• 1 Post
  • 1.93K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 9th, 2023

help-circle

  • Discovery Zone, man. I actually feel bad for the kids that never got to experience Discovery Zone. Lasted for like 2 years. It apparently failed because they had a mountain of debt (all those plastic tubes are capital intensive buildouts) and adults had to sit around while their kids played.

    I feel like if you made it work like a gym membership for your kids, and had something for adults to do off to the side, you might be able to make the numbers work.




  • Not necessarily a nepo hire, but they are scraping the barrel.

    Project 2025’s playbook was to fire all the existing people in the federal government and replace them with Trump loyalists. To that end, they created a list of pre-vetted replacements.

    Problem is, those people are vetted for loyalty first, and competence a distant second. Also, a lot of them likely have jobs already that are more lucrative than a federal position. In other cases, their circumstances change in the months in between vetting and the offer becoming concrete. So even though they may have a few thousand people on the list, a big chunk of them aren’t going to accept when the time comes. Those that do aren’t necessarily going to be qualified in any way.

    What may be surprising here is that they’re scraping the bottom so quickly. You’d think out of several thousand possibilities, they could find someone more qualified than this guy.

    This tends to be destructive in the short term, because incompetent people are making important decisions. In the long term, it’s one of the self-defeating factors of fascism. A system just can’t work this way, but it can destroy the rest of society before it implodes on itself.





  • Yeah, this stuff takes time to work out. As long as the side effects aren’t a big deal, they might err on the side of too much.

    Covid vaccines were something of an exception because they were motivated and infections were widespread. Lots of chances to get good data. Treatments for other diseases don’t have those advantages.

    The HPV vax, for example, was released in 2016 on a three dose schedule. There’s some studies out there that argue two doses would be plenty, but it’s not a consensus, either. That’s after almost a decade.

    PrEP is already keeping HIV infection rates pretty low, at least in rich countries where there’s money to do these studies. Not going to be good data on dose schedules for many, many years. Maybe even decades.






  • Pascal’s Wager, as well as other “logical proofs” for God like the Kalam Cosmological Argument, never get Christians or other religious people anywhere they want to go. Even if we accept their conclusions as given, it tells us nothing about the nature of that god. They want their god to be the one, and that doesn’t follow from any of these. Which is what the comic in OP is getting at.

    As far as the conclusions go, worshiping the Flying Spaghetti Monster is as good as any.



  • Yeah, those are mostly showing off. They’re not really what I’m getting at, either. I more want to challenge people to make useful things simply.

    And yes, there are ways that JavaScript can be used to give users a faster and more streamlined experience. The web as it stands is so far past that justification. I swear there’s lots of “full stack” devs that haven’t a clue how to make a site without React.


  • I’d like full stack developers to try something. Next time you have an itch for a personal project, see if you can make it with no frontend JavaScript. Just some CSS and HTML forms. All templating handled on the backend. Just try it and see how far you get. Don’t worry if it looks like a GeoCities page.

    Then try finding places where JavaScript would make it more responsive or better UX in some way. Does the back button still work? Is it actually faster? Does it provide any benefit at all?

    Maybe it does, but just try.