A Sudden, Quite Rapid, Relocation Of Stock

the correct Murrican spelling.
[ A muffled epithet, a vase shatters. ]

Brobdingnagian flutist says “history is freaking cool, you guys”, unless, of course, she ever actually reads a history book and finds out James Madison was a slave owner…

Every line of code that he wrote was either removed or replaced within a year of his termination.
A former boss once introduced a contractor as “the best .NET developer I’ve ever seen!”. Same thing happened. He had a bad habit of writing his own implementation of stable, trusted public libraries that already existed because he couldn’t be arsed to look up whether stable, trusted third-party libraries already existed for what he was doing.
Fortunately the boss in question didn’t last much longer than his contractor.
On a side note: am I the only one who’s noticed a correlation between a manager being on anti-anxiety drugs and having really, really poor risk evaluation skills? Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I’ve seen this happen a couple of times and there’s a plausible etiology: the point of anti-anxiety drugs is to suppress the fight-or-flight response to stress.

We had an employee who wasted everyone’s time in various ways, in addition to doing zero useful work. Every line of code that he wrote was either removed or replaced within a year of his termination.
I am seeing this more and more. I used to view it as a sign of a recovering economy as it indicated that even the stupid people were now getting jobs. Not so sure anymore. I also recall it from the 1970’s and I’m wondering if it isn’t a union/labor mentality-driven thing. People taking extraordinarily long time to do the simplest things. The wife and I call it the “Ken Denny” syndrome. See we used to work with a guy by that name when we were on TDY doing technical writing after the Challenger accident. We sat in a bull-pen kind of open area and there was this guy there who would answer the phone in a very slow drawl of “Good afternoon….Grumman Data Management….Ken Denny speaking….How may I help you……today”. Hearing that several times a day was quite…interesting.

and I’ll poke about in the spam filter.
Please remember the hazmat suit.

There’s a very real problem in software engineering in that it’s very hard to determine whether or not a particular praxis works because the pace of technology is so rapid that it’s hard to compare a project that took three years to the next project, because in those three years so much will have changed. That said, Node insists on making all the same mistakes Ruby on Rails did fifteen years ago and they’re still not learning.
Oooh, this. I’ve been pondering this quasi-paradox for about a dozen years now. Probably longer. In the time it takes to develop a reasonably large project the technology these days changes so rapidly measuring success is exceptionally hard. But putting that aside, the making all the same mistakes …outside of the Node context and just in regard to general design…I continue to be puzzled on a quite regular basis now by how the thing that used to be so easy to interface with is now a bloody PITA. Especially Apple products, of which I was originally a reluctant convert. The main selling point was UI ease of use which did impress me. Now something as simple as adding or updating a contact, something I do less and less of anymore, turns into a newbie learning experience. And not an intuitive one at that. Ah, but all I need to do is wait for the next under-the-covers update and what I don’t like will become something else I don’t like. Kind of like how my sister-in-law feels about the music selection on my iPod. Yes, I still have one and you will have to take it from my cold, dead hands you streaming service SOBs.

A Sudden, Quite Rapid, Relocation Of Stock
I always hated taking inventory, better they should steal it than I should have to count it. ;-p

I always hated taking inventory, better they should steal it than I should have to count it. ;-p
[ Recalls numerous visits to department stores where actual inventory bore no relation to quantities shown online. ]
I hate you.

The main selling point was UI ease of use which did impress me.

Only if that was the only UI you were ever exposed to. Imagine highlighting some text in one window and pressing a single mouse button to paste that highlighted text into another window.
I could go into into a rant about humans pasting images of text in bug reports versus providing the very text itself.

Steve Jobs was (in)famous for squashing new iOS feature suggestions from his engineers for no other reason than they would make the UI less intuitive or less discoverable. Since his death the UX design for iOS products has fallen into the hands of engineers, rather than people who actually understand how people want to use computers.With predictable results. I knew Jobs was well and truly cold in his grave when I learned that the number of times you click the single button on an iWhatever does different things.
I could go into into a rant about humans pasting images of text in bug reports versus providing the very text itself.
I’ve trained multiple QA teams that if they provide a screenshot of an error message from a build log rather than a link to the failing build I simply ignore them.

in rehab at 14
professed mental health issues
This kind of melodramatic self-styling as a terribly oppressed victim will look familiar to anyone with a teenage daughter.
“MOOoooOoooOOOM, you’re RUINING my LIIIIIFE”
Severe childhood trauma results in a kind of arrested emotional development. It’s the defining characteristic of the cluster B personality disorders.

People getting less competent
I still claim that the ubiquity* of software solutions has made some people much more capable and competent but most people dumber. There’s much less need to reason and think things through when you can click a button and get an “answer”, nevermind questioning how accurate that “answer” may be.
* I searched for the correct spelling of ‘ubiquity’ and Google’s first text at the top of the search results page was “Did you mean: ubiquiti”? The Ubiquiti company was also the first search result, and it wasn’t an ad.
“If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticize it.”
– Pierre Gallois

All this time I thought Trans World Airlines had gone out of business.

More critically needed research.

I’m not in central Florida right now but this is a group of lake swimmers that I have often swum with. It’s a Facebook link so…? But gee, I wish I could have been there.

All this time I thought Trans World Airlines had gone out of business.
Headline: Virgin Atlantic scraps gendered uniforms. Autoplay video: drag performers swinging their hips in tailored skirts, a highly gendered display.
Nurses no longer wear their old uniforms, among other reasons because feminists didn’t approve of the cultural associations of nurturing young women, perky helpers to doctors. Nowadays nurses, male and female, wear baggy overall things. The image of the cabin crew profession was going in a similar direction.
Airlines from Asia, and strangely enough from some Muslim countries (Emirates, Air Astana, etc), are still advertising the beauty and nurturing femininity of their stewardesses, but Western airlines have spent the past decades trying to disassociate their cabin crew from that image.
Until now, when the aspiring flag carrier of Rainbowtopia is reintroducing a sexualized Mad Man era image of stewardesses, not to give the passengers a pleasant trip looked after by pretty, agreeable hostesses, but to give the “hostesses” a captive audience for their right to “bring their whole selves to work”.

Also Florida right now…
Yep. Lawyers. Hurricanes draw them like stink on shit.

It’s not exactly been a secret that for decades a large proportion of cabin crew have been gay. Good luck to them. However until recently not a single one had felt the need to put on lippy (although admittedly I had noticed the occasional use of guy shadow) and squeeze into a red pencil skirt.
Yet this is how Virgin apparently expect to entice former customers back?

”Let er rip tater chip!!”. Might raise too many eyebrows across the pond though.
Indeed, too much confusion, have to change it to, “Be most brisk, potato crisp!”

And map showing depth of storm surge.
The highest elevation of Sanibel Island is only one meter above sea level. Good Lord.

And map showing depth of storm surge.
The highest elevation of Sanibel Island is only one meter above sea level. Good Lord.
Yes. If only they had put their storm shutters up five days ago it might have somehow raised the elevation of the island. AIUI, about a dozen years ago or so ago a hurricane put the entire nation of the Cayman Islands underwater.

Oh, I agree. The sarcasm wasn’t aimed at you, btw. Just the tiresome OMG PANIC PANIC PANIC porn people. Living close to the ocean is, was, and always has been a questionable risk factor. When we first moved to south Florida in 1969, US 1 had many motels to choose from. If you look at old 1950’s era and before pictures of Ft. Lauderdale, there were not so many high rises on the beach. With the lull in hurricanes in the 60’s and 70’s along with improved (but not by enough) building standards, and that coinciding with huge population growth, this brought more building closer to the ocean. Now, not a motel to be seen on that stretch. Even the last (a no-tell of some legend) motel there closed sometime in the 80’s, iirc. Insurance pretended to absorb the risk but did not maintain sufficient reserves. This coupled with insurance commissioners like Bill Nelson (spit) who instead of doing his job ensuring that the insurance companies were solvent, instead took the opposite approach of pressing insurance companies to lower their rates. He and similar have done considerable damage to this state to the extent that State Farm and others stopped issuing new insurance. The companies that remained got into cahoots with the lawyer scum (double spit spit) and now even more honest(ish) companies have left. For this Bill Nelson was promoted to senator. And thus here we are. And the panic porn people are setting the table for the screech and scream to be done not at the people responsible, but at the ones currently holding the bag. Reason #465 why I hate every dumb SOB that I know.

And how about that Florida condo that collapsed?
Yes. The shoddy construction that went on especially in Miami back then was somewhat notorious in the construction biz. And IRRC there’s a similar constructed condo done by the same people in Sarasota or someplace on the gulf coast.
I was a teenager working summer of ’79 working for a small industrial chain retailer that did odd jobs on the side. Small office, maybe ten total employees. The older guys I worked with would run down to Miami on occasion to fill in or help out with ongoing projects. The one guy I was closest to came back shaking his head about the construction of the sky metro bus something or other that was in the news but I don’t recall ever seeing it finished. Though I think it was. Anyway, the thing he was shaking his head about was that the construction on this thing had been delivered iron reinforcement bars that were too long. So what they were doing was cutting off the curved end but not bending another curve into the new shorter piece (sorry, no recall what the proper term is but if you’ve ever worked with pouring concrete on big construction, YKWIM). AIUI they later stopped the construction and redid it but as I also understand, that fix was either a lie or not done for every one of the vulnerable concrete pours. Nothing that collapses down there, that sky walkway from a couple years ago nor this condo surprises me. Especially anything from the 70’s.
And the port of Miami was notoriously corrupt. I’m still not convinced that I didn’t drive off with some “hot” construction load binders one day. When I got back the older guys asked me all kinds of questions about what had transpired business-wise and what I innocently told them cause a few smiles and barely contained guffaws.