I have (and you probably do too) enough stuff under your kitchen sink and in your garage to cause unfathomable trajedies if you out your mind to it and were so inclined.

And yet the world is not a cavalcade of catastrophes.

Similarly, there are more guns than people around here. And yet people getting shot is a rare event confined to a few places with lots of other problems already present.

There is no problem. There are only gullible and/or power hungry control freaks in government.

Being in the firearms business without an FFL will make you a human doing illegal things. Even if you do it with a file and hand-crank drill.

The problem, as you may have guessed, is not that off-the-books firearms manufacturing is illegal. The problem is that the state is getting lazy and doesn't want to enforce its laws. It wants shortcuts, and consequences be damned.

The charitable explanation is that the people who comprise the state are also lazy. They therefore believe the designated scapegoat (phones, social media, ai, cnc machines) are indeed the source of their problems. Not cultural rot, not lax standards in schools, not anything that's hard to fix. So attack the easy target and all will be well.

The conciseness of C and terse C++.

The performance of the former. Perhaps by excising some aspects of the latter.

Introspection. Generics. Named function parameters (honestly zero impact on run time since this entirely solvable at compile time and no changes to abi required).

Curly braces and semicolons. Because I'm not writing code for 80 column punch cards and occasionally it is useful to place two statements onto one line for conciseness and readability.

Deterministic memory handling and bare metal access when needed.

Rust doesn't check very many of those boxes. Python checks almost none of them (though the seamless lists are quite pretty).

That's why I'm still writing C++ and see absolutely no reason to port my half a million lines of code to the new hotness of the day.

Star trek is not fundamentally "left wing".

In its glory days it had left-wing elements and rightwing elements. Starry-eyed communist utopia and downright nazi racialism. But it was fundamentally apolitical and not partisan. Not team red or team blue. Not even team human either. Just team hard work, perseverance, and optimism in the face of danger or of the unknown.

At its best it was good because it set you up to think interesting thoughts. It did not tell you which thoughts you must think.

Strange new worlds I genuinely enjoy watching. I liked the first two seasons of discovery as well. I thought the title sequence was an absolute work of art. But then they went really really dumb around season 3, and by the time they literally had a whole scene about whats-her-face whining about her pronouns In The 32nd Century! and other inward-looking teenage angst (as opposed to ya know...an optimistic outward-looking future of human growth and exploration), I just turned it off for good.

Colloqual "bounce" = irl "fail to get captured, and go around one more time, and probably die of resource depletion along the way.

What's that you say? Scapegoating some designated bogeyman is a smokescreen and a red herring? No one is immune to the dark side of human nature, even if they're on team blue or on team red? Liberty and self-rule require eternal vigilance against not only the enemy without, not only the enemy within, but also again the enemy within oneself?

Naw.

Blame the fox news/the billionaires/the iphones and the facebooks instead. Burn them at the stake and eternal paradise on earth is right around the corner. Pinky swear.

Only if someone bothers to read the article *and* understand it *and* care enough to call out the publication.

A lot of predicates there.

The guy who wrote The Americans was supposedly asked specifically when he joined the CIA after college if he was in it just for getting ideas for a writing career. He lied. Obviously.

End result? Nice yarn. Total science fiction with regards to the omnidisciplinary genius spy stuff, but a good way to scratch an itch for 80s nostalgia.

and has a lot of empty space...very lightweight.

That generation actually got to the moon 11 years after the first orbital launch.

The present generation...takes its sweet time getting things done because ooh shiny.

Officers in charge of these kinds of programs rotate on to a new assignment after 3 to 5 years. Contractors keep personnel on staff whose whimsical title is "project manager" but whose real job is to work the rotating cast of government program managers into keeping the program going.

In such an environment it is almost structurally impossible to contract smart for any program that takes more than a few years from start to finish.

They have a king and a quasi institutionalized class system. What do you expect?

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

I have to click through a half dozen popups to get anything done.

No surprises there.