In what world is a seller compensating for referrals if it's demonstrably provable to the customer (and hence the seller) that the referral bonus in no way influences the recommendation - or even the pool of options the recommendation is singled out from - provided to the user?

except "cheap food" in this case is not actually food

Lets ignore for a moment the fact that privately funding an addition to the White House invites all kinds of inappropriate opportunity for the sort of quid pro quo one would generally want to presumably not have ones government engaged in ...

The ballroom triples the square footage. Hosting gets more expensive, maintenance gets more expensive, heating gets, cleaning gets more expensive. Building a thing is not the only cost associated with that thing.

Found the guy who never gets invited anywhere :D

What does that have to do with *what* or *who* is reviewing your code? If you're submitting PRs to the kernel, you're way beyond the concern of being self-conscious about shit like that.

"bad design decisions"

lol, it's like you have to make things reaaaalllllly simple in your mind

"The difference between anecdote and data is a clip board."

Lol, this is the combination of words you think says, "I am a smart person"?

*wanking motion*

That's a weird thing to say when the entire article is about how they needed to keep improving the test to better help them hire software engineers.

I feel like a large number of users here are still wailing against the Microsoft of 15 years ago. They're still hostile to home edition end users, of course, but they've very much cleaned up their technical posture compared to ages ago. Are they perfect? No, but they're nowhere near as developer/admin/OSS/*nix/etc hostile as they used to be.

A lot of Americans seem ..... very very bad with numbers

Sadly, it's what enough people have been told that they want, and they believe it. To me it's a generational failure of public education to have a population that is so easily sold against their own direct interest.

Good point - good science and use of resources would be for the HHS to announce a study to find out whether sacrificing things to gods makes it rain. After all, like you said, we'd never be here we didn't stop questioning literally everything over and over until the end of time.

I'm not going to believe you, because you're comparing a Chevy Bolt which is a small car to an SUV. I get what you're saying, but American's tastes for owning a large vehicle that is much cheaper to own and doesn't need filling up .. might win. How would they know? They literally don't have access to, or a neighbor who has what China is producing. You think it's an EV issue - I think it's that Americans just dont yet get how cheap cars could be. Obviously this is all intertwined with Americans thinking "We make the best stuff, and if we don't, we need to cut ourselves off from international markets so we're forced to relearn it" .. making cars is a national identity thing.

It's okay. American exceptionalism is a thing, and it is/was well earned. But I very much recommend Americans keep working on not thinking they're at any kind of leading edge anymore when it comes to mass produced commodity products.

seek therapy