I always say: when Life gives you lemons, jam them up Life’s tailpipe.

Because the last time Congress declared war was 1941, and we have fought a shit ton of wars since then.

I remember reading for four years that Merrick Garland was just making sure his T’s were crossed and his I’s dotted before putting Trump away. Whoopsie.

Are we going to start polling on things like what the current temperature is outside, too?

My stats prof in college actually used to do this, and the average guess was always within half a degree of the true temperature. Still not worth doing given that thermometers exist, but interesting nevertheless.

Aren’t most people on a fixed income?

No, most people are on broken incomes.

Yes: Features no original members.

This is technically true, but Yes does still have Steve Howe who was the guitarist on their first hit album (“The Yes Album” in 1971).

Yes for a couple of decades was like the anti-Ship of Theseus. They would go on tour with everybody who had ever been in the band at any point. They even had Peter Banks (guitarist on their first two largely unknown albums) and The Buggles with them.

Actually kind of a cool concept as their studio albums used a lot of overdubbing which was impossible for single musicians on stage to reproduce. Having 17 guitarists means you can do it all.

It would also be nice if it weren’t going to be used for the killer robots. When it very obviously is going to be used for the killer robots.

The Dune books had the “Butlerian jihad” where humanity banned all thinking machines. As a kid I was like “who would ever ban cool shit like that?” Now I’m all “where the fuck is this Butler dude?”

I grew up in the '80s with Reagan and Bush. When Clinton won in '92 I breathed a sigh of relief and stopped paying attention to politics, thinking everything was going to be OK for a very long time. November 2000 was a rude shock when it became apparent that the world didn’t work the way I thought it did. Far more of a shock than 9/11 was.

Lol I found the only less competent people than the managers were the consultants they hired.

With one hilarious exception: at my first real programming gig I was left alone and I had created the sort of vastly overcomplicated, unmaintainable mess that newbie programmers always manage to create. My company brought in a highly-paid consultant who correctly identified the problem: me. Since I was a rock star, my managers laughed and sent the consultant packing and I was allowed to keep fucking things up for another year or so.

I had a boss once come to me with an article he had just read about how APIs were the next big thing in programming. He told me I should incorporate some APIs in our software and I told him I would research it. This was in 2010.

I interned at IBM in the late '80s at the TJ Watson research facility. I have no idea if that’s still around or if it’s still what it used to be, but at the time it was a pretty amazing place, filled with brilliant people doing stuff that may or may not have been directly related to the corporate bottom line. Benoit Mandelbrot (the chaos theory guy) had an office there. There was an unused scanning electron microscope parked in the hallway outside of our lab because there was nowhere else to put it. I learned to use CADCAM on enormous monitors; it was a blast to design something, send it electronically to the machine shop for fabrication and have it delivered on a cart the next day (sometimes the same day). I worked on a project repurposing these miniature electric punches that had been designed for ceramic green sheets (the way they built their mainframe cores back then) and then got to experiment creating a new hole-punching technique using pressurized fluids. They let you do whatever you felt like doing even if you were just an intern. There were no corporate idiots anywhere in sight there.

As far as I can tell, that part of IBM (the actual innovation) is gone.

FWIW the trumpers that I know don’t believe that any of the things you mentioned are true. They think all that stuff is a smear campaign by liberals who hate such an effective conservative leader – that’s literally what “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is to them.

Somehow, the only exception to this is the “grab 'em by the pussy” comment which they do believe he said, but they believe he was joking and said it just to piss off us snowflakes.

I have a bunch of trumper coworkers who love to talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome. For fun I’ve been agreeing with them but telling them Trump Derangement Syndrome means that Trump is deranged. They get quite apoplectic.

The best my local wing place can do is to deep fry the wings, refrigerate the ones that don’t get sold and eaten, and deep fry them again the next day. Not literally the best way to have wings.

American homes…cheap AF.

One reason for this, believe it or not, is slavery. One very under-appreciated aspect of cotton plantations is that cotton (in the days before artificial fertilizers) very quickly exhausted the soil of the American South, leaving behind land that was mostly only suitable for growing pine trees. This left pine wood as a cheap and plentiful resource for building houses. Southern US pine is now so plentiful that it’s even the source of most of the chopsticks in China.

The search order would end up finding your shortcut first.

Sure, but in my case “Notepad” was a shortcut to actual Notepad.exe. It still should have worked.

Back in the year 2000 I was writing intranet apps for a big corporation, using Visual Basic and classic ASP (lol) and IE6 (lolol) for the UI. A very handy if not indispensable tool for this sort of work is the ability to View Source on the generated pages, which popped up the HTML in Notepad. One day for me this simply stopped worked entirely – hitting View Source did nothing and I couldn’t fix the problem on my computer no matter what I did (other people’s computers still worked fine). I even switched to a different computer, set up all my tools and programs as normal, and got the same problem with View Source not working at all. I went like this for six months, and it was a real challenge to debug problems.

Eventually I discovered the problem from a forum post: I had a shortcut to Notepad on my desktop. For no reason I can possibly imagine, this prevented View Source from doing anything at all. It didn’t even have to be a shortcut to Notepad proper; any shortcut that happened to be named “Notepad” would cause the break even if it was a shortcut to some other program. Renaming my shortcut to “NotepadX” fixed the problem. I would LOVE to have some old MS engineer explain to me what the living fuck was going on here.

another major tool in a designer’s workflow is testing with target users before release

Lol you should have seen this UX dude’s face when I suggested doing exactly this. It’s hard to imagine an actual live human being saying “users don’t know what they want” but that is exactly what he said. It should be no surprise that this company routinely produced one-star apps, and also no surprise that the company was a routine winner of the Worst Company of the Year contest.