I’m a school bus driver and I had to ban the singing of Christmas songs on my bus before Thanksgiving. Naturally the little bastards ignore this, just like they ignore my injunction against singing Taylor Swift songs. Thank god T-Swiffer has never done a Christmas album.

What is your area? I’ve lived in about 20 US states, in cities and rural areas, and it’s always been 1 cop per vehicle.

You’re thinking of cop shows from the '70s and '80s, not reality.

I don’t want to be the guy defending Hitler or Jeffery Dahmer, but

I’m a school bus driver and I regularly get infuriated by people who drive past me when I have my red flashers on and stop sign out, wishing there was a cop around. Only once so far have I gotten my wish … and unfortunately it was the cop driving past me at 40 mph just as some of my kids were about to cross the road. I looked down and saw him with his phone in his right hand and his left hand on the wheel, not paying the slightest attention to what was in front of him.

I’m lucky he didn’t run over any kids, because I probably would have gotten shot.

I grew up in Ohio in the 1970s (which was admittedly a rough decade as far as cold weather was concerned). Generally, the first snowfall was some time in September and at some point in October the ground would be completely covered in snow and you wouldn’t see grass again until April. The snow wasn’t completely gone until May. So essentially it was six months of Winter, three months of Summer and a month and a half each for Spring and Fall. It is certainly not anything like that any more.

Is it an increase? The article @macattack cited does not give any data on how much the IRS collected from high-income earners before this additional push supposedly funded by the Inflation Reduction Act. The article does mention that Republicans in congress recently rescinded more than $20 billion in additional IRS funding, which does suggest that the net benefit was far less than $1.3 billion and might even have been negative. It seems like the kind of breathless article the impact of which relies on people not well understanding the difference between a billion and a trillion.

Fine, revenues are $4.9 trillion. My point is that $1.9 billion is literally a drop in the bucket - hardly an example of the IRS “going after rich people”.

FWIW the US federal budget for 2024 is going to be about $6.8 trillion dollars. So that $1.3 billion is about 0.019% of the total budget. I’d call that a slap on the wrist for the billionaire class except that you can actually feel a slap on the wrist.

if the code changes and the comment isn’t updated accordingly, it can be ambiguous.

People always cite this as a reason comments are bad. In 30+ years as a developer I have seen (and participated in) a lot of failed software projects, but not once has a mismatch between comments and code been the actual cause of the failure. Moreover, the same logic could be applied to the names of methods and variables (“if the code changes and the method and variable names aren’t updated accordingly, it can be ambiguous”) but nobody ever suggests getting rid of that. At the end of the day, comments are useful for imparting information about the code to future developers (or yourself) that is too complicated to be adequately communicated by a method name.

I used to work for a software company that was a beneficiary of a $12 million a year political pork grant from the state of Louisiana that was officially intended for improving industrial and manufacturing capability in Louisiana. Somehow, my company was managing to spend this money in Mississippi, and giving it to a national defense contractor that wasn’t exactly in desperate need of (more) government handouts. That’s how fucking corrupt Mississippi is: they even suck in the corruption from their corrupt neighbors, while making sure that not a penny of that shit goes towards improving a state that I would describe as third-world if it wouldn’t be so insulting to the third world.

One thing I always liked about the various flavors of BASIC was that nobody ever pushed that shit as a religion.

Dude/Dudette, it was just a gag comment. Not only am I not really dismissing a massive body of work just because it uses quantization, as someone who’s spent more than half his life writing software synthesis applications, I’ve literally made a career out of quantization.

That being said, music that is not quantized definitely has a more natural feel to it, although putting that “feel” into sequencing software is surprisingly difficult.

Quarter-notes lol

I mean this is true but not about the '70s as the original post states. Even by the '60s they had sophisticated stereo audio mixers - they just cost hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of running on people’s phones like today.

You mean quantized, snapped-to-the-grid instrumental music? Sigh.

jewish community fleeing inquisition

I sure wan’t expecting this.

It would have been even more if the Pope could draw a straight line …

There’s a name for that: DEVELOPMESTUCTION

I learned it while at the same time learning (or really enhancing my previous knowledge of) javascript, thanks to an insane mostly-Finnish app development platform known as Qt Creator, which for no rational reason uses C++ for the under-hood-stuff and javascript for the UI front end. Just an absolutely horrible mismatch of mental states. For bonus points, the company that I worked for that used this monstrosity for its suite of apps got purchased by a huge west coast company and the apps were shut down and everybody was fired, after two years of my working on this shit.