Experienced Rails & JS full stack dev looking for freelance/contract/consulting opportunities.
Location: French Alps
Remote: Only - can travel anywhere in Europe for quarterly team meetups
Willing to relocate: no
Technologies: Ruby / Rails / JS / Node / Typescript / Vue / Git / AWS / Cloudflare
Résumé/CV: https://davekinkead.com/
Email: [email protected]
Once upon a time I was a military officer. Then I became an academic philosopher. Now I'm a full stack dev living in the French Alps.
I specialise in turning vague ideas into robust software. I’m really good at asking questions to get to the heart of a problem, translating these into actionable requirements, and implementing them in well tested and documented code.
Happy to work solo, lead, or as part of a team on any stack in the Ruby or JS ecosystems.
While I think programming can be a good way to teach general thinking skills like perspective, clarity, precision, and abstraction, I'm dubious about the claim that it is the best way to do so (§2.1).
Perspective - does learning multiple programming languages engender more awareness of different perspectives than say, learning multiple foreign natural languages?
Abstraction - does learning programming languages develop better use of conceptual abstraction than say, mathematics?
Precision and clarity - does learning programming languages develop better precision and clarity than studying philosophy and logic?
These are all empirical questions and no empiric data is provided. The lack of support in the argument for the conclusion given also hints that maybe learning programming isn't _the best_ way to learn clarity & precision after all.
Where I thinking learning to program stands out as superior is that it teaches a skill that is currently in high demand - programming.
The AEC manages the federal election roll. Enrolling is technically compulsory for all citizens but only seems to be enforceable once you are on the roll.
Failure to get your named crossed of a a voting booth (voting isn't compulsory - turning up is) results in a $50 fine.
Here are a few justifications of democracy and how increasing voter turnout would affect them:
1) Epistemic (democracy is good because it makes the correct choices). Increasing voter turnout doesn't do much because 10,000 randomly selected voters are sufficient to get the correct answers and increasing less competent voters would actually make it work.
2) Preference Satisfaction (democracy is good because it maximizes preferences). Increasing voter turnout is only beneficial if it improves the representation of voters to actual population.
3) Consent (democracy is good because we consent to it). Increasing voter turnout is only good if you deny those currently not voting are somehow not consenting. Higher voter turnouts make it easier for government to justify laws however - 'but you all voted for this!'
4) Transformational (democracy is good because participating makes us better people). Increasing voter turnout would be good regardless of how representative the new voters are of the population at large.
TLDR - there are many ways to justify democracy, increasing voter turnout will be good/bad/irrelevant depending on the justification.
Hi Debra - (longish) question about the white labelling aspect of vote.org:
It seems like the implied value of vote.org is that increasing voter turnout can make democracy 'better' by making it more representative. This can only happen however, if the increase in or delta from voter turnout is itself representative of the community at large. If the increase in turnout is only from the extreme of one end of the political spectrum, then that doesn't seem to help democracy.
But if you are white labelling vote.org, then the organisations that use it will be far from partisan and therefore the delta from voter turnout wont be representative.
So if vote.org is used primarily by one side of politics, how does this help democracy? (assuming you can't show that side of politics is objectively better) And if vote.org is used equally by all sides of politics, how does the increased voter turnout change anything?
To address your first question, the actual quote is:
> Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
So it's not a claim that democracy is the least worst simpliciter, but an empiric claim of history (and compared to 20th century alternatives like national socialism, fascism etc, is backed by evidence). None of that however, justifies the claim that democracy is the best form of government compared when compared possible alternatives.
> Just two of the [24] research groups produced a significant, positive effect
If only they had used green jelly beans instead [^1]...
This is not limited to social psychology. Scientific publishing has a strong bias towards positive results. As long as null results are filed away, this kind of thing will continue to happen.
Beautiful UI. Schelling's models of segregation is a great example of how simulation and data-vis can create insights in the humanities & social sciences.
I made a similar (though much less beautiful) simulation for a workshop in in computational philosophy last semester - but replaced intentional with random movement when uphappy.
Whether or not it is effective or fair is a different matter. As you point out, there are often financial & power imbalances between parties. One would have to make a very different kind of argument that this justifies the state prosecuting on the wronged party's behalf rather than say, making tort more equitable.
Perhaps this is not the best example given that Spain isn't from a common law tradition but I find the encroachment of criminal penalties for what are essentially civil matters very disturbing.
Criminal law exists to sanction actions that threaten society enough that the state is justified punish offenders ie murder or physical theft. Civil law by contrast exists to right wrongs between private parties ie suing for compensation.
Copyright violations strike me as a clear case for tort. It's a commercial, not a penal matter, but thanks to effective lobbying, the state has now become the MPAA's commercial lawyer.
"In 2012, Brown similarly pored over millions of emails hacked by Anonymous from the private intelligence company Stratfor. It was during his work on the Stratfor hack that Brown committed his most serious offence, according to US prosecutors – he posted a link in a chat room that connected users to Stratfor documents that had been released online.
The released documents included a list of email addresses and credit card numbers belonging to Stratfor subscribers. For posting that link, Brown is accused of disseminating stolen information – a charge with media commentators have warned criminalises the very act of linking."
Citizen policy juries, selected by random sampling of the electorate, with access to experts making public recommendations on policy.
Even if they don't have formal authority to legislate or execute policy, politicians enacting laws in conflict with those recommendations would have to at least explain why.
The real value of an MBA is the signalling it provides future employers - that you are sufficiently smart, diligent & focused to get into a B school, and prepared to do long & arduous hours for the company in order to get ahead.
The content is beneficial but inconsequential - not much more than a broad survey of intro/mid level undergrad stuff - and certainly nothing that a mildly dedicated auto-didactic couldn't learn with a local library card.
The tech world is one in which there are many ways to signal competence, and I'd argue that an MBA is a highly inefficient way of doing that. And even if you do find a tech company that does value MBAs, do you really want to work for one that values inefficient mechanisms or academic pedigree highly over say, competent contribution to open source?
That said, I don't regret doing an MBA - it was the seed that lead me to where I am now - doing a PhD in Philosophy
Rights are the correlative of duties and obligations. If people have a duty not to X, then who ever that duty is owed to now has a right to X.
As a being capable of moral reflection, I think I have a duty not to inflict, or support the infliction upon, other beings capable of feeling pain and suffering. Thus, other beings have a right not to be inflicted with pain and suffering, from me at least.
Nice to see an explanation video that isn't just stick figures and animation. It was really slick - informative, humorous, and on brand (love that your socks match your brand's colour).
Agree that dropbox for wi-fi is confusing. Why not something like 'easy wi-fi sharing' or the like.
Once upon a time I was a military officer. Then I became an academic philosopher. Now I'm a full stack dev living in the French Alps.
I specialise in turning vague ideas into robust software. I’m really good at asking questions to get to the heart of a problem, translating these into actionable requirements, and implementing them in well tested and documented code.
Happy to work solo, lead, or as part of a team on any stack in the Ruby or JS ecosystems.