When you decide to start a business, often times, you'll be doing lots of things you don't really want to be doing for that business. Like filing paperwork with the state or making sure your taxes are done on time. This stuff adds up and there is a lot of it.
To start a business, you really have to enjoy the product you are building enough to cover the work you don't want to do and enough to no longer do some things you enjoy doing in your life, as you may no longer have time for it.
Starting a real business is a challenge. I would suggest, if you do have an idea, try to build it. If you can build the idea, you might want to consider starting a business around it.
Starting by building is a great way to waste a huge amount of time on solving a problem no one has. Start by talking to potential customers and growing an email list, not building. Aside from being less risky, it's way more fun to work on something that you know people want and are waiting for.
It also conditions you for the fact that you'll need to spend at least 50% of your time on squishy marketing stuff to get anywhere. You can't just code your way to getting customers.
Building a product is easy. Especially if you are an engineer. Getting people to pay for a product now that's where a business sprouts from. Just because you built a product doesn't mean you have a company/business. You need users and those willing to pay for it. Most realize this when it comes to raising Series A.
We create organizations because even for their bloat, they make things more efficient than having individuals doing their individual, uncoordinated things. So no. Also, Japan railways were in fact privatized and so the heroes of this story are actually people working for private companies. I'm not sure if tax money is even used here, and if so, then probably not much of it.
For the record, I don't think your stupid if you have a child accidentally.
However, once you do accidentally have a child, the results are often not pretty, and I will feel bad watching as you deal with the consequences of your poorly thought out decision.
Regarding programming, I can't see the relationship you make at all.
If you write a good program, well good job. If you write a bad program, you are probably going to write a better one next time. (Ever look back at your old code?)
It takes practice to get good, and the more we work at it, the better we'll get. Just keep trying.
I think defen's point was that if a team produces truly high-quality C code, it's similar to a couple that both abstain until marriage. Yes, it's technically possible, but it's rare, and it's not something that should be the expected outcome (that is, most C code will have some problems, and most couples will have at least a little bit of regrettable sexual history before they're married).
It's as if I say: "Step 1 of writing good code: Don't make mistakes. If you make mistakes, you deserve what's coming to you!" Some mistakes are expected, and essentially inevitable; they're the default, not the exception. Blaming the programmer might seem like the right thing to do, but there's more practical benefit to improving the tools and teaching programmers how to handle errors, so that we can decrease the negative impact that bugs will have.
The point of the analogy is that it is very easy to prescribe behavior that is guaranteed to work if followed 100% to the letter, but fails catastrophically if there is even 1 mistake. There are two responses to this - you can either design systems that are easier to follow & fail less catastrophically in the real world (don't use C for new code if you don't need it; teach people about safe sex practices), OR you can double down on the sermonizing about how if people had just been smarter / had more willpower, they wouldn't be in this bad situation.
> However, once you do accidentally have a child, the results are often not pretty... Regarding programming, I can't see the relationship you make at all.
It's either that or the life of the grasshopper ;)
Now that I think of it, there's another parallel with unwanted pregnancies. There are men that stick around, and there are boys who run and let others clean up after their mess.
For what it's worth, as a white male, I've never had a bad experience opting out. At the very worst, they're curt and overly professional. Most of the time they make small chat.
I have had bad experiences twice. I am polite but refuse to answer questions or make small talk. Twice the man moved his hand "upwards until resistance" very fast and into my testicle. I complained and the managers response was "he has to go up until he feels resistance." TSA Complaint made, response was "no substantiating evidence." Shades of a police state.
The more drunk people take public transportation, the more I'd want to avoid it. The more I'd want my wife to avoid it.
Private business is good at solving problems with out the need for government intervention and higher taxes. If you are going to get drunk and you need to get from point A to point B, use Uber or call a taxi.
I agree with your former and latter point, but since I heard the middle point plenty (private business good at etc. without intervention and taxes) at BEST that's a very optimistic generalization. Taxis in fact are a _result_ of govt intervention (medallions) and uber's business practices, regardless of what you feel on the company, have not always been the solution people want (see many threads on "contractor" treatment, etc; not necessarily my own opinion but in this context the broader sentiment seems more relevant).
Govt intervention results in certain downsides, private business implementation others, I don't even have a great thought as to which is better or worse (yes, it's a cop out, but I'll defend that cop out as that it's the "great question of most governments" that I'm dodging), but it seems shortsighted to state "A does it better" (for either side)
(I hope this doesn't read as shutting down any rebuttal, not my intention. Feel free to challenge any of the above)
Have you considered approaching your dilemma from a moral perspective rather than a utilitarian/efficiency one? It may very well be that the two sides have different efficiency profiles, but one outweighs the other in terms of being more moral.
At the risk of driving this question into the bowels of philosophy, I'm VERY hesitant to drive anything from a moral argument, because I don't trust most judgements of morality, my own included. I can establish the empirical success of certain things by many metrics, a moral metric is not one of them. (I have and do regularly approach the question of "what is the utility / what should be my preference in terms of a moral metric", but again this seems to be like the prior "great question of X" but where X is religion/philosophy instead of govt.)
There are certainly times when a moral argument is attractive (and which I would pragmatically chose, especially in the many cases when there are material impacts against which a certain moral stance would oppose) but if we're having a conceptual discussion, I generally avoid that, and even in the cases when I would support a moral argument, I often seek other justifications of more utilitarian nature to try and support the moral suggestion.
"A Christian Manifesto" by Francis A. Schaeffer gives a reason why.
Our creator inspires freedom and love. When we follow him we seek to spread freedom to not only ourselves but to others as well. A population willingly adopting the new testament Biblical principles will spread freedom willingly.
The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force.
America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. The result is
predictable, the loss of individual freedom and the increase in the use of force to preserve the lack of these freedoms.
"A population willingly adopting the new testament Biblical principles will spread freedom willingly."
I think you need to specify which principles exactly one wants to adopt in a society. All the european states were devoutly christian for 2000 years and I would not call e.g. 15th century Spain the epitome of human rights and freedom.
"America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. The result is predictable, the loss of individual freedom and the increase in the use of force to preserve the lack of these freedoms."
At what point in time would you say america was more respectful of individual rights? It's not long ago it practiced genocidal policies towards the indigenous people of the continent - nor is it that long while ago it abolished slavery. If you go much back the colonies will not have been even established.
Our founders did that hard work for us. The Bill of Rights and the constitution explain what freedoms we are granted and as well why we are granted them (inalienable rights from our Creator). Previously throughout history, rights were granted to people from their government, through laws.
These concepts were flipped upside down, and if you study why, you'll see the reason is Biblical principles. All you have to do is read many founding documents to see this.
John Adams wrote "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Why would he say this? Think about it.
I'm not experienced enough to describe or explain why America has done bad things throughout history. We all make mistakes, and we are all unique. I'm sure corruption existed throughout our history. My personal feeling is that between 1900 and say now, Americans are more willing to reject the reasoning that gave it freedom to accept the reasoning that will take it away.
This rejection starts not only at the bottom but at the top.
Many Ivy League colleges were founded to educate and raise missionaries. Why? Perhaps to spread the message of freedom and liberty. What are they doing now? The exact opposite. Think about that.
Many here will argue it's a good thing. So be it, but it doesn't make it anymore true than the message I'm sharing.
"My personal feeling is that between 1900 and say now, Americans are more willing to reject the reasoning that gave it freedom to accept the reasoning that will take it away."
I can give several counterexamples to that claim.
Racial segregation "ended" in the United States in 1964. I would claim the country was - at least from a legislative standpoint - more free after than before it. So starting from 1900 I would claim there is a trend towards more freedom.
The recent years have seen the acceptance of more people as they are. Gay marriages are now legal which I think is a fantastic achievement in the history of human rights - no matter how long it took to get there
So, at least from the point of view of several minorities, United States seems to be more free now than ever. I don't know what the totality of the situation is, though (not an american).
I would state that the behavior occurring was already unconstitutional, as we are all created equal and we all have equal rights. This was a founding principle.
The question is, do you have equal rights on my private property? The law says yes. It's disappointing we need a
law to get us that far. We had to give up individual liberty, by allowing laws to move into our personal lives, in order to give equal rights to others?
I don't respect people of other nationalities because there is a law to do so. What new impact did the law have on people's hearts? What impact does the Bible have on a persons heart when it says to "love thy neighbor like thyself".
Even with the Civil Rights acts, we have a heightened sense of urgency in the united states, where the media reports violence between white and black people frequently. A new law won't stop this, but a change of heart just might.
> America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view.
America has been slowly transitioning from a superstitious nation to a more rational one.
Fixed that for you.
> The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force.
No one has moral absolutes, they do not exist except in the minds of those who want to force their morality onto others who don't agree with them. Laws aren't about morals, they're about reason.
Most contentious issues--marriage laws, universal healthcare, minimum wage, etc--are explicitly framed and argued (by both sides) with the language of justice. Moral preferences guide law; reason is just post-hoc rationalization.
You might object that "law" is not the same as "contentious issues," but that changes nothing. The emotionally charged political process that drives these debates is the same one that produces legislation. It is almost structurally incapable of producing rational outcomes.
Justice is not necessarily a moral concept, it's quite a reasonable concept as well. Laws are about reason in the sense that they're things we can convince majorities to abide by; sometimes those justifications are moral, but being immoral is not a justification to be illegal as morals themselves are fluid and what is moral for one isn't for another. As there are no absolute morals, laws are thus based on reasoning between moral beings as to what they can agree to.
It's an expression. Liquid water has mass and takes up space. It's material. It exists in a materialistic universe where the only things that exist are matter an energy.
On the other hand, there's nothing physical about "laws." They lose their law-like properties and become conventions of thought rather than regulators of truth and rationality in a world where only matter and energy exist.
> Rationality requires laws of logic--which do not exist in a humanistic, materialistic world.
And how do you suppose that? Materialism doesn't deny the existence of logic; you seem to not really know what materialism is.
> Tell me, can you stub your toe on the law of non-contradiction? No? How does it exist then?
Yea, you don't know what materialism is. I can't stub my toe on hacker news either, nor any website, but they clearly exist and they exist in way perfectly compatible with materialism as does your mind and the thing we call logic. They still all reduce down to patterns of matter in your brain or patterns of electrons in computer chips, it is all physical at the base level. To a materialist, mind is simply what the brain does, it's your operating system just as Windows is what your computer is probably doing. Perfectly compatible with materialism.
Science and logic go hand in hand and scientists are virtually all materialists because so far as anyone can demonstrate with evidence, materialism is the nature of reality.
> If Charlie holds to different laws of logic than Bill...whose brain is right?
If they're using different forms of logic, then they're both right according to the form they're using, but they can't be compared to each other unless they're using the same kind of logic.
> Your view is that laws are just conventions of thought. Those aren't laws, then.
It's not my view, it's simply the way it is. Different rules of logic exist [1]; such systems are axiomatic and obey their own rules. There is no one "correct" system of logic, there are many competing systems. The term law is meaningless, logic isn't a law in the sense you seem to think, it is merely a system of formalized thinking according to rules.
> I again assert: rationality is impossible without laws of logic. With conventions of logic, you just have strong opinions.
Logic is merely a branch of philosophy concerned with valid reasoning. Reasoning is not in opposition to materialism. Materialists do not argue that thoughts don't exist and logic is merely a formal method of thinking. You're objecting to materialism when it's quite clear you don't understand what it is.
> If they're using different forms of logic, then they're both right according to the form they're using,
Absurd. Knowledge is impossible if both are right. You're bad at this.
> but they can't be compared to each other unless they're using the same kind of logic.
Says who? Your conventions? What if my "conventions" of logic say the can be compared if they're different systems of logic? You're imposing a "law" of "you can't compare when I say so."
I'm telling you that you can't know anything or say something is rational or irrational with conventions of logic.
I'm also pointing out your treating laws of logic like laws (yay! I commend you for treating them like laws), but you are coming from a worldview that doesn't allow for laws (boo! inconsistency!).
This is where materialists bow out because they don't want to dig too deeply into their presuppositions.
> I'm telling you that you can't know anything or say something is rational or irrational with conventions of logic.
Stawman, that point is not in dispute.
> but you are coming from a worldview that doesn't allow for laws (boo! inconsistency!).
No I'm not. Your notion that materialism doesn't allow logic is simply wrong. You don't know what materialism is and I'm tired of repeating myself on that point why you continue to skirt the issue and ignore that.
> This is where materialists bow out because they don't want to dig too deeply into their presuppositions.
No, they bow out because you're clearly irrational and unable to engage in meaningful conversation because you don't address points being made to you. You just ignore them and keep saying the same non-sense that's being challenged.
If this account of things were correct, then we would expect to find that less-religious (or specifically less-Christian) nations have less freedom. It doesn't look to me as if this is true; for instance, the nations of Scandinavia are distinctly less Christian than the US (they often have established churches, but the rate of actual religious belief and commitment in the population is low) and they seem no less free than the US; and some notoriously un-free societies have been explicitly Christian (e.g., Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile, Mussolini's Italy).
We would also expect to see correlations between freedom and Christian belief and affiliation within nations on longer timescales. For instance, in Europe the Middle Ages are generally thought of as particularly religious; was that a specially free period of history? It doesn't seem so.
But the OP was not talking about "religion" per se, he was saying that freedom is a natural result of following Christ, specifically following the words of Christ as found in the Bible.
Your example of the Middle Ages is a case in point: During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language (Latin). How could society develop an attitude towards freedom in such a climate of religious oppression?
> not talking about "religion" per se [...] following the words of Christ as found in the Bible
We're in some danger of getting no-true-Scotsmanned here, since it's by no means straightforward to determine who is and isn't actually "following the words of Christ as found in the Bible".
Still, let's consider Uganda, where being (actively) homosexual is now punishable by life imprisonment thanks largely to the activism of Christians following the words they find in the Bible. (Not specifically "the words of Christ", but actually that's a bit you just made up; what code4life said was "the new testament Biblical principles".) Now, for all I know you may think this is a good law, and I'm not going to try to change your mind if so -- but what it obviously isn't is an improvement in freedom.
Or consider the long and sad history of how Christians, following the principles they found in the Bible, have tried to prevent schoolteachers telling their pupils accurately about certain areas of science. Again, you might agree with the people who made the laws in question that, e.g., evolution is a damnable atheistic error, but these laws very plainly reduced people's freedom. (In more recent years, as a result of having one such measure after another struck down in the courts, antievolutionists have shifted tactics, and since roughly the 1990s their preferred legal measures haven't been particularly anti-freedom. But that's only because their attempts to get their way by impeding teachers' freedom stopped working.)
> During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language
I think that's a rather tendentious way of putting it. What happened, rather, was that Latin-as-vernacular largely died out but the prevailing Bible translations remained in Latin. Not a matter of scripture being taken away from the people, but of the people moving away from the language used for the scriptures. (And from written language in general; literacy was very low in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Providing vernacular bibles might not have done anyone much good.)
So, anyway, it's true that mediaeval people generally didn't have Bibles. But they did go to church, where those clergy were supposed to expound on doctrines derived from the Bible, and they did have a culture saturated with Christian ideas. And, actually, it's not even so clear that they didn't have vernacular Bible translations. Take a look here (apologies for the outrageously long Google Books link):
"To be sure, the Protestant Reformation did achieve a change in the way the Bible was read and the way it functioned within Christian spirituality, but this change was largely due to a long medieval tradition of lay access to biblical texts."
I enjoy the New American Standard Bible (NASB).
It's easy to read and is very similar to the King James Version (KJV). Others I know enjoy the New King James Version.
I recommend starting in the new testament and reading Matthew through Romans if you are a first time reader. Read those several times through and see what the Bible (the Word of God) has to offer!
Yes, bison now is both, reentrant, thread-safe and supports push parsing. I helped implement the push parser support many years ago with the help of the Bison development team.
A christian is someone that believes in the teachings of Jesus Christ, namely salvation and sanctification. We come to salvation by believing Jesus Christ is God and his teachings are absolute, and that he is the Word of God, the Bible. We come to sanctification by striving daily to know God more, which happens through the indwelling Holy Spirit we receive during salvation and happens by reading and applying the Word of God in our soul, and then outwardly through our body.
Being homosexual or lusting after a women in your mind are equally damning, but rejecting these thoughts and actions and leaving them at the Cross is the message of the Bible.
Lots, possibly most Christians, consider the bible to be a heavily edited political work containing aspects of revelation. Some Christians explicitly deny the bible as a historical work and even go as far as to refuse to base their beliefs on the idea that Jesus had to exist, Jefferson being a notable example. For my money, I am in agreement with him that Paul's stuff shouldn't be trusted as far as you could throw it, but then I am not a Christian.
To be fair, if you believe in evolution, thinking of things in terms of improvement is very subjective. Evolution isn't selecting for improvement, it's selecting for survival, which may or may not be correlated with your vision of improvement. Think of cockroaches.
From a christian perspective, the natural discontent stems from the fallen nature of man. You're worldly accomplishments will never be able to satisfy that discontentment, as the two areas are unrelated.
Nobody is saying that evolution is selecting for some nebulous sense of "improvement." Reproductive success leads to traits being passed on to successive generations, and general survival is merely one precondition to reproduction. The human impulse to jockey for status is a reproductive strategy.
To start a business, you really have to enjoy the product you are building enough to cover the work you don't want to do and enough to no longer do some things you enjoy doing in your life, as you may no longer have time for it.
Starting a real business is a challenge. I would suggest, if you do have an idea, try to build it. If you can build the idea, you might want to consider starting a business around it.