caseydurfee

Most people pay more into insurance programs than they get out. That's how all forms of insurance works. Sheesh.

Ayn Rand ended up taking government benefits because she had to, not because she was trying to get back what she paid in. That's the key part.

Even if she could afford to take care of herself and was just trying to game the system to get her money back, that's morally pretty suspect, too. Imagine trying to mount the same argument about someone who deliberately crashed their car to "recover some of that money" they had to pay in insurance premiums.

Rand spent her whole life decrying people who are dependent on government assistance as looters and parasites, and then she spent the last few years of her life completely dependent on government assistance without it changing her stated beliefs. If you don't see the hypocrisy there, you're trying awfully hard not to.

She is an illustration that you can lead a successful, productive, non-moochery life and still end up needing government assistance at some point.

Why are you conflating Obamacare with progressive taxation? Incredibly misleading. Hayek was clearly fine with social insurance programs.

"Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to super-cede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective. But there is no incompatability in principle between the state’s providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom." -- The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek

"If I have to change my viewpoint, or choose not to express it, because someone finds it upsetting, then that is not freedom of speech."

I don't think you really understand that "freedom of speech" refers to the actions of the government. It has nothing to do with what private citizens do in response to what you say. The first amendment doesn't protect you from blowback and it's not supposed to. Freedom of speech is not freedom from criticism.

However if you consider freedom of speech an issue between citizens, wouldn't the right to bear arms be the greatest enemy of freedom of speech? Seems like "an armed society is a polite society" is a recipe for a society where nobody speaks their mind for fear of losing their life...

Reminds me of Steven Jay Gould's classic "The Median Isn't the Message":

"If the median is the reality and variation around the median just a device for its calculation, the "I will probably be dead in eight months" may pass as a reasonable interpretation.

But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions. Therefore, I looked at the mesothelioma statistics quite differently - and not only because I am an optimist who tends to see the doughnut instead of the hole, but primarily because I know that variation itself is the reality. I had to place myself amidst the variation."

http://www.cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html

If funky and homemade is your thing, there's always librarything (which also has a real business model, so not likely to get swallowed up any time soon.)

Seattle, WA. Full stack LAMP engineers. Full time.

RealSelf.com gives people the real story about cosmetic surgery treatments through unbiased reviews from patients and answers from the top plastic surgeons in the world. We are the 8th fastest growing company in Washington over the past 3 years.

We're looking for a couple more well-rounded LAMP engineers to add to our current team of 7. We hire people who have exceptional communication and teamwork skills, a user-centric mindset, and enjoy covering a lot of ground technically.

We: * Have a healthy corporate culture and set of values (http://www.realself.com/values) that informs everything we do * Write modular, testable, maintainable code * Learn quickly, pushing code several times a day, and share what we learn * Automate away the uncertainty/risk/boring parts of testing and deployment * Are comfortable jumping in wherever needed

Full job description here:

http://www.realself.com/about/jobs#dev

send an email to casey@realself.com if you're interested or have any questions.

Buzzword bingo: PHP, MySQL, Symfony 2, bootstrap, git, chef, capistrano, memcache, nagios

Is there a legitimate use case for being able to recursively define entities like that?

Hey, it worked just fine in The Mosquito Coast, Fitzcarraldo, Into The Wild and Apocalypse Now!

"Inter-universal Geometer" is a pretty badass job title.

Here are some resources I've found helpful:

http://whiletruecode.com/post/7-handy-text-manipulation-tric...

http://cheat.errtheblog.com/s/subl/

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-tips/essential-s...

Yeah, before the Federal Reserve came along, we never had these sorts of problems...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1857 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907

Indeed, how do you say "cruise control for cool" in Latin?

Original version of the license: "Lamson is licensed BSD or GPLv3, whichever you want. This basically means you shitheads who like using software without giving credit can go on being leeches on the world and tell everyone that you're fucking brilliant and invented all the gear running your shitty little company when really you just borrowed shit from real creators like me."

New version of the license: "Neither the name of Zed A. Shaw may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission."

We could very well call this whole incident "Learn You Have Borderline Personality Disorder The Hard Way, By Being Laughed Out Of Court." BSD, meet BPD.

Just curious, has that aspect of the GPL ever successfully been held up in court?

A software engineer drafting up his own crazy license is on as solid footing as a lawyer drafting up his own crazy email server software.

This is yet another example of engineers' disease. Having experience in a narrow technical domain does not confer you expertise in other domains. Being a mechanical engineer does not make you qualified as an expert on climate science. Being a software engineer does not make you qualified as an expert on contracts.

I'm surprised to see no mention of postrelational/multivalue databases. Postrelational DBs played in the 80's and 90's, and are still widely used in the world of big iron.

It's historically inaccurate to state we went from file-based databases to relational ones and are now slipping back to file-based ones.

Rather, both the relational and non-relational DB worlds have taken many ideas from the post-relational world (even if not intentionally.)

The SQL/NoSQL + ORM + MVC stack of today is much closer to what postrelational DB's were like rather than what SQL apps were like back in the day. Every generation thinks they invented sex, and high level database programming...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiValue

"The right to private variables is not the right to a common good. It’s a me-centered right, that obviously started in the sexual revolution with contraception and obviously quickly evolved to abortion, and now has found its way into the marriage debate. And all those acts that were self-giving acts, self-sacrificing acts, have been polluted by this right to privacy." -- Rick Santorum