Ok, let’s indulge in your racist rhetoric a little bit. What you’re essentially claiming is that violent crime will go up if there are more immigrants. However, if you look at actual data, you’ll see that the number of violent crimes per capita for undocumented immigrants is much, much lower than for citizens. Reality just doesn’t line up with your BS. Facts don’t care about your feelings.

Fearmongerers be like…

Trafficked women and children be like… HELP

Drug couriers be like… THANKS

Terrorists be like…EASY

So how did the general strike go?

Yes this is correct, we’re in complete agreement there. The comment I was responding to worded it vaguely though, which made it sound like you cannot get a divorce because you have a sexless marriage. It made it sound like people were being forcibly kept married, which is false. You can get divorced because it’s Tuesday, or because the moon is in retroflux. Holding your spouse responsible for those things is a different story, however.

For reference here’s the part of the comment I replied to:

Should a person not be allowed to divorce if they fell out of love with their partner, ergo they turned out to have less or no more sex?

Emphasis mine.

Should a person not be allowed to divorce if they fell out of love with their partner, ergo they turned out to have less or no more sex?

They absolutely should, and they will still be able to, nothing’s changed there.

Quickest way to get a test suite so tightly coupled to structure rather than behavior that even just looking at the tests wrong makes them fail. But technically you do get test coverage I guess. Goodhart’s law in action.

The moderate wing of fascism in action.

since they can use things like sick/vacation days conveniently timed right

American workers live in such a different world. Not once in my 34 years on earth would it have occurred to me to go on sick leave or spend one of my holidays on strike. Absolutely insane.

Every big change is ultimately just a series of small changes. It takes skill and engineering chops to be able to break up big ideas into small steps with quick feedback loops, but it can be done. Usually worth the effort too.

Unfortunately, often that’s a complex idea so it can be somewhere on the order of an hour before they stop coding and try compiling.

Maybe I’ve been lucky with the people I got to work with so far (and I definitely am), but I know of no professional software engineer that would voluntarily subject themselves to such a long feedback loop. I guess some of the juniors try to work this way sometimes, but they learn fairly quickly not to. The best ones I know work incrementally. Small change, run, small change run, and so on.

People still do that?

This is such a dumb argument to make. “Worse problems exist, so let’s not do anything about this one”. Who did you think you’d convince by writing all this out? What a waste of time.

So, I’m not interested in being a Debbie Debater here, and I’m absolutely not claiming that you’re wrong, but I think two of the three sources you give don’t really pass my standard for reliable.

The first one doesn’t quite pass the vibe check for me. When I go to the home page, the top articles are about “the five greatest russian erotic films” and “7 budding russian models”. It just doesn’t scream “impartial scientific article” to me.

The Christian Science Monitor one is from a researcher from radio liberty research. What I read is that this place was founded and funded by the CIA with the explicit purpose of broadcasting propaganda into the east bloc. To me, I’m about as likely to trust an article from this source as I am to trust an article about homelessness in South Korea coming from a think tank funded by North Korea, called the “Proletarian Empowerment Institute” or whatever.

One thing I can find plenty of impartial sources on is that it’s hard to find reliable data on homelessness from the USSR. But to go and trust some less than credible sources for a lack of alternatives is pure lamp post bias.

I don’t have a dog in this fight, and I’m not saying you’re wrong. All I’m saying is that the sources you cite don’t pass my personal smell test, and I still feel agnostic on whether or not homelessness rates in the USSR were better or worse than in the US in the 80s.

As an aside, it’s really embarrassing, but I don’t know where I got the 0.01% figure from. A second google search seems to suggest a range of 600,000 to 2,000,000 out of 247,000,000 so something closer to 0.0025%–0.08%. These figures I am more likely to trust, because the research climate for social sciences in the US was a bit freeer than in the USSR. For me personally, it doesn’t really affect whether or not I believe that the homelessness rate in the USSR was higher or lower than in the US because I still feel like I’m pretty much in the dark on the former. But maybe for you these figures help you sharpen your beliefs, so I figured I’d share them.

What was their homelessness rate in the 1980s? I’ve looked for 5 minutes and have not been able to find anything. In the US it was 0.01%.

Yes I was being sarcastic, and I should’ve made that clearer. I know of no other way of dealing with the smug sanctimonious attitude of those in rich peaceful countries demanding that the oppressed turn the other cheek because “violence bad”. It’s this bizarre combination of smugness, ignorance of history, and effective advocacy in favor of the oppressor that I really, really, cannot stand.

I’m a simple man; I see slop, I press the down arrow and block the poster.

This is silly. Everyone knows, historically, you stop opressors by asking nicely. Maybe go into the street in a funny costume or something, organize a singalong. Violence is what the baddies do.

Famously, the human rights gained by movements using violent tactics, such as the abolitionists, suffragettes, the civil rights movement, the ANC, were all very short-lived. Hollow victories, all.

Many of these folks are people that lost their plantation or were no longer allowed to be landlords because of communism. I feel like they have an inkling what communism is about. If all you are is a parasite, and communism weeds you out, you’re right to dislike communism, and the rest of the world is right to dislike you.

That is indeed possible. But it happens not to be both.