kaens

you call it defund the police because they are disproportionately overfunded.

I spent a decade homeless in appalachia and the general midwest for a decade, and another largely below the poverty line. I'm fine with citing my life and the lives of everyone I knew for the amount of political agency that was present in our lives.

I would not describe that period of my life as having more "free time" but I can understand how that may look the case.

I agree with you in spirit in some ways here and I do not believe in absolution of responsibility. Material conditions, however, often skew the will in ways rather extreme, possibility is not probability and it's a fool that eats shit after watching 20 people take a bite of a cake and realize it's shit.

you're off by a little bit.

> The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.

> In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.

part of what i'm saying is that if these statements are true, then we are not in a functioning representative democracy.

>if i lie to you a bunch and you vote me in, i'm not representing you.

>This feels like a contradiction to the previous point that

correct. it is an argument against it.

> Maybe a lying politician gets to do this once, but after that it's the populace's job to hold them accountable. The people have a responsibility in a democracy as well. I agree it's not easy and opportunists will try to rig the system. Being difficult doesn't absolve us of the responsibility.

regardless of whether or not i agree that in "the way its supposed to work" this is the case, it's been a lot more than once and for a lot longer than a little bit of time. longer than i've been alive.

with what time, resources, or authority are you suggesting the populace hold them accountable with? don't answer that just yet.

> I get the impression we fundamentally disagree that there's "zero accountability to the people". I think there is, but people may just not have the fortitude to do it for a variety of reasons.

We don't disagree in the sense you are talking about, technically. Zero accountability that the accountable will accept as valid though.

If i am born into a life with zero political agency and a constant threat of not having food or shelter in a populace that is largely entirely alienated not only from their peers but from also what they produce and consume how is that me getting what i deserve? In what way do you expect the hypothetical me to be organized or able to organize? How successful do you think someone like that could be at doing what you are suggesting when they don't have more than a $400 buffer and no supply chain?

> In many ways, I think the adage of "People get the government they deserve" is true.

I don't think the adage you're referring to is true at all; on the contrary I think that the responses you are speaking of simply take a long time to bubble up into enough of the populace to make them inevitable. Once that threshold is crossed you may as well swap the adage around. The structures and superstructures of societal organization are things that exist prior to you, it's natural for them to be baked into assumptions of "just how things are".

> If you want to tolerate rigged systems or lying politicians, or don't want to get actively engaged, what kind of system do you think you deserve?

I don't think that inaction in face of miserable conditions that have been part of your experience of reality since day one makes someone "deserve" those conditions. It just makes them someone living in the reality they've been presented with. Engagement however, of all sorts, has been rising

if i write "bees" on a box, does the box contain bees?

food, water, shelter, and healthcare are universal human interests. it's fine for you to believe the government shouldn't have a hand in them, but then in my view you are simply not in favor of what has been defined in this thread as a "healthy representative democracy"

you could argue that it's not your fault if lots of people don't vote so they get what they get, but you would be oversimplifying things for a HUGE section of the populace who don't vote because they have no one to represent their interests, where their interests are not starving or getting thrown on the street or being in debt for years and years because they slipped on the ice. these people not only do not have a meaningful way to vote, they also often do not have the time or energy to engage in local politics or trying to massage the system. they are currently risking their lives at metaphorical gunpoint every day to deliver "essential" services. minus the pandemic, it's been this way for a long time.

This:

> The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.

and this

> In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.

do not describe this country, even if you assert that only those who vote are represented. There's zero accountability to the people, the gaps are too large for people who do represent our interests to get through the door (and when they come close the rules tend to change suddenly) Something being against the rules has never stopped someone from doing it if they really wanted to when they are the enforcers or writers of the rules.

if i lie to you a bunch and you vote me in, i'm not representing you. i have no intention on acting in your interests. politics is a crooked game, and ours is a particularly easy one to fix.

and what of the rest of the citizens who didn't vote because they risk losing their job or because of a million other reasons? are they not still citizens? most of them didn't choose to be, and regardless of whether that gives them some sort of moral obligation to participate to their best in the politics of their situation it does not remove their need for food, water, shelter, and healthcare which has been an increasingly difficult need to meet with essentially zero assistance from the system that is supposed to represent them.

to me it seems a lot like the conclusion is either that they are simply lesser for whatever reason and too bad for them or that the institution is just insisting on itself the way that institutions tend to do when they've been around long enough, and maybe a lot of people are actually very out of touch with what it is like to live in america for about half of our populace.

it's just one example of many of huge swaths of people in this country not being treated in the way they they would be treated if they were in a well functioning representative democracy.

see if:

> In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.

and "half of this country is a very small bill from crisis for their entire lives, people do things like describing the insurance agent as the most traumatizing part of the bear attack they survived" are both true, in what way can it be considered well functioning?

right, that's why i put "if" there :P

ground realities are that, for example, flint michigan barely has clean water after seven years.

if you are claiming the usa is not a well functioning representative democracy, i agree.

> The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.

According to who? I understand that this is a kind of framing used here often, but the federal government has been concerned primarily with itself for a long time now at least to my eyes.

these are rules of thumb, not laws

if you were explicitly asked to, why not?

i think so, largely yes. large industry immersion for a long time (still) lead to, in my view,teaching people wage work skills as opposed to, say, trade or craft skills if that makes sense.

i don't think they'd necessarily become OOP programmers if fp was the default, but i do think we would see a similar trend of fp becoming a distasteful term. all approaches have edge cases and pain points, all those edge cases and pain points get amplified very loudly when they're not accounted for. a lot of fp requires at least as much subtlety in this regard as anything else.

within the framings of software development, i think it is the maintaining of rotting systems that ultimately causes distaste. it is not hard to imagine someone only ever running into, eg, oop systems that are a mess because that's basically all there was for many companies building many things under burnout schedules with no one with more than 5 years of experience working on them.

the problems that fp makes go away easily, the big wins, particularly things like mutability, are things that just happen to fit very well in the problem spaces a lot of software in "the discourse" is written for. if and when those spaces change, so will favored approaches, whatever they end up being.

all that said, i do not think that everyone writing software needs to be a mega computing wizard. the industry is very broad in terms of what types of skillsets are wanted or needed where. i don't think we support this idea very well as a whole.

oh i'm with you there

oh yeah i absolutely agree with you there honestly i just got too in the weeds here, sorry

not saying they aren't distinguished, am saying that a huge amount of the discussion around them in the workforce is being done by people who couldn't define them for you, and that a lot of everything in our field is driven by people who don't understand things copying the shape of them and repeating stuff they heard from people who sound like they do. in general, these aren't people who are going to cross-paradigm as a matter of honing their craft and the ones that are tend towards being good programmers in the end.

i'd further say that that mass lack of understanding is closer to the reason for there being such a mess in many oop systems, in combination with economic pressures, despite common OOP practices being not good for lots of things they got used for.

to quote you elsewhere in the thread:

> The reason bad OO is so common is some codebases become economically valuable right around when they start falling apart due to poor design, but you can hire more and more people if the software is bringing in more and more money.

this is a good insight, but i assure you this happens in fp codebases written by inexperienced programmers or poorly managed inexperienced businesses who hired someone to burn them out as well, in exactly the same way, for the same reasons, and that those fp codebases are just as bad, especially now that fp is a "attract the 10xers" item for companies. (would you rather figure out where the thing mutating the state under your nose is or where the hidden assumption that this state will mutate is? i'd prefer doing neither)

Milewski is correct with the caveat that people write the ugliness and build and maintain upon it, producing systems that themselves have tons of spooky action at a distance and get mitigated by bugpatch burn marches just the same