420stalin69 [he/him]

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  • 54 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 7th, 2022

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  • Don’t forget refinement where you describe your plan to add the “height: 80pt” rule (literally what the client wants), and then poker planning where you say it will be 1 point and the lead dev says 3 points and the other dev asks what is a point anyway leading to a time consuming discussion, and then the task gets scheduled for not next sprint but the sprint after, and then you do it and push your code, make a pull request, then during code review it is suggested you use tailwind instead but your project isn’t using tailwind because it’s some legacy PHP monster started by a junior who was just learning PHP, so now there’s a POC to consider using tailwind meanwhile the lead dev (who has a background in QA) designs a reusable “height engine” which uses rabbitmq to alert all worker nodes (there’s only one) about any changes to the height rules in mongodb. The height engine doesn’t include units so you have to hardcode if the client is expecting rem or pt. The product owner asks you in sprint review why this ended up taking a week when you said 1 point initially and the team agreed on 3. A team decision is made that all future CSS rule changes require a POC prior to implementation.



  • But it probably is the case that Ukraine was stomping Russia for pennies on the dollar earlier in the war.

    When the aid was flowing the narrative was that this was a “good investment” which is why they sold you with this “pennies on the dollar” angle.

    Put down the slava pipe and have a look at what the cost basis is for western military gear vs Russian stuff. It’s rarely better than 5:1 even for basic stuff like shells and advanced stuff runs at around 10:1. The idea that it was “pennies on the dollar” is crazy shit.

    It’s all narrative. It doesn’t have a relationship to facts on the ground. It’s a sales pitch.



  • I think the weakness of Ukraine is also narrative.

    Whatever narrative they push, it’s completely unrelated to the truth.

    When they wanted western sympathy and when the western funds were rolling, it was the plucky tractor brigade killing Russians at $1.40 a kill.

    Now that they aren’t getting another aid package, the front lines are about to collapse and Russia will be in Warsaw by summer.

    It’s all bullshit. As in it’s unrelated to the truth. The truth has no relationship to what Zelenskyy says.

    The fact Ukraine is starting to push an imminent collapse narrative is a key factor in me believing collapse is not in fact imminent.





  • The “Nazi economic miracle” is a myth that doesn’t die.

    Wages fell by 15%, manufacturing production fell despite the stimulus spending, and the reduction in unemployment wasn’t actually anything to be proud of since even by official statistics from Goebbels their recovery was about as impressive as that as Spain or Greeces recent exit from the Great Recession - not very impressive at all and that’s before you factor in how they excluded women from the statistics, engaged in mass conscription and conscription labor programs (forced labor digging ditches isn’t an achievement), and also forced another half million workers such as Jewish laborers out of the Germany economy by various means.

    Even so unemployment was still staggeringly high by 1936 which is when the rest of the world had began to recover anyway.

    It wasn’t an economic miracle, it was a decade of German stagflation with lots of propaganda and for some reason people in the west seem to just implicitly trust Nazi propaganda. It’s an odd phenomenon.

    Historians like Overy and Kershaw have debunked this nonsense decades ago but still people love to say “but he did make the trains run on time” in this weirdly pining way.

    On top of that they borrowed like crazy to fund this lackluster pseudo-recovery and had they not looted the coffers of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France they would have faced an economic implosion even worse than the Great Depression - which they faced anyway in 1945.

    Also are you saying “economic growth is fascism”?


  • If the public are paying for it, then it becomes a subsidy.

    And good luck getting the US government to require the code to be GPLed. That’s even less likely to happen than a public subsidy for OSS at all.

    They typically do the opposite and require “commercialization” to ensure the benefit of the publicly-funded technology is captured by their donors.

    This is how it basically works in biotech, for example. Government grants to study the medicine and then when the scientists actually find something important it becomes a “public-private partnership” often without even a royalty for the public let alone making it a public good.

    That’s not how government funding works in a modern democracy, unfortunately. It would amount to a cash transfer to big tech to make the public pay their R&D costs.





  • The qualifier “progressive” is used to describe a liberal who supports progressive social issues.

    Supporting gay rights or feminism etc, that’s being a “progressive” (loosely speaking, it can be defined better than that.)

    You seem to want to insist all liberals are progressive liberals but they aren’t.

    That’s why the qualifiers “classical liberal” or “liberal conservatism” exist.

    In some countries the “Liberal” party are the socially conservative faction of society.

    You’re wrong to conflate liberalism with progressivism. That’s why they’re different words.

    You’re also wrong to imply that progressive stances are “owned” by “liberals”.

    You want to say “progressive liberal” is a tautology…. But it isn’t.