Don't listen to the crowd, they say "jump."
The The Iron Law of Evaluation (Rossi, 1987) is that the expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero.
...
Why does this happen? The simple answer is that in a largely-rich, largely-free country, with many existing (if confusing) private and public supports for low-income people, itâs just as easy to screw things up than to make things better, no matter how much you spend.
Source: The Iron Law â spottedtoad
A great number of Americans had just got used to the notion that they were conservative, and they thought they were being conservative in supporting someone who wanted to make America great again, control the borders, stop policing the world (and if we have to keep doing it, get some other beneficiaries of the expenditure of American blood and treasure to start contributing their fair share, a real portion of their GDP not just token amounts), appoint original intent Justices to the Supreme Court -- well, you know. Put American interests first. Really. With a realistic foreign policy. And if we have to fight a war, then fight it, with enough force to win and win fast and then get out, the way we always have. Didnât we do that in four years, going from essentially no army at all, and while we were at it becoming the âarsenal of democracyâ whatever that means, and doing that in two years? While coming out of a Depression, for heavenâs sake. But, weâre told, thatâs not conservative, thatâs something else.
So a lot of people are confused. Having been read out of the conservative movement for being insufficiently enthusiastic about globalism, I didnât figure I owed any obedience to the label, and apparently there are a lot of Americans who feel the same way. Iâd say I was for liberty, but that sounds like a liberal, and I know Iâm not part of the liberal movement. Whatever I am, I know that Federal aid to education has been a disaster and we had far better schools when it was left to the states, some of whom competed to have schools run to serve the interests of the students, not the interests of the teachersâ unions. But itâs very much in the interest of the ruling class to have awful schools and to keep the price of good ones high; their kids generally donât go to public schools anyway.
Remember the Northwest Ordinance? Probably you donât. Or the Land Grant colleges and universities? Can you recall when public state colleges were essentially free to those qualified to be in them? I suspect nostalgia for those days is reactionary, not conservative.
But I also remember when Detroit was the symbol of productivity, and the enemies of America had the goal ending that.
But by 1750, the Quakers were kind of on their way out; by 1750, they were a demographic minority in Pennsylvania, and by 1773 they were a minority in its legislature as well. In 1750 Quakerism was the third-largest religion in the US; by 1820 it was the ninth-largest, and by 1981 it was the sixty-sixth largest. What happened? The Quakers basically tolerated themselves out of existence. They were so welcoming to religious minorities and immigrants that all these groups took up shop in Pennsylvania and ended its status as a uniquely Quaker society. At the same time, the Quakers themselves became more âfanaticalâ and many dropped out of politics believing it to be too worldly a concern for them; this was obviously fatal to their political domination. The most famous Pennsylvanian statesman of the Revolutionary era, Benjamin Franklin, was not a Quaker at all but a first-generation immigrant from New England. Finally, Quakerism was naturally extra-susceptible to that thing where Christian denominations become indistinguishable from liberal modernity and fade into the secular background.
With Producer, you can get a list of the open issues from your remote origin by running producer issues from the project repository:
$ cd ~/Code/radarphp/Radar.Adr
$ producer issues
radarphp/Radar.Adr
14. Separate Package for ResponderAcceptsInterface?
https://github.com/radarphp/Radar.Adr/issues/14
29. Service level actions?
https://github.com/radarphp/Radar.Adr/issues/29
$
However, I’m the lead on about 40 different packages and projects, and at one point or another many of them have issues to be tracked on Github. It’s tedious to go to each package repository to list its issues separately. I want to be able to see a list of all issues on all my projects; then I can review them all at once to see what gets my attention.
To get a list of all open issues on several projects, you can create a bash script that changes to each project directory and runs project issues in each one:
cd ~/Code/atlasphp/Atlas.Cli; producer issues;
cd ~/Code/atlasphp/Atlas.Orm; producer issues;
cd ~/Code/auraphp/Aura.Accept; producer issues;
; ...
cd ~/Code/radarphp/Radar.Project; producer issues;
cd ~/Code/relayphp/Relay.Relay; producer issues;
cd ~/Code/relayphp/Relay.Middleware; producer issues;
Call the script all-issues.sh, make it executable with chmod +x all-issues.sh, and then you can issue ./all-issues.sh to get a list of all open issues on all your projects. Pipe the result to a file for easy viewing if you like!
Read the Reddit discussion about this post here.
Just a short note to say that most (all?) of the feedback from last month’s inital release of Producer has been incorporated into today’s 2.0.0 stable release!
The major changes are:
You are no longer required to install Producer globally. You can now install it as a require-dev in your project and call it as ./vendor/bin/producer. (Personally, I prefer to have it global, but that's mostly because I manage so many different libraries.)
Along with that, Producer now recognizes a project-specific .producer/config file so you can override Producer settings on a per-project basis.
Finally, Producer does not install phpunit and phpdoc any more. You will need to install them yourself, either globally or as part of your package. The benefit here is that you can now specify custom paths to phpunit and phpdoc commands in your .producer/config file.
(Producer is a command-line quality-assurance tool to validate, and then release, your PHP library package. It supports Git and Mercurial for version control, as well as Github, Gitlab, and Bitbucket for remote origins.)
(Heavily condensed from the original, which you should read in its entirety.)
More Isnât Always Better: Higher code coverage was not the best measure of post-release failures in the field. If 99 percent of the code has been tested, but the 1 percent that did not get tested is what customers use the most, then there is a clear mismatch between usage and testing. It is more beneficial to achieve higher code coverage of more complex code than to test less complex code at an equivalent level. Those are the kinds of tradeoffs that development managers need to keep in mind.
Write Test Code First: TDD teams produced code that was 60 to 90 percent better in terms of defect density than non-TDD teams. They also discovered that TDD teams took longer to complete their projects--15 to 35 percent longer. âOver a development cycle of 12 months, 35 percent is another four months, which is huge. However, the tradeoff is that you reduce post-release maintenance costs significantly, since code quality is so much better. Again, these are decisions that managers have to make--where should they take the hit?â
Proving the Utility of Assertions: More assertions and code verifications means fewer bugs. Looking behind the straight statistical evidence, they also found a contextual variable: experience. Software engineers who were able to make productive use of assertions in their code base tended to be well-trained and experienced, a factor that contributed to the end results. What kind of action should development managers take based on these findings? The research team believes that enforcing the use of assertions would not work well; rather, there needs to be a culture of using assertions in order to produce the desired results.
Organizational Structure Does Matter – a Lot: Organizational metrics, which are not related to the code, can predict software failure-proneness with a precision and recall of 85 percent. This is a significantly higher precision than traditional metrics such as churn, complexity, or coverage that have been used until now to predict failure-proneness.
Geographical Distance Doesnât Matter – Much: Most people preferred to talk to someone from their own organization 4,000 miles away rather than someone only five doors down the hall but from a different organization. Organizational cohesiveness played a bigger role than geographical distance.
Source: Exploding Software-Engineering Myths - Microsoft Research
(Greatly condensed from the original, which you should read in its entirety; all emphasis in original.)
I like to think about media in terms of questions answered.
Like other media (the web) has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is:
Why wasn't I consulted?
âWhy wasn't I consulted,â which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.
WWIC is the thing people talk about when they talk about nicer-sounding things like âthe wisdom of crowdsâ or âcognitive surplus.â It has become the first thing I think about when I think about the web. I start by asking: âHow do we deal with the WWIC problem?â Everything else comes after.
The obvious example of WWIC at work is Wikipedia, created for free by unpaid labor. It tapped into the basic human need to be consulted and never looked back.
Once you see [thumbs-up/thumbs-down icons so that you can rank the comments], a website is complete. You're down to the bedrock. A boolean or integer value is the digital equivalent of a grunt. You can't get any more basic than a like, or a thumbs-up, or a favorite.
One of the great things about PHP is its session handling capabilities. One call to session_start() and a huge amount of heavy lifting is done for you. It’s a great aid when writing page scripts.
However, as you start to need finer control over the HTTP response in your project, some of the automatic session behaviors begin to get in the way. In particular, when you are using PSR-7 to build your HTTP response, you realize that session_start() and session_regenerate_id() both automatically do the equivalent of calling setcookie() to write headers directly to the output. This means you cannot buffer those calls into the Response object for later sending.
How then can we use PHP’s session handling, when we want finer control over when and how cookies get sent?
The first trick is to tell PHP not to send a cookie when it does session work. This is accomplished with three ini_set() calls:
ini_set('session.use_trans_sid', false);
ini_set('session.use_cookies', false);
ini_set('session.use_only_cookies', true);
These direct PHP not to use transparent session IDs, not to use cookies, and (counterintuitively) to use only cookies. If I understand correctly, the combination of the last two means that PHP will read only from the cookies, and from nowhere else, to find the session ID value.
With those settings, a call to session_start() will cause PHP to read from the cookie values for the session ID, but it will not cause PHP to set any cookies for the session.
The second trick is to compare the session ID in the incoming request, to the session_id() value at the time you want to send the response. If they are different, that means a session has been started or regenerated, at which point you can send the session cookie manually. The following is an example Relay-compatible middleware that puts session cookie handling logic into effect:
When you examine the class, note that the cookie-creation code is intended to be the same as in the PHP session handling code itself. Note also that you can extract the relevant logic (“compare the Request session ID to the current one, and send a cookie if they’re different”) and use it in a non-middleware-based application.
With SessionHeadersHandler in place, subsequent middleware decorators can call session_start() and session_regenerate_id(), and PHP will no longer automatically write out a session cookie on its own. The handler will set the cookie into a PSR-7 Response object for later sending.
Unfortunately, this is only a partial solution for session headers. The handler does not deal with things like session cache expire and limiter headers. However, it does give you control over when session cookie itself get sent, and that’s a great aid when you want to work with PSR-7 Response objects.
What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think... and 5) who to vote for.
With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30y of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, microeconomic papers wrong 40% of the time, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating only 1/5th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren't even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. I have shown that most of what Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types call "rational" or "irrational" comes from misunderstanding of probability theory.
Source: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The victim narrative of the Left is very infectious. You are always the victim and you are always owed something. The wealthy are always evil, while you are always good and wholesome. Converts are often more intense than those born into it. My father, raised a leftist, eventually mellowed and began to question some leftist beliefs. My mother, not raised a leftist, but having become one, never mellowed.
The victim narrative was in every conversation.
The class struggle/oppressed victim narrative is part of daily life on the Left. As a child, I would listen to adults talking. With friends and co-workers, with mothers chatting over tea, it was part of every conversation. They would talk about the weather, their kids, television, but before parting, one of them would always say something relating to the greedy oppression of the rich -- and the other had to agree. To not agree was social suicide.
While there were differences between working-class and middle-class leftists, certain attitudes were universal:When a leftist has never worked, they feel very generous toward anyone who claims to need help, who fits the narrative. They are generous with their emotions.
Emphasis in original. Source: The Mind of the Left From an Insider | Frontpage Mag