Isn't this just tautological nonsense? This applies to everything. If you have 1 friend rather than 5, you can focus and be more creative with that 1 friend than 5. If you have 1 sibling rather than 5, the same thing. If you have 1 book rather than 5, you can focus and read that one book.
Maybe we should have less schools and less "research" because so much of it seems like useless busy body work to justify academics' salaries.
And of course, such topics like these are great because it latches onto the simple-minded people's anecdotes as the comments here reflect.
> I would like to see western governments treat Chinese censorship as non-tariff barriers to trade when negotiating trade agreements.
Considering the west censors also, the chinese would laugh in our face. Weren't there chinese tourists who got locked up and fined in germany for silly speech recently? Weren't we all celebrating the censorship of the "alt-right"? Didn't we have celebrate the attacks on russian "fake news"? At worst, the chinese would simply justify their censorship by labeling apps as spreading fake news just like we do.
> Unfortunately for the most part western governments seem to have the same problem as western countries in not wanting to be frozen out of China and thus don't overtly question NTBs.
There you go. You act like NTBs go one way. We also have non-tariff trade barriers. Not only that, we also force other countries to end business transactions with china due to "national security concerns".
> There you go. You act like NTBs go one way. We also have non-tariff trade barriers.
No you misunderstand my point. My desire is that western governments treat Chinese censorship as NTBs when negotiating trade but they currently do not for fear of being simply frozen out of that market.
I make no comment nor judgement on western NTBs nor do I have an opinion on what the Chinese government should do from their side of the negotiating table in response to what they see as imbalances or NTBs. They should obviously do what is best for them.
> I think the problem is deeper than the author suggests. Not only are certain groups of people not getting the resources they need, there is also the matter of a cultural disconnect between the people in power who control the resources, and the underserved who may deserve them.
Beyond the cultural disconnect and more importantly, there is a disconnect in self-interest. It isn't in the interest of those in power to level the playing field. Humans are selfish creatures. We all want our family, friends, etc to have the advantage. We want ours to always have an advantage over others.
This isn't a conservative or liberal issue. It isn't bigots vs non-bigots. It's an innate human concern. Liberal parents/people want to advantage their children, families, etc over the others just as much as conservatives.
I'd say the reason why we are miserable is because of the media and the increased consumption of rubbish clickbait from the media. We are miserable because useless journalists have to write something everyday to generate controversy, fear, anxiety, etc in order to get people to click on their links so they can sell their ads.
My comment just mentioned the aesthetics of wind turbines and I still maintain they are no more ugly than a smokestack, city tower, bridge, radio antenna or even regular old suburban development that seldom get cancelled because of aesthetical concerns. What's so special about wind turbines that we hate how they look more than any other kind of development?
This argument holds for noise too: all the references I could find suggest wind turbines are far quieter than other forms of development. In my experience wind turbines aren't obtrusively loud at all. In my city we've installed a wind turbine at the top of a popular mountain and I can't remember ever distinctly hearing it, even within a couple of km[0]. The same cannot be said about highways or other development.
0. Grouse Mountain, overlooking Vancouver. I even think the wind turbine looks incredibly beautiful when you see it peaking up from the top of the mountain.
> Could you imagine something that equalizes the playing field more between men and women?
It really wouldn't because women would lose the societal benefits of being child bearers. So at best, it would be a wash.
> This provides the ability for people to have a child without the woman having to gestate the fetus for 9 months? None of the terrible side effects of pregnancy, none of the pain. Sounds pretty idealistic to me.
But most women actually want the experience of being pregnant. It's why this woman chose to transplant a uterus and become pregnant. She could have just hired a surrogate for far less time, effort and money.
But the issue of artificial wombs does offer a interesting question. How would it change humans as a species. Would it make men or women or both obsolete? Evolutionary pressure has made women child bearers and men providers. How would artificial wombs change that? Not to mention, the effects on physiology. Would women eventually lose uteri or will it become a useless vestigial organ over time?
> A C/C++ program is usually an order of magnitude longer than what a FAUST program would need to be.
That's true for all functional/scripting languages vs imperative languages.
There is a study that was done years ago which came to the same conclusion as you did - "An Empirical Comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl".
FAUST leads to shorter programs for a few reasons, one of them is certainly its pure functional nature.
The other reasons I think FAUST programs are shockingly short:
- It's a DSL for signal processing that overloads single character identifiers with commonly used signal processing functions (+ sums multiple signals, < splits into two signals, etc.). And, of course, it has a very powerful standard library of signal processing related functions.
- The boilerplate for getting signals in and out are handled by the language/compiler, rather than the programmer. You don't need to setup a ring buffer to receive an input/output signal or whatever...FAUST does it automagically. Even with very helpful libraries, such as JUCE, you're still doing a lot of the same tasks for every new signal processing program.
One could do these other two things in another language, even some imperative ones, I think. But, this is among the most concise tools for writing signal processing code I've seen. I only found it yesterday, so have only started reading the docs (and there's some math concepts I need to review before I can make sense out of some of the more advanced examples), but I was really struck by what a cool combination of pragmatism and purity FAUST is. It spits out the ugly stuff, so you can still readily use it in real world programs that are used by non-programmers.
It's also got a real-time experimental environment, so you can tweak your program in semi-realtime and immediately hear and see results. And, by "see" results, I mean it has a diagramming tool that spits out a block diagram of your function(s). I'm amazed it took me this long to find FAUST, as I've been reading up on this kind of programming for a couple of weeks, and it seems pretty clear it's the best thing going.
Maybe we should have less schools and less "research" because so much of it seems like useless busy body work to justify academics' salaries.
And of course, such topics like these are great because it latches onto the simple-minded people's anecdotes as the comments here reflect.