There are a few gnarly things about Nix, even for someone who’s familiar with Haskell (the most similar language to Nix that’s even close to mainstream).

• Dynamic typing (you mention this briefly). Some people like the extra flexibility that dynamic typing gives, but there’s a tradeoff: more errors. The thing is, due to NixOS’s complicated structure, the traceback for an evaluation error might not give you any information about where the cause is (indeed, the traceback might not include a single line of your own code!). This makes errors unusually costly in NixOS specifically, so any language feature that causes more runtime errors automatically has a worse impact than it would in a more “normal” language.
• The “standard library” (builtins) is extremely sparse. You basically have to depend on at least nixpkgs-lib if you want to get any real work done.
• No real data abstraction mechanisms. No ADTs, no nominal types. The only composite types are attrsets and lists. The usual way to encode a custom type is as an attrset with a _type field or some such.
• While we’re at it, very limited pattern-matching.
• Clunky list literal syntax: no commas between list elements. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve forgotten to surround list elements in parentheses.
• Can anyone remember the rules for escaping ${ or ''? I have to look them up every time.

Do you have support for smooth full-screen Flash video yet?

I don’t remember if that ever got fixed. Even if it did, Flash was already on its way out by that point.

Vance said this well before he became the VP.

Don’t treat Vance like he’s harmless. Vance is dangerous. Unlike Trump, he has something of a coherent vision, and he believes in things beyond himself. He’ll be willing to violate the rule of law for the sake of ideals.

Fiat isn’t “silly” insofar as there’s an underlying reason why fiat has value. The US dollar is valuable because the US government only accepts tax payments in USD. As long as the US government demands tax payments and has the ability to make good on those demands, US dollars will have value.

Vance has an old school polotician side. If left to himself, he wouldn’t go against the courts for example.

Don’t be so sure about that.

“I think that what Trump should, like, if I was giving him one piece of advice, [is] fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” he said in 2021 on a podcast. “Replace them with our people. And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Now, Vance doesn’t have the iron grip on 33% of the country that Trump has, so it’s possible that he’d have to be more cautious. But he’s definitely not against ignoring the courts in principle.

It’s actually exactly in line with what the link above says.

In June 2015, the Cochrane Collaboration—a global independent network of researchers and health care professionals known for rigorous scientific reviews of public health policies—published an analysis of 20 key studies on water fluoridation. They found that while water fluoridation is effective at reducing tooth decay among children, “no studies that aimed to determine the effectiveness of water fluoridation for preventing caries [cavities] in adults met the review’s inclusion criteria.”

In other words, water fluoridation might not make much difference for adults, but it can for children.

Counterpoint: I live in an area without fluoridated water, and I’m told that dentists can reliably identify people who didn’t grow up here by the state of their teeth.

Well, that’s a completely different argument.

If something is wrong, then it’s wrong, regardless of how efficient or inefficient it is.

How much earlier are we talking? I bet if you asked prehistoric hunter-gatherers whether they thought animals experienced pain, they woulds say yes. The idea that animals were automata comes from Descartes.

What? The fact that plants physically react to being cut has absolutely no bearing on whether they have conscious experience.

How about I just get to eat meat because I consider it far more humane to be more efficient about proteins?

What does this have to do with anything? This is bringing efficiency to an ethics fight.

Believing a candidate when they tell you who they are is the opposite of delusion.