Feeling somewhat validated in my choice to upgrade to a discounted phone from 2019 rather than spring for a newer phone with 5G support. I just had a feeling 5G was going to be something I would certainly eventually want to have, but wouldn't make a huge practical difference in the short-term (the next couple of years).
His argument that Donald Trump would be a better choice for President than Hillary Clinton because the former would be easier to remove from office than the latter, arguing specifically that "congressional Republicans would [not] automatically spring to his defense, if he overstepped the line". Doesn't seem like a great example of keen political judgment in hindsight.
"Numerous examples" is fantastic but what he said was a generalization and as a generalization it holds up. What % of congressional Republicans would you estimate "did not automatically spring to his defense"?
That's a pretty uninformed reading of the situation as it happened. If you followed conservative media throughout the process it wasn't at all obvious that establishment Republicans were going to actually mount a defense of the President. There was a lot of wavering back and forth as the narrative evolved and was fought over. It was not automatic at all.
Your reading of the situation seems predicated on a conveniently pedantic definition of "automatic" from my perspective. I watched the entirety proceedings as they transpired and don't recall witnessing much hesitation from Republicans, but it's definitely possible that by not "following conservative media" I overlooked the actually agonizing deliberation that transpired behind the scenes. I would love to educate myself more on this topic, can you link to any examples of what you're talking about?
> but it's definitely possible that by not "following conservative media" I overlooked the actually agonizing deliberation that transpired behind the scenes.
This is actually exactly what I'm talking about, not the proceedings themselves. With the exception of the potential wildcard of the Bolton testimony (which never ended up happening) at that point the party had essentially been whipped and it was just theatre.
Up until Matt Gaetz did his stunt disrupting the private/secret hearings of House witnesses there wasn't very much fire on the Republican side which was why these close-door pre-impeachment vote hearings happened in the first place. Remember that at certain point there was a pseudo-impeachment process occurring prior to any impeachment vote having taken place. Even convincing Republicans that they needed to fight to get an actual vote on the record was not an simple process.
Most of the conservative establishment was against Trump at the beginning. Especially Fox News, the primary mouthpiece of the then-traditional Republican Party. Remember that Trump was/is quite critical of the Bushes and other neocons. Watch one of those "Trump won't be president" highlight reels on YouTube and you'll see plenty of Republicans included.
Even today, you have a fair amount of Republicans who criticize Trump for various reasons, including Mitt Romney, the 2012 nominee, and John Kasich. Additionally the new "Lincoln Project" is funded and run by anti-Trump Republicans.
The Lincoln Project is mostly a group of ad guys who would normally get paid at this time of year but have made themselves anathema for the time being from their traditional customers. They've just pivoted because the smart money is on getting funding from Trump oppo groups.
"Five days before the House even approved the articles of impeachment on Dec. 18, McConnell took to television to say he would be in "total coordination with the White House counsel" as the impeachment process moved forward.
"During an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, McConnell said that "everything" he does "during this, I'm coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president's position and our position as to how to handle this, to the extent that we can."" (https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/mitch-mc...)
"But it evidently has great value to the president and to Mr. McConnell, who had spent nearly a year preparing for it. From the instant that Democrats assumed power in the House last January, denying that they had any intention of impeaching Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell, a six-term Kentuckian and the longest-serving Senate Republican leader, directed his staff to quietly dig into the history of impeachments and consult with outside experts.
"“We thought they would finally work themselves up to doing this on something,” Mr. McConnell said. “It has been threatened endlessly. We needed to come up to speed on what actually happens, and that began in earnest last fall.”
"So when Mr. McConnell fielded a phone call from Mr. Trump days before Christmas, he was ready. Stung by the House vote to impeach him on two charges, the president reached out to the majority leader from his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Fla., throwing out ideas about how to handle his coming Senate trial.
Mitt Romney was the first Senator, of any party, to cross party lines to vote for an impeachment of a President of their own party. Many Republican legislators immediately and publicly renounced Trump's comments[0] regarding delaying the election.
The [R]'s can read the wind and since their base is tied to the hip to Trump at the moment they'll play ball on day to day things and have his back on most things, but they are all quite aware he is a temporary force that will be spent eventually and the last thing they want to do is give him the permanent keys to the kingdom.
According to the OP he said Trump would be easier to remove than Clinton. The fact that Trump was not removed from office does not make the statement wrong.
I don’t think they automatically sprung to his defense though.
It seems to me that the Republican establishment didn’t support Trump but that he was able to rally his base in order force their support begrudgingly.
I believe the term that Trump’s base used for those Republicans was RINO, Republicans In Name Only. So the fact that this vocabulary existed among Trump’s base to me indicates that their support for Trump was not automatic.
I think there is merit to that, although I wouldn't care as much about republicans holding him to account. It would be nice but unrealistic from observations (not based in US).
I would argue that you should vote someone the press is actually critical of. Now, the press was very critical of H. Clinton too, but that was ignored because people made fun of Trump.
That's probably true, since Hilary's campaign cost 3 times more than Trump's campaign. In the end, both sides are there to defend their interests, and not yours.
I made this back in 2016, about voting and that famous paper that talks about how the opinions of voters are really only expressed for the top 10% of income earners in the US:
I've tried a strategy like that in various contexts. e.g. not uploading a photo of myself on a Slack workspace. How differently might people read what I'm saying if they assume that I'm white versus knowing that I'm black?
I thought it wise to try this strategy when looking for employment, but I think it actually works against me in that case. If the employer knows I'm black then they can filter me out from the get-go and save both of us time rather than be dragged through a pointless interview process. It's hard to really quantify the exact degree to which my race is a detriment to how I'm perceived, but I sense it often enough to know that it's there in some capacity.
So you feel confident in asserting that, at the time that the person made that tweet, the quality of the Python code that they shipped was poor, or it took an inordinate amount of time to produce? All because they had to look up len()?
Actually, yeah. That one jumped out at me, too: that’s kind of like saying “I know how to drive a car, but I always have to look up which one is the gas pedal and which one is the brake”. If you’ve done _anything_ in Python, the length function is ingrained in your brain, so if you honestly don’t remember it, you just haven’t written any Python (or it’s been more than 10 years).
I routinely use several languages, and am constantly forgetting which ones use .size() and which ones .len(). It's not worth committing to memory because, if I get it wrong, the compiler will tell me "what is this function of which you speak?", and I will simply turn around and use the other one, at which point it starts compiling again, wasting me at most a minute of my time.
Furthermore, I should point out that it's not out of the imagination that someone wouldn't use len() all that heavily. Python has functional operators that let you do map/reduce-style operations on lists, strings, dicts, etc. that don't require you to use length all that much. My most recent python script only uses len() in two places for more robust error reporting.
Well... try not to take this personally, but... that means that you're not really an expert in Python, which is what (I assume) the interviewer in the linked post was looking for. You're capable in several languages, and may be an expert in one or more of them, but if they're looking for Python expertise, asking you how to find the length of a string is a good way to get a feel for how much time you're going to need to get to where you can really be trusted to produce mission-critical Python software (which may not be a deal breaker, if you're good at a lot of other things).
>that’s kind of like saying “I know how to drive a car, but I always have to look up which one is the gas pedal and which one is the brake”
OK, I agree, it's kind of like saying that.
But it's also kind of not like saying that.
Incompetence in driving and incompetence in software development are measured in completely different ways for completely different reasons. In driving, notions of what you definitely should know in order to qualify as "competent" extend from the intrinsic risk to other people's well-being. You can't simply transpose those notions onto the low-stakes sandbox environment that is software development. In software development, process is only important as far as it hinders or helps to deliver good code; competence should be dictated purely by results. All of the actual competence of driving comes during the actual process part; successfully reaching your destination is actually considered to be less important than simply not fucking anything up on the way there.
Sometimes I pick up a video game that I haven't played in weeks, and perform actions incorrectly because the button layout has been overwritten by the button layout of a similar and more recent game. It would foolish to say I'm wholly incompetent at either game; I still have a strong concept of what I should be doing and what I intend to do, it's just that I'm fumbling a bit at the specifics of executing my intent. Am I incompetent for looking up the button layout? Am I incompetent, but only for the 1 hour that it takes me to get back in the groove of things?
Declaring someone is incompetent is a bold assertion to make from such limited information. At the end of the day you either deliver good code in good time or you don't. I would be extremely reluctant to determine this guy can't deliver good code because he had to look something up. Figures no one will hire me.
> I would be extremely reluctant to determine this guy can't deliver good code
See, I’d be extremely reluctant to assume the opposite - that he can, even though he doesn’t remember “len”. Given this one bit of information, all I know is that he has exactly one thing in common with everybody who doesn’t know how to program in Python: he doesn’t know the function for determining the length of a string. Now, he may (somehow?) know everything else about Python except for that one thing: I’m assuming the interviewer was a bit surprised (as I would be) that somebody presenting themselves as a Python programmer didn’t know len, but went ahead and asked him a few more questions which he may well have nailed. If the answer to every question was “I don’t know, I have to look it up”, you’d pass on him, too. I just can’t picture how anybody who didn’t remember that could remember much else, but I guess that’s why job interviews last an hour or so.
>See, I’d be extremely reluctant to assume
>Given this one bit of information, all I know
This seems like a really flawed way of approaching most things. Why assume anything? And if you're going to assume anything, why only factor in that one bit of information, and not any other context. How about the fact that he's been coding for 30 years and works at Google. Is that also relevant?
>I’m assuming the interviewer was a bit surprised
There was no interviewer in this situation. His tweet was not in regards to any interview. Did you read the article?
>If the answer to every question was “I don’t know, I have to look it up”, you’d pass on him, too.
But if I were to do so, at least in such a case I would be basing my suppositions on more than just one thing.
>It sounds like the poster has been rejected from a job interview for missing a semicolon or writing “length” instead of “len”.
These kinds of anecdotes make me often wonder if candidates are "disqualified" for far more superficial reasons, and if interviewers hone in on pedantry like this to legitimize their reasoning perhaps even unconsciously. I have trouble believing most candidates wouldn't make at least one trivial mistake of that sort and I am equally reluctant to believe the same interviewers would disqualify any given candidate for a mistake so trivial.
