Just so you know, your myth of mythiness is a myth. The guy writing this blog post fails at reading comprehension.

His one sole piece of "evidence" for this being a myth is an academic paper saying [IF] you set out to design a slow keyboard layout, you would probably design qwerty.

That's not the same thing as the person designing qwerty set out to make a slow layout. It's in fact well documented that his goal was to reduce jamming, and in fact he filed a patent for the design (US 79868), stating that explicitly as his goal.

The fact that reducing jamming meant that the letters were laid out in a pretty weird way just happened to slow down typing on a non-jamming-keyboard as a coincidence.

No, no it wasn't.

It was designed so that the hammers for successive key presses came from different areas of the typewriter, and hence reduce jamming (speeding up typing).

It happens that this is slower than the optimal layout if you ignore jamming, but much faster if you don't.

The result is that several layouts are better now for keyboards (which don't jam), but the design intention was not to slow typists down. It was to reduce jamming, and in doing so speed them up.

Actually, studies tend to show that being slightly over weight reduces all-cause mortality compared to "normal".

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Your all-cause mortality rate for overweight, and grade-1 obese are roughly 0.95 times that for "normal" weight. However, being grade-2 obese or more is associated with a sudden, very rapid increase in mortality rate.

Basically, being slightly overweight isn't bad, and may even be pretty good. Being more-than-slightly overweight is really really really bad though.

Yep, way too much focus is put on living a long time, and no where near enough on actually having some quality of life. Dying with dementia (or living with it) is honestly my worst fear.

Why would they render it no-longer-applicable?

All they do is change the fitness function.

Ah I see, so what you're arguing is that the US should be a country that drifts by with a bunch of people doing unsuccessful but barely profitable half assed things?

Fair enough then. I think we've found where we disagree about how the US should be.

Your hypothetical does not actually address the correct situation.

Lets say that ford is able to hire the best of the best (no matter what country they're from), and in doing so, is able to design a better car than Volkswagen is able to, at a cheaper price. The result of doing that is that people who were considering buying a Volkswagen will now consider buying a Ford instead. Ford will do better, and as a result have the cash flow to be able to hire more people. Ford's management will figure out what to do with that cash flow, and invest it in some new project (lets say, self driving cars), and as a result, will employ more people.

No, it assumes that companies that make money will start more projects and require more people for those projects than companies that are not being successful.

And no, no one is talking about the number of people being proportionate to the quality. They're saying that having higher quality engineers results in higher quality products. By allowing skilled workers in, you allow people to choose the best quality engineers, and produce something better.

The result is that more money is made, more other projects are started, and more people are hired.

People do love to point out that H1B visa holders inflate the labor supply. But they also conveniently ignore that they increase labor demand too. Companies that can hire enough people to produce high quality products on time are more successful than those that are understaffed. Those successful companies can then work on more projects, and hire more people to get them working too.

This is the entire reason why any western nation allows skilled migrants in - skilled migrants increase the value of the economy by more than the amount that they take away from the native citizens.

Your logic is flawed. You assume that an H1B has no effect on labor demand. This is false.

A company that is able to hire skilled workers will produce more, higher quality products than a company that can't hire enough people. As a result, that company will make more money, and be able to work on more projects and pay more people to do those more things.

The whole point of the H1B scheme is that a skilled worker increases the value of the economy by more than they take away from american citizens.

But why would you go to so much effort to always insert the right character, when you could just configure your editor to insert spaces to the next tab stop when you push tab, and be done?

Alternatively, just configure your editor to insert spaces to the next tab stop when you push tab, and you're done.

Having a mixture of tabs and spaces always leads to people fucking up the formatting, because it's impossible to see when they've made a mistake until it lands on someone else's machine.

It's not "just" a multiplier. It's a different multiplier on different systems, and therefore results in a different layout on different people's systems.

That's great if you stick only to tabs. However, in practice, you can't stick only to tabs, because fine layout control eventually requires you to use a couple of spaces.

As soon as you're at that point, you're screwed because the layout gets really messed up as soon as the tab width changes.

Which is basically a long winded way of saying "if you're lazy, it's really fast to not bother understanding things, and just copy/paste a chunk of sample code from SO"

So... basically exactly what I originally said.

Simple, people who don't spend their life copy-pasting don't google problems much.

They look up the documentation for the API directly and figure out the right way to solve the problem themselves.