On your particular example, there are lots of debates to be had about forms of taxation and which kinds are ‘fairer’ - but more importantly, and more overwhelmingly: eighteen percent of the population of America was literally owned by other people in 1790. They couldn’t ‘spend freely from the fruits of one's labor’ to any extent at all.

There are just so many ways in which this seems crazy to me. I feel like you think you’re luring me into some sort of rhetorical trap - but to pick the two elephants in the room, a large proportion of the population was literally owned by other people, and only white male landowners could vote.

Some dark, dark things happened in the USA, and almost every progression had a corresponding backslide - but the tick-tock has always ticked further towards a freer, more equal, and more equitable society.

Progress doesn’t always (ever?) require complete collapse.

I’m willing to hope this era is another ‘tock’. But that does require people to not just give up (or even work to accelerate the backslide?!) as you seem to be suggesting is the best course of action.

That’s a controversial statement.

To be clear, I enjoy all three!

Well over half of Google’s traffic is IPv6 in the USA, and it’s recently become over 50% of all Google’s traffic worldwide at weekends.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-... https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/swift-playground/id908519492

This isn’t a great example because, on the ‘other side', car chargers also have different size cables between the ‘charger’ (EVSE) and the car, with the same plug used on them all (especially with NACS, which doesn’t even differentiate between AC and DC plugs). They rely on negotiation to tell the car how much power it can draw. No-one complains about this.

I presume that if the answer is ‘yes’ we will do so, and I’d like to see some!

All of these are unfashionable nowadays, but they’re fundamental to Obj-C (some to the structure of the language itself, some just as idioms) and to the design of AppKit and UIKit.

Now, the fashion is:

Strong typing. Static binding at compile time with no runtime modifications to the type hierarchy. If OO is used, there should be minimal inheritance. Nullability is strictly defined in the type system, and acting on null objects causes, at its most forgiving, an exception, and at its least forgiving, program termination. Notification-based systems may be the outlier here (still in heavy use), but even they are often frowned upon for being too 'loose' and unanalyzable, at odds with the ideals of static typing and static binding.

From what they could see, there was very little doubt that these games were real. Of course, the grading process would 100% confirm that, but at face value, this looked like the real deal.

https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(novel)

https://www.alibris.com/Q-Luther-Blissett-pse/book/5481947

Bonus fact: some believe that the ‘Q’ of ‘Q’ is the inspiration for the naming of the pseudonymous ‘Q’ of Q-Anon fame :-| Don’t let that put you off the book though; its politics are not the same!

I hope the ‘free internet all the time’ era that airlines have been threatening us with for a decade now never arrives.