Source: https://www.catscafecomics.com/post/190403521540/slice-of-life

Correct. In the US, these practices are commonly not paid by employers.

The requirement should be that any time an employer makes a demand of an employee’s time, they pay.

FA waiting on your plane to arrive that’s 6 hours late? Pay up.

15 Apple store employees lined up and waiting to get searched by a single manager after a shift? Pay up.

Require an employee to respond to phone calls or issues after hours? That’s not “after hours”, that’s hours. Pay up.

Make an employee commute to an office for a job that can be accomplished from home? Believe it or not, pay the hell up.

Making demands of a person’s time for a job is part of the job. They should be compensated for it.

Oh, I totally agree – didn’t mean to give any impression otherwise. Filling the energy demand gap as quickly as possible with the least impactful generation source should be very high on societal goals, IMO. And it seems like that is what’s happening, mostly. Solar, wind, and storage are the largest share of what’s being brought up this year:

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/chart-nearly-all-new-us-power-plants-built-in-2024-will-be-clean-energy

As I understand it, planning new, grid-scale nuclear power plants takes 10-20 years. While this isn’t a reason not to start that process now, it does mean something needs to fill the demand gap until the nuke plants (and other clean sources) come online to displace the dirty generation, or demand has to be artificially held down, through usage regulation or techniques like rolling blackouts, all of which I would imagine is pretty unpalatable.

Second. John Barnett was the first in early March.

Yup. FCC abandoning the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan is what brought us sensationalism in broadcast news. Instead, it should have been expanded to cover anything using the term like “news” and “current events”, similar to other protected terminology like “professional engineer”. Cable news never being covered by FD was also ridiculous.

More info: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ronald-reagan-fairness-doctrine/

I agree. Quality is everyone’s job. “QA” as a synonym for “the people that make sure things don’t break” doesn’t actually prioritize quality as an inherent attribute of the product.

Developers need to write tests and build automatic testing harnesses so they can effectively own the code they write and guarantee its quality. A subset of developers might be “QA platform developer” or something similar, but this is to build tooling for testing, not the actual tests themselves.

Designers can’t produce turd of a design and pass the buck. E.g., “That wasn’t the intention of the original design.” and similar terrible defenses. They have to be responsible for the design all the way through to deployment, not just when they call the design spec “complete”. They also need to take feedback from the other groups they work with, instead of thinking their design is above criticism from the non-designer plebs.

Project managers must to prioritize quality initiatives within the project, instead of just driving at feature work or begrudgingly prioritizing critical bug fixes. This includes things like improving developers’ and sysadmins’ lives through tooling and observability. That pile of tech debt the developers and sysadmins has been talking/yelling/screaming about for months/years will eventually fall over and kill everyone, metaphorically of course… unless you work in a safety-critical industry, like medical or transportation.

Sysadmins (and other operator roles, like SRE) have to be empowered to tell everyone else to pound sand when a new proposed deployment is broken or under-tested, or when deployments have been too broken unexpectedly recently.

Apple locks old devices out of updates

Dropping support for older platforms happens for a number of reasons, including hardware-level security problems and lack of interest for ongoing maintenance. Linux distributions even drop support for older hardware. Even the Linux kernel itself has dropped support. A decision to not keep supporting a piece of hardware is not the same as preventing updates.

The thing to focus on isn’t that Apple halts maintaining its own OSes on older hardware. Rather, we should press hardware makers and regulators on the boot loader locks and other obstacles that prevent end users from installing alternate OSes, especially once hardware makers end OS support for hardware. E.g., older iPads that can’t run modern iPadOS but could easily run a lightweight Linux distribution. This applies to more than just Apple, like some Android devices. “Internet of Things” devices are similarly affected – Belkin halted support for a generation of Wemo smart plugs when a vulnerability came out – they told consumers to buy new Wemos and provided no alternate path for the older, still functional plugs.

When has being ineffective ever disqualified someone from Congress?

… I started writing this reply to be funny, then I realized it’s basically true, then I got sad.

Did this ever get better than the initial reviews? It seemed mediocre-to-bad. Steam still calls recent reviews “mixed”.

Yes.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/23/us/alabama-ivf-embryos-supreme-court-ruling-legislation/index.html