If they're not American, then following their own logic they probably shouldn't be heavily implying that they are. It's misleading. They should give context in each and every comment so that we know.

Is it too much to ask for clear communication?

You know that in many parts of South America, most Europeans are considered just as gringo as Americans? As are Canadians, Australians, etc.

If you're going to critique, you should probably try to get your facts right first.

Or how about the US starts using ".us"?

> The US is the center of the world though

Give it a few months.

> Weatherspoons charge under £3 for a pint in town. That's 15 minutes at minimum wage.

Yeah but then you've to drink at spoons.

The thing is, they've purchased so many historic pubs, that if you refuse to drink at one that's a choice. I'm not saying that's a terrible choice, but it's a choice that bars you from an awful lot of pubs.

isn't weatherspoons like getting drunk at applebees basically? comparing that to a "pub" is kinda laughable

Not really. Applebee’s is still too food oriented.

Wetherspoons are definitely pubs. They just have a reputation for cheap drinks and cheap meals. But there’s still a significant proportion of people who go there for drinks only.

It’s more like a drinking warehouse with carpet on the floor and a menu of mostly beige food than a larger version of a cosy country pub with a roaring fire and a varied food menu sometimes involving vegetables that have not been deep fried.

It's the VA for survivors of the 1980s as it doesn't allow music or TV inside, so tends to get ignored by the soccer followers of a weekend and the younger generation entirely.

TBF their curry club and other food specials are basically subsidising old bachelors to the point of being an ersatz social service @ £8.45 to £11.45, including a drink, for 12 hours of service every Thursday.

https://thewetherspoonsmenu.uk/wetherspoons-curry-club-menu/

Generally speaking, its best described as the RyanAir of pubs. It gets you there, cheaply, but the juice may not be worth the squeeze in terms of ambience and clientele.

no music or tv? that sounds fucked... why don't ppl just drink in a park? iirc public drinking is actually legal in the uk?

(I know in some countries it's actually not -- Bratislava being one surprising example, though some cops were really chill when I was like hey sorry, I thought this was allowed, it's cold out so I bought a pounder and I wanted to warm up on the way to my hostel I'm not trying to bother anyone... though maybe they may have been letting me slide mostly because they were amused by what a pounder is once I defined it)

(A pounder is a big can of beer that got it's nickname because American frat bros will "pound" (chug) it to get very drunk quickly in places where the sales of beer are looser than liquor)

Isn’t it a pounder because it’s 16oz (US fluid ounces) which is a (US) pound?

(Note a US pint is about 474ml compared to the UK pint which is 568ml).

Of course US fluid ounces are a different size to UK (Imperial) fluid ounces. Plus the UK has 20 (Imperial) fluid ounces in a UK pint whilst the US has 16 (US) fluid ounces in a US pint.

How does it go? “A pint’s a pound the whole world around, except the UK where a pint of water is a pound and a quarter.”

As for drinking in a park, it is either something you do in the height of summer, or something you do if you are a tramp. There’s not much middle ground.

I have been to a nice ones, like the one in Exeter (but the owner is from there so that figures); I forgot the other two that were nice. Not many nice ones but they do exist.

Wow, that's some nostalgia for me. I remember encountering BareMetalOS and its bootloader Pure64 back when I still lurked the OSDev.org forums, probably more than 15 years ago at this point. Glad to see you're still at it!

> They're kidnapping people off the street and out of their homes and cars

Don't forget the murder.

It has stringly typed macros. It's not comparable to Zig's comptime, even if it calls it comptime:

    fn main() {
        comptime {
            var N = 20;
            var fib: long[20];
            fib[0] = (long)0;
            fib[1] = (long)1;
            for var i=2; i<N; i+=1 {
                fib[i] = fib[i-1] + fib[i-2];
            }

            printf("// Generated Fibonacci Sequence\n");
            printf("var fibs: int[%d] = [", N);
            for var i=0; i<N; i+=1 {
                printf("%ld", fib[i]);
                if (i < N-1) printf(", ");
            }
            printf("];\n");
        }

        print "Compile-time generated Fibonacci sequence:\n";
        for i in 0..20 {
            print f"fib[{i}] = {fibs[i]}\n";
        }
    }

It just literally outputs characters, not even tokens like rust's macros, into the compiler's view of the current source file. It has no access to type information, as Zig's does, and can't really be used for any sort of reflection as far as I can tell.

The Zig equivalent of the above comptime block just be:

    const fibs = comptime blk: {
        var f: [20]u64 = undefined;
        f[0] = 0;
        f[1] = 1;
        for (2..f.len) |i| {
            f[i] = f[i-1] + f[i-2];
        }
        break :blk f; 
    };

Notice that there's no code generation step, the value is passed seamlessly from compile time to runtime code.

It's not even that. Free markets by themselves (as implemented thus far) DO NOT ACCOUNT FOR EXTERNALITIES.

I have yet to see reasonable fix to the tragedy of the commons in a free market situation, and that's one of the most basic things one is fucking introduced to when studying economics and game theory.

Anybody who thinks health care is best served solely privately should have to pay to be diagnosed for something; either that or they've been failed in their privately funded education.

In the past I have read some libertarian literature that suggested the answer to the tragedy of the commons was that there should be no commons. Everything should be privately owned. How that would actually work in practice is way beyond my tiny brain.

It doesn't matter if it works in practice - it's religion, so it doesn't have to be true. We sent rockets up into space and there wasn't a giant man there watching us, but people still believe God exists. We tried living in a free market and everything turned to shit, but people still believe in libertarianism.

I think the theory is that if people owned the forest, the rivers, etc, they would have an incentive to take care of them for the long term. As we've seen with how companies have had all the value sucked out of them by private equity, leaving nothing but husks, I think this is a pipe dream.

Former libertarian here. The issue with libertarianism is that it does not explain the state of the world. The world is inherently unregulated. If libertarianism was superior it would have outcompeted other systems and it would have been the dominant system right now.

Historic explanations are even more problematic. How does libertarianism explain nomadic cultures or rice growing cultures (that tend to be highly collectivist)?

> The US spends 5x the average of other wealthy countries on administrative costs [1]. This line that the government is automatically inefficient and terrible at anything at all is not true

It's a line that tends to be mainly parroted by... the US. Quelle fucking surprise.

A mix of public and private can work with proper regulation (especially when combined with state owned private companies).

This article only refers to the US. This is the second time I've brought it up over the last week, but it'd be nice if the US and "the west" weren't constantly conflated.

Not all of us have fucked over their citizens and spiraled into borderline dictatorships that are well on their way to becoming international pariahs as much as the US have.

Everything suddenly makes a lot more sense once you realize the US is a developing country, one that happens to control the global money printer (due to a few accidents of history).

It's the only developing country that is also "first-world" or "western", and unfortunately, also the most powerful of those.