Doesn’t language editions solve that problem? (I am not a Rust expert so please correct me if I am wrong.)

A Mortician’s Tale was a nice relatively short interactive experience about what it is like to work in that occupation and its ups and downs, and an opportunity to reflect a bit on the reality of death.

To The Moon

I have played that game five times (so I could share the experience with other people) and have broken down into tears at the end every time.

I can be glad that the Union won the U.S. Civil War and and ended slavery yet still consider it to be war crimes that they deliberately attacked civilians as part of Sherman’s March; no logic had been violated there.

The problem with this reasoning is that instability, whether as the result of undermining governments or regional wars, has unpredictable outcomes. For example, overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran seemed like a great idea to those in power in the U.S. at the time when we disagreed with Iran’s policies, but this decision turned around to bite us when that got overturned. So it is not in our material interests to promote instability, and I think that the current administration knows this, so to the extent it is supporting Israel with effectively no conditions on its actions I think that it is behaving irrationally rather than maliciously.

No dominant organisation in the world like the US state would give a significant amount of money(like it does for Israel) for something that doesn’t serve their material interests, namely the perpetuation and/or increase of their power and influence.

I disagree with the notion that dominant organizations would never give significant of money away in a manner contrary to their material interests. If anything, the opposite is true: if you are dominant, then you have more freedom to get away with acting against your material interests (intentionally or not).

I think that our treatment of Israel is an example of this. All of the money we have been throwing at them does not buy anything at all, since the Israeli government does not even seem to be that grateful for it but just expects it as a matter of course. They seem hell-bent on bringing the entire region into a war that would pull us in and cause a ton of damage to our material interests, and we have barely any ability to stop them from doing this. Worst, this situation is entirely avoidable because we could, at the very least, put strings on our military aid and then enforce them, rather than just giving Israel whatever it wants and ignoring whenever it crosses any of our supposed lines.

Just to be clear, I am not arguing that our material interests are the only reason to care about what is happening or to criticize our government’s actions, I am just saying that it makes no sense to just take as given that a dominant organization will always act in its own best material interests in this way.

Yes, and that is my point: unless you wearing a seat belt somehow made the accident more likely to happen, it really doesn’t seem like manslaughter applies here.

According to this page, you could attempt to argue “lack of causation” if there was no connection between you not wearing a seat belt and your passenger getting killed.

My taste buds disagree that this is “unfortunate”.

I think that sometimes what happens to people is that they build the life that they implicitly believe they are “supposed” to be living because that is what they see everyone else around them doing, rather than based on an honest self-assessment of whether this really is the what will make them happy. When they realize that this life is not actually making them very unhappy, they look for outside factors to blame because they did everything that they were “supposed” to be doing so it could not have been their own misinformed choices that led them to this point.

And in fairness, no one chooses where they are born and the cultural conditioning that we receive, so this is not entirely their fault. It is really a societal problem that we do not encourage enough people to engage in true self-introspection to figure out for themselves what is important to them and what they want to get out of life so that they make these kinds of decisions with great deliberation and personal self-insight rather than taking the default option.

Choosing to have a child later on generally has fewer negative consequences than unchoosing a child you have already had.

So does that make the new name the undead name, and therefore like a zombie name?

Yeah, I miss living in Australia where you didn’t have your own waiter but on the other hand that meant that it wasn’t rude to flag down any of the wait staff if you need anything rather than being restricted to having to go through a single person.

Horribly incompetent? No. Flawless, or even particularly prescient? No. They got a lot of big stuff right; they got a whole lot wrong.

So just to be clear: you think that this particular language was badly written because it is so easily bypassed?

If, as you say,

I’m unconcerned with how it was intended since that’s totally irrelevant to what it actually is.

Then why did you waste time describing what you believed was the intention behind it earlier when you said,

I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

Regardless, the other point that I made that you haven’t addressed still stands: they put that prohibition against banning the slave trade in there for a reason, and that reason was presumably not “as a rhetorical flourish”, so either the people who insisted that it be present were horribly incompetent at writing legal language that would preserve their own interests, or your personal opinion as to how Constitutional law works in this case is missing something important.

If the purpose of that clause were to restrict the kinds of laws that Congress can pass instead of the kinds of amendments that are allowed, then why does it appear in Article V, which relates to amendments, rather than Article I, which relates to Congress?

Indeed, the limitation in what can be amended is in practice totally powerless. I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

It isn’t worded as a “rhetorical flourish”; it is worded incredibly clearly and explicitly as a prohibition:

Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

In fact, taking your reasoning a step further: are you likewise arguing that when the prohibition against banning the slave trade prior to 1808 was included here, that it was also understood to be a “rhetorical flourish” with no teeth behind it? If so, then why did they go to so much trouble to put it in? It seems like a lot of wasted effort in that case.

This ensures that the Senate can never re-make itself to be anything other than the body with equal representation among states, unless the affected states also agree.

Yes, that is exactly my point: if this restriction could itself be eliminated through the amendment process, then it effectively does not exist.

Sure, but once there is enough determination to deprive a state of equal representation in the Senate that there are sufficient votes to amend the Constitution once in order to do this–which, as you have pointed out, is a very high bar–then it is no harder to go through the amendment process twice in order to first drop that sentence.

Sure, but obviously in that case it would no longer matter whether that state had Senators or not because it would no longer be subject to the laws of the U.S. government.