I am not defending the insulting Gold article, but this speciousness is equally delusional.

It matters whether Gold used to be fat. If she didn’t, she’s really just a horrible person. If she did, she makes me sad, and is also a pretty horrible person. A lot of formerly fat or temporarily not-fat people hate on fat individuals with an extra intense fervor because they need to justify all the suffering they’ve gone through to force their bodies into a shape it doesn’t want to be.

I don’t give a fuck what shape my body wants to be. I’ll make it the shape I want it to be. And I didn’t suffer even a little bit to do it — I ate higher-quality food that made me feel fuller, and I enjoy working out a great deal.

And “temporarily non-fat?” No, I will never be fat again. Lost weight a decade ago and didn’t put any of it back on. In fact, due to working out, I am currently not able to eat enough consistently to gain any more muscle — the main reason I haven’t set any new personal lifting records recently. Weighed myself and I am down to 159 pounds, when I was attempting to get to 170 pounds. Dammit. (But the difference between me and the FA people is that I will work to correct this and will hit my goal.)

I agree that the Gold article is pretty bad. But the strange denial of reality in the Fat Acceptance community is arguably just as bad, and is as Gold points out harmful to many, many people.

The amount of lies people tell themselves to allow them to believe they have no control over their body or their life at all is really shocking when you think about it. Sure, it isn’t easy, but if you don’t exert some control, no one else will. Carpe tibi!

The Day the Music Burned. It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business — and almost nobody knew. This is the story of the 2008 Universal fire.

Keeping all of our culture locked up in vaults for stupid and anti-human copyright reasons leads to disasters like this.

The archive in Building 6197 was UMG’s main West Coast storehouse of masters, the original recordings from which all subsequent copies are derived. A master is a one-of-a-kind artifact, the irreplaceable primary source of a piece of recorded music. According to UMG documents, the vault held analog tape masters dating back as far as the late 1940s, as well as digital masters of more recent vintage. It held multitrack recordings, the raw recorded materials — each part still isolated, the drums and keyboards and strings on separate but adjacent areas of tape — from which mixed or “flat” analog masters are usually assembled. And it held session masters, recordings that were never commercially released.

A whole era of history, just gone because of corporate greed. This is why I am largely against copyright and why this era will have very little left to remember it by. Over time, with no backup and no accounting for it, disasters and mistakes will inevitably and incrementally destroy our collective cultural history.

Everyone (in IT) should be a programmer is a terrible idea.

Making a networking expert a reluctant (and potentially bad) programmer makes as much sense as over-promoting him and making him a suboptimal boss (some people, myself included, just aren’t good at managing others).

If you need a custom-tailored network automation solution, pair a networking expert (who knows what needs to be done) with someone with programming skills who can translate those needs into running code – the networking expert becomes just another subject-matter expert (SME) working with the programmers to document the business needs (of networking department).

There are some people who can be networking experts at my level or above and expert programmers. And by “some,” I mean maybe in the range of 1/100th of 1 percent of IT people involved in networking, because that basically requires a beyond genius level of talent. I’ve only ever met one programmer who was a decent level system admin and even they weren’t a great sysadmin, merely a good one. Given that enterprise-class networking is about an order of magnitude more difficult than being “just” a sysadmin, the likelihood of someone being an acceptable programmer and a networking expert at the same time is just vanishingly small. There’s just not enough time in the world to pursue both to an expert level. Only an MBA could believe anything different.

I do a lot of scripting, of course, but I don’t consider scripting programming, because when people like me write scripts it’s mostly for our own use. Programming, through, is writing software intended for other people to use. The reason is that even the scripts I write presuppose expert-level knowledge of the domain for which the script is written. Sure, some of my scripts are very complex with functions, error-checking, arrays, and other more advanced features, but I or my close team are generally the only ones able to use them. That’s why I don’t really consider it programming because it’s not an expert-level full practice, but tools for domain-specific use only that can’t truly be released.

Becoming a programmer wouldn’t make me a better networking expert; quite the opposite. Then I’d be a bad networking expert and a bad programmer, which helps no one.

This person has noticed something I realized fairly recently as well, where he mentioned “kubernetes’s insane complexity proliferating #devops.”

Kubernetes is IT’s alternate path to having the a kind of sorting that other professions have, except instead of by degrees or other credentials (as those are less relevant in IT), they’ve chosen complexity. Probably only 10% of extant IT people have a hope of understanding the needless and valueless complexity of Kubernetes and related tech. That is a feature, not some accident.

While I agree that something like Kubernetes (though designed in a much saner way) does have its uses, most of those using it don’t actually need it. At least 90% of its real-world use would be better-served by a standard HA setup and a DR site or two.

It’s only picked up so much use because the drive in IT to professionalize and Kubernetes is one way to sort out those who can handle something utterly pointless but extremely convoluted from those who prefer sensible solutions. Kubernetes and related is credential-like in that respect and that, mainly, is its entire purpose.

Only an economist could believe something so stupid (proven by “evidence”) that H-1B visas are good for American workers. First, over what time scale, and second, in what circumstances?

Oh, companies bring in more H-1Bs and hire more American workers at the same time? And pray tell, when does this happen? When the economy is expanding. Some insight, there. I am getting accustomed to seeing through the typical economist tricks and salary-motivated mistakes so it just doesn’t take me as long as it used to.

This is also common methodological error in economics papers: presume the existence of the item you are claiming benefits the economy and/or workers, and then fail to examine worlds without the existence of said “beneficial” program as they cannot be tested. Fail to mention this or to account for it in any way. Thus, your paper’s postulation is merely a tautology, though gussied up in a lot of impenetrable mathematical formalism. As Taleb has pointed out, most economics papers have this problem.

That so many Americans are so fond of donuts proves definitively that they deserve the garbage food that corporate propagandists are pushing on them.

Donuts all taste the same no matter what is on them, and are only capable of being enjoyed by someone with the food mentality of a toddler.