As for FDD... standard on the east coast USA and many other parts of the world. It works for unthinking peons but utterly fails for jobs that require imagination.

If you treat your employees like unthinking peons, they will respond by behaving like that - and that means turning a blind eye towards the innumerable small irregularities and problems a workforce that doesn't actively hate you could easily correct before they have a noticeable effect on production. That is the difference between workplaces where everything seems to work as if by magic and one that does a passable impression of being haunted by an evil spirit because it is, specifically yours.

There are no jobs that don't benefit from thinking about how it fits to the bigger picture.

But if you're afraid to do your job, it's because you have a problem with confidence in your own skills. Blaming management for such fears just takes the incompetence you exhibit to a whole new level of blame-gaming.

Unless it's not just you, but every one of your fellow employees. Then the problem is systematic in that workplace, and thus must be in the system itself.

The thing is, managers are humans and sometimes have serious issues or even outright mental problems, such as ego too powerful for them to handle. And sometimes they're simply afraid of their superiors. Competence only matters in a healthy organization where everyone is trying to meet its goals; in an ill one they concentrate on covering their ass, not just against mistakes but also against backstabbing.

It seems like you're extrapolating from that experience, to thinking "FDD" is a current trend. AFAIK it's not.

Sure it is. What's happening to programming is what happens to anything when there's more supply than demand: a race to the bottom. Personal computers used to be rare, so programmers could rely on their skills being so as well; now they're ubiquitous, and the industry is entering the same phase others did during the Industrial Revolution. The only known solution is to unionize and bargain collectively, but of course that requires giving up the cherished illusions of being able to make it on your own.

telling us the name, address and phone number of the human responding to the mail

I'm pretty sure Google is not allowed to give anyone's private information without proper court warrant, and I'm very sure that an email saying "I'm a Judge, honest!" is not a proper warrant.

Not replying to this email will result in a doubling of your fine.

Courts of law don't have the power to arbitrarily double the punishment because they happen to be feeling ornery. They can add contempt of court charges to the case, but it's highly questionable whether ignoring an e-mail - which can be from anyone - counts as contempt, especially when said e-mail seems to involve illegal action and blackmail.

What happens in low Earth Orbit and above is none of their business

Nice satellite you have there. Would be a shame if a laser beam hit it. Good thing I'm selling "insurance".

Those are all wonderful reasons for voluntary government certification: anybody who wants to can go to the government and get some government seal of approval; I as a rider can then make a voluntary choice whether that certification is useful information or whether I want to throw caution to the wind and ride with uncertified drivers.

But I, as Joe Driver, can't choose whether I want to share the road with a taxi driver who pulls 16-hour workdays out of greed or desperation. Unless, of course, some entity with sufficient power forces the taxi to take breaks.

And of course you're also ignoring the well-known fact that human beings are extremely bad at estimating risks. So no, you as a rider can't make an informed choice about whether getting a certified taxi is worth the hassle, especially since unlicensed taxi companies have every incentive to bombard you with misinformation, while bean-counters utilizing cold math can. So it's a choice between letting a preventable tragedy play out forever, or stopping it but possibly hurting someone's cherished delusions of grandieur.

What moral authority does the state have to stop consenting adults from forming their own contracts and doing business with each other?

Well, for starters, it's expected to enforce these contracts. Every legally binding contract has the state as a third party.

The treaty was stupid and anyone who signed it should be shot for gross incompetence. Simple fact is their are resources and unless we are one world communist country every damn thing in space will have a price tag attached.

No, every damn thing in space doesn't have a price tag attached, because they aren't actually owned by anyone. Or should I be able to simply declare the Moon my property and seek to extract rent from anyone who builds a base on it, possibly decades in the future?

The treaty exists to keep people and nations from getting into fights over claims on places they can't even reach.

Besides I'm German, and if I nad the capacity to mine gold on an asteroid I certainly woukd not 'land' it in a nation but in international waters.

I guess that's one way to make pirates leave cargo ships alone...

Why aren't the developers risking anything by putting their time in and at least demonstrating some ability to deliver?

Developers need to eat, that means they need day jobs to work on an unfunded game. That in turn means time spent developing it comes from their free time, which is already a precious commodity required for personal maintenance. So make that an hour a day at most for a sustainable rate.

Now, how many hours of development do you think even a simple game requires, even if we assume you're a renaissance man who can program, draw, compose, write, design levels, design characters, etc?

Conservationists tend to be rational, environmentalists are for the most part off their rocker.

People, for the most part, are perfectly rational but have been socialized to value power over any other goal. And prestige is a form of power. So any issue tends to turn into a power struggle where facts are cast aside in favour of "winning".

It doesn't help that "enviromentalism" - or any other group - has a subculture with its own value systems, which don't necessarily have anything to do with the nominal goal. Thus someone who identifies themselves as an enviromentalist inherits a set of default positions, such as antipathy towards nuclear power, and can't change them without expenditure of willpower, since that risks expulsion from the group.

So it's not that people are off their rocker, it's that human mind is bad at properly prioritizing things in its current environment. We've simply grown too powerful too fast for evolution to keep up.

I prefer to think of myself as sitting in cheapskate lala-land.

Everyone has their favorite fantasies. The problem is, some people become addicted to theirs and start to actually believe them.

Yes, the thread was about Tesla using renewables for it's new factory.

But Tesla is not going to be using renewables for its new factory. It's going to be using a grid connection, because renewables aren't reliable enough to run a factory with. What it's going to do with renewables is vary its load wildly as wind comes and goes to lower and possibly completely cancel its electric bill. Good for Tesla, bad for the power company and other customers, and utterly useless for the environment, since almost all power plants can't ramp up and down in minutes or even hours, so they have to keep burning coal in order to keep those plants ready.

So the actual effect of all this is that people will end up paying more for their electricity, and the risk of a catastrophic grid failure increases, since there's now a huge and randomly varying load on it.

I came to my understanding faced with an incurable terminal illness. We were planning for the funeral until I decided to try to do my own research and try nutritional treatments. It was a truly stunning and miraculous transformation. The disease is still there, and death will come, but it's many years off now, not just a few months, the oxygen tanks are gone because they aren't needed any more, and life has real QUALITY now, even though there are a few things I still can't do.

Good for you. So... care to give us your disease and specifics of treatment for any fellow sufferers who might benefit from them?

Gluten isnt bad for you, unless you have a specific allergy or condition.

Possibly. However, "vague bad feeling" is a classic sign of constant low-level infection response. So it's entirely possible that gluten isn't really good for anyone despite only a few people being so sensitive to it that they get clearly visible symptoms.