As a python and node dev, I think NPM wins out just because I don't have to "activate" an environment when I want to use it. The environment is always right there where my code is.
Well, as somebody who is currently coding a calculation service that will handle a 500 billions portfolio, I can tell you this: the specs require the data to be interpolated + extrapolated left and right. And they use that to estimate risks and take huge decisions. And when they don't have enough data to interpolate from, they create a synthetic instrument from other instruments that have enough data, and use that to estimate risks and take decisions.
The only thing that makes the whole jenga tower stable is the fact it's all interdependent. E.G: to diminish your exposure, you take a swap with some other entity, and if everybody do that enough, the risk is averaged on the entire economy.
So from the inside, it's worse than it looks from the outside.
And mind you, the client I do that for is one of the most serious in the business. They are extremely risk adverse, and they have been acting nothing but honestly, at least at the level I can observe.
They are so by-the-book we have once found an error in $FAMOUS_DATA_PROVIDER calculations, because we thought we made a mistake, and we looked for it until we realized the data we compared ourselves to was wrong.
So if they manage half a trillion by using excel FORECAST.LINEAR and Matlab interp, imagine what is done by JP Morgan.
Briar can be banned, but for now it can't really be blocked though.
It's supposed to work in case the infrastructures are down by design.
So it can also work locally, meaning 2 Briar users can meet, and share messages from 1000 other users, and go on their way to propagate the update, without going trough the internet.
Now of course you can always enforce the ban, not through blocking, but through detection and punishment. However I doubt you want to spend that much resources for a single app.
The word does have some value though. I'd rather replace it by something that means "it's a popular way to do it", "it will help you to do it that way", or "it's recommended for beginners to use this procedure".
This and rear car seat belts are to me proof you can change the behavior of an entire society with a mix of punitive and educative actions if you stick to it long enough.
This is one of the things that bothers me when it comes to prohibition - whether it's marijuana, vaping, or even more obviously harmful drugs like opioids.
Cigarettes are some of the best evidence we have that we don't need prohibition to change behavior. We actually are capable of using regulation, taxation, and education to help encourage people to make smart choices on a society-wide scale. It's rare, it takes decades, and boy oh boy do a lot of incentives have to align. But it can be done!
>Cigarettes are some of the best evidence we have that we don't need prohibition to change behavior.
It only took over 60 years, entire generations, and millions dead. Meanwhile giant corporations profited immensely, literally advertised to children, and made up shit science and fostered a general anti-science and anti-intellectualism vibe among the ones who need education most. Glad avoided prohibition for that! It was so beneficial to society to allow people the freedom to inhale literal poison for the benefit of an insanely addictive, mild stimulant, with awful withdrawals, all while poisoning the people around them.
We have real, effective tools for dealing with substance abuse that don't involve a giant prison-industrial complex.
One of the major problems with prohibition is that it closes off a lot of the avenues we could otherwise use to reduce harm, while creating a black market and, in the case of the utterly senseless "War on Drugs," pushing tons of people into the criminal justice system and creating a massive industry for incarceration of low-level users.
After all this voluntarily created human misery, we've still got a crisis of opioid and other drug abuse in our society, and it's not clear that prohibition does much at all to reduce real rates of usage on the ground. A quick Google suggests that over 100,000 people died of overdoses in 2021.
What a goddamn victory for prohibition.
The decline of tobacco use is proof that there is a better way. It's just harder, takes longer, and, yes, despite the sneers of those who think they know better, has to respect individual liberty, personal responsibility, and freedom of choice.
It peeks in 1960. After that there's a plateau and then a long decline.
The thing that gets me is- why 1960? I mean there were lots of things done after that but if you look at it I can't help but imagine that the causality is backwards. That all the things done to make smoking cigarettes harder were just put there because people didn't want to smoke whatever the reason was.
