Are you still so sure about the idea of internal civil strife being "unsubstantiated fear mongering"?

And by the way, race-based civil conflict is only a small part of the structural problems I'm worried about. There are multiple deeper, more dangerous threats on the horizon.

For example, are you sure that Trump will peacefully vacate the office if he loses the election? If not, what exactly do you think will happen then?

Finally, not that this matters a whole lot to me, but to provide you with "substantiation" that you may accept, many mainstream media outlets have covered this in detail in the past year or two. Here are just a couple, Google keywords such as "US civil war 2" (just "civil war" turns up Avengers stuff) and "boogaloo" for more mainstream media coverage:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-america-talk-turn...

https://www.macleans.ca/society/america-is-deeply-divided-an...

And before you say: oh, they're different from us, remember that Sarajevo was a modern city that hosted the winter Olympics 8 years before brutal war broke out. Most of its citizens thought the idea of war happening was absolutely preposterous, until it wasn't.

I can't think of anyone who regularly writes on HN whom I'd characterize with such words, even ones I deeply disagree with.

I'd ask you to point me to such a user, but I know that it (reasonably) won't happen given the site's rules. Still, I'm very skeptical.

If someone is espousing things like Nazism or genocide, then yes the label applies, but I've never seen a regular HN user advocate for anything like that.

I think what's happening is that there's a subset of users here who live and/or have grown up in extremely liberal environments, like San Francisco, or university campuses, who view anything to the right of Joe Biden as being "extreme" and "evil". That doesn't mean such people are actually evil, or monsters. It just means they're on the right (often even center-right) of the political spectrum.

And most of the country is entirely unlike urban liberal enclaves. I don't use that term as an insult - many great innovations and ideas come from our urban liberal enclaves. But they're not representative of the country as a whole.

(and for the record, since some will assume my politics based on that remark, I'm neither a conservative nor a GOP/Trump supporter. I'm a centrist/moderate, both by self-identification and empirically - in the form of dozens of political tests).

By the way, just so you don't think this is a general anti-HN stance, it's not. I like HN a lot, and I think that aside from political/ideological issues and moderation, mods do a great job. I also don't agree with the common criticism that HN shields or shelters YCombinator companies. At least, I've not found that to be the case.

Measles, for example.

The point is sustained contact, not the route of transmission.

But restaurants and hairdressers are known to be places where COVID-19 can be actively spread to large groups of people. And gyms are even worse.

We should be encouraging people to go outdoors, and to not congregate in large groups.

Finally, bear in mind that public officials, like scientists and laypeople, are just figuring all this out, too. It's a novel infectious agent, after all. But it's important to self-correct quickly.

Ironically, it looks like masks may turn out to be one of the most effective interventions, yet there's a huge political backlash against them that many pols are stirring up, so 20-30% of the country will never wear them.

In some ways, very similar to TB, although a much shorter exposure time is sufficient for transmission.

Considered what? You've said they had a hard life.

Edit: Oh, I misread that (parsed it as "considered, going back decades ago", thinking you were implying you wish they had considered the effect of their actions). Yeah, I think for many older immigrants who were forced to emigrate from their homeland because of warfare or economic collapse, going back makes sense if conditions have improved.

They don't want to go back now? Or too old?

There's only a power imbalance if workers are prevented from organizing, or if they (for whatever reason) refuse to organize. Or if they workers are very easily replaceable.

Obviously, if you're one of 200 workers, you can't negotiate evenly with the ownership as 1/200th of the company's workforce. Same goes if you're an unskilled worker who is easy to replace. However, even then, if you organize with all 200 of your co-workers, you are closer to a balance in negotiating power since it would be hard for said company to replace all 200 workers at once.

By that logic, then technical folks, particularly devops people, are in a very strong role to make change. AWS is a very significant portion of Amazon's profits, and it will crumble to the ground if they mass strike just as much as Amazon's retail sector will crumble if the FC workers mass strike.

You think AWS can maintain 3+ 9s with 50%+ of their operations people striking? Look at what simply shifting to remote work has done to Github uptime over the past month: 99.6% after months of 3+ 9s. Their uptime would likely stop dropping quickly, particularly if strikes extended into weeks.

Eh, not sure about that. IBM went downhill fairly quickly once they stopped getting the cream of the crop. Oracle was able to stave off problems for a while, but only because of the lock-in issue. Amazon doesn't have the benefit of lock-in (with the exception of some parts of AWS).

There’s an outstanding and fairly flexible static site generator for rst files in Python that’s been around for quite a long time, called Sphinx. It’s basically a docs generator but I’ve used it as a generic static site generator.

How are their posts instantly updated using a static site generator? Don’t get me wrong, I was sold on in static site generators years ago. But not understanding this argument.

Edit: Yeah, you're right. I read to the end and that's pretty much functional programming as you suggested. I'm not convinced it's always better than using interfaces. Like most things, I think it depends. For example, particularly when programming "in-the-large", I think being able to package up different contexts (like a TestRenderer) into different protocol implementations is often an advantage of that approach, not a weakness, as he seems to imply.

So similar compositional techniques to Swift protocols would be typeclasses in Haskell, traits in Scala, module interfaces in ML languages (which have to be used at the module-level via functors instead of at the value-level like the other examples), etc.

Edit: I should have read to the end. I stopped after reading a few paragraphs of what looked like a basic interface vs inheritance discussion. Turns out, at the mid-point, he introduces an "alternative" to that approach, which is indeed more or less functional programming. As much as I like functional programming, (his "Value-Oriented-Programming"), interfaces are often quite useful when programming in the large.