Blazinghand

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1324.html

The Freedom Caucus-led attack on earmarks had nothing to do with corruption — Mick Mulvaney, Ron DeSantis, and Mark Meadows were founding members — and everything to do with the fact that the Freedom Caucus doesn’t want the government to do anything but cut taxes for the upper class and borrow money to funnel to the Pentagon.

For legislators who actually want to govern, this is good news:

The House Appropriations Committee is preparing to restore a limited version of earmarks, which give lawmakers power to direct spending to their districts to pay for special projects.

Why it matters: A series of scandals involving members in both parties prompted a moratorium on earmarks in 2011. But Democrats argue it’s worth the risk to bring them back because earmarks would increase their leverage to pass critical legislation with a narrow majority, especially infrastructure and spending bills.

• Plus, Democrats expect Republicans will join in the earmarks push once it’s clear directed spending is back.
• There’s already evidence that some are getting on board. “As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, I believe there is a time and a place for congressionally directed appropriations that are guided by a set of specific parameters,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told Axios in a statement.

In a briefing with the Democratic caucus Friday morning, House Appropriations Committee chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) laid out some of the new guardrails to avoid a repeat of past scandals…

Make earmarks great again!

Hey everyone, Reecius here to continue on with my NOVA Open tournament report featuring my pure Ultramarines army which made it to the top bracket and 15th place overall! You can read part 1 of this series where I explain how my list works, here. My first game of the event was in the invitational […]

It’s crunch time, folks.

You can do this! You still have time. I recommend you write for 20 minutes a day.

I know this isn’t writing advice, but I hope to have some for you soon. In the meantime, relax, put on your favourite playlist, and write.

I have total faith in you.

I just watched the eight-episode third series of the British detective drama Broadchurch and it is excellent, maintaining and even exceeding the standard set by the first two seasons. The third series takes place three years after the second one and features the return of detectives Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) […]

The incident took place a week after four consecutive days flying near U.S. territory.

Whose jobs will robots actually take?

I live somewhere where I can be killed or imprisoned and I have almost no civil rights, and while in other countries atheists have it better they are oppressed almost everywhere, but the best solution is to not fight back, to not express our opinions in a voice that might disturb the delicate sensibilities of religious people, but to service them and to please them into tolerating us. The burden of responsibility is on the atheist to stop being unpleasant, not on the person who is responsible for the actual oppression. That is absurd and offensive. The moral burden of oppression is on the oppressor, and trivializing and dismissing the hardships of atheists like this is absolutely absurd.

Jason Brennan reports:

Commodification is a hot topic in recent philosophy. There’s a limitless market for books about the limits of markets. The question: Are there some things which you permissibly may possess, use, and give away, but which are wrong to buy and sell? Most authors who write about this say yes. Peter Jaworski and I say no. There are no inherent limits to markets. Everything you may give away you may sell, and everything you may take for free you may buy. We defend that thesis in our book Markets without Limits, which will be published by Routledge Press, most likely in late 2015 or early 2016. As of now, we have a completed first draft.

We plan to commodify the book itself. We will sell acknowledgements in the preface of the book.

There is more information here.  I thank Michael Wiebe for a relevant pointer.

By Vasudev Ram



I came across this article by Peter Norvig:

Design Patterns in Dynamic Languages

(Peter Norvig is Director of Search at Google and a highly accomplished computer scientist.)

Haven't read the article fully yet, but scanned it a bit, and one line in particular interested me:

"A variable can have a type as a value"

That line is on the page with the heading: "First-Class Dynamic Types"

So I thought of checking this in Python - that section of the article seems to be about Lisp and Dylan (the programming language)).

Here's some code I used to check whether Python variables can have types as values - I typed it in the Python interpreter, so both the input and the output appear below:

>>> a = int
>>> type(a)
<type 'type'>
>>> print a('3') + 4
7
>>> b = str
>>> print b(12) * 5
1212121212
>>> class Foo:
...     def bar(self):
...         print "in Foo.bar()"
...
>>> f = Foo
>>> f().bar()
in Foo.bar()
>>>

And here's a couple more lines which give a clue why the above works:

>>> id(int)
505548800
>>> id(a)
505548800
>>> id(str)
505571224
>>> id(b)
505571224

Note that the names int and str have valid id()s, and that id(a) == id(int), and id(b) == id(str).

So it seems that variables in Python can have values that are types. Of course, the id() stuff I did above indicates that it will work for all Python types if it works for one, since "a = int" binds the name a to the same object that the (built-in) name int is bound to. That's my guess, anyway. Interested to see if anyone has any different ideas or a better explanation.

And speaking of Peter Norvig, here's another article by him about Albert Einstein:

'05 Annual Performance Review: Albert Einstein

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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If all has gone well, I am now in Singapore, so here are some relevant links:

1. Stephen Wiltshire’s aerial view of Singapore, drawn from memory.

2. Singaporean women are starting to marry Chinese men.

3. The government is concerned that too many public servants are visiting Singaporean casinos.

4. Pop Yeh Yeh: Psychedelic Rock from Singapore and Malaysia 1964-1970, an excellent CD, especially if you approach it with the right sense of humor.

5. The Ganges River in Singapore.

6. Borders Bookstore to be reborn in Singapore.