I can respect your viewpoint here. I know my response isn't adding much but I think it's important to recognize respect for a differing belief or opinion.
It's definitely too simplistic, and we could argue all day over which side is worse, but I think it's hard to argue against the fact that, right now the, left control the levers of power and are the most immediate threat to American liberty and constitutional government. If we are fortunate enough to vote them down to the minority, we can address the next immediate threat?
I'm glad you find me amusing, but I actually agree with you that the concept of power decentralization needs to be applied to corporations as well. I definitely don't claim to have the answers to how to accomplish this, nor did I think the U.S. founders would ever imagine the power that corporations would eventually wield.
The reality is that government and law are based on values, culture, and moral and religious beliefs. It has always been this way and always will be. I think the biggest mistake in your framing is the incorrect belief the left are not interested in strict social controls. They are absolutely interested in strict social controls, including:
Redefining gender and enforcing it in all institutions. Also, redefining marriage and enforcing this definition in all institutions. The left would love, for instance, to remove non-profit status from churches that don't support their definition of marriage.
Redefining racism and enforcing the definition in all institutions. The idea, for instance, that disparate outcome proves racism is deeply and fundamentally flawed, and yet the idea has been enforced and become entrenched via judicial activism, laws, and executive action.
Redefining sexual norms and force-teaching these norms to children in public schools.
Forcing citizens to pay for taxpayer-funded abortion.
Indoctrinating children with woke ideology in public schools, with support from the federal government. This is morally equivalent to forcing a particular religion into public schools, if not worse.
Cancel culture is a direct manifestation of the left's desire for full control over social behavior.
The left used to say play the anti-authoritarian card when they were the underdog in the culture wars. Now that they are winning, they no longer need to, nor would it be appropriate for them to do so.
So you sound like you are probably a lot more educated about politics than I am, so hopefully I can learn something from you, but I think one problem in practice is that collectivist views always seem to end in authoritarianism. Even in the U.S., the unions that resulted from collectivism became authoritarian and corrupt in their own right, the teacher's unions of America being a prime example of corruption and authoritarianism. Similarly, the auto workers unions have been a death knell to the American auto industry.
Anarchism isn't really a valid practical stance. Once you burn down the existing system, something has to replace it, and, to my limited knowledge, that has always been a dictatorship of some kind. Maybe that's just the simplest government one can form. Similarly, collectivist organizations always seem to result in top-down totalitarian regimes when they win the government.
America worked because the original founders were willing to give up power even though the people wanted to make them kings. At the same time, they established a system that made it hard for any one person or group to quickly amass political power. It seems like the left have, for the past century, been successfully dismantling the separation of powers, starting with Woodrow Wilson.
I actually agree with a lot of what you are saying. Often it feels like it doesn't matter who we vote for: no president ever actually does anything about the ever-expanding big government. I wish we had someone like Senator Rand Paul, but more charismatic, who had a chance of winning the presidency. Say what you will, but that man definitely seems to want to shrink the government.
So I think an underlying assumption you have that I want to scrutinize is that misbehaving students are costlier from a monetary perspective, or that they require more money spent to handle them, or that spending more money will result in better outcomes for these students. This assumption may or may not be true, but I think it is valuable to question it and expect some evidence to support it. For instance, it is quite possible that stricter and more rigorous discipline in schools could benefit misbehaving students far more than any spending increase in the school system. Likewise, there may be certain cultural norms or expectations in charter schools that have far more impact on misbehaving students than spending increases.
I think the far more important point, however is that some charter schools are working phenomenally well for the underprivileged and doing so with less funding, and that there are valuable lessons to be learned from that fact, which lessons are at risk of being ignored or lost. However, instead of either trying to learn from these charter schools or allow more of them to be created, teacher's unions and the government officials they support via campaign funds are openly hostile to them, as the book details. These adults are clearly acting in their best interests, not in the interests of the children they are claiming to serve.
With regard to government policy in general, there seems to be a complete disincentive to analyze policy in retrospect honestly, determine successes and failures, and learn from the past in order to influence future decisions. With government policy, intent often matters more than results, as intent earns votes. This can easily lead to perverse incentives.
As an example, it's easy to claim good intent when proposing to spend more money on schools. But, if we want to actually help children out, results matter more than intent, and it seems very clear that, past a certain point, pouring more money into the public school system has little to no impact on educational outcomes. Instead, we should both be looking at other factors, and we should be allowing for more competition so that we can iterate on more ideas more rapidly. The relative monoculture of the public school system, combined with perverse incentives among both the government and teacher's unions, seem unhealthy for society and for our children.
He addresses all of self-selection, demographics, and discipline directly in the book, if I remember accurately.
First, to address self-selection as a primary cause, Sowell specifically compares the outcomes of students who won the charter school lottery versus those who didn't, and shows the performance gap between public and charter schools remains even when only considering students who entered the lottery.
Second, Sowell purposely compares schools that have as similar demographics as possible, including racial makeup and economic status. He also attempts to control for location differences by comparing schools that are co-located in the same building or are located within a small distance of each other.
Finally, he specifically calls out charter schools' ability to enforce stronger discipline and even expel students as a distinct competitive advantage, one that the teachers unions recognize and are trying to undermine. He also believes that relaxing discipline in the name of reducing disparate outcome among identity groups has a direct causal effect on worsened education in public schools.
To me, with regards to discipline, the lesson to be learned is that public schools need to be empowered to enforce stricter discipline as well. There is no justice or fairness in allowing a small minority to disrupt the education of a willing majority. A few of the discipline-related anecdotes Sowell shares in his book are heart-wrenching, including one story of a student punching a pregnant teacher in the stomach, telling her he was going to punch the baby right out of her, and finally returning to school the next day with no imposed consequences for his violent behavior. I don't know how any student could learn in an environment like that.
Yes, and I think one important aspect to this is the necessary CI/CD changes needed to support these kinds of optimizations. If your performance targets are tight enough that you are making significant non-standard optimizations in your GC'ed language, you're probably going to want some automated performance regression testing in your deployment pipeline to ensure you don't ship something that falls down under load. In my experience, building and maintaining those pipeline components is not easy.
I am aware that you can hit really good latency targets with GC'ed languages, like in the video game and finance industry. Whenever I investigate examples, though, I find the devs have to go through a ton of effort to avoid memory allocations, and then I ask if using the GC'ed language was even worth it in the first place?
I'm actually fascinated with the idea of going off-heap in the hotspots of GC'ed languages to get better performance. Netty, for instance, relies on off-heap allocations to achieve better networking performance. But, once you do so, you start incurring the disadvantages of languages like C/C++, and it can get complicated mixing the two styles of code.
I'm not a rust user, but I would argue you are still managing memory manually, you're just doing a lot of it through rust's type system, which can check for errors at compile time, rather than through runtime APIs like the C or C++ standard library. The question then becomes whether it is easier to manage memory through Rust's type system versus via standard runtime APIs.
From what I've read, Rust memory management actually requires more work but provides fantastic safety guarantees. This could mean that rust actually lowers productivity at first, but as the complexity of the code base grows, some of that productivity is restored or even supercedes C/C++ because you spend no time chasing runtime memory bugs.
For some products or projects, the costs of shipping a security flaw caused by a memory bug exploit could be high enough that a drop in productivity from Rust relative to C is still more than justified due to external costs that Rust mitigates.
More importantly, GC'ed languages tend to use at least 2x the memory of un-GC'ed languages and have to deal with the consequences of GC-induced pauses and generally inferior native code interop. Whether that matters to you or not depends on your application. No one is going to use a GC'ed language in the Linux Kernel, but practically 100% of backend applications are written in GC'ed languages because the productivity benefits are of automatic memory management are massive.
I downvoted you at first and then changed my mind. I think I would like your comment more if it were more worded like: "buried in here are great examples of important optimizations that did not require a rewrite". Or something like: "this article does a great job of showing that you can hit many reasonable performance targets while using a GC'ed language like Go."
You can pretty much always get better performance with more control over memory, and more importantly, you can dramatically lower overall memory usage and avoid GC pauses, but you have to weigh that against the fact that automated memory management is one of the few programming language features that is basically proven to give a massive developer productivity boost. In my corner of the industry, everyone chooses the GC'ed languages and performance isn't really a major concern most of the time.
You should read Michael Knowles' Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds. Political radicals have explicitly defined tolerance to mean "don't tolerate dissenting views". I don't have the exact quote on hand at the moment or I would share it, but they were very explicit about their censorship goals.
The book also discusses how there has never been unbridled free speech. There has always been a standard of speech that allows some things said and disallows other things said. What's changed over time is the standards themselves, and many would argue they have changed for the far worse in recent years.
A better analogy is if you don't intend to run over someone with your car and they jump out in front of you, then you are not at fault, nor were you doing anything wrong.
Results do matter more than intentions, but sometimes results are out of your control or even disconnected from your actions. You may say something perfectly reasonable and yet someone takes unreasonable offense. Who is to define what is reasonable to say and what is reasonable to take offense to? In the past decades, the political left has taken us too far in the direction of giving a small minority tyrannical censorship power to silence by taking offense at whatever they dislike, and then cancelling the person who said it.
> I think I would much rather mildly inconvenience people and have my favorite political team’s score go down than the alternative of Italy-style medical system collapse with massive death totals.
That's a nice false dichotomy you have there. Florida's average death rates in the US despite having a highly vulnerable elderly population prove that.
Of course vaccinated people can still get COVID. Everyone knows that. Why repeat it? The point is that covid becomes a very low risk to the vaccinated. Once vaccinated, you are more likely to die of the flu than of covid.
Most theoretical mask studies were done when we thought COVID was primarily spread by droplets, not aerosols. To this day I haven't seen any study plausibly show that others' masks protect you as much as your own mask. I'd be happy to be proven wrong if there's any real scientific evidence out there.
If you're at risk of covid, you can get vaccinated and are protected from covid. That's all the defense you need in order to not worry about anyone else being infected.
If you're in an at-risk category where you feel the vaccine isn't enough of a defense, you can wear n95 masks, get a third booster shot, or do whatever other extra mitigation measures you feel you need.
The reality is that covid isn't dangerous enough, given the tools people have at their disposal, to warrant authoritarian government or societal overreach. That unfortunately hasn't stopped the government, or it's political allies, from trying anyways. I firmly believe this overreach will backfire on the US democrat party and they will feel the backlash in the midterm elections of 2022.
The much larger problem is that our medical system isn't designed to handle any kind of case surge at all, because, for cost efficiency reasons, it purposely wants to operate at 80-90% capacity. Instead of us focusing on how we can improve our hospital systems for future pandemics, we vilify the unvaccinated for political points.
People should be skeptical that hospitals almost never provide thorough or accurate information about their true capacity, constraints, and current cases broken down by primary causes. But at the end of the day, one's views on the situation seem to primarily depend on political identity and whether one blindly trusts the chronically dishonest mainstream media.
Your numbers are misleading and deceptive. 78% of the eligible population and 90% of the most vulnerable have been vaccinated in Israel. Children under 12, who are ineligible for the vaccine, are at insanely low risk from covid and at insanely low risk of spreading it. Pretending they have to be vaccinated to achieve "herd immunity" is a lie and is fear mongering. Data show that unvaccinated children are safer than vaccinated adults.
COVID will become endemic. Everyone knows this. All that's left is for politicians to vilify political opponents for potential votes and try to consolidate more power in the meantime.