drewbug01

The existence of additional problems and avenues for violence does not mean we shouldn’t address gun violence.

If we take your argument to its logical conclusion - why have any laws or regulations at all? Such arguments are silly.

> I wouldn’t take the lower end of the estimate

Oh, sure. Why not.

> banning things has never worked

I can think of at least one high-profile counter-example to this, specifically with guns, within living memory.

I’m done arguing with you; there’s no sense arguing with people who think that gun violence is just a political football. I pray you are never the victim of your preferred policies.

> Lawfully owned and carried firearms are used defensively something like 10x more than in the commission of crimes.

That's citing the maximum of the CDC estimate; the low end of that same estimate paints a more sobering picture.

If you take the lower end of the estimate, another way of saying it would be "nearly 40% of the interactions involving this product are used illegally." We strongly regulate things that have a much smaller chance of causing harm than firearms.

> Sure, just like providing food to starving people is the best way of helping them. Unfortunately, things are rarely so simple and black-and-white, right?

Your argument here is, what - it's not "so simple and black-and-white" to provide food to the hungry? I happen to think it is that simple, and black-and-white: there is no good reason that anyone on this planet goes hungry. We have more than enough resources to go around. I find any suggestion to the contrary to be deeply morally abhorrent.

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is the canonical form of this argument. And it’s utterly irrelevant.

Sure, most people with a gun don’t kill anyone. But the fact is, some people will. Prohibiting access is by far the best means of preventing those tragedies before they happen. High price to pay? Sure. But saving lives is worth it.

> Now, as for that data, it exists

No one ever wants to provide it, though.

> cant read at all when they enter.

That's a pretty important confounding factor, don't you think? Might that change the way one should interpret the data - knowing that kids weren't starting at a level playing field, but in fact playing catch-up from the beginning?

> To CPS's credit they do pretty decently taking all these kids who are far behind and brining them almost to grade level, but its just hard for me to say thats a huge accomplishment when tons of kids are still so far behind.

What precisely do you expect a school district to do? If kids are behind, it's going to take more time and effort to get them up to speed and there are only so many hours in a day; only so many days in a year; only so many years before the kids leave at 18. Sounds like you expect a miracle, and I don't think any other district could do what you're expecting either.

CPS does a pretty damn good job, even by your own account.

Would you care to support that with some hard data?

Everybody loves to hate on CPS, but there’s actually a lot of interesting signs of progress:

- https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/states/illinois/

- https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/11/2/18330871/cps-student-...

“We should improve society somewhat.”

“Yet you participate in society. Curious!”

I don’t appreciate the conflation of conservative views and religious views, which is my main problem. I never said it wasn’t important to discuss; don’t put words in my mouth.

My other problem is that I just find his writing and rhetoric to be very weak.

> But they do have some serious, thoughtful conservatives in their opinion pages. Like David French and Ross Douthat.

You do a serious disservice to David French by including him in the same boat as Ross Douthat. Mr. French does often post thoughtful pieces from a conservative viewpoint, but most of what I’ve read from Mr. Douthat is quite the opposite.

Indeed, most of what I’ve read from Mr. Douthat is just a thinly-veiled sermon that paints “liberals” as one-dimensional characters that (along with our whole society) just need to find god. A conservative catholic god, specifically.

Really, he’s a religion columnist masquerading as political commentator. And not a particularly good one, at that.

David French, though, is a decent writer.

Gotcha - the comment read precisely the opposite to me, thank you for clarifying :)

> Funding in many schools isn't there now for specialists to do these roles.... because teachers wanted to earn more after inflation, so cuts made - more responsibilites to teachers.

This seems as though you're implying that it's the greedy teacher's fault that our school systems shove ever-increasing responsibilities upon them. As if the total pot of money in the system is a fixed, immovable sum, and so that if a teacher wants a raise it must mean that something elsewhere has to give.

Is there any shred of evidence to support that kind of thinking, though? We can quibble about salaries and outlier districts all day long if you want, but fundamentally it's not like teachers are the most highly-paid group of workers out there. And governments manage to find money to increase funding to other systems year after year (the police, for example).

A far more accurate title would be “Nine writers on their drug addictions and experiences,” because very little of this article has anything to do with ADHD or the legitimate therapeutic uses of Adderall.

Also telling that none of the writers reflected on how their behavior contributes to the absurd hoops people like me have to jump through to actually access the drug (when we can get it at all, anyways).

If you’ve got ADHD, don’t bother reading it. It’s just infuriating.

> designed to appeal to or pander to the prurient interest

This is the part that really concerns me, to be honest. The main meaning of "prurient" is "characterized by an inordinate interest in sex."

The main reason this concerns me is because some people believe LGBTQ issues to be inherently sexual; and thus this law could be used to suppress general LGBTQ content as well as pornography. It depends on who enforces it and who interprets it, of course. But when you consider it in light of the hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills filed this year alone, it just worries me.

> But you weren’t talking about pot.

I was. I was replying to a comment that was talking about pot; and the comment I was replying to was on an article that was about pot. In context, I would have thought "medicate" would be understood as "medicate [with cannabis]".

> You were talking about people treating their work related depression and stress being a bad thing because it enables their employer to depress and stress them. At least, that was the message I got.

Nope, nope, nope. You brought up antidepressants - as I said before, I think that's an apples-to-oranges comparison. Recall the original comment I was replying to in the first place - it talks about being "more eager to work and more resistant to burn out" via pot and people "continuously stressing out and thinking about changing jobs". And I don't think it remotely bad to treat depression or stress with medication, at all.

Now maybe somebody is about to burn out and thinks about changing jobs because they're depressed, but that's reading a lot into it. My comment was trying to talk about leaving toxic and shitty jobs. You're bringing a framing into it that I do not agree with and didn't ever say.

It doesn’t really surprise me, actually. We spend an enormous amount of our waking hours engaging with our jobs! If one believes in democracy, holds it as a core value - it seems perfectly reasonable that such a person would want the place they spend so much time to reflect those values.

Whether or not that’s “right” or “wrong” is an entirely separate matter, of course.

But it doesn’t surprise me, not in the least.

The most common, plain meanings of the phrase “rightfully so” do imply a basis in morality.

It’s fair to say that it can mean that the “rightness” is derived from other sources, but pretending that the primary meaning of the phrase doesn’t imply morality is just being intentionally obtuse.

Why are you so obsessed with trying to tie my comments to marxism? That’s deeply odd.

> But you didn’t suggest individual action. You set out objectives which can only succeed if enough ppl coordinate to do it.

I suggested individual action; you attached success criteria to it that support your weirdly strong desire to paint me as a marxist.

Now, I don’t know why you’re so adamant on it, but that’s your business I guess. I think it’s kinda weird honestly.

Well, if all it takes to be a marxist is suggesting that people take individual action to change a socially undesirable situation, I guess I’m a marxist.

But I mean with definitions that broad, who wouldn’t be? I guess it’s useful for trying to shut down conversation, but I’m not sure what other utility it holds.

Well; I’m inclined to agree that my comment would indeed sound silly if you simply substituted antidepressants for pot. But in my mind that’s because it’s comparing apples to oranges. I just don’t see how they are comparable.

If I wanted to make a marxist-style call for collective action, there’d be nothing “thinly veiled” about it.

What I was actually suggesting is that people should, in fact, decide for themselves; and that employers should reap the consequences of those decisions.

It sounds like you’ve mistaken me for someone you’ve been arguing with elsewhere. Maybe my comment vaguely resembles a fight you’ve been having before, but you’re reaching some conclusions that just aren’t supported by what I said.

In the short term, for the individual: yes, it could be better to medicate.

However in the long run, it ends up giving license to shitty employers to continue being shitty, and perhaps to become even worse.

Such employers need to feel the negative consequences of their behavior. Their business needs to suffer from high turnover and poor quality work, and if they don’t change then they need to fold.

Businesses are, at the end of the day, just people - people who live together and participate in the same society. I can’t honestly say that the best outcome is for workers to medicate themselves to be able to tolerate their bosses. Work doesn’t have to be so toxic and awful, you know?

You’re technically correct; they’re misreading what you literally wrote. Instead, they’re responding to the combative tone you wrote it with.

If you really are the VP of Eng at a company, I hope this kind of fight-picking isn’t how you lead.

My living room backs up to a T-intersection in the alley. I also live next door to a school.

Every. Single. Day. I see parents on their phone blowing through the stop signs in the alley at that intersection. During school drop-off! While there are kids and parents walking in that alley to get to the school!

It is utter madness.

Were those flaws not obvious on the test drive? I also bought a car this year and the mirrors + pillars aren’t like that - I would say maybe we shouldn’t support manufacturers with our money who are pushing unsafe designs.

There was something like this a few years ago, "Elixir for Rubyists": https://thoughtbot.com/blog/elixir-for-rubyists

I have such mixed feelings about it. I went back to the Apple Store today to exchange the “light seal” for something that fit better - and an older couple who were there for a demo asked me “what do you use it for?”

I didn’t have a great answer. The technology is really compelling; but it is a solo experience. I tried to show my friends last night what I saw via AirPlay… and it’s just not as interesting that way.

And despite that - last night I played a little LEGO game, and I was utterly transfixed. It plucked at my heartstrings in a way that shocked me. Today, I used the built-in “Mindfulness” app, while sitting atop a lifelike recreation of Haleakala… and it was incredibly peaceful.

I just don’t know what to make of it yet, but it’s fascinating. I’m making a conscious effort so far not to use it much around others, and I hope that will be a good balance.

Useless? Come on. Documentation is hard, and I suspect rather than admit something is hard we'd just rather pretend that "it's not important."

> Requiring commit messages is a vestige of engineering practices from the ancient times of the mid-aughts.

I know it's been ~20 years, but hardly ancient. I suppose it's ancient to the young?

> With modern trunk-based engineering, pull request branches are squash-merged onto main — and all those silly commit messages are thrown out in the process.

I do work that way; but those commits are still preserved in git history on the branch I cut the PR from. People have gone back and read them! They've told me as much!

But also worth noting that this is a very github/gitlab-centric workflow; certainly the kernel devs don't work that way.

> You shouldn’t have to show your work like you did in school.

Commit messages aren't for showing your work, they're for explaining why you did what you did at a given point.

---

Honestly, in some ways I kinda see the point. But if you're not disciplined enough to squash your damn commits on your branch and re-write messages as-needed there, I just don't believe you're disciplined enough to write good PR messages. The author alludes to this when talking about how the real good stuff is captured in slack, google docs, etc. (all infinitely less-discoverable, especially as time marches on... but I digress). And if you aren't disciplined to write good PR messages either, then who really cares what your git history looks like at that point.

I work with and have worked with a lot of engineers with this general mindset - "the real information is in a meeting doc" or whatever - and it honestly sucks. Systems are less reliable, work is of poorer quality, lots of unnecessary work gets done, etc. It's a bad way to do engineering, and there's no other way to put it.

I’d suspect it has something to do with signing up for an Ozempic discount card (which many people did / still do). Pretty sure they’re allowed to sell that data (their privacy policy seems to allow as much).

I mean, I can see the comparison!

But on the other hand, they took the feedback this time and created a different strap to address it (and early reviews seem to indicate it does help quite a bit).

So - lols aside - I don’t think it’s quite the same thing. I think they realize it’s a real issue for some people and they’re trying to address that earnestly.