Multiple parties do hold guns at each other's heads in every voting station. Party 1 ensures that Party 2 doesn't steal any votes and vice versa. A party that does not have representatives in any given station will most likely lose some votes there.

You can shit on western democracy all you want, and you are probably correct in most cases however a single party system is not and cannot be democratic. In that case, the legitimacy of the party is guaranteed by the lack of alternatives that can fill the political power vacuum.

Western voting systems work more or less because the parties are in a mexican standoff when counting the ballots. This requires at least two parties and doesn't translate very well to electronic voting or vote-by-mail where a comparatively small minority (programmers or postal workers) can heavily skew the results in their favor.

Defense contractors charge maintenance fees both domestic and abroad. For abroad, the maintenance contract is a requirement of getting the deal passed through congress and is frequently more expensive than the gear itself.

SaaS charge monthly instead of one upfront fee for a well tested product that used to be the norm

Video games similarly have been transitioning to day 1 paid DLCs and monthly fees

Even the movie industry is a subscription now (streaming providers aside). There's not one movie, there's the MCU pumping out 3 movies a year for the last 20. How many movies from last year have a number in their name?

Then there's of course, the actual rents. And insurance. And taxes. Something has to give, but I fear it will be the humans.

That's the job of a OSS library author.

You don't necessarily mind people profiting off of your contributions because you have been profiting from other peoples' contributions at your job. Take away the jobs and suddenly there isn't enough grant money to go around to keep the lights on.

Picking up history books is of no use if you only use their weight to gain muscle mass.

There is simply no universe in which a security-conscientious reviewer looks at the code, spots * being a valid return value, remembers that * is the default value in /etc/shadow for "no password login please" and then is all like:

This is fine, you check for * and return + instead.

There are more 32-long character sequences than atoms in the universe. Pick one, any of them instead.

Standard C api calls return an integer, which is 0 on success or nonzero on error. Ignoring it is an intentional choice. `errno` is the hack that shouldn't really exist because it's trivially easy to forget to check that and also has issues with threading (patched by making it a thread local) and more recently, coroutines (which admit no general purpose patch because they're a userspace construct).

Another reason why this is terrible is that it's unclear what the returned pointer's lifetime is. Is it until the next call to crypt? If so, is it thread-local like errno? If it's passed on to the user, is it safe to call free() on it, or is there a crypt_free function that should be called instead?

But all of this, and I mean all of it pales in comparison to returning '*' on error.

Why * specifically? Why not some random guid generated before committing, if it's so important to not let buggy software crash?

The find bug was merged the next day from what I could tell.

But don't me stop you, go for the mirage, I'll be rooting for you!

It's always better to protect politicians from someone else

Automation is... coming for those jobs a well, soon it'll be a niche for those nostalgic enough to desire a human... touch. Damn, these puns write themselves.

But on the topic at hand, demand is capped by the intentionally rare elite status, but then so is supply. Luckily (for some), we've had great success in selective breeding over our 10k year run on this planet between discovering agriculture and the great filter.

Between those, biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, missiles and drones and the fact that using them against the civilian population has no impact on the economy, I think you may need to rethink your use of force.

Or do you actually think that they're building humanoid robots to automate blue collar work? More like automate the boys in blue, with unwavering loyalty.