LordKano

Like many others here, I work in IT and that's the kind of thinking that led to every new project being "Ruby On Rails" about 12-15 years ago and every time a new underlying library gets updated, a bunch of code breaks. Meanwhile, C/C++, COBOL and FORTRAN programs from 30-50 years ago are still running the infrastructure of the world.

Newer doesn't always mean better.

Of course it's important and it's inevitable but calling it an "emergency" would by hyperbole and cause it to be taken less seriously.

Perl is still my go-to language when I need to write something quickly.

I have so many purpose driven utilities that I have written in Perl, that it saves me several man-hours of work every month.

I am unabashedly pro gun. I have testified at hearings on behalf of gun owners.

Still, the point I'm making here is that there is something especially troubling about those cops who see themselves as the protagonist from an 80s action movie.

I had one high school classmate who wanted to become a cop. He was a runt who discovered weightlifting and steroids. The thing that kept him from becoming a cop was that he got caught stealing from vending machines when we were teenagers.

It's fantastic that he didn't get to carry a badge and gun.

They're thinking about making their vehicles look differently than everyone else's instead of thinking about what would work the best?

I spent a year at a TA at a University and in that time I had two students who were really stellar. They were outstanding programmers. They paid attention detail and wrote elegant but easy to read code that worked. I took the time to offer both of them my assistance if they needed any help after graduation.

I play video games with one of them. The other one got out of CS and changed her major to something art related.

That would free up over 80% of the DEA's budget to go after meth and heroin.

Apparently, one of them is a doctor with a caribbean bank account. I was getting monthly balance updates for years.

I get confirmations of automobile service appointments and a bunch of other things.

Once, I even got an email from someone saying "This is MY name."

Occasionally, I get alerts on my phone that someone tried a password recovery. I gleefully decline and go about my day.

My name is neither common nor uncommon but I'm glad I got here first.

Their behavior wasn't ethical. They didn't approach me. I found their job posting and approached them.

My decision to make them persona non grata was about not rewarding them for behavior that negatively impacted me.

I responded that I wasn't owned by my employer and just as they were free to let me go, I was free to leave on my own. The real reason was that since employers pay them and talent does not, they don't want to risk their income stream. Since that day, when this agency emails me to ask if I'm looking for new opportunities. I remind them of that incident and request that they don't contact me again.

It took about 8 years to finally sink in that I would NEVER have any dealings with them and they eventually stopped emailing me.

This isn't a junkie wanting your wallet. This is someone forcibly entering your home with weapons and assaulting you.

You have to assume that once you have given up the thing he wants, you remaining alive isn't high on his list of priorities.

The victim lived. He did the right thing.

It's the masses voting bread and circuses for themselves.

Rich people only have the option of leaving but pretty much every place worth living does the same thing.

I'm not sure that's a fair criticism. They're certainly not doing a perfect job but the number of people who have a higher quality of life than a century ago is a real success.

There are people who are living fulfilling lives who would have been housed in mental institutions or who would have long since killed themselves, given the state of mental health care 50 or 60 years ago.

I'm also extremely grateful that they're smaller than us. A dog sized mantis would be the stuff of nightmares and horse sized mantises would pretty much have guaranteed our extinction long before now.

As someone who has recently joined that club, I agree. I have been hunting for years but this year I killed my first deer. The whole process changed something inside of me.

Because of my actions, this gentle creature went from breathing, living and doing whatever it wanted to being food.

While I was aiming my shot, she turned her head towards me and looked at me. I can clearly remember seeing her blink.

I put the arrow through her heart and lungs. I dragged her out of the woods. I gutted her and hung her up. I packed her body in ice.

These were things that I had seen done before but never did myself.

As I was field dressing the body, I looked at her and apologized, then I thanked her for providing healthy meat to feed my family.

In my mind, it changed venison from butcher paper wrapped meat that was leaner than beef into the flesh of an animal that was killed.

I don't know what she thought but I think she was, on some level, self aware.