It's as much a fantasy as any other "nuclear option", including the literal nuclear option.
Violent revolutions are a part of our history, and they still happen around the world today. Unless things go very, very poorly in the next few decades, we probably won't see another one in the USA in our lifetimes. We can all admit that that fact makes the 2nd amendment's usefulness feel fantastical.
But on deeper reflection I would hope that we can acknowledge that violent revolution is not an impossibility, it's merely an improbability. And anybody who tries to tell you that hundreds of millions of small arms are inconsequential in a fight is uninformed, to put it lightly.
The fact that the current level of rights abuses (which I would agree is much too high and climbing!) has not lead to a violent revolution is a feature, not a bug.
> It's as much a fantasy as any other "nuclear option", including the literal nuclear option.
Mutually assured destruction is what makes the literal nuclear option a valid deterrent. That doesn't work with the second amendment though because one side has guns and the other side has guns and tanks and drones and nukes and the ability to control all public communication networks, etc.
Violent revolutions are a part of our history, but back at a time when having muskets was enough to get the job done. It's completely unrealistic to expect that to work out in today's environment and the government knows that. Hundreds of millions of small arms are inconsequential in a fight when you're fighting against planes and drones that can drop bombs while flying higher than bullets fired upwards can ever reach.
That said, while the success of outright revolution (at which point the constitution doesn't really matter) can be reasonably debated, what can't be argued is that the 2nd amendment has been effective at protecting our rights. Our rights are routinely violated. The 2nd amendment is total failure when it comes to protecting our rights and when it comes it preventing violations of those rights. The government does not fear the people and that becomes increasingly clear as the mask slips away and they stop even pretending to be anything but openly corrupt.
Tanks and planes require logistics and people. You don't shoot at the tanks directly, you shoot at the people loading them, or the refinery towers that fuel them, or the people that have to eventually get out of them.
What are they going to do, level factories and skyscrapers when their logistics are threatened thus destroying their own logistics and economy that is supporting them? An insurgency is not like a nation state war, it is asymettrical warfare where even telling who the enemy is is incredibly difficult and many exist among your own personnel.
> What are they going to do, level factories and skyscrapers when their logistics are threatened thus destroying their own logistics
They've already got planes and tanks. They can also be strategic about what they target, protecting what's important to them while targeting what's important to the population. The people flying the planes and drones won't have homes in the communities they bomb. Our government has already opened fire on Americans, already dropped bombs on American cities. Like I said though, how well they'd do in a revolt is theoretical. What isn't theoretical is the failure of the 2nd amendment to protect our freedoms.
> That doesn't work with the second amendment though because one side has guns and the other side has guns and tanks and drones and nukes and the ability to control all public communication networks, etc.
I don't want to be too blunt, but this is the "uninformed" I was talking about. The same asymmetry was present in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The ability to level cities is not actually that helpful when the goal is to control the population. Modern revolutions don't involve standing armies that you can kill will tanks.
> outright revolution (at which point the constitution doesn't really matter)
It doesn't matter beyond the point of revolution. It matters a lot that it was in effect before the revolution.
> what can't be argued is that the 2nd amendment has been effective at protecting our rights. Our rights are routinely violated.
I'm not sure if you just don't understand the concept of a last resort or if you actually think that we're at the point of last resort already, in which case my only question is: Do you own a gun yet?
> The same asymmetry was present in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Those also occurred overseas. The government didn't already have control over the population like they do here. They didn't have massive amounts of data on every last person there, and everyone those people knew. They hadn't been tracking all of their movements. If the founding fathers had tried to gain independence while still in Brittan the fight would have been much much harder.
We can argue over how well a revolution might go in theory, but the second amendment's failure to protect our freedoms isn't theoretical. Our freedoms are being violated all the time. It failed. That means that having the "last resort" option doesn't prevent our government from violating our rights. The second does not protect the first.
A last resort isn't effective at defending our freedoms under the government we have. It just maybe gives us a very very small chance to throw the old system away and replace it with something new that would restore our rights.
Personally, I'd like to think that it's still possible to vote our freedoms back, but there's been a lot of efforts made to reduce or prevent our ability to accomplish that and recently voter suppression efforts appear to be escalating alongside talk of "third terms" and election canceling. It's certainty not encouraging. In my case, under an absolute worst case scenario, the most effective use of a gun would be suicide. At best it might save me from looters. I can't imagine it being any use against a drone strike.
Your acceptance criteria for a last line of defense is pretty strict. Governments break the rules, a lot. If we tried to overthrow every government that broke the rules we'd be in a permanent state of violent revolution.
You don't seem like a violent person; quite the opposite. Most people are like that, myself included. I'm mad at the government. Steaming mad, even. But killing? Not even remotely close.
I get that it's easy to discount low-probability futures as meaningless, but I won't do that either. Maybe the insurance policy that is the 2nd amendment has paid out $0 so far. I don't think that's the case, but for the sake of argument let's say it's so. Even if it were so, history and current events indicate to me that we should keep paying for the policy. We think we've got it bad now, but our guy is an absolute kitten compared to some of the tyrants our species has cooked up.
Who is blaming the students? If 13 year olds were smoking and we blamed poor sports performance in that age group on the smoking, we wouldn't be "blaming" them. We don't model 13 year olds as little islands of free will.
A revelation of a mysterious element of the game which is not revealed in any of its marketing material is a spoiler. The fact that you believe it's a "decent compromise" doesn't enter into it. The proper disclaimer for your comment would be: "Spoilers, but I think these things should be spoiled."
I played the game years ago and did not have this element spoiled, and I thought it was presented at exactly the right time and in the right way. I'd go so far as to say that if somebody is so frustrated by that early mystery (which you're all but guaranteed to understand better and better as you play) that they quit there, then the rest of the game will just be an exercise in misery. It's a puzzle game. The developers put settings in place to cut the flight mechanics out of it so people could just experience it as a puzzle box instead of a flight simulator as well. What they did NOT put in the game is a hint about the thing you're spoiling.
"presented at exactly the right time and in the right way" is highly dependent on individual gameplay experiences. For me it was revealed in a very obtuse way. I love the game very much but I think this is perhaps its biggest flaw.
I'm happy to say that I would be fired if I did this, thought this, or wrote this comment.
EDIT: Parent used to say "it's common for salespeople to log in to customer environments to show potential customers what the product looks like with actual data in it."
I removed the part where I said 'it's typical for sales people to access customer environments', because I don't know how accurate that is, but probably happens more than anyone knows. Obviously it shouldn't happen without customers consent.
Also, reviewing the article again, the access patterns don't seem to match with this behavior, so there seems to be something else going on.
I've worked in enterprise IT departments for nearly 20 years and not once during a demo for any product has a sales engineer logged into a live customer or showed actual customer data
It's even more depressing than that framing would suggest, because we skipped over the decades where cars were just fast, powerful transportation tools and went straight from "mind bicycles" to "mind Teslas" full of cameras, tracking, proprietary software, and subscription fees.
I think that's a little harsh. A lot of the most powerful bits are applicable to any intelligence that we could digitally (ergo casually) instantiate or extinguish.
While it may seem that the origin of those intelligences is more likely to be some kind of reinforcement-learning algorithm trained on diverse datasets instead of a simulation of a human brain, the way we might treat them isn't any less though provoking.
when you read this and its follow-up "driver" as a commentary on how capitalism removes persons from their humanity, it's as relevant as it was on day one.
But there's a reason that caches are always sized in powers of two as well, and that same reason is applicable to high-performance ring buffers: Division by powers of two is easy and easy is fast. It's reliably a single cycle, compared to division by arbitrary 32bit integers which can be 8-30 cycles depending on CPU.
Also, there's another benefit downstream of that one: Powers of two work as a schelling point for allocations. Picking powers of two for resizable vectors maximizes "good luck" when you malloc/realloc in most allocators, in part because e.g. a buddy allocator is probably also implemented using power-of-two allocations for the above reason, but also for the plain reason that other users of the same allocator are more likely to have requested power of two allocations. Spontaneous coordination is a benefit all its own. Almost supernatural! :)
CPU Caches are powers of two because retrieval involves a logarithmic number of gates have to fire in a clock cycle. There is a saddle point where more cache starts to make the instructions per second start to go back down again, and that number will be a power of two.
That has next to nothing to do with how much of your 128 GB of RAM should be dedicated to any one data structure, because working memory for a task is the sum of a bunch of different data structures that have to fit into both the caches and main memory, which used to be powers of two but now main memory is often 2^n x 3.
And as someone else pointed out, the optimal growth factor for resizable data structures is not 2, but the golden ratio, 1.61. But most implementations use 1.5 aka 3/2.
Fwiw in this application you would never need to divide by an arbitrary integer each time; you'd pick it once and then plumb it into libdivide and get something significantly cheaper than 8-30 cycles.
powers-of-two are problematic with growable arrays on small heaps. You risk ending up with fragmented space you can't allocate unless you keep growth less than 1.61x, which would necessitate data structures that can deal with arbitrary sizes.
Speaking from a place of long-term frustration with Java, some compiler authors just absolutely hate exposing the ability to hint/force optimizations. Never mind that it might improve performance for N-5 and N+5 major releases, it might be meaningless or unhelpful or difficult to maintain in a release ten years from now, so it must not be exposed today.
I once exposed a "disableXYZOptimization" flag to customers so they could debug a easier without stuff getting scrambled. Paid for my gesture for the next year signing off on release updates, writing user guide entries, bleh.
So it's better to hardcode your specific library name and deal with the same issue after people have reverse engineered it and started depending on it anyway?
The premise of removing the flag is that it's useless or a problem. If it's still causing a big speed boost somewhere then you need to figure something out, but the core scenario here is that it's obsolete.
Violent revolutions are a part of our history, and they still happen around the world today. Unless things go very, very poorly in the next few decades, we probably won't see another one in the USA in our lifetimes. We can all admit that that fact makes the 2nd amendment's usefulness feel fantastical.
But on deeper reflection I would hope that we can acknowledge that violent revolution is not an impossibility, it's merely an improbability. And anybody who tries to tell you that hundreds of millions of small arms are inconsequential in a fight is uninformed, to put it lightly.
The fact that the current level of rights abuses (which I would agree is much too high and climbing!) has not lead to a violent revolution is a feature, not a bug.
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