The whole "dropping kids off in the dark" thing is a dumb argument because that's going to happen to some people no matter which time zone you use.

The fuss wasn't that it happened - it was that it happened to a different group of people than it used to. People don't like change, and complained loudly that they were now the ones inconvenienced.

Everyone already has the choice to set their own hours for their business.

But most people need some sort of alignment between school hours and work hours. If you need to commute via mass transit, you need to align with transport. If you work in the financial industry, your hours are generally based off the stock market's hours. There's lots and lots of factors that essentially force large chunks of people to align their schedules.

We ended up in the time zone situation we have because it's the easiest way to get things reasonably aligned.

Which is unreliable in many situations. I worked on several projects that had issues involving intermittent data loss on a DB9 port, and every time the culprit turned out to be a USB/DB9 adapter. When we'd install dedicated RS232 cards, the problem went away.

For laptops, the answer to this kind of thing should be a standard space where a customer can specify what ports he wants... you get X number of standard ports, and then you can choose what goes into one or two available spaces. But you're just not going to see that happen with manufacturers, even if the customer is willing to pay a greater cost.

Except that I spent some years growing up in dense, street-centric areas, and kids simply played in the streets. Every day. Our substitute for baseball (so as not to damage cars or windows) was "whiffle ball", with hollow plastic balls and bats. In the summers especially, we spent literally all day outside. In the streets. For kids who did this too much, the criticism was literally that "you let your kids run the streets".

Being car-centric has nothing to do with kids activity. The spread of video games and Internet connected culture had everything to do with the modern dearth of outdoor activity by kids. All of my youngest's friends are online in distant places. There are other kids in the neighborhood, but very few of them play outside that I can see. Online is where all the action is. Maybe the answer is for parents to literally kick kids out of the house, they way they used to do ("out, and I don't want to see you back inside until lunch" was a common summer refrain from parents). Maybe if all the kids are turned out, they'll start doing the natural thing, and make their own fun, which is all "outside" is.

I don't give a shit if some Russian/Kazakh/Malaysian bot farmer wants to take over my phone.

So you do no banking on your phone? Unlikely.

For the 99% of people that do in fact use a phone for banking, protection from lower level criminals is invaluable. For most people there is real financial loss possible from a phone being taken over, at the very least to monitor banking access mechanisms.

No, because experience isn't a protected category. Age is, but only in certain cases mostly dealing with existing employees. Youth isn't protected at all:

https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discr...

"The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination. It is not illegal for an employer or other covered entity to favor an older worker over a younger one, even if both workers are age 40 or older."

Tipping is great in good service jobs. You tend to make good money in mid-to-nicer restaurants as a waiter or waitress. Where tipping sucks is when you work in cheap joints with cheap customers. Or delivering pizza, like you did in college, where your customers tend to be either poor or cheapskates. Poor people can't afford to tip, and cheapskates simply won't. And then there are the groups that simply refuse to tip because they don't see labor or service as a value at all. "If I can't hold it in my hand, I ain't payin' for it".

Calling your superiors in the workplace a vulgar name is a fire-able offense pretty much any place else. It's not just the word, but also the fact that using it is a type of insubordination. If your boss is a jerk, then you need to find work elsewhere. But every workplace has discipline and conduct standards. You simply can't let subordinates openly insult their chain of command or you won't have much command.

You've just charged a comedian with a criminal offense because his Tweet might hurt feelings. Any freedom of expression Brits had is meaningless empty symbolism at this point.

Unless Trump was the one who personally built all these models that companies are trying to replace workers with, I don't think he's much of the reason there are so many more people out of work.

If all you know is a minimal subset of the language, you don't know the language. What you describe may be ok for a toy app you write on your own time and never need to support or put to serious use, but not for anything approaching actual development. What you describe is hacking, not developing.

And outside of a masters degree course somewhere, where has that ever been a thing? Formal proving of programs isn't something done anywhere. Even then its utility is dubious- "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." - Donald Knuth

I don't know what you were doing, but having to use reflection is generally considered a code smell, if not outright banned in most code bases. Generally its only accepted in serialization libraries. If that's what you got out of working in Java, it sounds more like you were doing it wrong.

Seriously. This is the South. Put a bounty on these things, with no bag limit, and local hunters will pursue them to extinction. Get the major cowboy boot companies to chip in with all skins going to them for their "Florida Man" production line. Compensation can be a little cash and free boots for yourself and the wife. And all that snake meat will surely be good for something. In 5 seasons, they'll declare a snake genocide.

In 45 years of living and eating at cheap restaurants, I've never had this problem when going to one in the United States. Or any other country where English was the native language. Why? Because they may hire non-english speakers in the back for kitchens, dishwasher, etc they make sure cashiers and waiters speak english, and they talk to the people in back. So it's an utter non-issue. It may have niche usecases in places with large international tourist crowds, but even then you generally need to tell speech recognition the input language for real time translation.