“Your daughters won’t even want dolls once I get through with them.”

It’s funny, I also own a used school bus and that gets barely worse mileage than the roadster.

At least your getting good gas mileage.

Lol I get about 16-18 mpg. 6-cylinder engines ain’t fuel efficient even when they’re jammed into a go-kart. For bonus points, the damned thing takes 93 octane.

I wish I could do that but I drive a roadster. Absolutely no fucking way to stretch out comfortably.

I would love for the Japanese capsule hotels to become a thing here in the US. I’ve always hated paying $150 or whatever for a full room (or suite) during a road trip late at night when all I do is crash out on the bed and then get up and drive first thing the next morning.

I stayed at one AirBnB where the owner had replaced all the kitchen counters with untreated butcher block. The instructions basically said “don’t use the kitchen”. For bonus points, my parents got the one bedroom and I had to sleep in the kids’ room … on the bottom bunk with the actual kid’s sheets because there weren’t any other sheets in the house. I just felt sorry for the kid.

I had a friend in the '90s who moved into a duplex and found that the previous tenant had cut into the separating wall and tied a splitter into the neighbor’s cable line. So he had free cable until the day the cable went out and he called the cable company to complain.

Istanbul?

This has to be Istanbul. It’s a stray in the best possible city in the world to be a stray cat in.

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.