I've actually created some experimental DSL embeddings around this idea before as I find it a fascinating area. Skimming through the Vx docs it seems like it is moving some of the abstract machine into the type system for greater flexibility.

I understand that one side of this debate really looks towards the prefatory clause as somehow being operative, but that doesn't even mesh with contemporary usage of the pattern. Two very analogous examples:

> The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a State; it ought not, therefore, to be restrained in this commonwealth.

-- Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, pt. I, art. XVI.

> The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a State; it ought, therefore, to be inviolably preserved.

-- New Hampshire Constitution of 1784, pt. I, art. XXII

This was in fact a very common construction in early American legal history. While membership in civil society may impose civic duties and responsibilities the foundational philosophy underpinning these amendments, including the 2nd, is that civil society could not abolish natural rights. The right to self-defense is deeply rooted in English common law stretching back nearly a thousand years. We therefore arrive at my two original quotes from Representatives Bingham and Howard addressing what they considered a weakness in the original construction of the Bill of Rights for which the people had no redress; Howard even mentions the operative clause specifically. They are not the only ones to mention this either given the backdrop of Southern Black Codes.

> He should have the right to bear arms for the defense of himself and family and his homestead. And if the cabin door of the freedman is broken open and the intruder enters for purposes as vile as were known to slavery, then should a well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the polluted wretch to another world, where his wretchedness will forever remain complete.

-- Samuel Pomeroy, Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 1182

> As citizens of the United States [blacks] have equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense.

-- James Nye, Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 1073

The Second Freedmen’s Bureau Act even plainly states that "the right… to have full and equal benefits of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty, personal security, and the acquisition, enjoyment, and disposition of estate, real and personal, including the constitutional right to bear arms, shall be secured to and enjoyed by all the citizens of such State or district without respect to race or color, or previous condition of slavery."

To say that incorporation doctrine of any variety would not incorporate the 2nd would be to ignore both founding era law, philosophy, and the context surrounding the passage of the 14th which would render it a useless doctrine.

> Allow me, Mr. Speaker, in passing, to say that this amendment takes from any State any right that ever pertained to it. No State ever had the right, under the forms of law or otherwise, to deny to any freeman the equal protection of the laws or to abridge the privileges or immunities of any citizen of the Republic, although many of them have assumed and exercised the power, and that without remedy.

-- John Bingham, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 2542

> Such is the character of the privileges and immunities spoken of in the second section of the fourth article of the Constitution. To these privileges and immunities, whatever they may be -- for they are not and cannot be fully defined in their entire extent and precise nature -- to these should be added the personal rights guarantied and secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution; such as the freedom of speech and of the press; the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances, a right appertaining to each and all the people; the right to keep and to bear arms; the right to be exempted from the quartering of soldiers in a house without the consent of the owner; the right to be exempt from unreasonable searches and seizures, and from any search or seizure except by virtue of a warrant issued upon a formal oath or affidavit; the right of an accused person to be informed of the nature of the accusation against him, and his right to be tried by an impartial jury of the vicinage; and also the right to be secure against excessive bail and against cruel and unusual punishments.

-- Jacob Howard, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 2765

It's correct to say that the second amendment was a limit on the federal government only as decided in Barron v. Baltimore (1833). Total incorporation was the intent of the 14th even though the courts ultimately re-affirmed Barron in US v. Cruikshank (1876) which was a 14th amendment case over the 1st and 2nd amendment. De Jonge v. Oregon (1937) overturned part of Cruikshank by incorporating the right to peaceable assembly from the 1st, later that year Palko vs. Connecticut created selective incorporation doctrine and incorporated double jeopardy from the 5th, and of course McDonald v. Chicago (2010) overturned the other part of Cruikshank by incorporating the 2nd. All this to say, incorporation doctrine is pretty convoluted. If you think that the 2nd amendment should not be incorporated but the rest should then that would make things even more absurd. There's just no way via either total or selective incorporation that you can exclude the 2nd without it becoming nine judges determine what rights the government grants you, thus defeating the entire purpose of the bill of rights.

So you are correct that cooperation can become the dominant strategy under certain conditions; those conditions require a small population though.

The preamble isn't a source of any substantive power.

The fourteenth amendment, specifically the due process clause at issue here, says that if the government exercises its power to deprive you of life, liberty, or property it must provide due process. In this case the government was not exercising such a power. It does not say that the government must provide clean water, in which case our understanding of what “clean” means would mirror the technological indifference of the aforementioned rights. Due process clause is just a really bad vehicle for this type of grievance.

I kind of wish the article touched on "everything" a bit more. Biological evolution is not the only process characterized by variation, selection, and retention repeated over time. Language is another system that displays these properties, something known before Darwin wrote "On the Origin of Species". Darwin himself noted this in terms of morality in "The Descent of Man" whereby certain morals could help some tribes to outcompete other tribes allowing those morals to become more prevalent. Friedrich Carl von Savigny noted this in relation to the law. Carl Menger noted this in relation to money, markets, division of labor, the law, and the like. I think one of the most profoundly insightful books I've ever read was F.A. Hayek's "The Fatal Conceit" where he ties a lot of these threads together.

So while the "birth" and "death" of universes may be a bit too analogous to biological evolution specifically, I think it is entirely plausible that the order we call the universe could arise from some process of variation, selection, and retention repeated over time.

This is not the only reason to use a microcontroller or 75% of microcontroller vendor (e.g. STM) offerings would have no customers. Not everyone has custom IP that does all the work either, that’s actually fairly rare. It’s odd to pigeonhole microcontrollers like this just to go on a fairly lengthy rant about interrupt latency as if that somehow makes RISC-V unsuitable to what is an incredibly diverse application space. Maybe the rest of their post has better arguments, but I’m not impressed enough by the first one to keep reading.

Citizens United was a non-profit corporation that created Hillary: The Movie which was critical of Hillary Clinton. They wanted to distribute it shortly before the 2008 primaries. The Federal Election Campaign Act prohibited corporations from using general funds for electioneering or speech that advocates for the election or defeat of a federal candidate within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of an election.

The Court held that the First Amendment prohibited the government from stopping an incorporated association from independently spending its own money for political advocacy of a candidate. To put it another way, if I can spend my money to advocate for or against a candidate, why can I not get together with some friends to pool our money and incorporate to do the same? If this had gone the other way would you be okay with a corporation being forbidden from releasing a video critical of Trump shortly before the 2024 election?

I think there are multiple things here that need to be disentangled. The first is that just because science "proves" something that doesn't mean the political, civil, or economic path is nearly as clear cut. While there certainly are people who just deny these things outright there's also the camp that accepts the scientific result but disputes how to deal with it as a society.

Second I've seen an alarming rise in what I would characterize as scientism, a belief structure around science itself where the "acolytes" of science do not understand the science themselves, but use it to reinforce their own worldview in the same way that deniers (heretics really) use other sources to reinforce their worldview. I have seen this play out within my own social circle as people will defer to experts as if they are a clerical class with divine authority to determine ultimate truth. To give an example in a much less controversial arena, how often have you witnessed people adopting fad diets because the "science" shows X is good even though the actual backing papers, that no adopter has read, are much more murky at best? This is an understandable consequence of having a limited lifespan where not everyone can know everything therefore heuristics must be used to comprehend the world, but the flexible heuristic which can lead to a change of opinion can be swapped out for a rigid belief that permits no change of opinion unfortunately.

Last I think this ultimately stems from what F.A. Hayek called constructivist rationalism[1], the idea that we can rationally construct our own social order. I share your own concern about mistakes that affect all of us specifically regarding philosophies that adopt constructivist rationalism such as the family of collectivist ideologies (socialism and the like) which are currently on the rise. My conclusion is that civilizations will evolve according to the culmination of all individual actors' actions and I personally have a limited role to play, although I am a classical liberal. Your last question unfortunately can lead some to conclude that a much more dictatorial society is necessary to produce a result that may itself not be possible and instead lead to an even worse result than the alternative.

[1] I highly recommend The Fatal Conceit by Hayek if you want to challenge assumptions your own worldview likely rests on without even knowing it.

[1] Maybe AI meta-moderation?

[2] I don’t mean that this is happening intentionally by bad actors, merely that on average large groups produce outcomes that are dictated by incentives.

The second aspect to this is that specifically when it comes to economics the timescales needed to understand the impact of a policy are generally longer than the collective memory of the people. Politicians inevitably sell and enact good intentions, but by the time the reality of the consequences from those intentions becomes manifest it will be years or decades later and the causal relationship is masked and the politician will generally be long gone. At that point it just looks like a new problem that similarly needs a “solution”.

The concept of the free press does not guarantee that the truth will proliferate, it merely attempts to avoid the problem of the state defining what truth is. It’s an attempt to select the least worst option because no one knows of a perfect solution or even if one exists.

> Intragovernmental debt holdings represent federal debt owed by Treasury to federal government accounts—primarily federal trust funds such as those established for Social Security and Medicare—that typically have an obligation to invest their excess annual receipts (including interest earnings) over disbursements in federal securities.

> Debt held by the public represents a claim on today’s taxpayers and absorbs resources from today’s economy, meaning that when an investor buys Treasury securities it is not investing that money elsewhere in the economy.

> Intragovernmental debt holdings reflect a claim on taxpayers and the economy in the future. Specifically, when federal government accounts redeem Treasury securities to obtain cash to fund expenditures, Treasury usually borrows from the public to finance these redemptions.

Or to put it simply the excess contributions are lent to the Treasury who uses it for general government expenditures. When it’s time to pay it back the Treasury can either pay it with tax revenue assuming it has excess or has cut spending elsewhere or it will be forced to borrow it. The latter is generally what happens.

I wouldn’t be so quick to call people ill-informed on this subject if I were you.

[1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-25-107138.pdf

Plus I have no idea what the word "statistical" even means in this context...