A country that is a thousand years old is obviously going to have to change its constitution.
European countries have gone from massive societal changes to massive societal changes (for example from monarchies to republics).
The USA is a new country, and its constitutional rigidity causes a lot of social and political problems that most likely will lead to big changes in the future.
Yes, some countries in Europe remained monarchies for 1500 years or longer. They didn't really have a constituion back then because they were not republics.
They really did have constitutions back then. Substantial constitutions. With many many many documents over hundreds of years.
A constitution, or supreme law, is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organization or other type of entity, and commonly determines how that entity is to be governed. [0]
Their entire history of implementing and applying principles of Roman Law and other creeds was their ever growing constitution.
> The USA is a new country, and its constitutional rigidity
and general loudness on the matter of "what is a constitution and why ours is the first and the greatest" has caused much confusion given they have such a short and barely evolved one.
Furthermore, even if the trade deficit was something to worry about, why should the food and drug safety bureaucracies be the ones to determine that kind of economic policy?
I've been working through Nand2Tetris with my 13-year-old son, but the official hardware simulator was pretty overwhelming. That's why I built a browser version that tests the first 2 chapters, is simpler, and has a tighter feedback loop with more helpful hints.
It's not insane at all to return both in a lookup. The "reporting person" will often be wrong about slight variations when calling in a license plate and the downside of errors are asymmetric: it is much more dangerous for the officer to think a driver doesn't have a warrant when they do versus thinking they have a warrant when they don't.
The insane part is trying to solve the problems created by homoglyphs in post-assignment.
What's the need to allow both `O` and `0` on a plate if it's supposed to be hard to tell apart anyway? Say there was some reason to want to both characters, why allow assigning a new plate which would match with an existing assignment? It's just a loss of time, resources, and safety for both law enforcement and everyone else to allow duplicate matches to be a possibility.
The funny thing is that disambiguation of glyphs in a font is a solved problem. Slash the zeroes, wide serifs on the capital i, etc. They just...don't do so in these states where it is still a problem.
It's also a a problem because not all states are the same, some don't allow O, some do. Some allow 0, some don't! The cameras need to be able to read both.
Sorry, is it not also much more dangerous for the erroneously-flagged person to be put in this situation? I imagine anyone legally transporting a weapon, for example, would be put in material risk for their safety by this practice.
Let's just arrest everyone then - I'm sure they've committed a crime of some kind during their life.
We're approximately halfway down the slippery slope, and I don't see any way out other than hard revolution, which is very touchy talk on the internet.
Ultimately it's all modern capitalism's fault, else there would be much less incentive for these companies to fuel what is rapidly becoming the effective Fourth Reich
People are worse at mental arithmetic than they were in the recent past, so it's not clear that they aren't "dumber" in the sense people meant at the time.
And did our thinking about the importance of being good at arithmetic change in response? I think so.
We also used to be much better remembering things, when we relied on oral histories, our memory skills have degraded quite a bit. And there's a quote from Socrates criticizing how writing is a crutch that degrades our skill (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1... , the last bit). Over time, we've just moved to valuing other things more.
Well, with anything, practice is key. When I was in school, I was in a math competition where you had to do everything in your head. There was no scratch paper, you could not modify your answer once written, and erasing was obviously not allowed either. I wasn't the greatest at it, but I didn't suck at it either. That was decades ago, and I no longer do math in my head that way. What I used to do in seconds for a result now takes a couple of seconds to think about what needs to be done and then the time to come up with the result.
Does this apply to other domains or just AI? For example, if you think gain-of-function research accidents put millions of lives at risk, is the logical next step to quit your job and become a terrorist?
I'm beginning to homeschool my kids in computing, and we are pairing up chapters of The Elements of Computing System (the Nand2Tetris book) with games that teach similar skills/kinds of thinking (Human Resource Machine, Comet 64, etc...), but we didn't find anything to supplement the first two chapters (where you build basic chips up to an ALU in HDL). I ended up starting creating a kind of browser based kata for those chapters here:
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