Many people have argued for a long time for the complete decriminalization of all drugs. And there are many valid reasons to advocate for such a world. Not the least of which is that a country that fancies itself the "land of the free" but harshly polices and punishes people for executing their right to bodily autonomy in ways that don't directly impact others, is immensely hypocritical and damaging to the fantasy of individual freedom that largely animates this society.
The "criminalize drugs" meme is losing ground not because we're falling down a slippery slope, but because the bodily autonomy and individual freedom meme is proving to be more powerful and taking ground by force.
It's not a slippery slope.
It's a memetic war, and the stronger meme is gaining ground step by step through constant, brutal battles.
Drugs have been used as tool by the elites to control the masses for years, since at least the opium wars. Whereas religion was once the opium of the people, now opium will be the opium of the people, as Huxley intended.
Powerful people will always use whatever tools are available to control and manipulate the masses, including drugs, religion, media, and outright violence when necessary.
Another thing powerful people use to control the masses is criminal law. Criminal drug laws have now been used by the rich and powerful for almost a century to stomp on the face of marginalized groups and societies while giving their own foul and weak progeny and local society a pass.
This is what's coming to an end, and you are not on the side that history will look kindly on if you resist this change.
However, if you've done your own moral math and determined criminalizing drugs to be a net moral good, then please continue the fight, because we all must fight for what we think is right, even in the face of seemingly inevitable defeat.
I mean, they’re not wrong! They’re expensive ($300k each 2022 inflation adjusted in the US, from 0-18), they age you faster, and there is no guarantee the experience is worth it. They also destroy relationship satisfaction in the early years. Half of all annual pregnancies both domestic to the US and internationally are unintended.
I have kids and attempt to convince those who ask me about my experience not to have them. It is not for the faint of heart.
You can easily adjust your spending by an order of magnitude either direction.
> they age you faster
Yeah, I'm sure you'd have been looking great at 60 if not for those damned kids.
> there is no guarantee the experience is worth it
Satisfying the primary evolutionary optimization criterion seems overwhelmingly likely to be worth it.
> They also destroy relationship satisfaction in the early years
What do you think the effect on relationship satisfaction will be in later years to have lost your youth in any case, but also to be in a sterile relationship with no connection to the future?
> It is not for the faint of heart.
Almost anyone can handle it. Nutrient-deprived illiterate cavemen have been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years without much issue - anyone doing it today is probably fine.
“Life is going to suck anyway, might as well drag others along for the ride” is not a philosophy worth having imho.
Suffering is a choice I suppose, just go into it with both eyes open. That’s my thesis. You can have a great life without having kids. Unpartnered older childfree women are one of the happiest cohorts, for example.
> Life is going to suck anyway, might as well drag others along for the ride
How in the world did you get that from anything I said?
I can't pick out any part of my comment that could be construed to mean that.
Marginal life is (as of now) more or less strictly positive EV, as is the expected internalized and externalized outcome of most of the people on this site having kids.
> Unpartnered older childfree women are one of the happiest cohorts
I really really doubt this is the case. Typically for sociology research, there are tons of papers claiming strong effect sizes of child-rearing on life satisfaction in both directions. However, older women are by far the subpopulation most dependent on psychoactive drugs such as antidepressants. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db377.htm I unfortunately can't find any studies that break down antidepressant use rates by parental status at all, or a fortiori by age/marriage/parental status individually.
I’ve tried that and it didn’t work reliably for me. The jet brains runtime release works but it’s a bear to figure out which download to use.
Regardless, it’s ridiculous that at this point Java doesn’t have full hotswap. All the hooks are there (as is apparent from the error messages when a hotswap fails) and the dcevm is being maintained by jetbrains employees. It needs an internal champion at oracle/sun.
What should happen when you remove an existing field, remove a method already used, change its initial value, etc? You will quickly get some incorrect state by blind hot swapping, and it is not trivial to do in a mutable object graph.
Clojure (and other lisps) can do it well because their scope of changes can be really small.
Nonetheless, method hot-swap is well-defined and is implemented by OpenJDK.
Dcevm handles all those reasonably well. The current version doesn’t support changing super classes but the old version did. This is in dev mode so it doesn’t need to be perfect, just right enough most of the time.
> The biggest thing Java is missing is full hot swap
The biggest thing missing in Java is an answer for the billion-dollar mistake. Real world Java is plagued by NPEs because a lot of Java is written by low caliber programmers. Java + functional error handling would be a monumental improvement.
Can't really blame Java for that, though - if everybody standardized on, say, Haskell (or whatever we might agree is the "gold standard" for programming), the low caliber programmers would find a way to do something stupid in it, too. The only way to get around low caliber programmers is to raise the standard, but any suggestion of raising (or even setting) a standard for programming invites accusations of "gatekeeping" (a gate that really, really, really ought to be kept).
Hmm. Can't I? I know why Sun made Java. They wanted a platform to develop applications that didn't require the skill of a competent C++ programmer. They were targeting lower caliber coders.
I'm a pragmatist; yes, Java programmers would still find escapes, but they'd do it less and so the net number of flaws would be smaller. As jayd16 points out, there is a pragmatic way to deal with this; provide a compiler mode that eliminates null dereferences and rework the standard library to accommodate this. Simple and obvious. Afterwards you can throw the switch on whatever code your facing and you'll know if you're dealing with crap or not.
It doesn't fully solve the problem, but @lombok.NonNull helps a lot. It makes it clear which properties shouldn't be null, and catches NPEs closer to the source. Incidentally, lombok in general does wonders for boilerplate reduction.
Which @NonNull? There's javax.validation.constraints.NotNull, org.springframework.lang.NonNull, org.checkerframework.checker.nullness.qual.NonNull, org.jetbrains.annotations.NotNull, android.support.annotation.NonNull and a bunch of others[1]. The proliferation of Not|NonNull is evidence that I'm right, no matter how hard I get downed on HN.
I didn't say it wasn't a problem - if I could wave a magic wand and get rid of the concept of null in Java I would. That isn't what we're discussing though - you said, "The biggest thing missing in Java is an answer for the billion-dollar mistake [- NPEs]". I've provided what I consider to be at least a partial answer. If you care about avoiding NPEs in Java, it's a pretty good solution.
Realistically, null is so fundamental to the Java language that removing it would arguably result in a different language entirely. Certainly all existing java codebases would have to be refactored. The same goes for exceptions. That's obviously not an option when one of your primary selling points is backwards compatibility, so I'm not really sure what kind of solution you're looking for here.
The answer to your SO link notwithstanding, I would argue the @lombok.NonNull is at least one of the best options, as it actually generates a null check that is executed at runtime. This makes it more powerful than most of the other solutions.
> Realistically, null is so fundamental to the Java language that removing it would...
Again, as jayd16 pointed out a solution has been retrofitted to C#, Java's great nemesis. I don't accept the argument that this is somehow infeasible. Just make null assignments (including potential ones coming from libraries) an error and allow this feature to be scoped to your source files. Eventually the practice becomes ubiquitous. It's been done again and again in many languages and their various 'strict' modes.
The only actual problem here is that Java language developers aren't feeling sufficient pressure to address it. They should, but they're not, and that's sad. That sort of sadness is a common theme with Java.
While this could be solved by introducing one into the standard lib, it is not that big of a problem in practice as nullability checkers understand all of these annotations.
Agree, love that tool. Unfortunately it does not fully support Java 8, and that seems unlikely to change. I have never used it on a large project, I don’t think that compile times are good.
You could always try C#. They have a non-null compile mode where variables are non-nullable by default. They did the work to mark up core libraries and also have some pragmatic handling of olde nullable calls in 3rd party libraries.
The idea these messages are “gone” is ridiculous. They are in plenty of intelligence databases. If they don’t come out it’s because the powers that be don’t want them out.
This; guessing part of the reason they won’t ask the alphabet boys for them is because they don’t want the public to really understand that “collection” just means “searched for” information that they’re storing for everyone.
