A Taxi Driver is focused on criticising the authoritarian government of the South in the 1980s. It has the media blaming the uprising on the North, though the film has already shown that to be untrue.

Certainly there's going to be antipathy in some things. The Spy Gone North deals with that head on. But there are plenty of examples where it just doesn't come up at all. It's not like the prerequisite nudity in every single French film.

Telling people "if you're poor, you should just go somewhere else" is not a particularly compassionate response. It's literally the rhetoric of ghouls.

And why should cheaper countries—which are cheaper because of historical (and ongoing) exploitation—be required to solve the problems of richer nations (yet again)?

Beyond that, moving anywhere—let alone another country—is an impossible task for anyone with necessary family/social connections or particular healthcare needs, all situations more likely to be true among older people.

Rising house prices has in many ways been a trick to distract people from stagnating wages. It is a trick because the extra "value" of their house is only realised in exchange, which isn't actually possible much of the time, and in any case is usually only possible in a market where all other alternatives have also increased in price, negating much of the benefit.

For a brief period, it was possible for ordinary working class people to buy a home. This is a good thing. And while some of them will have contributed to the changes that leave us in the situation today, many of them did not and, in spite of having their own home, continue to face difficulties.

In your comment you appear to be conflating these people with richer folk, and you also don't appear to know how much elder care actually costs.

I'm not especially sympathetic to most of the anti-tax whining either, since it usually comes from the resentful rather than the struggling, but older homeowners are not a monolith.

The bit is from a decade ago. I'm not sure the volatility had arrived/was obvious yet.

The rake has nothing to do with JS (which I agree is cursed, but for its own reasons, not this).

You have called a function in a way that does not give a consistent value (Date()). Such functions are hardly the preserve of JavaScript. You've failed to adequately deal with the range of values produced, with code that tries to insist that the "31st February" can be a meaningful date in February. You should accept that this is your mistake and learn to (better) avoid side effects where possible.

Also, the function isn't side effecty since it doesn't make implicit references outside its scope.

Edit responding to your edit:

Also, the function isn't side effecty since it doesn't make implicit references outside its scope.

The Date() function's output varies according to something other than its input (and even the rest of your program). Using its output without accounting for that variation means that your function, as originally written, also gives inconsistent return values, varying according to something other than its input, because it does, in fact, reference something outside the function. If it did not, the results would only depend on the monthNumber argument, and would always be consistent. I don't know what you call that, but I view it as a side effect.

As you have said, the rake is that months have different lengths, and you need to account for that. But that's not one of JavaScript's many issues.

The colony leaders claim that those who disagree with their new system are either "too outmoded to comprehend the visionary" or "too visionary to accept what can reasonably be achieved today".

Great! A colony of centrists.

there have been protests against their binary doctrines

With centrist matriarchs, there's a reading here that they're terfs.

No.

The point of an analogy is that it isn't a 1:1 mapping.

The utility of an analogy is that it conveys a point in a more obvious way. To do this, it can be stripped down, exaggerated and distorted, even logically inconsistent. The only measure of success is whether the point is received, and once that has occurred, the whole thing can be discarded in favour of a return to the original topic, now with a new perspective.

The analogy is merely a conversational tool. If it does the job, put it down and move on.

This kind of pedantic over-analysis is an even more useless interjection, and is a perfect example of something that, while correct in some regard, misses the point and only serves as a distraction.

Uh, the XiBucks, obviously.

Look, I get it. Hexbear is a demanding place to be. It expects you to not be a complete asshole almost all the time. You're regularly tested on knowledge of an emoji system so complex, it's been known to make London cab drivers cry. If you unthinkingly parrot talking points, you'll be pounced on with annoying facts and aggressive reasonable concern for the value of other people. And if you emit the slightest Hitler particle, you'll be outright banned. How authoritarian! Honesty, sometimes I wonder why I signed up, never mind stay around.

But then I remember that the folks there are a deeply caring lot, who see the problems in the world and actually want to do something about it—even though the goal often seems barely possible—and, in spite of everything, retain a sense of humour and try to make improvements for each other, even if, for now at least, it can only be a :meow-hug:.

Oh, and the XiBucks, of course. Some of us even get roubles, too!

We don't allow slave labor like communism does.

You might want to recheck that constitution.

Oh, no, what am I saying? You don't want to do that, because that would once more point out that you're clueless in your assertions. Now I don't want to read any more of them. And I'm free to turn you down, right?

Bad faith it is, then. Got it.

Honestly, even just the "a" is fine, really. I'll just read it as "blah-hadge" for my own amusement. But if anyone wants the å, it's probably Alt-0229 on Windows, Ctrl-Shift-u e 5 on Linux, or hold down "a" until the accented-characters popup appears on Macs, iOS and Android.

The problem with notable examples is that they're pretty much never representative examples.

Ah, Enhanced, the folks that brought us interrogation.