This is our place and our time and our life, and we should be enjoying it. But are we? Look in from outside; ask yourself… Just what are we doing?
...
Ah, the contempt of it. The glut of contempt we seem to have achieved. Our own disguised contempt for “primitives,” the contempt of those who left the Culture when war was declared for those who chose to fight the Idirans; the contempt so many of our own people feel for Special Circumstances… the contempt we all guess the Minds must feel for us… and elsewhere; the Idirans’ contempt for us, all of us humans; and human contempt for Changers. A federated disgust, a galaxy of scorn. Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.
---Consider Phlebas
Python programmer
A Python programmer enters a bar
He orders a glass of soy milk
The bartender returns 2 hours later
“Sorry mate, the soy machine is written in Python, it’s still creating a virtual environment and resolving 47 conflicting package versions…”
“Take your time, I value ‘it works on my machine’ and the massive ecosystem over reproducible builds”
JavaScript programmer
A JavaScript programmer enters a bar
He orders a glass of soy milk
The bartender returns 2 hours later
“Sorry mate, the soy machine is written in JavaScript, node_modules is still installing and we hit a peer dependency conflict with left-pad 2.0…”
“Take your time, I value having a package for literally everything over having a small dependency tree”
Java programmer
A Java programmer enters a bar
He orders a glass of soy milk
The bartender returns 2 hours later
“Sorry mate, the soy machine is written in Java, it’s still initializing the Spring context, wiring up 14 beans, and waiting for the JVM to finish warming up…”
“Take your time, I value enterprise-grade patterns and type safety over startup speed”
C++ programmer
A C++ programmer enters a bar
He orders a glass of soy milk
The bartender returns 2 hours later
“Sorry mate, the soy machine is written in C++, it’s still compiling all the template specializations for different milk temperatures and fat percentages…”
“Take your time, I value zero-cost abstractions and maximum performance over fast compilation”
Haskell programmer
A Haskell programmer enters a bar
He orders a glass of soy milk
The bartender returns 2 hours later
“Sorry mate, I’m still figuring out which monad transformer stack lets me serve soy milk without introducing side effects or breaking referential transparency…”
“Take your time, I value mathematical purity and correctness over actually getting the drink”
@pegobry_en Illegals or people on green cards/work visas , makes some sense.. but birth tourism from Russia/China is just obnoxious. That’s really where morals kick in. You don’t even have the decency to invest yourself into the USA , just use it like a cheap whore.
Birthright citizenship does come with duties, one is to report taxes. If those people’s tax burden is lower than in the USA , they are required to pay the difference to the IRS. Does this start with 18?
I assume, not reporting the taxes incurs penalties and eventual denaturalization ( denaturalization at least should be possible for anchor babies? Right? )
So you get a nice global surveillance arm for free ( even generating income for the USA, since finances are optimal for surveillance data ).
Do an audit for be current stock of the anchor babies ( how many millions are this currently , collected over the years ) and weed out the ones breaking the requirements at least and start hitting them with duties.. don’t focus on their privileges..
@grok what do you think?