Holy shit. This is weirder than I realized.

I’m just realizing that the person submitting the change was demanding that their lost feature be re-added, and the repo owner decided to YOLO the change into master. Lol.

Nice.

Holds hat over heart, and salutes.

What will get manufactured locally will be the things where there’s enough margin in it. Nothing to do with how vital or desirable it might be to make locally.

More to your point, I think we agree on that.

My point is that government is for when the open market fails.

Providing margin against known common disasters and shortages is a great use of government power to distort a market.

Tariffs and subsidies can close the gap to provide incentive to have local production of things like clean water, food, power, medical supplies, and computer chips.

In my ideal case, each government would provide consistent local demand, and ship the excess product as goodwill donations to neighbors in need.

We actually see some of that now, but 2020 revealed a number of substantial gaps.

Except corn, which is heavily subsidized in the US.

(I suspect the primary motive is to provide an alternative fuel for the war machine, sadly. But corn is also useable as local transport fuel and even food, which is nice.)

I’m in favor of additional subsidies to support local manufacturing of critical products, to protect the local population against the whims of the global market.

I’m not a huge fan of tariffs, but in theory tariffs can get the same job done. And I’m willing to concede that a balance between subsidies and tariffs might be the sweet spot for practicality, or might be a necessary a step on the journey to pragmatic people centric policies.

I did the same only due to a broken toilet.

I typically start by deep cleaning each area when something breaks.

It takes a bit longer, but it’s nicer to repair something in a really clean space.

Edit: And for those familiar with toilet repairs - yes, I did spent substantially more time on the cleaning than the repair.

I’m with you, but I can see the other side of this.

The US experienced shocking shortages during the global pandemic.

I’m not personally a huge fan of tariffs as the way to keep manufacturing local, but I think it’s a goal worth pursuing.

And I value of impact of global trade toward peace, and I’m increasingly inclined to believe it’s critical for our survival as a race.

But I’m sympathetic to having some provision for ensuring local production of basic necessities. It’s foolish to always assume that someone will be willing and able to ship what we need halfway across the globe.

I’m not sure that tariffs are an acceptable answer, but I am sure that we need to stop assuming there will always be another impoverished nation excited to be exploited to produce things for us cheap.

It’s wise to have some provision for locally producing critical things.

Congrats on joining the ranks of those who know how to build a Windows installer without Install shield. I believe there are now four people with that skill. Use it wisely.

In fairness, the NASA Engineer can’t get NPM to behave either. That’s why we don’t send JavaScript to space.

Or do we? Now I desperately want to know what the first piece of JacaScript to run in space was/will be? It did/will mark the exact moment that we stopped taking space seriously.

The real clue here is the cropped top line “refactor…”

“Here’s a huge mostly unnecessary format change that incidentally loses some functionality I don’t care about”.

Followed by “why won’t anyone accept my contributions?!”

Oh, I didn’t realize but I’ve also had a Jade laptop. I was just holding it upside down.

Nice. Getting to the doctor can be a challenge, and worth overcoming.

This collection is fantastic.

Mildly related - Ryan North’s recent contributions to Marvel Comics are full of delight. (Ryan North helped organize Machine Of Death).

“We’re confident that these additional staff will dramatically increase our effectiveness, while also now giving Tim three people to play cards with on lunch breaks.”

Nice. Takenoko has solid replayability, and so much charm.

Yeah. The symbiotes can mimic clothing. Sometimes this leads to surprise-it’s-a-symbiote.

Thankfully, Mad Magazine has made the many required underwear jokes, over the years.

Your token might be used by someone else, though

Yeah. I feel like that cool bad influence not-actually-my-uncle is gonna publish their porn access token everywhere.

If I really had to, I would require everyone to whip out whatever assets of sexual maturity they happen to have, and let the computer analyze it and decide a maturity level.

I would also keep copies for blackmail purposes, because the world is a better place if we all mistrust this solution and anything remotely like it. It’ll be in the legal fine print, which I’m confident no one will read.

Every answer (other than “trust the user to self identify”) is at least remotely like mine, but I’m proposing we cut out the half-measures on the way.

To avoid personal consequences, the system I architect will probably wait on a dead-man-switch for me to die or be incarcerated.

Then it will publish everything it has ever seen, along with AI generated commentary. I’m confident that some of it will be hilarious, and I am hopeful that it will piss everyone off enough that we stop doing this kind of thing.

True rational self interest would involve creating cooperative structures that give a safety net if anything goes wrong just like how it’s rational to get home insurance even if you don’t expect to burn your house down.

This is the part that drives me nuts. Plenty of today’s decision makers only survive later thanks to social nets. But they’re so sure that they won’t be, they’re willing to cut back social benefits to make a quick buck.

This is why it’s so important to keep the sacrifice pits up and running. The sacrifice pits are going to provide invaluable information to future scientists about our current way of life.