There are good sides to DST, such as coming home “earlier” (by the sun clock but not by the social clock) from school or work and therefore having more hours of daylight during the free time after work. These positive effects may go beyond subjective feelings. A study has shown for example that activity increases with longer evening daylight (Goodman et al., 2014) – albeit with small biological effect sizes (≈6% difference in the daily activity between the Standard Time of the year and DST, adjusted for photoperiod). Interestingly these results of the above study were culture-specific: a significant increase was mainly observed in Europe and to some extent in Australia, while no significant effects or even slightly negative effects were seen in the United States and Brazil.

Fucking duh. This is the sticking point for me, and I am disappointed that the article doesn’t mention the effect of latitude here. Very easy for muricans to say “DST is not useful” when these fuckers never get pitch-black night before 6pm or full daylight before 6am ST.

Brussels is on the same latitude as Calgary. ST robs every office worker of one hour of useful daylight. That’s it. That’s the whole argument for permanent DST. Businesses will not change their opening hours, so permanent ST means a net loss of one active hour in the day for every office worker. Permanent DST in Europe means someone working 9-6 would not have to drive home at night for 4 months of the year and could maybe even take the dog for a walk in the evening sun.

The kind that rails on “anti authoritarianism”? Or do you have a charitable interpretation of “authoritarianism” that is somehow compatible with democracy?

I also fail to see what any of that has to do with capitalism, which I have neither defended nor mentioned yet you brought up.

Goddam arguing with tankies and their endless litany of non-sequiturs is such a pointless exercise.

Please, go ahead and develop. What part of my comment leads you to believe that?

Typical Stalinism/Maoism: Anyone who opposes my implementation of Marxism is an enemy of the proletariat and can be persecuted to any extent. These people agree with the mainstream idea that communism can’t be implemented democratically, but come to the conclusion that democracy must be abolished.

This meme is an open dogwhistle to tankies and thankfully meaningless to anyone who hasn’t fallen into or interacted with this small subsection of the far-left.

What kind of non-agile bottom-up software projects have you experienced? Bottom-up waterfall? I guess it’s possible in theory but that would be a sight to behold.

My only point is that in most situations, upper management are fools that should be left to their devices and should never get a say in development methodologies. By definition if upper management imposes Scrum, it’s a self-defeating prophecy.

Your average tech company should be somewhere in the bottom-right, but bad managers are trying to pull the needle upwards to justify their existence or make up for their incompetence. But they still call that “Agile” (which can be true by some definitions of the word) or “Scrum” (which that isn’t, by definition).

Good software does not come out of companies without a bottom-up approach to software development. Top-down approaches are either terrible or extremely expensive.

Agile development is something that at my company we fought for, not against. It’s literally impossible to fight against actual agile development since it has to come from the workers. Agile is not scrum, and neither are a collection of ceremonies. It’s just a framework to give agency to developers.

Scrum is not the be-all end-all, but in organizations that cannot implement scrum effectively, no system could hope to achieve anything meaningful either.

Scrum aims at empowering workers to remove power from clueless MBAs and meritless CEOs, if they don’t want to play ball then the idiocracy will win every time regardless.

Villains are stereotypically older fat queer bald men (e.g. Vladimir Harkonnen). These are all factors people have little-to-no control over.

Media will sometimes subvert those expectations, but most of the time the iconography matters more to the filmmaker than decency. It’s quite fucked up the insecurities these portrayals breed, no amount of positive affirmation will make up for the fact that some natural body types are fundamentally associated with villainy in the Western visual canon.

I’ve witnessed similar corporate screwups from the inside, I know the greed and political games and misaligned incentives that allow for such an obviously and catastrophically badly scoped project to be pushed dead-on-arrival in production, against the advice of literally anyone with a pair of eyes and literally any honesty.

Intellectually, I understand. Yet my heart doesn’t, because it refuses to believe the sheer amount of collective stupidity and outright malice at every level of management, consistently for years on end, required to achieve these outcomes. How anyone can sleep at night with “Product Manager for New Outlook” on their resume is beyond me.

Beta road signs: Unreadable if you don’t speak English, take a while to process, do not stand out

Chad Vienna convention signs:

I mean, bad programming sucks regardless of the “paradigm” (and vice-versa, mostly). But as someone whose job it often is to sift through production logs hunting for an issue in someone else’s component, at least I have a chance with OOP, because its behavior is normally predictable at compile time. So with the source and the backtrace I can pretty reasonably map the code path, even if the spaghetti is 300 calls deep.

Now where shit really hits the fan is OOP with dependency injection. Now I’m back to square 1 grepping through 15 libraries because my LSP has no idea where the member comes from. Ugh.

Anyone who praises FP is either a student, works primarily in academia, or otherwise never had to look at a deep stack trace in their life.

Every time a production system spits out a backtrace that’s just 15 event loop calls into a random callback, I lose 6 months life expectancy. Then I go look at the source, and the “go to definition” of my LSP never works because WHY WOULD IT, IT’S ALL FUNCTIONAL hapi.register CALLS

I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it. I support UBI because the people pushing functional programming in real production systems should be reassigned to gardening duties.

Comparing Cloudflare to insurance companies is not how you’ll convince me they’re not acting like jerks lol

Well someone’s done it at least once this century. It looks equal parts awesome and terrifying.

If I saw that in someone’s house I’d think “well that’s terrible but no-one’s first woodworking project looks great, at least it’s creative problem-solving”.

Hearing the price tag is where I’d probably faint.

I’m honestly unsure. What is the alternative?

Given that there are plenty of developed countries where credit scores don’t exist (and plenty more where they do but only for businesses), I think alternatives are imaginable. I would know, I live in one such country.

If you want a mortgage here, the bank will:

• Ask you about your current loans and potential past defaults
• Ask you about your current and past income, marital status, employment status, etc.
• Use those variables to pretty straightforwardly determine your loan capacity
• I think do a background check in national databases for defaults/“bad payer” status
• Contractually obligate you to receive your salary on the same account from which they will automatically pull the mortgage. I don’t think this helps reduce actual defaults much, but it probably greatly reduces the financial and administrative overhead of late/missed payments. Also this ties you into the creditor bank which is good for business, IDK how standard that practice is abroad.

The US consumer economy is very highly dependent on short-term/credit debt, and that is absolutely crazy to me. Some Americans say they “need” a credit card to defer payment on some purchases, and as someone raised in culture where debit is king this sounds absolutely insane. Y’all have been propagandized, here it is perfectly normal to not have a single credit line open before shopping for a mortgage and if anything your banker will commend you for it.

I’ve heard that was more of a European thing, but the only two serious contenders are Pozidriv vs Torx for screws (and hex vs Allen for bolts).

I just checked my local hardware store’s website, and out of the 176 kinds of 4/4.5mm screw boxes in their inventory, 74 are Torx, 55 are Pozidriv, and 38 are Phillips (ew).

Either Torx or Pozidriv is fine when used properly, however most DIYers don’t understand the difference between PZ and PH and end up stripping their heads. Also it’s much harder to use the wrong-sized bit with Torx than PZ.

So yeah, Torx wins in just about every category and other heads only get manufactured to appease old people and penny-pinchers.

Now you’re just reaching at straws to comfort your worldview. I could explain to you that I never was a huge gamer (and only started spending significant time gaming around 12 y/o), and that I am hugely uncreative (in the traditional sense at least) despite having played with dolls as a child. But I get the feeling that you’ll just come up with more explanations why I somehow unconsciously “trained” the things I’m naturally good at.

Anything to avoid facing the fact that brains, like bodies, aren’t all created equal and identical. To pretend they are is completely ridiculous. Yet we do so because admitting that not everyone is born with equal potential breaks through the veil of The Meritocracy™, Karma™ and all the other little lies we tell ourselves to avoid facing the fact that the world is fundamentally unjust.

Nah, I hate maths and never studied at home. Still did way better than kids with difficulties that were studying way more.
Not studying didn’t pay off in higher education (focus issues, possibly undiagnosed ADHD or related), because talent ALONE is not enough anymore, but before then I had an objectively easier time than most and that was with little time or interest devoted to it.

We ALL use the concept of “left” and “right” daily. I’ve been doing that instinctively without a problem since I was, like, 8. Some adults still need to use a mnemonic every single time. Is that because they don’t have enough interest or didn’t spend as much time on it as 8 yo me did? Of course not.

I have put hundreds of hours into one of my hobbies, digital photography. I really like it. I have watched and read plenty of theory and know most of what there is to know about what makes a good picture. My photographs are only halfway decent and nowhere near what they should be given my time investment. And that’s OK, because I know it’s not because of anything I did and I like the hobby anyway.

Your argument does not have a leg to stand on. Someone with music agnosia cannot learn to play the guitar like you do. Dyslexics cannot “just study like I did” their way into being good at mental arithmetic. Pretending that skill is ONLY a function of time and drive is extremely pretentious and factually incorrect. It’s the “you’re depressed? Just do like me, think happy thoughts” of education.

nuh-UH. Nope.

Talent ≠ practice ; talent + practice = greatness

Thankfully it’s usually quite easy to dispel this myth by saying “then why are you bad at maths”. We all had the same number of hours in maths class as kids, but some had to practice WAY MORE to achieve a passable grade.

Most people can’t be Mozart. Some dedicate their lives to music, and do not get a fraction of the way there.

“Talent doesn’t exist” is a lie we tell ourselves as a society because our individualist culture sells us a pipe dream of personal greatness that many/most people literally aren’t equipped to achieve no matter how hard they try (and we should try regardless).