A troll like this isn't even necessarily a racist, just a sadist who feels empowered by offending other people / evoking bad feelings.

What we have is so far from being based on merit it's deplorable. The only kind of intelligence that is in high demand in our upper ranks is social intelligence - people that can lie and manipulate well. Everyone else is just *used* for profit.

I think our capitalist system has a worse problem. What do we do when there's not enough labor that needs doing? Cutting hours in the average work-week would work, but that's not how we do things. Instead we just brainwash our people into filling their homes and lives with the latest BULLSHIT reason to spend more and work harder. Never mind raising quality of life - thats just an occasional positive side effect.

America is way behind where they should be for bandwidth in the residential sector, everywhere. ISPs gobble up money and don't produce value. I think this is mostly a side effect of the fact that, as a society, empowerment isn't high on the to-do list, compared to, say, surveillance, so the already-empowered-by-huge-swaths-of-cash can maintain "order" (Me, first! Me, absolutely! Me, above all else!) Google is doing what's right in this case as they are giving us what we have long since paid for as taxpayers and exploited value-producers in terms of last mile internet performance. If that's because they believe in their own mission of "don't be evil" or because they see a way to "monetize" (amorally exploit for money) the flood of data remains to be seen, but raising the bar in any way here is generally positive.

The reason you havent met anyone who prefers editing code graphically is because there isn't a good graphical code editor. The reason there isn't a good graphical code editor is that programming is an immature profession, as are most that deal with high technology, and that minds change slowly. I guarantee you we can get more, better code into the computer with less chance of error by representing the code in more elegant ways. That is to say, representing it in ways that are more easily processed visually, that convey more infomation with less noise -- with more easily identifiable patterns. IDEs already do this. They bring the code to life with interactive menus and highlighting. There is no reason that the info represented there always has to have an ASCII, syntactically complex equivalent.

Every time I try to cancel my cable tv they tell me that it is cheaper to keep it. Thats right, its less expensive to get 50mb internet WITH tv than without, thanks to the deals they offer. This is via comcast in eastern mass. They must be doing it to inflate tv subscriber numbers or hide the rate of cord cutting.

The whole shift in thinking about burning fuel and the problems that it leads to, however small my contribution, has certainly impacted my lifestyle.

My decision to live in a place where I can depend on public transportation was influenced by that knowledge.

The lack of attachment to a physical place, knowing that I can continue to nurture my friendships from a distance, through the internet, also played a big part.

just throwing this out there... javascipt that has been uglified/minified with r.js actually excludes code that isnt ever called. I can use 3MB worth of javascript libraries and if I only use one tiny function from each, the resulting r.js optimized file is like 10k. this is something that mostly clueless web devs can do successfully, (and do, at their high paying jobs they arent qualified for)

Product managers. Agile development. *Lean methodology*

The business world is full of stupid yes-men who constantly jump on the newest trends regardless of merit.

One of those trends, in product management, is "lean methodology", which as some people implement it, means leaving out any sensible features that haven't been explicitly asked for. This is in the name of giving users what they want. The rigid way which product managers interpret it means they resist implementing sensible, intuitive functionality that hasn't been planned for specifically, and the whole product refinement process becomes less efficient as a result, with the minor benefit that you don't build anything that wasn't needed.

sorry for the redundant posts - I was having a hard time with the mobile site.

Oh, well now I sorta want one.

I'm ashamed it never occurred to me they would have lenses like that. Or that I didn't bother to read how they worked before assuming you'd be focusing a few inches from your face...

It is believed that the relationship is causal, meaning that spending too much time indoors is creating myopia, not the other way around. Do some googling with search terms like "Asian myopia indoors"

http://m.scmp.com/news/world/article/1334213/scientists-blame-surging-asian-myopia-rates-too-much-time-spent-indoors The relationship is believed to be causal in the direction I implied.

Your eyes "focus" at 80 feet only in the parralax sense, not in terms of the actual optics of your eye. There is no actual way to simulate different depths in this way, other than with a physical lens.

There is a strong correlation between time spent indoors and rates of myopia. It's not just a genetic thing that you need glasses. The only thing that's not clear is whether:
a) eyes' ability to focus on distant objects is atrophying from lack of use, e.g. actually looking at things far away
or b) low light levels indoors or other properties of artificial light are causing damage
My preferred explanation is A - an eye physically changes its focus as you look at objects nearer or further. Being in one configuration all the time only looking at nearby objects basically means a lack of exercise for those muscles and it seems to follow intuitively that they would stop working as well. This kind of stuff is likely really unhealthy and I don't get why no one is talking about that... Our eyes evolved to work *outside*