It's woefully short sighted, as it misses the long-term prospect of economic output, as most classes of people you mentioned provide some economic benefit in one way or another. Cynicism should be precise, in my opinion.
You can swing to the opposite end of the spectrum and argue that everybody is economically useful indirectly to the point that any meaningful definition of economic utility is gone.
I think emotional opposition to what I wrote comes mainly from the fact that people tend to give moral valuation to economic usefulness. If you are not useful, you are bad. And since they don't want to think about large amount of people as bad, cognitive dissonance arises and forces them to extend the definition of economic utility till they feel comfortable again. Till they narrowed down the amount of bad people to fit their comfortable world view.
I think much healthier way is to say that economic utility and morality are orthogonal and it's perfectly fine that retirees or learners don't have economical utility without any additional justifications. This approach allows making moral judgements more freely and accurately. In this framework, being economically useful can't be used to cover immoral behavior and lack of usefulness can't be used to stigmatize perfectly harmless people or even those useful in other ways.
At this point, we all should point to personalized diets. I'm vegetarian for many years now, yet I started to have iron deficiency. B12 is perfectly fine. My wife is also vegetarian, her B12 and iron are fine.
You should keep an eye on your b12/iron/protein/whatever levels, but each individual requires a different approach.
Don't have a horse in the race. Isn't Israeli constitution specifically about the Jewish people, as a ethnic, religious group? I read it discriminates against interfaith marriages, etc
Israel doesn't have a constitution. There's the declaration of independence which does explicitly say the Jewish People. But the interpretation of that is varied. The closest thing Israel has to a founding father (who died before the country was formed) is Hertzel and he called it "state of the Jews". Many make a strong distinction between that and "Jewish state" as American TV anchors like to say (that's like nails on a blackboard for me).
Israel doesn't have civil unions. It only has religious marriage any religion is OK but the religions do discriminate. This is both problematic and a blessing. I'm not married to my spouse because I'm an atheist, but Israel has a "known in public" status which gives us the same rights (and some obligations) as married people. That means Gay and inter-religion couples can enjoy all the rights.
Another option some people take is to fly to nearby cypress to have a civil union which is recognized in Israeli courts.
About the broader question. Yes, there are religious elements in the government that have been pushing the secular envelope. This creates a lot of friction within Israeli society. E.g. there's a law against pastries in passover which is just the dumbest thing ever... Unenforceable and just stupid. There's also regulations prohibiting Jews from working on a Sabath (supposedly as a labor protection). Notice that both laws mostly affect people who are listed as "Jews" even if they are secular.
The laws discriminate against non-jews. Below is a list which includes things like restricting who can emigrate or gain residency, who land can be distributed or leased to, restricting commemoration of ethnic cleansing that the state was founded on, etc.
You would encode it for the same reason we use source control - confidence that what is deployed matches some kind of record of it.
In development we don't send archives of code to each other (OK, some people do I guess) and in infrastructure we don't click around in AWS to make changes
Have you ever worked in a regulated environment? One where you can't just SSH into production and change things? Logs and audit trails provide attribution, not prevention. How do you prevent unwanted changes to production? How do you block changes to production with quality gates? How do you ensure that modules conform to specific specifications before they are launched? How do you do an equivalent to code review? What happens when AWS rolls out a new feature like blocking public access and you have to roll it out to all of your buckets immediately? All of this is much, much more tedious in an interactive system.
Some great points from a sibling comment, and the one I'd add is:
You don't need 100 instances of something to make managing it programmatically worthwhile. Different environments, for example: Terraform makes it very easy to ensure _all_ of the cloud config in prod matches staging (or the inverse), and to set up and bring down ephemeral development environments, using parameterised Terraform modules so you can be confident changes will propagate appropriately.
Congrats on the (kinda) launch. I was curious to see what you guys were up to. The blog post is pretty detailed, and with good insights. Reducing modern app development complexity to mixing data structures sounds like a good abstraction. I'm sure you thought really hard about the building blocks of Rama and you know your problems better than most of the hn crowd.
Now, the really hard part becomes selling. If companies start using your product to get ahead, that will be the real proof, otherwise its "just" tech that is good on paper.
On a side note, did you guys got any inspiration from clojure? I see lots of interesting projects propping up from clojure people...
Does a possibility of a Python API figure anywhere in your roadmap? Or am I missing the point here? Seems like it would be a smart choice to have one on the statically-typed side, and one on dynamically-typed side?
We're not releasing one as we don't have the bandwidth right now to maintain and document another API. That said, making a Clojure wrapper around the Java API should be pretty easy.
Veganism is actually a spectrum, as one can always find some connection to animals and their suffering. And you don't need to buy into it, you can go with your own definition.
To me it sounds you have just a bunch of excuses to avoid actually doing anything.
This is the Mediterranean. I am sure most countries know the location of most vessels. If a rich guy would try to cross in wooden plank we would call him adventurer, and I'm sure the effort to rescue him would be far greater.
By not saving people in the Mediterranean, it acts as a deterrent to future attempts.
Until liability finally becomes a thing in computing like in other industries, then lets see how much everyone cares.
It is slowly happening, lawsuits against failed consulting projects, returns in digital stores, fixes free of charges due to warranties and security regulations changes,....
