There's definitely a lot of people in this thread with no fucking empathy, and this is a technology-related site. Checkmate, Obama! Or something.

Well, I use my rotating and rolling chair all the time. Besides the value to sysadmins, which I have found to be significant, it's pretty much mandatory for anyone who has a filing cabinet right next to their desk. I also sweat in plastic chairs, maybe because I am fat. Still, it's true. Actually, I found this to be true way back when I was a child, when I was not fat. That didn't really happen until Jr. high.

The only office chair I know of which is worth one tenth of one shit is the Aeron. It's still one of the most ergonomic chairs around in spite of not actually having been designed to be particularly ergonomic. The goal was to create "the office chair of the future" and obviously in the future, your chair should be fully adjustable. As it turns out, there's many different body types and sizes of human, so full adjustability is what's needed for ergonomics. I literally sit down in this chair when my back hurts. The combination of good posture and good lumbar support is unbeatable. And I bought my Aeron used, so I didn't get completely mauled on the price. And it doesn't have cushions to stink up or make you sweat, either.

If you spend a lot of time sitting in an office chair, you want an Aeron. I don't care how much markup they have. Of all the shit that startups wasted their money on back in the dot-com bubble, the chairs were the least senseless.

"Yes men", or "enablers" as you call them, are the root cause of the out-of-control bureaucracy problem.

Management wants desperately to have processes that can be followed by minimum wage desperate people. They want to believe that they're incredibly smart and insightful, and that their knowledge of their business is so absolute and perfect that a process is easily applied to every situation. The enablers then create the real problems by saying "yes, we'll make this work," when they are actually lying. The problems then get worse, because the enablers also feel that every status report must be green, otherwise their process is not as perfect as they said it was.

The transparent lies breed more processes to control the mistakes that never seem to get fixed, despite the change review board processes. Nobody ever questions the process, because they'd be seen as a blocker. Change becomes impossible, because the middle-management process owners who have been lying "yes" will lose their jobs if their process is removed.

The process explosion reaches critical mass as each failed process begets two more to control it. The business goes into a death spiral of bloat and inefficiency.

Everything is painful. The smart middle managers flee early, leaving only the enablers behind, and they refuse to see or acknowledge any problems. The loyal people have their jobs turned into paperwork and outsourcing. With luck, the board will recognize the out of control costs, and bring in a lean outsider. An organization this bad off may need to fire 50%-90% of the people. Or the board may go the wrong direction, and outsource the whole damn mess, further eroding their ability to change.

This philosophy has caused more damage to business and productivity than any other idea, ever.

Avoiding this is simple, in theory. Tell the truth, and don't be afraid to change your mind if shown evidence that you're wrong.

RAID doesn't improve first access time, but good RAID improves non-sequential seek times.

Yes, for some workloads it is very important. But for many of those, there's prefetching.

However, if there is anything in which I have confidence, it is this administration's commitment to slow, methodical, blame-laden screwings of the lower- and middle-class.

In what way has the lower and middle class been screwed by the present administration? I'll agree that the previous administration was great for the rich and crappy for everyone else, but I posit it's slowly improving.

The lower and middle classes have been getting royally screwed for at least half my life, and I retired earlier this year. The screwings started with Reagan's Capital Gains cuts, which caused an orgy of hostile corporate takeovers leading to layoffs and lowered hours. I was hurt badly when my employer staved off an attempted corporate pirate raid.

No, that suppository arrives with the Clinton Administration. I reckon she's wreckin'.

I certainly hope so, it would be nice for the US to raise to the level of the rest of the industrialized world from our historically barbaric health care "system". American health care is far from #1 in any measure except cost; ours is the most expensive. It's neither logical nor rational.

As to Clinton, if she's elected and half as good as her husband the country will be in fine shape. It would be incredibly hard for her to be anywhere as bad as George Junior, the worst President in my lifetime (AFAIC we've really only had two good Presidents in my lifetime, Eisenhower and Clinton, and as I was very young I could be wrong about Eisenhower but love that interstate highway system, as well as his cautions about a military industrial complex).

I'm more worried about Illinois. Dillard was Chief of Staff under Thompson and Edgar, and Illinois did pretty good until Ryan got in, and it deteriorated worse under Blago. It hasn't gotten much better under Quinn, but unfortunately Dillard lost the primary and the stupid Republicans nominated the only one of the four candidates that would get me to vote for Quinn.

Liars always lie. I think people mistrust statistics because they don't understand statistics, or worse, understand a little, just enough to be dangerous.

I worked with data and statisticians my whole career. I'm not a statistician, but learned a lot about the discipline from working with them. One of my co-workers had written a textbook on the subject that was used in colleges. Very interesting discipline.

Because intel has never figured out ARM. They tried once, and failed. But x86 chips are running on less and less power all the time.

All of those people are down on their luck, even the scammers. They were emotionally and/or socially undernourished, and they can't see any better way to live than a lifestyle which will lead to a sad and pathetic retirement, if any. The druggies and drunks are addicts, they're caught in the grip of something they can't get away from. It's not enviable.

I hope your local shelters are actually good places. Often they are staffed with serious assholes. You wouldn't think that was possible. It is.

Well, in Santa Cruz, CA, most of the homeless kids came from homes where they had been actively abused, often sexually. I went to school with some kids who lived in squats. They didn't move out of their houses and onto the streets because of a good home life.

For thousands of years, people have been getting mad at the beggars instead of those who profit from and thus are motivated to maintain the status quo that creates them, and indeed, depends on economic conditions which produce them. After thousands of years of this and nothing working, those who learn the lessons of history are doomed to stand around and watch everyone else repeat it.

Unfunded mandates are never benevolent. If the idea is that people will get help, but no mechanism for that is in the act, then that idea was constructed to fool fools.

The old appeal to authority works every time. If your doctor is fifteen minutes late for your appointment, suck it up, buttercup. But if you're fifteen minutes late, they just might charge you for the visit and tell you to go home because the doc is seeing another patient right now. Or just banging an assistant. And if you overpay, the IRS might well keep it, but if you underpay your ass is theirs.

Or, you know, if they decide at any time that you might have underpaid once.

What public infrastructure? All that infrastructure is private. That's [part of] the problem.