zamadatix

Well, again, it's not that these things take place of each other it's that they influence each other. Taking the first example, America only exists because individuals went to settle and conquer new lands and then pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to defeat the tyranny of the monarchy. There is no way in which this can happen without these cultural traits in the same way there is no way it could have happened and not driven these cultural traits further. The other examples follow the same line.

That's not arguing small government is supposed to be good or bad, it's just saying what the American mindset considers important when judging things - which is on traits which align with its mindset over its history, not on whether or not the application of policy seems evenly distributed to all.

A microstate is not just "one smaller than another" though, and nobody lists Norway as a microstate of Europe/the EU.

But with what you had meant - it means Norway is pretty comparable to a typical US state division or, in other words, something US states could be expected to implement successfully in their state prison systems if there weren't other reasons than scale they do things differently.

Speaking of code golf, I had it optimize Diskitude into a <8 kb (still uncompressed) executable, add some features, and improve scanning performance all while increasing size. An LLM will gladly make extremely optimized software, you just have to ask for it.

I don't think there is a clear cause and effect (or even separation) of those two things. The early views/situations of those who made America are largely the same force which drove the desire for small government and vice versa. I.e. what you believe is ideal in reality is going to be based on the way you weigh things morally just as much as the way you weigh things is going to be based on what ideal is held.

There is, of course, more than one reason people hold the views they do, but I do believe things like rugged individualism & the Protestant work ethic definitely played a major role in why the majority of Americans hold the desires and fears about government they do - particularly in the aspect of these examples. Without those influences, I think what America has tried vs what it has feared would be a very different list today (which is not to say whether it'd've been more successful or not).

Much of the US doesn't think of it in terms of proactive vs reactive governance but instead in cultural/moral expectations of how you should "pull yourself up from your bootstraps" to be great. This view is often to the point many see removing the need to pull oneself up from their own bootstraps as removing the ability for them to better themselves (& wasting everyone else's money/freedom/whatever to do so). A soldier and an obese person are examples at polar opposites of that moral spectrum.

The policies just follow that. This comes up in all sorts of areas such as prison as punishment vs rehabilitation.

They were talking about the money sources, not the list of grivences by political source in order of severity. The latter, however much you'd like to make the conversation be about it, does not change how each actually gets its money.

I've started to despise revealed preference for precisely this scenario. When it's applied accurately it rarely says anything normal reasoning couldn't already make abundantly apparent but it's soooo easy to inaccurately apply and then the conversation goes off the rails to focus on what the revealed preference does/doesn't say.

Lots have thoughts on this, few take the time to review the existing implementations/proposals and explain both how it is their approach doesn't run in to the same problems as well as the problems their proposal still doesn't resolve.

Most of the time, this results in people thinking the big problems are one set like "if only there was a way to translate" while the real remaining problems are another set like "and how do you get people to want to transition when it works well enough for those clients in the translated state".

Hopefully you mean a static prefix, a static address would be an abomination from an ISP in IPv6!

Hmm, I suppose I see it the opposite - it's important these limits don't apply to one specific instance, just as the citation points out problematic things still apply if it's a horse rather than a car. That doesn't seem an accident/mistake, but a key part of making the limitation meaningful and well formed.

I suppose that's the split between "writing code" the action and "writing code" the overall development process. I do agree there is some nuance in thoughts here often lost by the term getting overloaded.

> We know that if something gained somewhere, something lost somewhere.

I don't know that.