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I'm a bit baffled by this comment, so much so that I find it difficult to believe we've read the same article. I don't see any indication in the article that the author ever submitted any work to SciAm, let alone that he's sore about not being published. None of the examples he cites have anything to do with climate denialism, nor is he defending any pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories. How is any of this responding to the article you're commenting on?

Yes, it's a curious coincidence that the people writing this report, surely in good faith, just happened to pick March 2020 as the point of comparison.

> the default would be to just build housing without any regard to affordability.

Luckily, that would still lead to affordable housing, because "just build housing" is what actually makes housing affordable.

> That's obviously not the distinction between the parties here. The second one intends (or at least has a policy to) do something about it, but just not by raising the existing CO2 tax.

Do they, though? I don't know how familiar you are with the German political parties, but the concern about climate change is mostly empty marketing on all sides. We should stop running coal electricity plants, but somehow turning off all nuclear plants immediately is more important. We should stop subsidising driving to work, but that would be regressive etc. Most parties are making noises about climate change being bad, but they're all pretty unwilling to accept any trade-offs involved in doing something about it.

I'm saying if you want something effective do be done, look at what the parties are actually proposing to do, not how concerned they're expressing to be in their election flyers.

> As an example, 2 parties could both say No to a higher Co2-tax, but one of them does so because they claim climate change is a hoax, while the other one has a problem with it not being progressive enough, thus hitting poorer people harder than rich people.

But as a voter who is in favour of a higher CO2 tax, why would you care about that distinction? If there's one party who thinks climate change doesn't exist and one who believes in climate change but is unwilling to do anything about it, the only difference between the parties is in their rhetoric. I'd argue that voting based on actual policy proposals a benefit, not a drawback of this approach.

Corporal punishment, hopefully.

Facebook famously has dual-class shares that give Mark Zuckerberg a majority of the votes. The shareholders can't make him do anything he doesn't want to do.

Why would languages without tail recursion optimisation perform worse when all languages use the naive implementation? It's not tail recursive, so it shouldn't make a difference, right?

> Some particular names used in the examples were introduced by Python. For example the `enumerate` function or `zip`. I haven't seen those names used in programming languages older than Python, I know I might wrong.

All the ML dialects that I know have a zip function and ML pre-dates Python by about 20 years. This is particularly relevant since Rust is clearly strongly influenced by ML.

> The fact that those are functional I think is not particularly relevant. It's like someone seeing a comparison of Java and Go and saying that those are just the principles of imperative programming, or object oriented programming.

The comparison feels right, but I think it would certainly be odd if somebody explained loops in Go as "a Java idiom".

> People can't discriminate on properties that the person they are doing business with can't pick or change [...] but can discriminate on properties that the person in question did choose or could change

Religious beliefs seem to fall squarely in the latter category (at least to the extent that political views do). Are you really comfortable with people discriminating on that basis?

You're right, of course. I blame low blood sugar.

> every 5th german is named lars

That is completely untrue. Lars isn't exactly a rare name in Germany, but I'd be surprised if it was even one of the 20 most common first names. It's definitely nowhere near 1/5th of the population.

match also lets you destructure values, which is useful when you're dealing with enums. It also doesn't have C's fall-through behaviour.

Edit: match doesn't insist on a default clause, it enforces exhaustiveness. Which can be achieved by having a default clause, but quite often you just have an explicit branch for every possible case.

House is basically a modern interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, with the same unpleasant personality. Which seems to contradict the idea that jerk protagonists are a new phenomenon.