Ironically, one of the universal things I’ve noticed in programmers (myself included) is that newbie coders always go through a phase of thinking “why am I writing SQL? I’ll write a set of classes to write the SQL for me!” resulting in a massively overcomplicated mess that is a hundred times harder to use (and maintain) than a simple SQL statement would be. The most hilarious example of this I ever saw was when I took over a young colleague’s code base and found two classes named “OR.cs” and “AND.cs”. All they did was take a String as a parameter, append " OR " or " AND " to it, and return it as the output. Very forward-thinking, in case the meanings of “OR” and “AND” were ever to change in future versions of SQL.

I always liked United Snakes.

I had a friend in college whose parents were big into world government and had founded an organization to promote that. Talking to them was a weird experience because 1) they felt every problem facing the world could be solved by a one-world government, and 2) they actually felt achieving that world government was a realistic possibility. And it wasn’t like they thought the solution was just the USA taking over everything; they were very critical of everything about this country.

I don’t know if this is irony or not, but that friend is now worth $34 million after her parents’ company went public. She doesn’t say anything about world government any more.

I started my career with Visual Basic (3!) and I appreciated the loose typing because it meant I could get going and actually have something running quickly as a newbie. A few years later I switched to C# and saw how an entire class of errors disappeared because of the strong typing. Both have their place, depending on the skill level of the coder and the needs of the application.

It’s funny, the exact same logic applies to method and variable names. There’s no compiler that ensures that a method’s name accurately describes what the method does or ensures that a variable’s name accurately describes what the variable represents. Yet nobody ever says “you shouldn’t use descriptive method and variable names because they might be misleading”. And this is hardly academic: I can’t count the number of times I’ve run into methods that no longer do what the method name implies they do.

And yet method and variable names are exactly what people mean when they talk about “self-documenting” code.

There are no comments in the code

At my last job, I was assigned to a project being run by a straight-out-of-college developer who felt that not only were comments unnecessary, they were actually a “code smell”, a sign of professional incompetence on the part of whoever added them. It’s an insane philosophy that could only appeal to people who have never had to take over an old codebase.

needs to be in a nursing home

Specifically, in the medicaid wing of a nursing home.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

Isaac Asimov said this almost fifty years ago. It still doesn’t answer the “why” but it shows how long (at least) this has been going on.

I unfortunately watched the 60 Minutes bit last sunday on farmers getting fucked over by trump (parents had it on). It ended with one of the farmers saying “he’s a very smart man, I’m not gonna take that away from him.” The thought of the mental state you have to be in to think trump is a genius is just soul-crushing.

“Dunning-Kruger 2028” would make an amusing yard sign.

Another factor is that insurance companies make money on the “float”, meaning that they invest the premiums and keep the returns before paying out on claims. In times where rates of return on investment are high, they can be profitable overall even if claim payouts are larger than premiums collected. If medical costs are high then so are premiums and they make even more money off the float.

the judiciary system not understanding statistics (5 percent of all nurses have a statistically-significant high death rate)

There was a study years ago in Norway where they wanted to see if there were correlations between any disease and living underneath high-voltage power lines. They found that 5% of all diseases were so correlated … when using an alpha of .05.

Where I live (Philly suburb) there was an incident where a guy driving a 12,000 gallon gasoline truck pumped out 4000 gallons at his first gas station stop and then decided he just wanted to go home rather than making the rest of his deliveries. So he ran the hose to the back of the station and dumped the other 8000 gallons onto the ground. This happened to be right above a creek and about 200 feet from an elementary school.

It just doesn’t make any sense how anybody could be this stupid. He got 20 years in prison for it or something like that. He certainly deserved it, but meanwhile executives who manage to create far worse disasters never see a day in jail.

It’s not really a crisis – eventually he can go back to using regular toilet paper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_ho

The wikipedia article doesn’t mention the “pull together” (as in rope pulling) interpretation. That was from a book about Mao that I read a long time ago, I can’t remember what it was. The book had a bit about Evans Carlson traveling with Mao’s army and meeting him. I am certainly not a Chinese speaker so I’m happy to have my inaccuracies corrected.

sounds like a communist slogan

I’ve always been amused by the fact that “gung ho” (which in Mandarin means “pull together”, as in pulling on a rope in unison) started out as a slogan of the Chinese Communist Party under Mao and then migrated to the US during WWII because of an openly-communist Marine. Its real meaning is more like “be a team player” but it was somehow transformed into “eagerly shoot brown people”.

Also, the Marines’ “ooh rah” chant sounds exactly like the Soviet Red Army’s chant. More weird shit.

I’m squishing your head!

Overrated. ON ERROR RESUME was much more fun.

Back when I still rode airplanes, I used to never shut my notebook off except when I was about to leave for a flight. Then I had the pleasure of watching Windows install 957 updates while the cab was honking outside.

I remember Macintosh computers from circa 1990. Even then Apple loved to just remove buttons because they hate buttons. Because it was so perfectly intuitive to drag a disc icon over to the fucking trash can icon in order to eject the floppy disc, they didn’t have a physical eject button for the floppy drive. Helpfully, they instead put the power button right where a floppy drive eject button should have been. So I was constantly turning the computer off whenever I wanted to eject a disc.