People with real expertise would probably disagree or put it better, but:

We’ve had slavery in the America’s since about 1500. Neither England, France or Spain were a capitalistic society until sometime in the 18th or 19th century. They were feudal societies that later turned into mercantile societies.

My understanding is that the difference has to do with who can participate in markets, as well as whether there are markets. In feudal societies everything is down to the king. The king decides whether there are markets and what type of people may participate. The king issues charters to companies to allow people to act collectively. Colonial America was quasi-governmental, even if they called it “the Virginia Company”. It also took a royal writ to create.

As the industrial revolution went on we got to recognizable modern capitalism, but there was a mercantile stop off, where trade is recognized as good, but only within a country. External trade was viewed as harmful. The government had a much larger role in defining who could participate and what markets were allowed than it does today.

My understanding is a little shaky, though I’ll admit

As to your point about slaves, they are capital, and very expensive capital at that. I’m not sure I’d call any slave owning society capitalist though, because even with massive inequalities in a capitalist society, the lowest can still own things and trade things. Slaves can’t do that. Everything a slave has belongs to their master, everything a slave creates belongs to their master. A slave’s offspring belongs to their master. A slave’s ability to have offspring belongs to their master

As I clarified, I was referring to the statement that economic inequality was low, which is true if and only if you are comparing across uniform demographics. I made no statements regarding increased wages across the board.

Try to argue to the point instead of feeling butt-hurt that someone suggested there are structural inequalities that benefited white men more than anyone else.

Restrained capitalism seems to be better than command-economy socialism, as the latter has failed every time.

I think I found the source of our disagreement. It is often that people use the term capitalism to mean free market and private ownership. I mean it as a select few owning the means of production. The way Marx meant it. To me capitalism IS command and control.

If you look at most capitalist corporations, they are command and control. Tiny fiefdoms. I suspect when you say capitalism you mean private ownership and markets.

I guess I am using the term as it meant by the people who coined it. A derogatory term to hark back to feudal times.

In other words as you move from the spectrum of Capitalism->Socialism->Communism you move from command and control to democratic to social ownership.

This is why it is perfectly sane to me to call the Soviet Union state capitalism. Because the social relations are capitalist in nature (in other words, few own the means of production).

When you think communism you think command and control. When I think communism, I think everyone owning their production. When you think capitalism, you think markets and private ownership. When I think capitalism, I think command and control.

In other words, if you take the idea of capital ownership to the extreme, where everyone is their own company and own their own production, that’s communism to me. Oh and of course communism doesn’t even have money, because money is another command and control tool created by the state. And communism is stateless.

Side projects are great for learning and it’s perfectly understandable that, as they grow organically, maintenance becomes more and more of an overhead. That’s what’s happened with me - I like running my own stuff but the sysadmin overhead is so high that it’s taking all of the time I should be working on proper side projects.

Ansible is pretty quick to get started with and the tutorials are good. Be warned that some older content online doesn’t follow current good practise - some older options are deprecated, etc. Perfectly understandable, but I’d suggest reading the “Best Practises” guide before you get started seriously.

I suggest picking an ops / deployment / setup task that you at least kind of want to do anyway and learn Ansible by automating it as you go.

I still don’t sysadmin any of my own stuff, but I now have some familiarity with Ansible and have a set of playbooks for deploying a web-based RSS reader, setting up the services / accounts it depends on, and taking / restoring backups from it.

Pattern matching and related constructs generally eliminate the need to name it. However, I’d just call it uncons.

In Clojure, you can write (if-some [[head & tail] seq] …), but if I recall correctly, the underlying implementation still always uses first/next. Haskell fails better here with the colon/cons syntax in patterns, but trades a sequence abstraction for a concrete list type (at least without various extensions).

I’ll obviously let Church speak for himself here, but I my feeling is basically thus (very depressing read ahead):

The zeitgeist of the time is hopelessness, distraction, and greed. We are all, at some level or another, greedily trying to buy distractions from the hopeless nature of things.

At the risk of repeating platitudes, some observations: We use the iPhone, but pay no attention to the e-waste dumps and factory suicides. We inhabit Facebook, but try to ignore the massive surveillance it is predicated on. We praise Uber et al., but tacitly ignore the continued abuse of municipal laws. We espouse diversity, but only when it is applied to viewpoints we like. We enjoy fictional violence, but isolate ourselves ever-further from actual displays of force.

Simply put, we are all drifting further from the reality and impacts of our lifestyle decisions, and at least for people trained in systems thinking (e.g., developers) there is the undeniable slow creeping sensation on the back of the neck that things aren’t quite right, that the sums and figures don’t quite come out correct, and that sometime soon the music is going to stop and we’re all fucked. Those of us not occupied with academic pursuits and the makework of refurbishing the Javascript ecosystem, that is.

Knowing this, and knowing just how ruthless and brutal the system is about optimizing away things (read: people) that are extraneous to a particular economic objective, we make the rational decision and start trying to grab as much money as we can before we can’t anymore.

The obvious posing and fake advertising and frivolity of social media makes it even easier to see our fellow man as marks, makes it easier to justify extracting maximum revenue from them. Whether it’s the dolt retweeting everything Trump says, or the VC who cuts a check on anything which mentions ML or IoT, or just a dumb public official who needs to show their constituents that they are “investing in the future” is of no practical matter: there are just the people who have resources, the people that can become resources, and the people who know how to harvest resources. As developers, we think ourselves in the third category though we’re basically just the second.

I used to think that there was enough room on the bus for everyone, that we could elevate and enlighten and teach and move people (as a whole) forward. I’m increasingly of the opinion that there are simply the people driving the bus, the people under the bus, and extremely limited seating for folks that are neither.

There’s no immediate solution either, right?

Do you believe in your community, in the common good? Both candidates in the current election have basically disowned the other’s would-be voters. The legislature will merrily play chicken with budgets in order to score political points. Even the very notion of belonging to one’s country or civilization is under attack by various philosophies popular in educated circles!

How, how are we to believe in the greatness of the people and the goodness of man when we are constantly reminded of this? How are we to devote our efforts to holding up a tottering dam holding back chaos when that act is criticized by some, used as a cheap revenue source by others, and actively hindered by the rest of folks too stupid not to play with matches next to the piers?

We have an additional mokita: more than ever we individually are both more aware of our mortality and limitations and at the same time further isolated from them. War and famine are things that we see on Twitter and the news but which never really effect us. We can learn more than ever before about any given subject, and yet we are continually overshadowed by stories and articles about people who are either best in their field or just exceptionally good at advertising.

In such a situation, what is the value of your life? What is its purpose? What makes it special or desirable? Why bother? At a large enough scale and with good enough coverage, we’re all just Brownian noise in the lifestream–and that’s where we are today. There’s no point in being the best person in town at doing foo, because we all read about foo on the ‘net and know how far we’d have to go.

So, instead, maybe we can get enough money to paper over that existential void. Maybe we can buy enough things or influence to secure a place in history. Maybe this time we’ll pull it off…maybe.

“If it’s simply human nature then what is causing the change you describe in young people? If it’s not, then there must be a deeper problem.”

I threw a savant brain at the angle for years trying to figure it out. I eventually did come up with a model that explains it. Tried to find every work-around I could to change it. Ended up really depressed when I couldn’t find one permutation likely to work without straight-up revolution. It got to the point where I could predict what would happen with national events or elections at an abstract level. I originally thought it was emergent behavior but it’s increasingly clear the worst parts of what are happening are by design and emergent behavior within that design. Occasional outliers but the system the elites put in place is pretty air-tight.

It’s too complex to explain in one comment but I’ll give you a few key points.

1. It starts with capitalism at banking and industry levels. They realized certain practices would get them rich. One of those was screwing workers. The vast majority of people starting businesses are selfish enough to want to be very rich. They managed to use money to Congress and media presentation to voters to make sure vast majority of wealth produced by majority of workers went to tiny few with similar interests. They started forming monopolies using their vast capital. When that was busted up, they started forming oligopolies w/ cartel agreements to prevent competition. They get outrageous CEO compensation since the boards that keep that in check often have other CEO’s, founders, etc They’re all on each others' boards (“interlocking boards”) with emergent behavior of “you get me rich, I’ll get you rich.” They also pushed for patent and copyright to be strong to allow both selective monopolies plus prevent or financially drain competition. We’re already a plutocracy at this point where one cartel controls whole financial system plus others control most markets key for survival. Worse, the incentives say reduce cost/quality/safety while charging more.

2. Congress will save the day with laws “for the People,” right? Congress and Executive branch are corrupt so no. First, they need tons of money to get elected. A Presidency costs around $200 million these days. Congressional seat at least millions probably tens. That means only people that can run are rich people or those backed by them. Also, existing system lets current legislators attempt to filter out anyone less corrupt that bypasses that problem. The voters themselves are extremely superficial where character and voting/business history are mostly ignored in favor of whatever a candidate looks like, does in personal time, says during campaign, etc. What professional liars say >= what they do or did. (???) Once in Congress, they spend most of their time preparing for next election. They pay back contributors, mostly elites, with laws that benefit them at people’s expense. Most Congress has portfolios of stock in dirtiest companies. They also ensure votes by sending massive amounts of pork to their districts which is why they waste so much on “Defense” spending building shit we don’t need & broken welfare systems. Those are tied to millions of votes directly impacted by changes. All adds up to preserve the status quo.

3. Media will inform us so we change votes and overthrow the system, right? Media is a bunch of for-profit corporations whose business model is making money off adds by getting people to look at the screen as long as possible. They are not there to inform! It’s a business! Getting people’s attention meant they covered key stories, had important people on the air, etc. The also are run by elites who like the system as it is since they’re rich and powerful. Changes would impact them. So, they always practiced self-censorship where they collectively avoid topics or avenues of investigation that would lead to radical change while focusing on issues that appeal to each’s demographic with a mix of emotional responses. They’ll break veil of censorship if someone hits critical mass where they can’t be caught ignoring it. At that point, they either present it in a non-actionable way focusing on blame instead of solid response or start covering shock stories that distract people. This already worked way too well to point the corporate media is single greatest threat to American democracy in existence. Fox improved the model by basically turning up the bullshit to extreme levels with a format that focused on people fighting with each other, use of fake experts, tying message more to viewer, and getting more viewer involvement that doesn’t really do anything but feels like it does. Record-breaking profits and dominance on right-leaning side followed. Others copy their techniques now. You often can’t talk about a key issue for over a minute before host interrupts you or Americans tune out. So how can you change anything again? Go to another of those tens of thousands of stations that are all owned by the same 20+ for-profit corporations with interlocking boards? Good luck.

4. Our eduction system will help people figure it all out, right? I still haven’t read Gatto’s Underground History of Education to see if it’s legit or bullshit but the abstract I saw a while back seems true. It was elites like Rockafeller that started the system as industrialization kicked in where they needed tons of workers smart enough to do the shit jobs they were creating that made elites rich. As Carlin said, “smart enough to operate the machines but not smart enough to” know how much they were being screwed. The education system dictated what people would learn at what pace with promises of them making millions over time if they followed it plus severe punishments for those that didn’t. The process itself combined rote memorization of material from authority figures, rigid routines, punishment of dissent, and simple metrics to assess skill. Smart people had to teach themselves shit constantly outside of school plus fight with educators over being taught ineffective methods “because it’s required by the bosses.” Basically like working in a factory or big corporation. It’s not education people: it’s conditioning humans like dogs with bare minimum in education. No wonder elites sent their own children to expensive private schools, got them tutors, and brought them along to see how they did business at executive level. That class gets educated where I’m still fighting to learn some aspects of what the C-level people do.

There’s also surveillance/police state, what the U.S. military actually does, systematic suppression of dissent from voting rights to business, and so on. However, the above combined with human nature are all that’s necessary for a successful plutocracy. Human nature is herd-minded, terrible at long-term risks, focuses on here/now presented to our faces, prefers easy battles to hard ones, wants to maximize individual gain in local context, and has trouble being vigilant. The education and media combine to create a mental maze for average person where they go in the directions that are safe for the system. Some will fight it in ineffective ways while others will defend it thinking it benefits them. Some will make themselves and elite investors rich improving something, most will expand on the profits of incumbent elites, some break away from the system without achieving critical mass to affect it, and rest fall through the cracks. Capital almost entirely in rich’s hands combined with corrupt, capitalist Congress reinforcing system in law means the battle will always be uphill. Media continues to suppress key issues, like how most problems are due to Congressional bribes, but will endlessly repeat or generate frivilous stories that maximize their revenue. Americans stay fighting with each other in the maze instead of the elites that built it. Most successful, reality-distortion field I’ve ever seen.

So, there it is in a nutshell. I have no hope of fixing it. The system is too robust after the decades they spend working on it. There’s a small chance that a solution can happen involving Internet media if the both the bait messages and the presented solutions are ultra-simple. The problem and solution have to be simple with candidates and legislation ready to go. They have to be willing to vote people out of office. The source(s) can’t make one mistake in accuracy plus need several tuned to different demographics all pushing same thing from different perspectives. There’s a chance that several classes of problems could be knocked out that way. Most aren’t using this strategy, though. The few that are use it on the wrong messages that just add to lower classes fighting each other.

Most people are indeed in an environment where they can use either c99 or c11, but since c11 is not quite a superset of c99, c89 seems to have retained a certain role in C programmers' mental models as the core of C. The real working core today could in practice be a bit bigger, essentially c89 plus those features that were not in c89, but are in both of c99 and c11. But that starts getting more complex to think about! So if you want your stuff to compile on both c99 and c11 compilers, just sticking to c89 is one solution, and probably the simplest one if you already knew c89.

I personally wrote mostly c99 in the early 2000s, but one of the specific features I used most, variable-length arrays [1], was taken back out of c11! (Well, demoted to an optional feature.)

[1] Perhaps better called runtime-length arrays. They aren’t variable in the sense of resizable, just with size not specified at compile-time; usually it’s known instead at function-entry time.

Because for most development purposes the interface used when building up strings is more important than the performance. And StringBuilders are a common and well understood interface for building up strings incrementally.