overton's comments

> The submarine's captain, Robert Dunn, feels they have been largely written out of the Libyan campaign and is keen his crew get their due.

Interesting, how did that turn out for Libya and North Africa in general?

Seeing a few canned tuna comments here. I love it as much as the next guy but PSA: it has more mercury than you would imagine -- in the range of ~60mcg per tin in some cases. Nobody needs that, and I've personally banned it from my diet.

Yeah, I doubt it's a viable long term strategy, but I think they're terrified of the crash being on their watch.

The Canadian government knows what they're doing. They're more afraid of a crash than they want to rein in prices.

Modern western society has not built the social capital necessary to cope with its material complexity. It's built on an ethic of grifting, in the large or in the small. See the part of the piece where people think you deserve what's coming to you if you aren't assuming everybody's out to f* you.

Sue me, I have whatever concept of efficiency that means that people eating and having housing and having a habitable environment is more important than NFT's or space tourism or car collections. That's my ladder of importance. So weasely!

Heck, even private businesses often do a kind of ad-hoc rationing for essential goods when there's a rush on them, because they know that the kind of arbitrage free-for-all described in the article has extremely poor social outcomes in a crisis.

The argument starts that people who need gas more are going to buy it in the shortage (suggesting efficient distribution), and then acknowledges that it's just as likely wealthier people or price gougers who don't need it.

In actual shortages where there's a strong political motivation to efficiently distribute goods (e.g. wartime), we switch to central planning (i.e. rations) because we know that's what works, denying price gougers their tax and making sure poor people who need stuff can get it.

Rails is unquestionably better now than when it was new and cool. Before, the ecosystem and core framework were evolving at a rapid pace, leading to some suboptimal patterns and sometimes making maintenance a bit of a nightmare. Now there's a pretty settled solution for most things. If you want to get started building apps without much fuss, there's no better way.

I have to wonder what other unintended side effects of modern tech/modes of behaviour we'll find.

Same story pretty much everywhere -- wealthy property owners can't be bothered to allow the minimum amount of development that would let the workers they depend on find decent housing.

A valuable perspective that alludes to a troubling phenomenon: discourses around disability often cater to the comfort of the abled.

Abled people don't want to accept that disabled people might require care beyond exercise and a change of mindset. It's disturbing to them that somebody (potentially them one day) could be in such a vulnerable position, and it potentially calls for costly support beyond these minimalist interventions.

Why should it take 20 years to own a home?

the OS landscape is pretty grim in 2021 in general:

- Some Linux distros are getting pretty usable, but there are also still plenty of rough edges and limited support for certain apps. It's understandable because the community is under-resourced.

- After having last used Windows XP, I was astounded at the lack of polish and QA on Windows 10. It seems that I encounter some bug or UX mess every time I use it. And this is supposed to be the 'good' iteration in their good/bad release cycle?

- MacOS is tied to expensive hardware which you may or may not want. The new M1 arch also makes it less useful for web dev work.

The first case linked above was in a gym where patrons were supposed to be masked and two meters apart, and the second case had a CDC investigation which would have mentioned that as a factor if it were present.

That's certainly the dominant narrative, but it flies in the face of superspreader events where it appears that one or a few people infected hundreds. Did they directly breathe on everybody they infected?

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/outbreak-at-quebec-city-gym-link...

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6919e6.htm

https://elpais.com/especiales/coronavirus-covid-19/a-room-a-...

Early on in the pandemic, the Canadian IPAC (Infection Control and Prevention) establishment came down hard against theories of airborne COVID transmission, at first even going so far as to not recommend masking. Even now that the science of airborne transmission has been established, they're waging a rearguard battle to obfuscate/deny it and airborne protections such as better ventilation and masking. If you go to a Canadian hospital wearing an N95 these days there's a good chance they will insist you to take it off in favour of a "clean" surgical mask with gaps around the sides and nose.

The primary usecase (which happens to me fairly frequently in Javascript) is when you need to operate on a native or library data structure with some function other than its built-in methods.

Some people also find it easier to program in an FP style (separating data and functions) in their app code. It seems to be a matter of neurodiversity.

I would add that it's misleading to generalize the experience of tech workers to workers at large.

We're in a weird and fortunate spot because we work as in a well capitalized industry as highly specialized skilled artisans. So often we get autonomy, leverage, and a good paycheck. This is not the experience for workers in general.

> Most people work but most dont necessarily have to, at least as much as we do. People enter the "rat race" because it gives them something, not just a source of money but other achievement and identity stuff.

What? In 2020, 50-78% of Americans earned just enough to pay their bills each month. Worldwide, a poll found that 85% of people are disengaged at work. I guarantee you that most people work -- even work long hours -- because they have no real choice.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown...

https://news.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/212045/world-broken...