What steps are you referencing? I don't get your comment.

Also, the DNC and RNC just choose people and fundraise. It's strange to me how people refer to the parties like this.

That had been their strategy, to just let Trump do things and become unpopular without drawing attention to themselves, but while Trump and Republicans have become less popular, Democrats' approval ratings have been sliding down as well (although they have a lead in the generic ballot) and polling indicates most Democratic voters think they're not doing enough to stop Trump. So, making a big show of "playing dirty" (threatening to gerrymander back in retaliation), and publicly saying that they'll no longer tie their hands behind their back, probably brings satisfaction to those people they're polling badly with. It's the kind of sentiment I've heard for years from online Democratic voters, and from people I know, but never was validated by the actual Democrats until now.

> Under current policy, the United States has about 20 years for corrective action after which no amount of future tax increases or spending cuts could avoid the government defaulting on its debt whether explicitly or implicitly (i.e., debt monetization producing significant inflation). Unlike technical defaults where payments are merely delayed, this default would be much larger and would reverberate across the U.S. and world economies.

My prediction is that the deficit will continue to increase, and so the default will come by then or sooner.

[0]: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2023/10/6/when-...

That's different from just saying the numbers are obviously being faked under Biden or whatever with no real evidence because you just feel like the economy is bad and assume corruption. Now there actually does seem to be corruption!

It makes me angry as hell. They hate us and you can't say anything about it because if you're not nice enough to them, they act like you're being mean to them and the personal reason they'll continue to vote for people that demonize and hate you.

It's clearly just dismissive language that doesn't have to make sense. The only purpose is to make climate change seem like a fake concept thought of by groups with nefarious intentions. It's like asking the author of a short story what the main character's favorite color is. That detail simply wasn't considered because it's not needed in the short story.

The most expressive part of C is the syntax oriented around writing terse, side-effectful expressions that manipulate buffers, pointers and counters, with the array of precedences and the pre- and post-increments and assignment operators and short-circuiting operators. You can write stuff like this:

  while (--n > 0 && (c = getchar()) != EOF && (*s++ = c) != '\n')
      ;
  *s = '\0';

  // Parsing flags for command line arguments
  while (--argc > 0 && (*++argv)[O] == '-')
      while (c = *++argv[O])
          switch (c) {
          // ...
          }

  // Last line of a buffered `getchar()` implementation 
  return (--n >= 0) ? (unsigned char) *bufp++ : EOF;

  assert(i <= j);
  for (;;) {
      do_something_with(i);
      if (i == j)
          break;
      i++;
  }

You're reminding me of the book "Modern Compiler Design." The author goes over how to compile a general Pascal-style for-loop correctly, accounting for increasing or decreasing ranges, differing step sizes, and accounting for overflow. It was written using just goto statements, so I adapted a version of it to C. Just replace "intN_t" with an actual integer size. It works by calculating the number of times the loop will run. If "from" is equal to "to," it's still going to run at least once. Again, this is not mine, just adapted from the author's code (Dick Grune's).

  // enumerate: print out numbers from "from" to "to", inclusive, with step size "by"
  void enumerate(intN_t from, intN_t to, intN_t by) {
      uintN_t loop_count;
      intN_t i;
      if (by > 0) {
          if (from > to) return;
          loop_count = (to - from) / by + 1;
      } else if (by < 0) {
          if (from < to) return;
          loop_count = (from - to) / -by + 1;
      } else /* (by == 0) */ {
          // Maybe some kind of error
          return;
      }
      for (i = from; ; i += by) {
          printf("%d\n", i);
          if (--loop_count == 0) break;
      }
  }

Having an advanced type system does seem to encourage this sort of informal proof oriented thinking more than imperative and somewhat typeless languages do, though, since preconditions and postconditions and loop invariants and inductive proofs on loops are things you have to do yourself entirely in your head.

Mere gender non-conformity isn't enough for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, despite what you're claiming. These are the DSM criteria for diagnosis of gender dysphoria in children:

---

A. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least 6 months’ duration, as manifested by at least six of the following (one of which must be Criterion A1):

1. A strong desire to be of the other gender or an insistence that one is the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender).

2. In boys (assigned gender), a strong preference for cross-dressing or simulating female attire; or in girls (assigned gender), a strong preference for wearing only typical masculine clothing and a strong resistance to the wearing of typical feminine clothing.

3. A strong preference for cross-gender roles in make-believe play or fantasy play.

4. A strong preference for the toys, games, or activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other gender.

5. A strong preference for playmates of the other gender.

6. In boys (assigned gender), a strong rejection of typically masculine toys, games, and activities and a strong avoidance of rough-and-tumble play; or in girls (assigned gender), a strong rejection of typically feminine toys, games, and activities.

7. A strong dislike of one’s sexual anatomy.

8. A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics that match one’s experienced gender.

B. The condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, school, or other important areas of functioning.

---

> If you had any faith that your message was the correct one you wouldn't be on the internet arguing for access to other people's children.

Classy as ever implying that trans people are grooming children to be trans.

It seems like the opposite happens to me: parents with attitudes like yours will attempt to keep the existence of trans people secret in an attempt to groom their child to be cis, but if their child is gender dysphoric, it's not going to work and they're just going to suffer worse dysphoria-induced distress during puberty and transition as adults.

"If" can be implemented as a function in Haskell, but it's not a function. You can't pass it as a higher-order function and it uses the "then" and "else" keywords, too. But you could implement it as a function if you wanted:

  if' :: Bool -> a -> a
  if' True x _ = x
  if' False _ y = y

  max x y = if x > y then x else y

  max x y = if' (x > y) x y

I was just pointing out that English, due to its strict word order, is more reliant on the passive voice to change word order than less inflexibly-ordered languages.

To borrow from a sentence I used in an earlier comment, here's a fragment of Spanish.

"...sólo porque te impresionó un espectáculo de magia barato."

The equivalent English would be "...just because you were impressed by a cheap magic show."

The English sentence has to use the passive voice to put the verb "impress" at the beginning of that phrase, whereas you still use the active voice in Spanish, just with the word order putting the verb first.

Yeah, that's what the creator said, and that's actually how I pronounce it, too. Just pointing out that "gi-" words can have both hard and soft Gs.

> TIL: gimp is gimp and not gimp? I always pronounced this like gin.

You learn something new every day!

In languages with more flexible word order, you could just switch the two without passive voice. You could just say the equivalent of "The ball kicked John," with it being clear somehow that the ball is the grammatical object and John the subject, without needing to use the passive voice at all.