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backlava

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I think most programmers don't realize how much vision holds them back. I've been coding blindfolded for over a month and I'm never going back. If you are a touch typist what do you need to see? Not looking at things helps me to focus.

I do take the blindfold off while checking my work an during some parts of debugging.

None of the things in that list were themselves decisions. They were causes of poor decisions. Do you dispute that mental illness can be a cause of poor decision making?

School Is to Submit 10 years ago

In theory the market should balance this. Workers should be willing to accept less money for more rewarding work.

Mercury Spill 11 years ago

Insurance rates usually go up after a claim even if it's obvious that the claim doesn't reflect a higher future risk, though.

Your rhetorical style here is off-putting. I don't think he's committed any logical fallacy. It's perfectly possible to do charitable work selfishly. For example, if you were offered a choice between saving two lives or, for the same money, saving only one life but getting a nice packet documenting the one life saved, it's selfish to choose the latter for the purpose of making yourself feel better. Even though you're still doing good.

So do I understand correctly that in this metaphor the poor quality of software is mostly because the practitioners are morons? I need to revisit the creeping complexity in my own projects and try to understand where I used the wrong nailgun, because this seems like a super productive analogy.

The innocent until proven guilty approach to traffic violations is already a farce. If you have a job, it costs more to dispute a ticket than to pay it. I'm in favor of changes to the legal system that would allow rapid turn around in low stakes cases. Start with something very informal and quick and have an appeals process where the loser pays.

Cracking the local monitoring device can be disincentived just like speeding. If an officer sees you speeding and you're not self reporting it, bam. Bigger offense.

The thing about more effective enforcement in any setting is that it can increase justice (lower the lottery effects) but it makes it that much more important that you got the laws right to begin with.

I assume that you're a software guy so I would hope that you would naturally understand the benefit of simplicity. Let's assume that a speeding ticket currently costs $200. What percentage of speeding instances do you think are currently fined? I'm going to guess far less than 1%. That means you can lower the fine to $2 per instance or probably much less and still be meting out the same expected punishment for speeding.

The goal of this fine is not to partition drivers into good and bad drivers. It's to incentivize good driving. Yes, good drivers are going to get fined occasionally but it will be a very small fine. Why try to make a more complicated rule that never fines "good" drivers? That will sometimes lead to drivers who decide to speed this once because it's free.

I agree. When he started talking about how capitalism shouldn't create these BS jobs, I assumed a reasoned economic argument was coming. Then this passage. It's a cabal of elites who have decided to spend their own money occupying the masses. What a joke. He could have just as convincingly claimed it was space aliens creating the jobs.