A new employee I took a risk on is not panning out. It's early yet so they have a few more months to gel and get up to speed but early indications are that I made a mistake. I spent a lot of time today covering their job duties and I lost my cool.

This is on me, but that's how my week is wrapping up. Sigh.

In this thread - tons of smart people thinking that the tools we use to replace "make a backup of a file on a server somewhere" should require entire reference books, as if that's normal.

Saying "it's a graph of commits" makes no sense to a layperson. Hell the word "diff" makes no sense. Requiring training to get something right is acceptable, but "using CVS" is a tiny tiny part of the job, not the whole job. I mean, even most of the commenters on this thread are getting small things wrong (and some are handwaving it away saying "oh that small detail doesn't matter").

Look, git is hard. It's learnable, but it's hard. The concepts are medium hard to understand, and the way it does things is unique and designed for distributed, asynchronous work - which are usually hard problems to solve.

Dragonlance is a good one.

• Wheel of Time
• Mistborn
• The Uplift Saga
• The Alex Benedict Series

Yeah, that's what the conservatives love about them. That and all the indoctrination.

Small price to pay for keeping your dream alive!

That's not how it works in America FYI. Children can't inherit parent's debt. They can have inheritances taken away and they can assume debt, but it doesn't automatically go to them.

And privacy rollbacks through the disasterous patriot act! In reality it was a longstanding wishlist of cop and law enforcement intrusions on the populace that would never otherwise have been enacted. Warrantless searches and wiretaps! Intrusive scans! Data sharing leading to leakage and being prosecuted for crimes unrelated to the warrant!

The passage of the patriot act is the reason that, in my heart of hearts, I can't completely dismiss 9/11 conspiracy theories. 96% I can, but 4% I look at the patriot act and the wars and I go "hmmm".

You're right that poverty is the root cause of crime and violence, but I think you're missing the point that OP was trying to make. Why does crime get worse or get better during any given week or month? Even if it's because maybe a factory shuts down and more people are out of work (for example, though I daresay that this leads to petty theft and not violence), it seems nobody's really able to predict these trends on a macro scale.

Counterpoint, capitalism has existed for only a few hundred years and yet hunter gatherer societies by and large faded out a few thousand years ago. I'm not saying there's a magic bullet solution here and/or we should revert to feudalism. But you didn't make the point you thought you were making.

"Heyimatthemallcomegetmebythefoodcourt" is my one word. It's what you would use as your name when using 1-800-collect.

+1 for not bouncing off the folks on the edge like they're the ropes of a WWE ring. I'm always on the edge cause I'm bigger but don't mosh much and at some shows the people are just the worst (paledusk fans you're the worst).

Dang I live in the suburbs. I can go to football games, play d&d, go to concerts, hang out at brewpubs, etc. The same things other Americans do to amuse themselves :)

Plus I can go rock climbing, boating on thousands of different lakes, canoeing for days, camping, hunting, stargazing, etc. It's an amazing place to live.