AnyOldName3

Personally, I can ignore the effects of artificial sweeteners on insulin levels as they, like everything else, have no effect, and my insulin levels are only affected by when I inject it. I’m type 1 diabetic. When people make incorrect claims based on effects that aren’t reproducible or weren’t statistically significant in the first place about the safety of sweeteners, it causes direct problems for me. I’ve had bartenders mess up my blood sugar levels by lying about serving diet drinks because they think they’re dangerous. Plus, if the people who push for artificial sweeteners to be banned had their way, there are plenty of things I couldn’t ever eat or drink again.

Aspartame is very mildly carcinogenic. An equivalent amount of sugar is much more carcinogenic, and is harmful in other ways, too. If you have to have a can of cola, diet is the healthier choice.

Minoxidil is produced in 5% concentration creams and foams, and that study is comparing rosemary oil to a 2% preparation. It’s impressive that rosemary oil is comparable at all, but obviously if you’re not taking a therapeutic dose of Monoxidil, it’s not going to work properly.

I use topical Minoxidil. It’s clearly made some difference, replacing a bald patch with a thin patch, and making my scalp noticeably warmer to the touch due to the extra bloodflow. It wasn’t the brilliant instantaneous wonderdrug some people told me it would be, nor totally ineffectual like others said, so I guess it’s something whose efficacy varies from person to person.

A lot of the comments are making the assumption that the buttons are telling the truth about being different sizes, but I’ve flushed plenty of toilets where both buttons do a full flush. If you can’t tell the difference after experimenting, it might just be broken or cheap tat.

Yes. Every time, it’s gone less well than opening a banana from the stem end, unless the banana was horrendously underripe. I’ve never had the problem the alternative approach is claiming to fix unless I’ve intentionally opened the banana badly on purpose to prove a point about the problem really being people opening from the stem end incompetently.

A) The peel becomes easier to tear faster than the inside gets softer. You don’t need to snap it, it doesn’t need nearly enough tension to count as a snap once it’s ripe.

B) The banana’s been selectively bred to want to be as delicious as possible. It only wants you to be happy.

Bananas are the way they are through millenia of selective breeding, so there’s no reason to think that monkeys know anything we don’t. If pinching the bottom is easier than bending the stem, your banana isn’t ripe yet and doesn’t want to be eaten until later.

A vote for neoliberals is a vote to not have fascism for four more years. America’s voting system doesn’t allow the never-have-fascism votes to be pooled with the delay-fascism votes, so unless there’s a decent chance for a mass swing of voters from delay-fascism to never-have-fascism, trying to encourage a small-scale swing only makes immediate fascism more likely by weakening the only thing with a chance to delay it.

If the plan is to try and encourage the Democrats to have primaries that actually have the power to move the party left, now is not the time to withhold a vote in protest as there’s a good chance that even if it did convince them, there’d never be another election that wasn’t rigged so they’d lose it no matter how popular they were.

No, but mostly you.

And yeah, the PETA kills site clearly has an agenda, but their agenda is to try and save animals from PETA’s “love.”

Their agenda’s to make PETA look bad so people don’t become vegan or demand higher welfare standards from meat producers, and they can continue selling meat to Americans of such low standards that it would be illegal in the rest of the civilised world.

You know what no-kill shelters try to do when they don’t have space? Coordinate with local foster programs, coordinate with other shelters to see if they have space. There are other alternatives besides taking in a perfectly healthy animal and dropping it in the euthanasia queue.

As I said, they can’t do that once the foster programs and other shelters are full, too, and then overflow into PETA-run shelters because they’re the ones that still have a capability to receive more animals after they’re full. There aren’t enough shelters to keep every animal in good conditions until it’s either adopted or dies of natural causes, and no amount of coordination can magically create extra capacity.

It doesn’t strengthen your point to link Fox News and the literal website for the smear campaign I mentioned: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=PETA_Kills_Animals

As for PETA putting down lots of animals, that’s no secret. It’s really easy to get people to donate to a no-kill animal shelter, so there are lots of them. However, when you’re a no-kill animal shelter, and you’re full of animals you can’t kill, or are asked to take an animal that can’t be ethically be treated with anything other than euthanasia, you have to turn the animal down, and it ends up wherever will take it. Usually, that ends up being a PETA-run shelter. When a PETA-run shelter is being given all the rejects from everywhere else, it’s obviously going to end up putting lots of animals down. It’d be better for PR if they didn’t, but less ethical, and they prioritise the ethics above the PR.

If you look at one of your more reliable sources, the Snopes article, it backs up what I’m saying, and not what you’re saying. It corroborates the story from my original post, lists another incident where PETA staff were accused but not convicted, and then discusses that they put down a lot of animals in their shelters, and how it includes healthy animals. The only controversy there is the definition of adoptable - a healthy stray kitten is theoretically adoptable, but if you get ten times as many kittens in a week as you do people wanting to adopt a kitten, 90% of them won’t get adopted, and your shelter will get quickly overcrowded if you insist on ignoring that fact.

The UK has a high rate of veganism, and part of that is attributed to the fact that the major vegetarian and vegan organisations in the UK generally recommend persuading people by offering them delicious food that is also vegetarian/vegan and saying it’s more ethical. On the other hand, the equivalent organisations in the US tend to lean more towards recommending telling people that eating animal products is unethical, and it’s difficult to accuse someone of unethical behaviour without being insulting. It also doesn’t help that multibillion-dollar organisations have run successful smear campaigns against groups like PETA - everyone’s heard of the time they took someone’s pet dog and killed it, but most aren’t aware that it happened once and gets reported on as if it’s news every few months, or that it was an accident as the dog’s collar had come off and it was with a group of strays, and got muddled with another dog, so was put down weeks earlier than it was supposed to be, bypassing the waiting period they had specifically to avoid this kind of mistake.

They might be. They’re clearly a major shareholder in Boeing.

It’s not expecting a terrible reaction from everyone, just acknowledging that there’s a slim chance of life-ending consequences. It’s not discriminatory against vehicles to avoid tailgating because of a one in ten thousand chance that they’ll brake too suddenly for you to react and you’ll crash, so it’s not reasonable to demand women to be happy putting themselves in a situation where they’ve got a comparable chance of getting stabbed by a nutter.

It’s by no means all men’s fault that there are nutters who’ll stab women for rejecting them, but they are real, and are much more common than women who’ll stab men for rejecting them (not least because of women being less likely to hit on men they don’t know in the first place). The problem makes the world worse for everyone, but denying it or saying we should pretend it’s not real because it would be sexist still leaves women with a disproportionate and quantifiable actual risk of death, which is a much worse consequence than having to only hit on women in environments they feel safe.

I think you’ve misunderstood my complaint. I know how you go about composing things in a Unix shell. Within your post, you’ve mentioned several distinct languages:

• sh (I don’t see any Bash-specific extensions here)
• Perl-compatible regular expressions, via grep -P
• printf expressions
• GNU ps’s format expressions
• awk

That’s quite a lot of languages for such a simple task, and there’s nothing forcing any consistency between them. Indeed, awk specifically avoids being like sh because it wants to be good at the things you use awk for. I don’t personally consider something to be doing its job well if it’s going to be wildly different from the things it’s supposed to be used with, though (which is where the disagreement comes from - the people designing Unix thought of it as a benefit). It’s important to remember that the people designing Unix were very clever and were designing it for other very clever people, but also under conditions where if they hit a confusing awk script, they could just yell Brian, and have the inventor of awk walk over to their desk and explain it. On the other hand, it’s a lot of stuff for a regular person to have in their head at once, and it’s not particularly easy to discover or learn about in the first place, especially if you’re just reading a script someone else has written that uses utilities you’ve not encountered before. If a general-purpose programming language had completely different conventions in different parts of its standard library, it’d be rightly criticised for it, and the Unix shell experience isn’t a completely un-analogous entity.

So, I wouldn’t consider the various tools you used that don’t behave like the other tools you used to be doing their job well, as I’d say that’s a reasonable requirement for something to be doing its job well.

On the other hand, PowerShell can do all of this without needing to call into any external tools while using a single language designed to be consistent with itself. You’ve actually managed to land on what I’d consider a pretty bad case for PowerShell as instead of using an obvious command like Get-ComputerInfo, you need:

(Get-WmiObject Win32_ComputerSystem).FreePhysicalMemory / 1024

Even so, you can tell at a glance that it’s getting the computer system, accessing it’s free physical memory, and dividing the number by 1024.

To get the process ID with the largest working set, you’d use something like

(Get-Process | Sort-Object WorkingSet | Select-Object -Last 1).Id
# or
(Get-Process | Sort-Object WorkingSet)[-1].Id

I’m assuming either your ps is different to mine, or you’ve got a typo, as mine gives the parent process ID as the second column, not the process’ own ID, which is a good demonstration of the benefits of structured data in a shell - you don’t need sed/awk/grep incantations to extract the data you need, and don’t need to learn the right output flag for each program to get JSON output and pipe it to jq.

There’s not a PowerShell builtin that does the same job as watch, but it’s not a standard POSIX tool, so I’m not going to consider it cheating if I don’t bother implementing it for this post.

So overall, there’s still the same concept of composing something to do a specific task out of parts, and the way you need to think about it isn’t wildly different, but:

• PowerShell sees its jurisdiction as being much larger than Bash does, so a lot of ancillary tools are unnecessary as they’re part of the one thing it aims to do well.
• Because PowerShell is one thing, it’s got a pretty consistent design between different functions, so each one’s better at its job as you don’t need to know as much about it the first time you see it in order to make it work.
• The verbosity of naming means you can understand what something is at first glace, and can discover it easily if you need it but don’t know what it’s called - Select-String does what it says on the tin. grep only does what it says on the tin if you already know it’s global regular expression print.
• Structured data is easier to move between commands and extract information from.

Specifically regarding the Unix philosophy, it’s really just the first two bullet points that are relevant - a different definition of thing is used, and consistency is a part of doing a job well.

Powershell isn’t perfect, but I like it a lot more than anything that takes sh as a major influence or thing to maintain backwards compatibility with. I don’t think the Unix philosophy of having lots of small tools that do one thing and do it well that you compose together has ever been achieved as I think being consistent with other tools you use at the same time should be part of doing your thing well, and things like sed, grep and perl all having different regular expression syntax demonstrate inconsistency and are easy to find. I also like that powershell is so verbose as it makes it much easier to read someone else’s script without knowing much powershell, and doesn’t end up getting in the way of actually writing powershell as the autocomplete is really good. I like having a type system and structured data, too.

Some of these things are brought to a unixier shell with nushell, but I’m not convinced it’ll take off. Even if people use it, it’ll be a long while before you Google a problem and the solution also includes a nushell snippet, whereas for any Windows problem, you’ll typically get a GUI solution and a powershell solution, and only a maniac would give a CMD solution.

Commands and flags (for native powershell commands) are case insensitive, but the autocomplete both in the shell and text editors is really good, so people typically use it and have it tidy up whatever they’ve written to match the canonical case.

You’re thinking of at-will employment states. Right to work is about joining unions and making that difficult.

Again, you’re reading things into my comment that I specifically avoided saying. If perfect, good and mediocre can’t exist, then obviously what I said isn’t applicable, and you shouldn’t be applying it in that context. It’s just like you wouldn’t reply to a post about it being necessary to outlaw the slavery of elves by saying elves are fictional and the author is demonstrating that they’ve not considered this.

This segues nicely into my original point - if you try applying adages to situations they’re unsuitable for, dumb things will happen.