Aceticon

"Good" old Nazi thinking never left the German elites, hence their "unwavering support" for a nation committing Genocide very openly because of the race of its people, hence the highly manipulated Press over there spreading and amplifying race-based views and hence their casual bypassing of legal rights to silence those who would demonstrate against such ultra-racism and the support of Genocide based on it.

They might have changed who the ubermenschen and the untermenshen are but they still keep on classifying people into those two categories by race and treating then very differently, as well as using force to silence dissent against such views and practices.

In light of Russia's aggressiveness, the recent news of Germany militarizing itself sounds like good news, but in light of the increasing regression of Germany back to their old extreme-racist and repressive practices those are very bad news - a Germany which thinks race justifies Genocide and suppresses by force dissent from such way of thinking is bound to sooner or later once again use such military power against those they deem "lesser races"

Now that just sounds like the arguments from the other far-right party in America in the Cultural Wars used to distract the people from the actual lack of economic prosperity and quality of life for the many.

"Strict immigration policies" needs not be the "so bad we even betray those we invited in" shit of the far-right: something as simple as having limited numbers per year and preferring the provision of help to the worse off refugees rather than economic migrants is a "strict immigration policy" whilst actually being a pretty Leftwing and Humanitarian posture.

It's reasonable that countries which are wealtier can't just allow anybody out of the other billions of human beings living in places which aren't as wealthy to come over and settle there, simply because several times the local population worth of people with far lower average education who can't even speak the local language coming over will basically destroy the very reason the country is a properous as it is (mainly because those people will be far less productive than the locals but still consume roughly the same amount of resources per-capita).

(This is without even going into the cultural clashes and subsequent rise of the far-right that happen when people from totally different cultures move to a country in large numbers within a short time period)

Once one accepts that no-limits immigration is mathematically and socially destructive, the conversation can then moves into the world of the possible, such as how to make sure it's the most deserving who get invited in, helping those who come integrate (as social clashes with immigrants are almost always just prejudice against the unknown and mismatched cultural expectations), managing the pressures of all those new people on infrastructure and so on: that's things like activelly looking for the worst off people in refugee camps in the worst areas and helping those (including inviting them over), adult education including of the local language to that those coming in can become fully productive citizens of their adopted country, making sure housing markets are properly supplying demand to reduce the pressure of the population growth associated with immigration and so on.

Immigration policy needs not be the anti-other hostility to the point of kicking out the very people who have been invited in (quite extreme when you think that treating one's guests well is an important element of lots of cultures) of the far-right, but it can't be the pie-in-the-sky open door policies of neoliberals cosplaying as lefties with Identity Politics.

Ultimatelly there have to be limits of a "number of people per time unit" kind, the difference between the rightwing take and the leftwing take is the criteria for chosing who gets in if there are more candidates than the limits.

That's the thing: laws that only in practice apply to the riff-raff can stop things like the copper demanding a bribe for not to fining somebody for speeding or the hygene inspector wanting something-something not to close down a restaurant - i.e. the kind of everyday widespread corruption that everybody sooner or later comes in contact with in some countries in Africa and South America - but does nothing to stop the really big, broadest impact corruption that affects the whole country sometimes holding it back or even dragging it down for generations, like putting certain clauses in Environmental legislation to allow highly destructive activities by certain companies, making sure certain markets are monopolies or tight cartels, selling state assets (such as during privatisations) at "friendly prices" to the "right people", or making sure multimillionaire or even billionaire military procurement contracts go to certain companies.

This shit is often far too subtle for most people to spot it or fully understand its impact but can have big effects in the lives of just about everybody in a country and then people for example just go around feeling that their money doesn't seem to go as far as before not putting two and two together to figure out they're dieing the death of a thousand cuts as monopolies and cartels which should never have existed without corrupt legislation bleed them out, are dying younger because of avoidable air polution or exploitative private healthcare systems all possible thanks to legislation designed together by crooked politicians and lobbyists, feel their quality of life is much less than before as most public spaces have been made sold to private interest, and so on.

What's happening in France (and has been happening for a while - both Sarkozy and the guy before him ended up convicted for their crimes) is actually a very good thing and needs to carry on happening, with as you say equal treatment for all and no velvet glove treatment for "VIP" types.

I was thinking that once the roads are bad enough it's gonna be horse/camel-mounted warriors and maybe animal drawn wagons.

In most cataclismic sci-fi cars seem to be of little or no importance, which makes sense given that most countries have no oil themselves and even for those which do, the ability of actually extracting the stuff from the current hard to reach modern reserves (the stuff doesn't just boil out of the ground nowadays) and refining it isn't likely to be available at all for what's left of society.

Curiously, electric cars and solar panels make post-catacysmic use of cars more likely than the ICE engine of the cars in Mad Max.

That said, given enough time whatever stock of solar panels use will be gone to just natural degradation and exposure to the elements and the technology to do more won't be there anymore (though wind and water generation would still be possible), plus the roads themselves will become unusable as Nature does its thing.

The most likely Mad-Max post-cataclismic future will be using animal-drawn vehicles or just people riding the animals.

Mate, I'm Portuguese, living in Portugal right now and let me tell you that whilst I agree with you that Portugal is a pretty corrupt place, it's far better now that it used to be back before 2009 when the first government minister ever was convicted and imprisioned for corruption.

(20 years ago nobody would have even found out that our last Prime Minister's family paid over €700k for real estate using money he had not declared to the transparency comission as having earned - not least because there was no such things as transparency legislation - much less the government falling because of it)

Outside the countries were Corruption is such a widespread and everyday thing that it can't be denied (so, the kind of place were it's normal to pay the police not to give you a fine for a traffic infraction or are expected to pay somebody at the city hall if you want to ever be issued a permit for something), the most corrupt places are places like the US and UK (the latter of which were I lived for over a decade) where the system is designed so that they won't even investigate, much less prosecute and convict anybody who is "important" for Corruption and if any such people are publicly accused of Corruption the Justice System comes down hard on the accusers for Libel or even Harassment.

There is this interesting paradox in the perception of corruption (and hence in things like the Corruption Perception Index) that when the Justice System starts going after high level politicians for corruption, people think Corruption is going up (because it gets so much coverage in the news), when in fact Corruption is going down because some crooks are getting arrested and the rest get scared (not least because when high level types get jailed, the highest level politicians who can get millions with corrupt practices that affect an entire country, stop thinking that they have de facto immunity)

Meanwhile, in the countries with purposefully designed to be innefective "anti"-corruption systems (the UK being a perfect example, with the entire responsability for fighting corruption AND fraud, from investigation to prosecution in the entire country, being the responsability of a single entity in the Justice System - the Serious Fraud Office - who have less budget than a small city hall) alongside nasty "honor/image defending" legislation to fend off any accusations of corruption - so only those convicted for Corruption can be publicly accused of being corrupt and the system is setup so that nobody but the small fry ever gets convicted for Corruption - are the one's with the most "strange" pieces of legislation and ministerial orders that clearly help certain sectors and even specific companies and really high rates of politicians ending up multi-millionaires via things like work-one-day-a-month very highly paid non-executive board memberships in private companies and/or getting hundreds or thousands per-speech in the speech circuit, and yet people generally think the country is very clean because you literally never see any high level politician end up in the news for Corruption.

In my own experience, ideally you try to avoid using such interfaces. If however you're forced to handle such things (which is far too common) the design which is cheapest and safest is to convert to UTC using a suitable default timezone at the interface level and store the result in your core system time field AND also store the local time but not in a field that you actually use for queries and computations in the core. If (more likely, when) some of those times converted with a "suitable" default turn out to have been wrong in some way - which is not necessarilly something due to the timezone conversion - you can manually fix just those (ideally with bulk data update).

Mind you, a lot of this shit needs to be solved at the systems design and requirements specifications level - either it's accepted that the system will have a fraction of the time data wrong (and it will always do anyway, even without timezones: users enter wrong dates, OCR data reading can't correct for users filling-in the wrong time in a time field on a document, timestamps generated by machines whose internal clocks are not regularly synched with NTP serves can be off my many minutes and so forth), or the whole thing is designed as I described above so that all data is treated as compatible and when it inneviably turns out some times in some fields were wrong or incorrectly translated, you can fixe it in an non-automated way.

As much as the dream is to have the computer do everything itself in code and the data be perfect, that's incompatible with the real world, and that's for way more things than just time values.

The point is, again, that programmers have to deal with the world as is (and dates are hardly the only "quirk" around), not the world as they would like it to be, and that needs to be dealt with already at the level of system design by the (supposedly) senior designers and technical architects rather than having programmers running around fixing the innevitable problems in a system whose design does not take in account the quirks of how certain kinds of data are produced and consumed: proper systems design is about minimising the direct and indirect consequences of data errors, inconsistencies and datatype-specific quirks, not trying to fulfill expectations that all data in one's system is perfect.

For starters resistance changes with temperature.

Also even in a multi-turn potentiometer, getting a precision of 1 in 10^9 would require an equal level of precision in the angle you rotate that potentiometer to (for example, a 0.1 degree error in a 10 turn potentiometer - which I believe is more turns than anything that actually can be bought - translates into a 1 in 36,000 error in resistance, so about 3000 larger than 10^9) even if you had a perfect material whose resistance doesn't change with temperature.

(PS: Just out of curiosity I went and dove down further and to translate a 1/3000 deg movement in a rotating potentiometer into a 1mm movement at the end of a bar attached to it, you would need a 176m long bar - i.e. the radius for 1/(360*3000) of a circumference to be equal to 1mm, is aproximatelly 176 m. This of course has serious mechanical problems even if you remove the bar at the end of the process as the removal process itself would shift the potentiometer by much more than 1/3000 degrees)

The joke here isn't even specifically about resistances and electronics, it's that the real world has all sorts of limitations that when you're doing things wholly in the mathematical world you don't have to account for, and that's a hard realisation for Physicists (having gone to study Physics at uni and then half way in my degree changing to Electronics Engineering I can tell you that's one of the shocks I had to deal with in the transition).

(In a way, it's really a joke about Theoretical Physicists)

See also the "assuming this chicken is a spherical ovoid" kind of joke.

We had a saying in my country which goes roughly like this: "It's not the dog that barks which bites"

I'd say it applies here, and I ain't talking about the corgies.

When the date timezone is not specified the interface just picks up the local time of the user. Even web stuff will send you this info so even there is perfectly doable.

I'm talking about systems where we design both the interface and the backend.

If the user wants a different behaviour it's up to them to specify it and the interface is designed so that they can do it it - if they don't it's their problem, not the system's: this is hardly the only situation were the software can't just guess information that's not provided (random example, when a full name is provided in a single line: has it been provided family name first and then surname or the other way around - this is also an international problem by the way since in most of Asia the natural order tends to be family name first: the most common solution for this is to just break it into two fields, explicitly one for surname and family name, but that introduces the problem of which middle names are part of the surname and which are part of the family name, for people with more than 2 names).

Generally the approach in systems design for balancing the need for complete and consistent information of a software system operating in a certain environment (such as across timezones and having to compare data between time zones) with users, being human hence naturally only providing part of the information and not context (mentally they just assume those things which for them "are always the same" and generally don't even think about them, whilst programmer do think about it because computers are stupid) is to provide good defaults and if that context information is important for your system, designing the UI to have a "validate this" step which makes it very obvious the default value that has been filled for that information or some other mechanism (it really depends on the business process that the user is following) and lets the user change it (for when they do in fact want something else), along with the means for the user to pull out that data and correct it later because somebody at some point will invariably make a mistake in entering data and have to fix it.

All this is a foundational element of software design - humans will always go around carrying tons of assumptions in their minds about a ton of things and don't want to "waste time" always filling in the form the value for those assumptions, so as a system designer you have to find a balance between not wasting the time (and patience) of lots of users because you're forcing them to have to enter info that's redundant 99.99% of the time, and data consistency - and you do that by designing appropriate user flows and user interfaces, which include taking in account that people will always make mistakes (so you design your system to reduce the chances of human error AND give them a process for later correcting the info info they entered).

Granted, proper design of multi-tiered systems (which include a UX/UI) to balance user needs and the almost laughably bad level of data "integrity", completness and consistency in the minds and communication of human users, with system needs, isn't exactly a common skill amongst software developers: I've seen plenty of junior devs and even mid-level devs expressing the very same frustrations as you about lots of things (not just dates and times) and blaming the users - blaming lusers is almost a stereotipical thing for programmers at a certain level of seniority - and then the whole thing boils down to crap systems design (often UI, but often also things like not have the appropriate steps in user flows to make sure unusual cases - such as users entering times in a timezone other than their local one - are spotted and validated/adjusted) and/or their own selfisheness that life should be harder for the many in order for them - the few - having an easier life.

Ultimatelly, the (IMHO) error of your point of view is that you seem to be forgetting that we programmers do our work for our users, not for ourselves - it's up to us to design our software to be used by humans within the environment they live in, not for everybody else to change their lives to make our job easier. This too is a foundational element of software design.

It's up to programmers to adapt to the conventions of most people in the World, not the other way around.

Yupes, good old "benevolent" sexism.

Prejudice, just like the Far-Right, just with different "superior" and "inferior" groups.

Historically the best criteria for selecting people to positions of power is how little they want power, not gender or race.

(Personally I think that's because people who do not want power see it as a burden, and they do so because for them power is a great responsability towards many others - what sane individuals would ever want to be in a position were they can ruin the lives of countless people by making a mistake - and that's exactly the kind of people you want to entrust with it, not the ones for whom power is a form of ego-stroking or even a tools for personal upside maximization)

The pettyness of all this shit is what's really shocking...