items on the list do you think are just the author's preferences, but other potential contributors wouldn't like? It seems unlikely that contributors would prefer NOT to know if the maintainer doesn't want PRs, or would prefer NOT to have an example of how to contribute, e.g.

However, contrary to the article's automated method, my workflow is to manually input transactions every day (or every couple days, depending on what's going on) and balance my accounts. It's a bit of a ritual, but I like having a really good handle on day-to-day spending. Plus, I find ~10 minutes once a day way easier than (e.g.) ~3 hours once a month, even if it's the same amount of time overall.

Net Neutrality - maybe? My read on it is that it's just too wonky of any issue for most people to actually care that much about, and polling can't really tell us much about how the electorate would lean if they actually studied it - phrasing of the survey question can probably skew things strongly one way or the other. But, maybe that's just a cop-out.

ACA - doesn't this strengthen my argument? It's popular enough that even when the Republicans had a trifecta they still couldn't repeal it, despite running on "repeal and replace"... Maybe if they had actually had a replacement ready to go, they actually would have succeeded... but they couldn't reach consensus on a replacement, so it didn't happen.

Stock trading by members of Congress - the jury is still out on this one... when did this push start, during Biden's term? If (1) public opinion stays strongly in favor of it during Trump's current term but (2) we still don't see any legislation during the next presidential term... then I would call this a mark in your favor, but not until then.

Overall, I'm still not buying your argument that our government is unresponsive to the will of the people. It's certainly not a perfect reflection of the electorate, but generally when we build consensus, we get things done... it's just that consensus is really hard to come by these days.

Have a good one my friend, thank you for engaging, I think this stuff is really important. :)

Actually, I just read your update, you've changed from making a bold (and, in my view, wrong) statement about how government is not responsive to the will of the people, to a fairly boring technical point about how a representative democracy works. I have no idea if you're just doing a motte and bailey or if you were never trying to make a bold claim in the first place...

I'll just leave my piece here, in any case: I believe that the US system of government actually works really well, and in general we tend to get laws and regulations that are based on the broad consensus of a very diverse electorate. This is a good thing. In my opinion, when most people complain about how the government doesn't work for the people, what they actually don't like is that a lot of the country disagrees with them, and that disagreement is reflected in our government.

But, maybe I'm wrong and there's some other system we can come up with that will keep a vast and diverse nation hanging together prosperously for another 250 years. Shrug.