"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is a thread about flag emojis, hardly tangential!

And it isn't flamebait to point out the f*cked up power dynamics in highly-government-influenced standards orgs. Especially the Unicode Consortium, since you can fit the alphabets of the official language of every country but one into a 16-bit space (no I'm not advocating Han Unification -- in fact precisely the opposite). The whole rest of the world has to deal with variable-length encodings and "grapheme cluster" nonsense just to keep one country happy.

dang, you have impugned my honor. I demand satisfaction in the form of a duel! Nerf guns at twenty paces.

	▲	dang a day ago \| parent [-]
		IMO veering from minutiae of 5-codepoint Unicode sequences to hot geopolitics ("for fairly obvious reasons") is a classic generic flamewar tangent, in the textbook sense of "tangent": there's one point in common and otherwise the lines don't intersect at all. These tangents always go in the same direction, too: they bump the thread off the back road (obscure Unicode details!) and onto the well-paved multi-line highway (to hell!). None of that matters though, if you're going to be as good-humored as this!