The JDK team has advertised these changes for years. People who want to do wild & crazy dynamic stuff in their testing infrastructure still can, with a tiny amount of added setup. This is the correct tradeoff, vs having the JVM pessimistically unable to apply all sorts of optimizations because they never know when their users might have inadvertently opted into runtime shenanigans.

A general strike is a pretty different (and more effective) beast than something like the Floyd riots.

> With type annotation, it's becoming "ugly", a lot more verbose. It's no longer English-like.

In our codebase that uses Sorbet I find this is really only true at function boundaries. Within a function it is pretty rare that anything needs to be spelled out with inline annotations to satisfy the compiler.

This is my biggest irk about Sorbet: because its signatures are wordy and because it can't infer the generic type of a private method, it slightly pushes you towards NOT extracting helper methods if they are going to be 2-5 lines. With Sorbet annotation, it'd easily become 10 lines. So it pushes towards bigger methods, and those are not always readable.

If only private methods would be allowed not having typing at all (with a promise of not being used in subclasses, for example), and Sorbet would be used mostly on the public surface of classes, it'd be much more tolerable for me.

> Adding static typing to a dynamic language mostly gives you the disadvantages of both, without a lot of benefits.

As an engineer at a firm doing heavy duty data pipelines and internal tooling in a Sorbet-ified codebase, I disagree pretty strongly. While Sorbet type signatures are never going to win a syntax beauty contest, they are more than worth their weight in the way I can rely on them to catch typing and nilability goofs, and often serve as helpful documentation. Meanwhile, the internal code of most functions I write still looks like straight Ruby, fluent and uncluttered.

A good CI story that leans on tapioca was crucial here for us.

> That the US cannot win a war is silly. The US could erase every population center within a few minutes.

Although the U.S. ruling class often likes to pretend it can operate with no regard for its domestic perceptions of legitimacy, the stunning amounts they expend on relentless psychological operations suggest otherwise. Killing millions in an aggressive nuclear strike would do nothing but reveal to many people (who are desperately trying to pretend otherwise) that they are controlled by a klatch of relentless psychopaths.

The main purpose is probably to get American ships to fire the first shot, and thereby firmly establish that it is the U.S. empire that is the aggressor.

That ship has sailed.

I see your point, but it's kind of one thing to blow up a handful of "drug boats" (only a complete idiot believes that story, but simply having _any story_ seems to be the only requirement these days), quite another to start going after tankers carrying oil or their escorts.

Maybe they'll try to arrange some kind of Gulf of Tonkin style false flag.

Are you seriously claiming that the the boats blown up so far were not smuggling drugs? I think that sinking them was bad policy and possibly illegal, but I know enough about boats to be pretty certain that those guys weren't out there fishing.

Why was the ship flying a Guyanese flag rather than a Venezuelan one in the first place?

You'll have to ask the M/T Skipper's master about why he was flying a false Guyanese flag. I understand that he has been detained so that may come out during the investigation. The vessel had never been registered in Venezuela so there would have been no reason to fly that flag.

Are we really going to obtusely pretend we can't think of a single reason on our own for them to have done that?

I can speculate as to motives for flying a false flag but so what? Any vessel flying a false flag is subject to seizure and isn't entitled to legal protection.

And what should the U.S. vessels imposing an illegal and unprovoked blockade be subject to?

If you believe in "might makes right" why not just be honest and come out and say that?

> It's widely accepted that the US lost in Vietnam due not to military defeat, but from the clever Tet Offensive - where they successfully influenced US politics via US journalism, to cause them to simply cease fighting.

Yes, that's called "losing a war," and no serious strategist pretends that politics is not one of the key theaters (if not the key theater) of conflict.

Well in some ways Iran was also a winner.