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As someone who worked as a wave pool lifeguard for 8 years and is a current certified Water Safety Instructor, I mostly agree. The large rafts are never really what I have an issue with. It's water wings and other personal flotation devices that are much more troublesome.

Parents are a huge part of the issue. PFDs give them a false sense of security where they feel like they don't have to watch their kid. The best change my old pool ever made was banning them (besides USCG approved life vests). The rafts were almost never an issue unless parents stuck their kid in the middle and stopped supervising (which happened a lot and we'd yell at the about). Crappy parental supervision is the cause of most problems at pools.

Exactly. If you're not focusing on form and don't have experience or guidance, almost any free weight lift can be dangerous. There are ways to mitigate the risk of deadlifts just like any other lift. Use a hexbar so the weight isn't entirely in front of you. Start learning incredibly light and focus on form. Wear a belt to help keep your core engaged. These plus so many other tips will mitigate the risks of one of the most effective full body lifts.

I'm not sure this is entirely true. While I agree that we might be automating our work away, it's not zero-sum. New technologies and industries will develop creating new spaces to automate. There are tons of things that computer scientists in the 70s couldn't even dream of. I'm sure there will be things we couldn't even imagine in 50 years. I'm not saying the rates of growth and decay are the same, but it's definitely not just all decay.

This is why Supreme Court justices are appointed for life. At least in theory, they'll carry out their job impartially because they don't have to run for re-election. They'll hold their position long past when the current administration so any conflict of interest should be mitigated over time. Directly electing judges has its own set of problems. I'm not trying to argue for one way over the other, just pointing out that the executive branch appointing judges is not inherently wrong.

I think it's mostly for chew spit. Depending on where you're at, it's still not uncommon for kids to be using chewing tobacco or snus during school hours. If you were sly with a colored bottle, you could spit all day and never get caught. I'm not saying this is a great reason, but this isn't totally illogical.

Exactly. Unless you're a startup, just have a rotation for people on call. Also, resolving these issues tends to go far more quickly when you have as few people as possible looking at the issue. Those calls where you have multiple engineers debugging are generally a waste of time for most people on the call. It gets even worse when management and product ownership are also on the call asking questions. Like please, for the love of god let me work and I'll get an RCA to you when we find and resolve the issue.

You can practice mindfulness and meditate daily and still be depressed about the state of the world you live in. You can recognize negative experiences, embrace them, and still feel empty afterwards. You can see yourself as a bristle on the brushstroke of the universe and still feel insignificant. You can see that life is just a game and not want to play.

In a world with 7 billion people all playing their own game, there's bound to be some people who don't want to play. Calling their game "delusional" is hilarious because reality is an abstraction. Saying you can "control" your thoughts is also ridiculous. You can't control your thoughts, Buddhism, Taoism, etc will tell you that. Your thoughts are you. You can only change how you react to them. No matter how many Alan Watts books people read, acid trips they take, hours they spend meditating, etc some people aren't going to think the game is worth playing. That's okay. No amount of telling them to go to the gym, eat better, and meditate is ever going to change their game.

Mint is such a wonderful distro for people who want to use Linux but don't want to mess with things. I'm glad you've been enjoying it so far. Canonical really dropped the ball with how great a no-config, no-bullshit distro can be. Ubuntu felt like it was on this path 10 years ago before they started adding all the unnecessary bullshit. I'm glad Mint is the fork that picked up the slack.

I think lumping all coding together isn't fair either. When I'm designing and implementing new features, I definitely get a sense of satisfaction. It feels good to solve a difficult problem and the sense of accomplishment is definitely there (at least for me). When I'm dealing with a bug ticket or doing a lot of plumbing with a story, I definitely get far more burned out and don't have the same sense of satisfaction.

There's a ton of diversity in humans. I do honestly believe that software can be just as fulfilling to some people as hunting, gathering, farming, etc that are more "natural" to humans. With that said, I definitely don't think it's for everyone. I can certainly see how people could get very little satisfaction out of programming as a career. To each their own, but I personally wouldn't trade my career in software for anything outside of a "dream" job like being a writer or standup comedian. I'm sure there's people that wouldn't trade their job programming for anything.

This is a poor analogy imo. It's not a physical medium. There's a finite number of parking spots. Once they're used up they're gone. Media is not a finite resource. If I have 50 friends over to watch the Avengers movie, there's nothing wrong with that. There's not less movie to go around, but there's probably fewer people who would spend money to rent it. I can't bring 50 people in my car to use a parking spot. There's physical limitations. Comparing digital things to physical things is always going to be a poor translation.

I'm not arguing that that other forms of engineering are completely inflexible or that software doesn't have some constraints. I'm just saying that in general it is far, far easier to change lines of code than it is physical objects. That's why when there is a hardware issue that can be addressed in software, they send you a patch not a new CPU.

I feel like other engineering disciplines would function closer to the software world if it was easier to iterate. It is very difficult to nearly impossible to change the design of a bridge once construction has started.

If it was super easy, we'd very likely change things once they were in use. Perhaps we didn't account for pedestrians using the bridge and they're walking across it all the time or tractor trailers are having trouble making a right off the bridge. Software is inherently "soft". It's malleable. When done well, it can create better fit to purpose solutions than almost any other discipline. I agree that most "software engineering" is more like plumbing, but I do feel like "real" engineering disciplines would likely follow a similar paradigm if they had the same luxury to rework things.

It depends on the acuity of the test imo. Autism is a spectrum. High functioning and low functioning autism are two different beasts. If they can't differentiate between high and low functioning, I agree that they should do what they can to try to prevent it. If they can predict high functioning, I think there's a real debate to be had. Especially if there are any potential risk factors with the treatment.

People and businesses don't behave rationally. They behave with bounded rationality [0]. That is, they make the most rational decisions with information available to them. No one is working with perfect information. This leaves plenty of room for them to leave money on the table.

With that said, I have no guarantee that these companies are leaving money on the table. We also have no guarantee that they aren't. The best you are going to be able to do is create a model. Models are not reality. Models use assumptions. You're making two huge assumptions. One, that the models assumptions are correct. Two, the people interpreting the model are doing it correctly. Humans are imperfect, we make imperfect models, those models are interpreted by other imperfect humans. Making concrete statements either way is silly in my opinion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality

Justice isn't a pick and choose kind of thing.

Yes, it is. That is the entire purpose of the executive branch; choosing what laws to enforce. We don't have the capacity to enforce every law. There are such a ridiculous amount of laws on the books over the last 250 years that enforcing them all is impossible. So, we prioritize things. There is a reason why most lawyers will suggest that you don't talk to the police without an attorney present[0]. If they want to get you for something, they will find something.

Also, justice and law are not the same at all. We do not have a justice system. We have a legal system. If you have more money, you will almost always have more favorable outcomes in court. I'm not saying to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We need some laws and law enforcement. But legality does not equal morality. You have to weigh things on their own.

[0]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

This is amazing! Thank you

This resonates so much and seems to be a major trend in non-traditional tech companies. I've mostly worked in the financial industry and the executives' knowledge of technology is almost always horrible. As you said, a couple buzz words and very set opinions on the ways to do things. It's like they get pet projects in their head from reading an article in a magazine and get locked into it.

I don't really have an issue with CXXs being ignorant about a subject. No one knows everything. What I do have an issue with is when they act like an expert ignoring all the people who are actually experts in a particular area. It'd be like me going into a room full of IT people and saying EBITDA a bunch of times claiming to be an accounting wizard ready to lead a major initiative. It's frustrating but I've learned all I can really do is smile and watch the show.

State colleges really vary by state. I grew up in Pennsylvania and when I graduated, our in-state tuition was already the highest in the country at around 16k. Now it's nearly $23k a year just for tuition in PA [0]. I went to a private college with nearly quadruple the sticker price and was actually paying less than my peers who went to Pitt and Penn State.

You're right about the community college. That is absolutely a way to save money, but in states like PA, you'd still have to pay nearly $46k for tuition alone. That's not including housing or transportation costs. It's not as easy as "2 years at community college and then transfer to a state school" for everyone.

[0]http://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/pennsylvania/

I don't think this is a practical solution at all. What would a licensing board certification entail? Thousands of certifications already exist, and we don't take any of them seriously. Why would the licensing board have any power? We'd need software engineers to form a union or have government regulate that companies hire certified engineers. Either way, there needs to be some enforcement mechanism.

Shifting the onus on security away from the companies and onto the developers also seems like a bad idea. With GDPR, there is a financial incentive for companies to use good practices. With a licensing board, companies will care far less if Joe Q Developer might lose his license. Why would they care unless there is financial or legal incentive? I just don't see how this would work without getting back to government regulation. I'll definitely reconsider my view point if you have a solution to this hurdle.