I always claimed in job interviews to be good at debugging, but there are no certifications for debugging and there’s really no way for an interviewer to verify such a claim. So even though it is an incredibly important skill, companies just do not look for it. There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.

I grew up in a town in Ohio where the famous abolitionist John Brown (hanged in 1859 after his abortive raid on Harpers Ferry) had built a tannery in the 1840s 1835 that was still standing in 1976. To celebrate the bicentennial, the city council had it condemned and torn down, to make way for … a parking lot. Hilariously, the council claimed it was a danger because it was about to collapse, but it took three days to demolish and they had to bring in special heavy equipment to do it after their wrecking balls failed to make a dent in it. This thing had been built with massive 40-foot long oak beams with 12"x8" cross-sections that showed no signs of rot (my dad salvaged a piece of one of these beams and set it up as a bench in our garden, and it was still in good shape in 2012 despite being outside the whole time), so it could have easily been preserved as a historical site. In fact it had been declared an official historical site by the state just days before its destruction but the town council simply ignored that.

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And the people who say “loud pipes save lives” often don’t wear helmets, which statistically are safer. Not all motorcyclists are full of shit, but a hell of a lot of them are.

I wish police would simply enforce noise ordinances

I live next to a catholic church/school and sometimes on the weekend or near sunset a local kid rides his motocross bike all around the church yard. Annoying as fuck and it chews up the yard and everything. I’ve called the cops three or four times but they’ve never bothered to send an officer out. I called the church and all they did was install a bunch of super-bright LED lights which are on 24 hours a day. Kid still rides his bike there and now I can’t sit outside at night anymore because of the fucking lights.

I was a teen in the ‘80s and I never heard the origin of “Joy Division”, just knew the band. DJs on the radio (or on MTV) back then never discussed bands’ names or what they meant, so it wasn’t easy to know about that stuff. I also never knew what “Dead Kennedys” meant although that’s pretty obvious if you just think about it. Hell, I never knew Freddie Mercury was gay despite the band name “Queen”.

I also thought Boy George was a woman, but everybody did.

I don’t really understand how cats even can get this large. I’ve kept a number of cats and always just fed them dry food in big bowls or auto-feed dispensers where they could eat as much as they wanted whenever they wanted it, and they always stayed a normal weight.

They don’t think that. They don’t have morals.

I was talking to a guy with an $8K bike the other day and he was proud of the fact that he could calibrate his shifters with his phone.

That is exactly how they’re seen in Philadelphia.

A halberd and a bow? You don’t know if you’re pikemen or archers?

I mean, some people drive to the mailbox at the end of their fucking driveway.

OTOH it’s absolutely insane what new bicycles are costing these days - bikes can be money pits too. I bought my road bike 12 years ago for about $1800 and was kicking myself for years for spending that much. A modern road bike (with disc brakes, wi-fi controlled electronic shifters etc.) would be in the neighborhood of ten grand, more than my car cost. Meanwhile my favorite bike is the 25yo hybrid that I bought on Craigslist for $100.

Deporting all the non-citizens would send us into a literal death spiral thanks to the fact that they pick all the vegetables, cut all the meat, and cook all the food in restaurants. For bonus points we would starve to death behind our unkept lawns, but at least we’d have plenty to drink from the water pouring through our leaking roofs.

My mom was born during the Great Depression and re-uses ziplock bags. On the other hand, she insists on brand-name everything instead of generics or store brands, so it’s not purely about frugality.

Now now, the poor man got a nick on his ear that healed within days and left no scar. He was lucky to survive an injury that gruesome.

How does he propose to “MAKE HOUSING AFFORDABLE AGAIN”? By interfering with the free market lol?

I have a MAGA coworker who goes on about how immigrants bring diseases because they’re unvaccinated. She’s also anti-vax.

In my township (a Philly suburb) the annual budget for the latest fiscal year was $9 million. The school budget (which is entirely separate from the township budget) was $93 million. Police budget was $3.6 million - which is 3.5% of the overall budget if you include the school money in the overall budget, but appears to be a whopping 40% of the township budget if you exclude the schools. I’m no fan of cops, but I think the inflated percentages reported for police budgets are generally the result of this sort of financial sleight-of-hand.

Fun irrelevant fact: I’m a school bus driver for my district and from time to time local cops will sail past my stopped bus with the red lights flashing, one hand on their steering wheels and the other holding their phones. Sometimes they look up briefly at the sound of my horn. At least they’re not drinking while driving, I suppose.

Pshaw. Why on earth would they write something like that into my movie?

Fun fact: at his mother’s deathbed, Stalin reportedly told her that he had “become something like the Tsar”. Perfectly accurate FWIW.