In general, I oppose the death penalty. My argument against it goes broadly along the lines that our social contract is based around the system protecting each individual (thus, it cannot kill them), and that rehabilitation should always be on the table (benefits everyone).

I definitely think that people in power that abuse their power in order to commit a crime should be far more severely punished that an ordinary person committing the same crime.

Whether the above extrapolates to the point where it is justified to execute police officers that have body cam footage of themselves executing unarmed, non-threatening civilians (there are plenty such cases) is actually a question I’m a bit torn about. There are a couple videos out there (that no one should see) which show police straight up purposefully executing civilians that are either incapacitated or otherwise neutralized (lying face-down, spread eagle, unarmed). Should these warrant execution of the officer involved? I haven’t concluded for myself what I think yet.

Lord almighty… I’m truly baffled. It’s a funny story, but I’m a bit conflicted regarding whether it becomes more funny or just sad by being true…

Forgive me if I’m just unknowledgable here, but it appears from the downvotes that there might indeed exist adults as dumb as the one described. I’m honestly dumbfounded if that’s actually the case.

Is this a true story? Sounds to me like the gut may have fallen asleep or had some kind of mental short-circuit or something. I honestly can’t believe someone can survive to adulthood if they were actually just this dumb…

I write a lot of Python. I hate it when people use “X is more pythonic” as some kind of argument for what is a better solution to a problem. I also have a hang up with people acting like python has any form of type safety, instead of just embracing duck typing.This lands us at the following:

The article states that “you can check a list for emptiness in two ways: if not mylist or if len(mylist) == 0”. Already here, a fundamental mistake has been made: You don’t know (and shouldn’t care) whether mylist is a list. These two checks are not different ways of doing the same thing, but two different checks altogether. The first checks whether the object is “falsey” and the second checks whether the object has a well defined length that is zero. These are two completely different checks, which often (but far from always) overlap. Embrace the duck type- type safe python is a myth.