What is your area? I’ve lived in about 20 US states, in cities and rural areas, and it’s always been 1 cop per vehicle.

You’re thinking of cop shows from the '70s and '80s, not reality.

I don’t want to be the guy defending Hitler or Jeffery Dahmer, but

I’m a school bus driver and I regularly get infuriated by people who drive past me when I have my red flashers on and stop sign out, wishing there was a cop around. Only once so far have I gotten my wish … and unfortunately it was the cop driving past me at 40 mph just as some of my kids were about to cross the road. I looked down and saw him with his phone in his right hand and his left hand on the wheel, not paying the slightest attention to what was in front of him.

I’m lucky he didn’t run over any kids, because I probably would have gotten shot.

My favorite thing is when archaeologists dig up female statues with big breasts and wide hips and call them evidence for a “cult of fertility”. I guess that sounds more sciencey than “porn”.

I can see valid reasons for why someone might want to use Apple Macbooks

I use one because I write apps for iOS and you can only do that on a Macbook. It doesn’t make me a fanboi.

Wow thanks, never heard of this before. I was getting all set to buy a new Macbook so I could install the latest versions of Xcode and keep developing iOS apps. Looks like I can keep on abusing my 12yo Macbook instead.

I never once had a manager who even pretended to be a coder, and I’ve worked for a wide variety of companies ranging in size from a few people to tens of thousands. The only technical manager I’ve ever witnessed was myself when I managed teams of developers (and that only happened by accident when I wasn’t really paying attention). Even then I was less of a technical manager and more of a lead developer who also took on management functions because there was nobody else around to do it.

It certainly seems like a manager with actual technical skills would make the best manager of a team of developers, as long as they also have the people skills to do it. And didn’t harbor the desire to fire everybody and just do everything themselves - like I did.

or was it that they hired “career managers” whose only skill was to organise things?

My best manager was a former dentist who quit the profession after just two months because he couldn’t stand the idea of sticking his hands in peoples’ mouths all day long. I don’t think he had anything resembling formal qualifications for management.

I’m mostly a technical unblocker that jumps into the hardest or slowest moving technical challenges

In thirty years as a programmer, I never had a manager who was capable of jumping into any technical challenges at all. For me, the best managers were the ones who kept out of my way and insulated me from their managers.

But at the same time nothing is really expected of you - by the people above or below you. And you make more money than the people doing the actual work.

I grew up in Ohio in the 1970s (which was admittedly a rough decade as far as cold weather was concerned). Generally, the first snowfall was some time in September and at some point in October the ground would be completely covered in snow and you wouldn’t see grass again until April. The snow wasn’t completely gone until May. So essentially it was six months of Winter, three months of Summer and a month and a half each for Spring and Fall. It is certainly not anything like that any more.

Is it an increase? The article @macattack cited does not give any data on how much the IRS collected from high-income earners before this additional push supposedly funded by the Inflation Reduction Act. The article does mention that Republicans in congress recently rescinded more than $20 billion in additional IRS funding, which does suggest that the net benefit was far less than $1.3 billion and might even have been negative. It seems like the kind of breathless article the impact of which relies on people not well understanding the difference between a billion and a trillion.

Fine, revenues are $4.9 trillion. My point is that $1.9 billion is literally a drop in the bucket - hardly an example of the IRS “going after rich people”.

FWIW the US federal budget for 2024 is going to be about $6.8 trillion dollars. So that $1.3 billion is about 0.019% of the total budget. I’d call that a slap on the wrist for the billionaire class except that you can actually feel a slap on the wrist.

“Get rid of those ugly strain reliefs on the plugs!”
“Uh, we don’t make hardware.”
“I don’t care, get rid of them!”

For me, working from home meant eating endangered species for lunch seven days a week instead of just two. Checkmate, liberals.

I used to work for a software company that was a beneficiary of a $12 million a year political pork grant from the state of Louisiana that was officially intended for improving industrial and manufacturing capability in Louisiana. Somehow, my company was managing to spend this money in Mississippi, and giving it to a national defense contractor that wasn’t exactly in desperate need of (more) government handouts. That’s how fucking corrupt Mississippi is: they even suck in the corruption from their corrupt neighbors, while making sure that not a penny of that shit goes towards improving a state that I would describe as third-world if it wouldn’t be so insulting to the third world.

I always claimed in job interviews to be good at debugging, but there are no certifications for debugging and there’s really no way for an interviewer to verify such a claim. So even though it is an incredibly important skill, companies just do not look for it. There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.

You can’t just find a signal in the middle of the ocean.

Uh, this was the primary way the Allies defeated the U-Boats in WWII.

I meant to say commits and not merges, and yes he removed the comments before committing. It made no difference in long run because every new release broke all the accessibility stuff anyway. It’s amazing how little developers can be made to care about blind people - almost as little as managers. The only reason my company cared at all was they were facing million-dollar-a-month fines from the FCC.