Children are not typically known for sitting quietly in a room alone. Blaise Pascal himself was unmarried and childless, and died at the relatively young age of 39.
I actually don't think this is true. I do think that most programming errors are type errors, in the broader sense of one part of a system making one set of assumptions about the properties of some data, that aren't shared by another part of the system; and that would've been caught automatically by sufficiently sophisticated static correctness checking. I do not think that Rust has a maximally sophisticated type system (nor is it trying to), and while this is reasonable for Rust as a project to decide, I do expect that there will be languages in the future that do more complex things with type systems that might supplant Rust in some domains.
The Cloudflare incident was caused by a confluence of factors, of which code written in Rust was only one. I actually think that Rust code worked reasonably well given the other parts of the system that failed - a developer used unwrap() to immediately crash instead of handling an error condition they thought would never happen; when that error condition did happen the Rust program crashed immediately exactly as expected; and if Cloudflare decided that they wanted to ban not handling an error like this in their codebase, it's a pretty easy thing to lint for with automatic tooling.
Why do you think that solar+battery technology or MRNA vaccines haven't been written about in excited, hype-filled ways? If a technology is successful, then looking at past accounts of that technology and why it will change the world don't come across to you reading it now as hype, they come across as a description of something normal about the world.
And why wouldn't this European equivalent do something that a lot of people in Europe dislike too, in the future? The entire model of large cloud companies is bad.
This is precisely why I don't care very much about accusations that there's big money in politics. Of course there is - there's huge numbers of people and institutions with money, using that money to advocate for the political change they want to see, and an important strategy for doing this involves promulgating information that they think is favorable to their cause. Everyone is doing this all the time.
Nonetheless, an individual citizen still has to support some political cause (even if you are completely politically disinterested, there are multiple factions claiming that your inaction is tantamount to support for their opponents). Whatever information about the world you think is true, or whatever political cause you think is in your interests, someone else can point to a monied interest who supports similar things. There's no way to use the absence of big money as a heuristic for what political causes are good or bad for you to support.
What specific educational test would you like to see for someone to be legally eligible to vote in some jurisdiction? SAT score higher than a certain threshold (what specific threshold?). What if huge numbers of people cheat on the test in order to be able to legally vote? What if instead the educational criteria is a degree from some credited educational institution? Who decides what institutions will be authorized to grant people the right to vote or not? What if some authorities within those educational institutions believe in universal suffrage and so make sure to give suffrage-granting degrees to literally everyone who sets foot in their institution, regardless of their academic performance? (During the Vietnam War in the US many college professors gave passing grades to all males in their classes, in order to allow them to keep their student draft deferments, to try to prevent them from being drafted into the US military to fight in Vietnam).
There's a set of similar questions one could ask about exactly how you implement a ban on "voting yourself other people's stuff", in an adversarial political system where everyone has a different idea of what that means and is motivated to use whatever constitutional framework exists to ensure that their idea gets structurally advantaged.
I'm not saying you have to have a certain level of education to vote, I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.
Voting yourself other people's stuff would be that the safety net is bare minimum to keep people who are going through unexpected issues alive. But no one gets to live in the social safety net. No one who is receiving these kinds of benefits from the government should expect name brand anything, or to even be able to choose what food to eat, or to travel, or even pick who you socialize with. If you want to eat steak, you have to be a net producer. If you want name brand clothing, be a net producer. If you want to go to the beach, be a net producer.
Everyone who should pay some amount of tax, and anytime there is an increase in government spending, that amount that they are taxed should go up. If there is a decrease in government spending, it can go down. But everyone pays something. People need to have skin in the game. The US's current situation where nearly half the country are not net tax payers is not sustainable. Anything that can't go on forever, won't. So the country should ease into better situation, where the country is a nation of producers and not a nation of consumers, instead of hitting a brick wall where suddenly your ration of beans just stop.
> I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.
Having a failure of parental upbringing and education system causing someone to be incarcerated seems cruel. Should a child who ran away from home & school to avoid family abuse be incarcerated? There are so many current systems of society (education, police, disability, etc) that have failures at the margin that adding incarceration seems over the top.
Plenty of illiterate people manage to stay out of jail, you’re implying that you weren’t suggesting literacy tests for voting, so I’ll just admit to being at a loss as to your point. But if you care to take another whack at how you would suggest “we ban ill educated people”, I’m all ears.
I am not attempting to describe the world. I am trying to define the expectations we should have of the citizens of our polity. It has nothing to do with illiterate people manage not to commit crimes. I am saying that before we decide to get "big money" out of politics or we let people vote for the seven people who promise them the most shit, we should decided to put people who chose not to acquire basic skills that any human within standard deviation of average intelligence can acquire, when given 12 years of free education, into jail. It literally is not a literacy test for voting. It's an "are you a lazy piece of shit who is going to drag all of society down" policy.
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