I agree with you. The poor can be affected by this as well, in the case of fines. A $150 speeding ticket isn't more of an inconvenience to most of us, but a poor person could be ruined by it. Nobody should escape consequences entirely, but I think the poor should be given some exemption from the governments iron-fist policy with fines, penalty fees, and bench warrants when you dont pay them.
There's a simple solution: here in Scandinavia at lot of monetary punishments are based on your income. E.g. your speeding ticket costs you a week's pay.
(Yes, tax evaders get off too easy with this system)
> One of his big motivators is that dealing with people is hard, even for just the brief interaction of paying for his purchase.
this is a fine line though. If you have some level of social anxiety, avoiding social contact is about the worst you can do for it. It's allowing the fear to control you. A better solution is to work your way through the social anxeity, learning organic ways to "grease the gears" and make situations pleasant to both parties.
I had to learn this in my late teens/early 20s. I was withdrawing more and more, stone-faced all the time in public places such as the grocery store. I'd park behind the store just so I didn't have the hassle of interactions in the parking lot. That's letting anxiety reign over you. Cognitive distortions [1] can send you on a downward trajectory where avoidance is the norm and you to go greater and more extreme lengths to mitigate the "problem". I learned that a smile, saying "hi, how are you?" or "excuse me" seem to make most interactions at least 50 "percent" less uncomfortable compared to unemotional silence, which I've seen in psychology books as a sign of hostility.
Now, if you are autistic and have something inhibiting your ability to understand social cues, then "just facing it" wont work, but even people on the spectrum can learn to improve their situation through a skilled therapist.
I remember clearly the day when I decided the work of pushing my items through the shitty self-checkout scanner (the clerk's scanner is way better) and bagging my own stuff was a waste of time vs saying four or five pre-rehearsed words and letting the nice clerk do it for me.
You are projecting your issues onto someone you know nothing about. I have seen cashiers react as if they want to strip search him because he is trying to pay for a pizza. Other people react incredibly negatively to him in ways that are seriously problematic. This is a completely different situation from what you describe. His desire to avoid it when possible is in no way neurotic nor dysfunctional.
Additionally, letting him avoid it part of the time makes it easier for him to cope effectively the rest of the time. You can think of it as him having a limited people skills budget and not insisting he piss it away unnecessarily just because other people with a bigger budget don't find it to be a hardship to pay such things. For him, it amounts to being nickeled and dimed to death.
Can you explain why you seem to be reading everything I say in the worst possible light? It comes across like you are intentionally trying to bust my chops, not understand my point.
I don't think I'm reading this negatively. I'm genuinely curious as to what sort of reaction would make you think they wanted to strip search your son. The only image that comes to my mind when I think of someone wanting to strip search someone involves a cop, a latex glove snapping on the wrist and a menacing look and that seems so the opposite of every experience in a pizza place I've ever had.
You are taking my remarks a bit too literally. And your experience in a pizza place and my son's experience are entirely different things. Coaching him on what to say does not solve it.
We have done a lot of reading and we believe he lacks prosody and lacks the ability to tone match. This is something other people are not consciously aware is socially important, but he routinely gets that reaction that is summed up by the phrase "I don't like your tone."
In contrast, I appear to habitually tone match without trying. This gets me read as incredibly deferential, which has a different social downside. So, one thing that does work is he and I frequently shop together, everyone knows I am his mother and people generally find me likeable. They eventually conclude "He's a nice, quiet young man." and quit having an issue with him being him.
I'm responding to your comment based on the information you provided. You should direct him over to /r/socialskills. If he's neither "neurotic nor dysfunctional" then he just needs to polish his social skills.
You do not know my son at all. His situation does not begin to get summed up in a few paragraphs on a forum.
This right here is the arrogance I am talking about. You think you know better than I do what my nearly 30 year old son needs. Now why on earth would you think that? That is incredibly contemptuous.
just to save everyone the suspense: he "survived" so long by stealing resources earned by other people who worked for them. Apparently the so-called "hermit" didn't mind people that much.
He admits to this: "I stole. I was a thief. I repeatedly stole over many years. I knew it was wrong. Knew it was wrong, felt guilty about it every time, yet continued to do it."
If folks haven't already, the GQ article by Michael Finkel (linked in the older post oska pointed out) is worth the read:
I dont even think it's worth reading about him. He's a criminal who got away with it for a long time because of geography and the supply and demand relationship between cold weather and unoccupied cabins.
If you think of him in that terms, sure. I think much of the disappointment people have here is that they were expecting a man vs nature story and instead read about a thief who lived off the fat of the modern world. The responses in this thread differ from those from the earlier discussion [0] oska linked. I suspect it's due to the different titles and resulting expectations.
Personally, I didn't know about original thread when it was posted, and your original comment actually prompted me to find the GQ story and read it under the expectation that I was going to learn about a societal mooch.
What ended up making an impression was Christopher Knight's unique writing style, his observations on everyday interactions we take for granted ("I’m not used to seeing people’s faces," he said. "There’s too much information there. Aren’t you aware of it? Too much, too fast."), and how he survived those winters.
And yes, I get it, he stole. He used stolen propane tanks to fire up the stolen Coleman to melt snow in a stolen pot to drink water. But still, he fattened himself up for winter and camped in the winter months of Maine while not leaving behind footprints for 25 years. I was impressed. Yes it's not Primitive Technology [0] ingenuity, but Mr Knight is still an outlier and shared an experience I don't encounter every day.
Not leaving a footprint? I remember when this was on the local news - he had a helluva mess in the hobo camp he was living in. It's also not exactly a big secret that he was in the area stealing shit all those years - people knew, and some of them left stuff out for him.
A literal footprint: "The first snow usually came in November. Chris was always fearful about leaving a single boot print anywhere, which is impossible to avoid in a blanket of snow. And so for the next six months, until the spring thaw in April, Chris rarely strayed from his clearing in the woods."
The morality of his actions aside, it's a little disappointing because it's not as if he lived without human contact for all that time, there were always people in the visible distance but he just chose not to engage with them. There's recluses in every neighborhood who live like that. I think I was expecting more of a Robinson Crusoe/Castaway type situation.
I can see that. He's not Crusoe, but I still found his story interesting because this is someone I usually don't get a chance to talk to (as most recluses are).
And maybe it's my age and experience, but 25-27 years is a really impressive time span to be focused on doing one thing.
I would like to have learned more about how he feels about how the world has changed, he's like Rip Van Winkle or a time traveler in that respect. But most likely as a person who would voluntarily isolate himself from society in the first place, he probably doesn't care about the world.
I dont like articles that bait and switch. The title says "into the woods" when it should read "squatting in vacant cabins: how this homeless man lived off other peoples' supplies and shelter for a quarter century".
Well, he robbed vacation homes, so I don't know that owners were really put out as much as all that. What strikes me as funny is that he went to such lengths to rob them, it seems like gardening, hunting and fishing would have been easier. But I suppose it's possible it was the thrill of getting away with it that motivated him.
Hunting and fishing are not as calorically rewarding as what he could get concentrated in peanut butter and sweets. Read the GQ article, it's fascinating how he would intentionally get fat for the winter.
Robbery is robbery; the immorality of which has no dependency on how "put out" his victims were... as though it were for you or me to even make such a determination. He was a thief that stole stuff from people: nuff said. I hope at some point his victims got justice.
Burglary is not armed robbery. They are different in the eyes of the law, and justly so.
Theft of a candy bar carries a different penalty from theft of an automobile, and justly so.
A thief is a thief, and a criminal is a criminal, but not all crimes are identical. There is a difference between the rigidity of ethics, and the flexible punishment-must-fit-the-crime nature of justice.
Of course, you are correct in your statements, but contextual application in this discussion would appear to be in error on at least one point.
You are correct in that I used an term incorrectly: I shouldn't have said robbery, I should have simply said "theft". Robbery indicates force: there was no indication of direct force/intimidation that I saw. Point conceded.
Where I think your criticism is incorrect. Your examples differentiate based on the what the criminal was trying to get away with. Trying to steal a candy bar is different that trying to steal an automobile: the resources involved in obtaining a candy bar legitimately are much smaller than the resources dedicated to obtaining a car. You rightfully call out that distinction, they are different (as individual acts) and I would not disagree that they should be different in what answer justice should demand of the criminal. Where you go astray is that the context of my criticism of was that the original commentator was differentiating the severity of the crime not on the value of the property stolen, but on some perception of the of the victim's "need". So, it's not the difference of the value of the good taken, but a judgment on how important that should have been to the victim. This is a very important distinction and changes the validity of the ethical judgement. I assert that, whereas the value of the stolen item is correctly a part of the determining the severity of the transgression, the "need" of the victim is not a proper factor in determining the severity of the crime. (And yes, this is a generalization. If I steal a hospital respirator from a medical supply company showroom floor, it is different than if I steal it while it's in use by a patient... though even then the theft aspect should likely be seen as the same and there are just other, different ethical/legal crimes in addition to theft.)
I see where you're coming from, but to be succinct:
If your argument were correct, then duress would never serve as an acceptable defense.
I'm not saying that Chris was under duress (his situation was due to his own choices, not forced upon him), but the fact is, some accused criminals are able to defend their crimes by saying "my actions were necessary to avoid a serious, immediate danger in a situation that was forced upon me." That is a form of need and it is a legally workable defense, at least in the USA and UK.
Over a decade ago, a thief broke into my car and stole some items. The feeling of violation still burns within me now. It's terrible to think that someone was in my car, my space, and took my things, and used them for some unsavoury end.
In the grand scheme of the universe, those things are pretty minor. But they still hurt.
I don't know that I'd want to hurt the person or people who stole from me; I think that I'd like to get to know why he or they did it, that I'd like to see why that seemed like the right thing to do at the time. But it does hurt, even now.
> ... as though it were for you or me to even make such a determination.
Don't be ridiculous. Both you and the OP (and anybody else who wants to) are fully qualified to determine the morality of the situation for yourselves and discus it. Why would either of you not be?
as though it were for you or me to even make such a determination.
The article indicates that some of them put out pen and paper and tried to get him to leave a grocery list. He declined to cooperate, so they stopped.
I doesn't sound like some of these people were particularly bothered by him getting free groceries and otherwise leaving the place essentially untouched.
I am not saying that makes his choice "morally correct" or anything. But, you are trying to impose a determination here that dramatically differs from the evidence we have been presented for how some of these people felt about the situation.
One interesting aspect is that he did not contract any major (contagious) disease while not having access to a doctor or any medicine (beyond what he may have found/stolen from cabins, etc. He attributed his good health to being away from people (and thus disease). Also he was able to take good care of his Rx glasses for all those year. No loss or breakage.
I was wondering about his dental hygiene. I've never had a major toothache before, but I've heard they are off-the-charts painful. Maybe he went to the dentist, too, off his stolen goods ?
Generally yes. My gripes in assessment were mainly with science classes that asked subtly different questions on exams than what was covered in class, and english/humanities teachers who had broad reign to judge your performance based on whether you found some highly subjective moral or nugget of wisdom in the literature material. Both cases to me felt more like Three Card Monte [1] than a straightforward "Here's some information, learn it, we'll test you on it."
I'm jaded to the point that I'm skeptical of any posts starting with the words "Why" or "How". It's creeping closer to the phrase "these n easy steps".
what makes other encodings hard ? The two things that come to my mind are byte length and comparison function. If the encoding had a fixed-length byte length, then it should be just swapping n-bytes at a time instead of 1-byte. What else is difficult about non-ascii encodings ?
e.g. in UTF-8 a codepoint is encoded in varying byte lengths (so you have to split into codepoints and then reverse), and, a lot more difficult, a sequence of multiple codepoints can be combined to form a symbol. Simplest case would be something like "ö" encoded as "o" (U+006F) followed by a combining diaeresis (U+0308).
Other fun special cases: 🇺🇸 is U+1F1FA REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER U, followed by U+1F1F8 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER S and should if possible be displayed as a US flag (otherwise falls back to text "US"), should reversing it create 🇸🇺 (replacing the flag with the characters "SU"), or still show the flag? (I'm not even sure if there isn't a case where both are valid country codes and it would change to a different flag?)
Similarly, Emoji can be formed from a sequence with combining characters inbetween, which don't display correctly if reversed codepoint by codepoint.
Some examples: If you're dealing with UTF-8, which is very common, you need to handle variable-length characters. If you're working with UTF-16 you need to handle surrogate pairs. Neither are the end of the world, but the basic "array walking" string reversal methods you'd expect from a white boarding session wouldn't work.
Allow me to play Freud here for a moment. Perhaps that question more points to anxieties about not knowing 100% of the material (which, I think we can both agree is ok. nobody retains 100%. But the student may not realize that).
So maybe they ask that question seeking approval, hoping to hear "No, thats an advanced concept for advanced students wanting to learn {special advanced concept}". Obviously thats not the case, but I could see a student asking that to soothe their worries that they understand other things, but not the difficult concept.
I completely disagree. I'm an experienced dev from C++ learning Android/Java dev. Literally 90% of what I need is on SO (the rest usually from mkyong), thanks to google some of the answers even bubble up to the search page so I dont even have to click on them. I would be much worse off without SO.
That says more about you as a developer than SO. In just about any SO answer I find numerous things that are either wrong or bad advice. The difference between me and a lot of SO users, especially novices, is that they don't know a good answer from a bad one.
A lot of people on SO seem to be answering just for points, half the time, or more, they don't actually know what they are talking about all or have experience with what they are explaining; they have often literally just "researched" the question and now they condense a couple of sources into an answer. Without having a proper understanding of the subject.
SO is bad for the whole industry. And there is not much that is worse than a "developer" copying an answer off SO and putting it into a production code base, without even understanding the answer they just copied.
Not going to argue the general case, but for Android in particular the documentation is also full of bad advice and half-explanations. Plus it's not uncommon to hit a long-outstanding SDK bug. SO is great for Android development to fill in those gaps, provided you can sort wheat from chaff.
But without relocatable stacks you're incurring a large, fixed cost per coroutine.
Of course, with stackful coroutines you'll have a lot less coroutine objects. But the real issue is that you have to decide ahead of time how large you want to make the stack. Too large and you waste memory, too small and you'll blow the stack. In the context of individual projects the programmer can usually make the call without much trouble. But removing that kind of burden from the programmer is usually the primary reason you add such abstractions to the language standard. And it's why the typical execution stack is so huge (1+ megabytes) on most non-embedded systems (and even many embedded, network-facing systems).
boost.coroutine can be optionally used with segmented stacks. Copyable stacks are a problem in C++ as objects can have custom copy semantics.
Anyway, large stacks (assuming you want at least 1 page per coroutine) do not waste memory, they only waste address space which is plentiful. If you want slim coroutines, there are the shallow generator style coroutines of the other proposal.
There is some hope that we will have the best of both worlds, stackful coruoutine semantics plus annotations to opt in to the stackless coroutines optimization.
There is some hope that we will have the best of both
worlds, stackful coruoutine semantics plus annotations to
opt in to the stackless coroutines optimization.
That would be pretty amazing. Are there proposals or committee discussions you could link to? If C++ got stackful coroutines I might finally make the switch from C.
Makes perfect sense to me. Why upgrade some critical piece of infrastructure if upgrading can only hurt you, but can never help you ? Assuming they didn't have ongoing problems such as bit-rot with floppies, why upgrade to USB ? There have been at least a few major attacks using either auto-run , auto-mount, or even infections in USB firmware over the years.
If you dont need the extra capacity or speed that USB or optical offers you, don't upgrade. I mean this specifically for infrastructure-size projects where the "thing" / entity that is controlled costs multiple orders of magnitude more than the computer system controlling it. Say I have a hydro-electric dam, or any kind of power plant (not just nuke), or train switch controller, submarine, aircraft carrier, etc. Stuff that can't break. Its just cheaper and safer to keep using the same tech, keep replacing known-working parts, than it is to risk updating the system to "stay current", and risk a costly outage (or some kind of catastrophe, even if theres only a 10^-7 chance of it happening). I dont blame them one bit.
You assume too much. Bit rot was the driver towards anything-not-floppy, if I recall the 90s correctly. "Can't break" and "floppies" is an oxymoron - oh God, now I have that horrible sound of a floppy read error (yes, you could actually hear most types of read errors) stuck in my head. (Perhaps the 8-inch floppies are still in use as their lower density gives higher resilience?)
What I meant was if you expect them to die, and discard them on some regimented schedule instead of expecting them to last forever. Flash-based USB storage (and even platter-based HDDs ) suffer degradation and/or bitrot, just at different rates/probabilities. Even optical media only has a few years of expected lifetime.
Of course there's bit rot everywhere, just that floppies were notoriously unreliable because of it.
OTOH, the only way to actually preserve data is to keep rolling them forward to new physical media as the old ones die off (this is of course abstracted away in cloud solutions).
