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.

People are literally starving

Which means it’s working exactly the way they want.

Lol “will”. GOP fuckery is the only reason Republicans have held power for the last 30 years.

Jesus HGH Christ

I have an aunt slowly dying of kidney disease, living on just Social Security. She got hit hard by the Medicare cuts and it hasn’t affected her love for Trump in the slightest. My mom just got a text from her where she says she’s looking forward to meeting “Jesus and Charlie Kirk” lol.

When I first started checking out Nextdoor occasionally (mainly looking for cheap used bicycles) I was hopeful that it was mostly just bots. Unfortunately I started seeing posts from people I actually know in real life, and I was reminded of why I (very happily) bailed on Facebork fifteen years ago.