When did C add standard library functions for Vecs and HashMaps? You're putting words in his mouth, no one claimed C lacked "robust, debugged standard library functions". It's no secret that the C standard library lacks implementations of a variety of things that programmers use on a daily basis.
You're right, it would be a shame if the police had to face any sort of retaliation for blowing up people's houses. If we ban guns they can blow up everyone's house without fear!
Do the police face any retaliation from blowing up houses through guns? Is there any way to retaliate police violence without getting the death penalty?
No, it does not, its exactly the other way around. English Rule protects the innocent, who did not commit a crime, as they'll eventually win the case.
American Rule protects the rich (and those in power, such as police, public prosecutor, etc), as it allows them to bully the poor who can't afford a lawyer, or lose so much money that their interests are harmed. A clear example of that is patent trolls.
The rich can afford in either system, but the poor can only afford in English Rule. It should not be about poor vs rich but about truth (ie. guilty vs innocent).
How does loser-pays protect the poor? As noted above, unless you have significant resources, bringing suit against a large corporate entity is extremely risky, as you could get stuck paying for their army of lawyers, paralegals, and investigators.
In the US system, a poor person can bring suit, using a lawyer working on contingency, and not fear for being stuck should they lose.
Your argument seems to hinge on the "correct" party always winning, but that's far from the case.
With loser pays, bringing a suit is risky (with the risk depending on the risk of losing the suit).
With the US system, there is no way to get justice in many cases, even when you're obviously right, because the (non-recoverable) legal costs exceed the amount by which you have been wronged (and the opponent knows that).
This is IMO part of the problem with common law: the judge rarely inquires into matters before them, instead relying on arguments presented by lawyers, so the party which can afford better lawyers tends to win.
In continental law, judges role is more like an investigator; his/hers role is to establish the facts of the case and to apply the provisions of the code. They are the ones questioning witnesses.
If you can't afford an attorney, you can get one appointed, it is like that in every system AFAIK.
> Your argument seems to hinge on the "correct" party always winning, but that's far from the case.
Of course it does.
If the correct party does not usually win (with a few exceptions, being rounding errors) then your legal system, and democracy, is indeed very much broken.
If the police bust someone for murder, and this person gets sued, gets a fair trial, and gets incarcerated in jail for murder we, civilians/voters, must be able to assume that the system worked correctly. If this is not the case, if it is "normal" (too high percentage) innocent people get behind bars, that is a high priority problem. There's always going to be false positives, sure, but in general we must be able to assume one is a true positive.
Now, in English law the poor could sue, and win, if they're in the right. In American law, they can't afford a lawsuit. If they get sued for whatever, they'll be more likely to settle, without being on the good end of the stick. I can only define that as class justice.
There are limits to the claims, btw [1] [2]. Also, the amounts have to be reasonable.
Also, I believe @xyzal is correct in describing the difference between civil and common law. The problem you described is much less of a problem in civil law.
If you can't afford an attorney, you can get one appointed,
In the US, that only applies to indigent defendants in criminal cases. It does not apply to anybody with any semblance of financial stability and does not apply to anybody in civil cases.
I used to work in litigation support and something that stuck in my mind was an article some years ago in a trade magazine about how a new trend in venture capital from the UK was funding American lawsuits.
I always think of that when someone is sneering at the American legal system or blaming Americans for everything they interact with globally.
As far as I know, there is no way to legally verify that an animal is a service animal. I remember when I worked as a bus driver we were extremely limited (legally) in the questions we could ask, basically just "Is it a service animal?". It would be very easy to lie although I never had problems with untrained dogs.
The amount of "emotional support animals" at the local university is pretty ridiculous as well. I'm pretty sure students just lie so they can have a dog while they live in dorms.
Firefox's spellchecking is just generally awful, even for English. It fails to recognize even basic words such as 'surveil' with the closest suggestion being 'survive'. I've found several other words I wanted to use that weren't found too. I have spellcheck off by default but when I write something long I do a quick check at the end so I don't normally notice this.
Firefox is by far my least favorite piece of software that I regularly use and I've considered throwing my computer out the window because of it.
I think you need to install a new or different dictionary. It’s dumb, but that’s how it works - spellcheck dictionaries are provided on the Mozilla extension store. You could try a new one.
There is something seriously wrong with Firefox if the default spellcheck dictionary is so bad that I might need to install a different one, especially for the English language. Hell they should just be able to merge theirs with Chromium's. Regardless, as I said I don't normally use spellcheck and I trust my own judgement over the computer's so it isn't a big deal for me.
I wouldn't act like you're better than politicians when your "expertise" is based on a documentary. My experience is that factory work is not dangerous[1] and companies try to eliminate any danger if it's brought up because any OSHA/medical costs are very expensive. My experience is also that the work is pretty easy. It can be boring but so are most programming jobs. I don't understand how writing CRUD day after day isn't as boring as working in a factory.
As for whether it is something that should be done or not: why should programming be done? How do most apps benefit the average person. I'm willing to argue that FAANG companies have been detrimental to society.
I've also been well-payed at the factories I work at, but $20/hr in rural Iowa goes way further than in LA or wherever. There were quite a few people who had moved from cities to work where I was at.
The idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are. A lot of people were worried that long-term our jobs would be automated or moved to Mexico.
[1] This may depend on what is being done and more importantly on the age of the company.
I don't know why you're getting so defensive as I'm simply providing an anecdote from a documentary I just watched. I'm happy that your experience at the factory wasn't dangerous. In the documentary some of the workers suffered serious injurious, and many were justifiably greatly concerned with the safety of their working conditions. Working any hard labor job like construction is extremely grueling and involves coming home sore everyday in a way that no office job entails. Meanwhile the worst I've ever had to deal with as a software engineer is avoiding carpel tunnel and eye strain.
Great, if you like working in a factory, then all the power to you. Personally I'd probably be contemplating suicide if I had to work on an assembly line in a work environment similar to how the film portrayed the factory in China, working 12 hour days with only 4 days off per month for crap money.
I never claimed that all programming benefits society.
> the idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are
The fact that you'd write such a dumb baseless insulting comment shows how out of touch you are. Since you didn't provide an argument, I'm not going to waste my time trying to decipher whatever your reasoning was and respond to it. Also it doesn't even really matter if it's a good or bad thing because it's happening, and there's nothing you can do to stop it (unless you're suggesting some kind of ludditism movement of breaking machines for the sake of preserving jobs, which is just flat out stupid).
> The idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are.
That's such a ridiculous statement for someone on HN. If we were to believe such a thing, why would you want to advance at all, if not for removing/reducing the work load imposed on people, or, equivalently, improving productivity per working hour?
I'm going to call bullshit on that. Federal minimum wage is over $1000 per month at full time and I've seen 2br in my county for $550+utilities. I don't disagree with your general point but that report did a piss-poor job. I suspect they only looked in urban areas.
Unlikely, it will just eliminate the "easy" jobs. Just look at writing, mass literacy surely eliminated many jobs but lawyers are still quite well compensated. Another area is mathematics with actuaries.
Democratization of computing will lead to greater stratification of programming jobs. The "Excel Programmer" won't exist being supplanted by the "Office Drone" whereas the "Distributed Systems Engineer" (or whatever) will keep on going.
Ops is getting commoditized through no-code/IaaS-turnkey solutions -- not there yet but I can see what is hard now, becoming easy for 80% of a business needs.
This isn't a modern problem. If you read Thucydides you'll find that cities were often betrayed by a small, radicalized percentage of the civilian population hiding in plain sight. Their solution was sometimes to kill all of the men and enslave the women and children. Obviously this wouldn't fly today, but I imagine that a nation like China might simply surveil everyone, sending anyone suspicious to concentration camps. That seems like effectively the same win condition; making it effectively impossible to resist.
