Oct 31

The Modern Left

“Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under the omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

-C.S. Lewis

Oct 31

New FF

New Firefox is barely even 1/10 as capable as the old one where real extensions actually worked. They got on the fail train and rode it all the way to the last station.

Oct 31

What I Thought

The progressive ideology is defunct. People are realizing — a little — the propaganda war that is being waged now, and what are its targets. It’s you. Especially if you are disabled or helpless in any way. They want to take away any possibility of a good life from you.

Oct 31

No Access

Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won’t Die.

Here’s why every IT person in existence despises Access: A user develops some application in Access. Sure, it is needed by the business. I’m all for users having what they require to get their work done. But they don’t tell IT about this little project. Then they start attempting to scale it to more than the 1-2 users who originally needed it. That’s always when the problems begin.

The application breaks. It has data and concurrency issues. It crashes. Then, the user comes to the IT department about this broken “business-critical” application which the IT department has never heard of and has no knowledge of at all. Inevitably, the user washes his or her hands of the application and the IT department must now support this poorly-developed pile of unknown and atrociously-written code. It’s an unfunded mandate, foisted on people who had no role in developing said application, and it’s usually either develop it properly (hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost at least) or continue supporting the Access apocalypse written by a user, which is often so support-intensive it basically needs its own dedicated helpdesk person.

This has happened to me at least a dozen times in my IT career. And this is why all IT people absolutely abhor Access and always will.

Oct 31

Santa Clausewitz

Exactly. The people with power — real power — aren’t the much-derided bumpkins and deplorables. Those are just scapegoats. The people with the true power are the plutocrats, share an ideology (see the friendship between Ellen DeGeneres and George W. Bush) and hope you get distracted by hating racists in Alabama and other “bad” places rather than confronting any larger issues.