It's the most convoluted explanation I could find.
I just found out that my company pays ~$12,000 annually for my health care premium. This isn’t the Cadillac of plans, either. And that the rate has risen by about 25% every year since 2000.
So do costs go up by ~25% every year? I have a hard time believing that.
Ugh, I’ve been reading too many of Will’s posts, and it’s affected my critical reasoning capacities.
Like, for example, I was able to pick out some flaws in this guest post over at BoingBoing. See if you can see what I picked out. Three years ago, I would have been sitting at my chair, nodding. Now I’m shaking my head.
Like, doesn’t inflation also encourage spending/investing over saving?
Like, doesn’t lending stimulate growth?
Like, hasn’t the growth of the merchant class improved equality? The thing about the old aristocrats is that there weren’t that many of them. The thing about the nouveaux riche is that the ways they became rich broke up the old, stagnant social structures and helped everyone else along the way.
I’m not exactly a champion of upper class privilege, but come on.
Been playing Spore a bit lately.
There are plenty of reviews and comment threads floating around the web. I’ll keep this quick.
Not bad, but it doesn’t approach the hype. Games rarely do.
It really, really, really needs a patch. I got my first species up to the Space stage a few nights ago. I’ve got a maximum of about 180 seconds (I timed it) between alien attacks. Usually less. If the Space stage is supposed to be a sandbox, they built it below the tide line.
DRM controversy aside, I’ve come to expect this kind of thing from Electronic Arts. Every so often, I test the waters to see if they’ve improved their act. Battlefield 2 was a big disappointment – lots of firewall tweaking to get it to work online, perpetual balance issues, and ridiculous load times. Crysis had a pretty great single player campaign, but the multiplayer was non-functional, and by most accounts will never be fixed. Simcity 4? Great game, but some of the gameplay elements never worked, and needed 3rd party mods to implement properly.
And now there’s Spore, which I bought on day 0. Like an idiot.
Edit:
Maybe not totally idiotic. After coming very, very close to quitting a couple of times, I decided to tough it out and punch through the beginning of the space stage. Many corpse rushes later, I was able to unlock a few new items and shove the invaders’ borders back a few parsecs. This cut the frequency of attacks by a lot.
Imagine you’re hiking around a lake on a paved trail. Imagine you come to a section where a landslide has destroyed a section of trail, and you have to pick your way across boulders and fallen trees to get to the other side. That’s what the beginning of the space stage is like.
Past that, it’s pretty fun. The disasters are still annoyingly frequent, but it isn’t the whack-a-mole game that hours 2-6 of the space section represent.
I’ve been working on a little IE bug that came up in a site I’ve been working on. Short tech explanation: I’ve got some boxes full of links on a page with little grey borders all around them, and in IE the bottom borders get cut off.
Wonky tech explanation: Unordered list, links are inline LIs (not floated). IE is ignoring the bottom margin on the UL.
I tried lots of things to fix the problem. When I commented out one of my non-working solutions, I hit on something that did work. After a little experimentation, I found a fix:
Put a comment in the HTML right before the box.
A comment in code is a little note to anyone reading the code. Whatever machine is reading the code is supposed to say “oh, this is a comment, I’ll just ignore this bit” and go on executing things after the comment ends.
In layman’s terms, imagine your car’s engine is making a funny thumping noise while it’s idling. Imagine if you discovered that you could fix the problem by drawing a happy face on a sticky note and putting that sticky note on the rear seat.
What’s up with the watermelon? I’ll tell you later.
So now I have a comment in my code that says:
<!– Magic comment. Do not remove. –>
And people wonder why web developers hate IE.
Jesus Christ, I just got out of an hour-long conference call. Three project managers, another developer, and myself. The take-away from the meeting? “Move the javascript on these pages to two external files. We’ll deliver the files to you by the end of the week.” That’s it. That’s the whole message. The whole enchilada. We probably burned through about $600 worth of billable hours on that call.
Worse: the message was directed at me. I was called into this project to analyze some code that was written and abandoned by some cut-rate Chinese HTML shop. For my trouble, and the two intelligent questions I managed to come up with, I got a patronizing 60 minute lecture that basically went: “It’s good to separate your code into reusable libraries. It’s easier to maintain. When you have to maintain your code, it’s easier to work on a single library file. For good maintenance. In an external file. Which is your library. Which is easier to update and maintain. I can walk you through how to do that if you need, it’s just a really good idea and good practice. Attaboy, junior.”
I’m willing to eat crow from time to time, if it’s for the good of the company or the account, even if it’s someone else’s crow. I’m just worried that my name is in some permanent company record now. It’ll get filed away, and if I should ever apply for a job with the other vendor or one of their partners, this little flag will come up: *DOES NOT KNOW BASIC CODING PRACTICES*. Right next to the picture of me in the third grade, picking up a dog by the hind legs and pushing it around like a vacuum cleaner.
Just saving this for Will, for when he gets back from his unauthorized sabbatical research retreat. This topic seems to be of great interest to him.
Quit using “final” in file names. It isn’t final. Especially when you get into “final_2,” “final_2.1,” “final_final,” and finally “real_final.” Then “real_final_2.”
Something annoying about web design:
The field has been around for roughly 15 years. It’s displacing the iron pillar of print media. It’s changing the politics and business and culture of the first world. Fortunes have risen and fallen with the emergence of the Web. All of this upheaval has happened at the hands of clever designers and engineers. It’s like owning your own independent printing press in 1730 and being able to publish whatever the hell you want. We hold even more power than that.
So why is it that when I go to indicate my field on a web site, it’s never listed? Accounting gets its own entry. Ok, that’s a big one. Farming gets its own entry. Ok, sure, lots of farmers might be signing up to professional networking sites. Maritime gets its own entry. Uh, ok. Shipbuilding gets its own entry. Tobacco gets its own entry. Railroad manufacture gets its own entry separate from machining.
Seems all of these clever engineers brainstorm comprehensive lists of fields, but they never remember to add their own. Do I go under computer software, or Internet, or networking, or graphic design? Even on monster.com, you know, the big web based career web site apparently written by some clever web people to help match employers to candidates on the web, I had to drill through a couple of layers to find something that vaguely resembled the stuff I work on.
It’s kind of like a college application-
Ethnicity (choose one):
Yeah.
Many of the arguments I see against cutting domestic fossil fuel emissions are based around a central theme: “China is growing really fast, and their oil and coal consumption will just go up and up regardless of what we do. Therefore, any measures we take here don’t matter.”
A couple of things occur to me:
What is China doing with all of those fossil fuels? Their per-capita energy consumption is still relatively low. I think that they are making stuff to sell, mostly to us. Gigatons of stuff. They’re not tossing up factories and power plants left and right for fun.
More to the point: if we bought less stuff from China, they wouldn’t make so much of it. I don’t think a blanket boycott is the answer to our environmental woes or anything. I just want to point out the direct relationship between Chinese exports and Chinese manufacturing. Besides, if we forced all of the manufacturing to return, we’d just save a little on shipping costs, localize the pollution, pay some more for domestic labor, and everyone would come out a little poorer in the long run.
It’s too facile to think of China as some alien species that’s slowly colonizing the planet. They’re in business. Like any business, they’re going about their business because we’re funding it by buying their goods and services. They’re growing fast because we’re buying more and more of their stuff.
Also, China is in business. If we developed relatively clean, reliable, economically competitive technologies for generating power, they’d implement them. Because it would let them cut costs.
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