If you ever doubted that paid sick days and paid medical leave and universal health insurance were smart *economic* policies, I hope these last few weeks have clarified that for you.

— Michael Linden (@MichaelSLinden) March 9, 2020

This just shows that something I’ve been saying for years is true: many, many people care far more about power than profit, and having the ability to lord over their lowly subordinates is far more important than any money in their bank account.

The evidence for that is everywhere. Most companies could make far more with fairer policies to workers, but then they could not dominate and manipulate them like puppets.

Language skills are a stronger predictor of programming ability than math knowledge.

I could’ve told you this. I can do programming. It’s not something I enjoy, but it’s not impossible for me like math is. I’d never want to be a full-time developer because I despise debugging, but it’s a job I could do if I wanted to enough.

I could never even pass most math classes. Totally different things. Most programing is like talking to a computer. You just have to figure out what to tell it and it’ll do it. Math is like looking at a million things that look exactly identical and being expected to know somehow (magic? crystal ball?) how they relate or how the million things that are identical are secretly somehow different. No idea how people do the latter while the former is comparatively easy for me.