Paul M. Jones

Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.

Logic is a pretty powerful tool, but it only works if you give it good input. If you know all the constraints and weights - with perfect precision - then you can use logic to find the perfect answer. But when you don't, which is always, there's a pretty good chance your logic will lead you very, very far astray.

Most people find this out pretty early on in life, because their logic is imperfect and fails them often. But really, really smart computer geek types may not ever find it out. They start off living in a bubble, they isolate themselves because socializing is unpleasant, and, if they get a good job straight out of school, they may never need to leave that bubble. To such people, it may appear that logic actually works, and that they are themselves logical creatures.

Working at a large, successful company lets you keep your isolation. If you choose, you can just ignore all the inconvenient facts about the world. You can make decisions based on whatever input you choose.

It's a setup that makes it very easy to describe all your successes in terms of your team's greatness, and all your failures in terms of other people's capriciousness.

One of the biggest social problems currently reported at work is lack of confidence, also known as Impostor Syndrome.

But I think Impostor Syndrome is valuable. The people with Impostor Syndrome are the people who *aren't* sure that a logical proof of their smartness is sufficient. They're looking around them and finding something wrong, an intuitive sense that around here, logic does not always agree with reality, and the obviously right solution does not lead to obviously happy customers, and it's unsettling because maybe smartness isn't enough, and maybe if we don't feel like we know what we're doing, it's because we don't.

Impostor Syndrome is that voice inside you saying that not everything is as it seems, and it could all be lost in a moment. The people with the problem are the people who can't hear that voice.

That's a "Reader's Digest" version of the original; I omitted intercessory languauge to improve the flow of the excerpt, but have not changed the meaning. Please read the whole thing at apenwarr.

Why do all these exceedingly well-off [Democrats] keep trying to convince us we’ll see them at the dollar store?

It’s all part of the increasingly delusional myth Democrats tell themselves that they are the tribunes of the middle class. In fact, their party is a strange two-headed beast -- picture a Cerberus featuring the faces of Barbra Streisand and Lois Lerner.

The Dems are a coalition of ultra-rich cultural-elite donors on the one hand and government employees and their clients on the other.

See also the phrase "prolier than thou". Via Why Democrats insist on lying about how ‘poor’ they are | New York Post.

Your right to swing your fist ends at the other's guy's nose. But what if the other guy is Pinocchio, and his nose is growing? Your freedom is being restricted by his expanding sense of harm.

Some ideas of "harm" are unreasonable. Via Dan Carlin, Common Sense #269, "The Challenges Of Living Dangerously" at about the 38:00 mark.

This is because “stand your ground” simply means that, if you reasonably believe that you face imminent death, serious bodily injury, rape, kidnapping, or (in most states) robbery, you can use deadly force against the assailant, even if you have a perfectly safe avenue of retreat. In non-stand-your-ground states, when you face such threats outside your home (and, in some states, your business), you can only use deadly force against the assailant if you lack a perfectly safe avenue of retreat. In no states are you allowed to shoot someone who is simply shouting at you or moving towards you loudly and aggressively, unless you reasonably believe that you’re in danger of death, serious bodily injury, or the other harms I listed. (When the person is coming into your home, in many states you can indeed shoot, but that doesn’t apply to confrontations on the public street.)

Pro-gun-control folk should read the entire article. Hell, so should pro-liberty folk. Via What ‘stand your ground’ laws actually mean - The Washington Post.

The arrest of an Olympic gold medalist on charges of domestic violence would normally be an occasion for a soul-searching conversation about machismo in sports, toxic masculinity and violence against women. But not when the alleged offender is a woman: 32-year-old Hope Solo, goalkeeper of the U.S. women’s soccer team, who is facing charges of assaulting her sister and 17-year-old nephew in a drunken, violent outburst.

via The Surprising Truth About Women and Violence | TIME.

It can be difficult to find a truly standalone, authentication-only library, and Aura.Auth fits that bill.

The library is still under development, but the major pieces are all now in place:

• a state-tracking object

• services for login, logout, and resuming sessions

• adapters for htpasswd and PDO backends

• service integration idioms (including HTTP Authorization: Basic login integration)

• native session management

Each layer can handle custom implementations. There are instructions for custom adapters, custom session managers (including session-less authentication), and custom services.

Via An Updated Preview Of Aura.Auth.

But this idea that bureaucrats -- very broadly defined -- can become their own class bent on protecting their interests at the expense of the public seems not only plausible but obviously true.

The evidence is everywhere. Every day it seems there’s another story about teachers’ unions using their stranglehold on public schools to reward themselves at the expense of children. School-choice programs and even public charter schools are under vicious attack, not because they are bad at educating children but because they’re good at it. Specifically, they are good at it because they don’t have to abide by rules aimed at protecting government workers at the expense of students.

The Veterans Affairs scandal can be boiled down to the fact that VA employees are the agency’s most important constituency. The Phoenix VA health-care system created secret waiting lists where patients languished and even died, while the administrator paid out almost $10 million in bonuses to VA employees over the last three years.

Working for the federal government simply isn’t like working for the private sector. Government employees are essentially unfireable.

See also the IRS. Via Of the Bureaucrats, by the Bureaucrats, for the Bureaucrats | National Review Online.

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that police cannot go snooping through people’s cell phones without a warrant, in a unanimous decision that amounts to a major statement in favor of privacy rights.

Police agencies had argued that searching through the data on cell phones was no different than asking someone to turn out his pockets, but the justices rejected that, saying a cell phone is more fundamental.

This is a blow in favor of liberty. Now you need to remember to uphold your rights. When the officer asks to see your cellphone, you reply in a polite and deferential tone: "Officer, with great respect, I do not consent to searches. May I be on my way now?" Via Supreme Court bans warrantless cell phone searches - Washington Times.

In an earlier article I described how to start moving away from singletons in favor of dependency injection. It occurs to me that the process for moving away from Service Locator is almost exactly the same, except that we use the container outside the class instead of inside it.

Let's say we have a class that uses a Service Locator. First we examine the class for all uses of the locator. Then, we create constructor parameters for the dependencies it extracts from the locator, and add setter code for those dependencies in the constructor body. For example, we can convert the above Service Locator example classes to these dependency-injected variations:

<?php
class FooClass
{
    protected $db;
    public function __construct(Database $db)
    {
        $this->db = $db;
    }
}

class BarClass
{
    protected $db;
    public function __construct(Database $db)
    {
        $this->db = $db;
    }
}
?>

Finally, any time we instantiate one of these dependency-injected classes, we use the locator outside the class to retrieve the dependencies. We then pass them to the new call for the class. For example:

<?php
// for FooClass
$db = $container->get('db');
$foo = new FooClass($db);

// for BarClass
$db = StaticContainer::get('db');
$bar = new BarClass($db);
?>

Now the class dependencies are explicit and predictable, instead of implicit and unpredictable (i.e., the class might depend on any combination of dependencies hidden inside the container). It is also somewhat easier to build a test, since we only have to build the dependencies themselves, not the container that holds the dependencies.

Afterword

Are you overwhelmed by a legacy PHP application? Have you inherited a spaghetti mess of code? Does it use globals everywhere, so that a fix in one place causes a bug somewhere else? Does every feature addition feel like slogging through a swamp of includes?

It doesn’t have to be that way. "Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP" gives you step-by-step instructions on how to get your legacy code under control by eliminating globals and separating concerns. Each chapter shows you exactly one task and how to accomplish it, along with common questions related to that task.

When you are done, you will come and go through your code like the wind. Your application will have become autoloaded, dependency injected, unit tested, layer separated, and front controlled. And you will have kept it running the whole time.

Buy the book today!

Read the Reddit discussion about this post here.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, celebrated science fiction and fantasy author, recipient of the, cofounder of the Society for Creative Anachronism, posthumous recipient of the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement, has just been revealed by her own daughter Moira Greyland as a repeat child molester, who not only countenanced her sometime husband Walter Breen‘s relationship with an underage boy, but also violated her own daughter,  and other children, of both sexes, repeatedly, over many years.

I apologize to anyone this offends, but this is already public information and I am simply repeating it. Walter Breen’s convictions are a matter of public record, and reinforced by Bradley’s own public statements on the subject. This goes far beyond any notion of Fifties homophobia. And also, I apologize to Moira Greyland if sharing this upsets her further, but her statement is already being shared elsewhere, and I’m just adding a little more exposure on top of what’s already going on – with some good purpose, I hope. And I apologize if this article title for one moment appears to call into question what she said, but I’m adding it in case TeleRead needs a fallback position and I’ve been wrong all along. But so far it looks like anything but.

Cue the excuses. Via Marion Zimmer Bradley was a child abuser - says her own daughter « TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.