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I believe he is trying to articulate the failings of e.g., JFK's Whiz Kids who were experts of statistical analysis and tried to use that knowledge to domains they knew little about. In a nutshell, these experts tend to deep dive on parts of the problem where data was available and ignore the parts of the problem that is not quantified. Which is usually a huge mistake.

The article you cited said it was done during wartime. It was a way to keep the scientists and technicians who were drafted into military service... so they can keep working in the laboratories they are already working in.

As a solution, the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) in May secured authorization to establish the Special Engineering Detachment (SED) to which technical and scientific personnel could be assigned upon being drafted


In the US, once you are in an elder care facility and you run out of money, the facility will try to keep you in. At that time they will apply to Medicaid in your name. After you die, Medicaid will try to claw back funds by putting a lien against your house. There are extremely complicated rules about exemptions etc.

https://apnews.com/article/medicaid-estate-recovery-nursing-...


I have worked with databases my entire career. I hate triggers with a passion. The issue is no one “owns” or has the authority to keep triggers clean. Eventually triggers become a dumping ground for all sorts of nasty slow code.

I usually tell people to stop treating databases like firebase and wax on/wax off records and fields willy nilly. You need to treat the database as the store of your business process. And your business processes demand retention of all requests. You need to keep the request to soft delete a record. You need to keep a request to undelete a record.

Too much crap in the database, you need to create a field saying this record will be archived off by this date. On that date, you move that record off into another table or file that is only accessible to admins. And yes, you need to keep a record of that archival as well. Too much gunk in your request logs? Well then you need to create an archive process for that as well.

These principles are nothing new. They are in line with “Generally Accepted Record Keeping Principles” which are US oriented. Other countries have similar standards.


What you describe is basically event sourcing, which is definitely popular. However, for OLAP, you will still want a copy of your data that only has the actual dimensions of interest, and not their history - and the easiest way to create that copy and to keep it in sync with your events is via triggers.

Business processes and the database systems I described (and built) have existed before event sourcing was invented. I had built what is essentially event sourcing using nothing more than database tables, views, and stored procedures.

The article’s title is awkward. In it, he says he is addicted to being useful to his management queue. He avoids “time predators” and dismisses Jira ticket jockeys.

That is the author’s real intention is to assert engineers should deliver what their bosses ask.


I don't think that's necessarily the case, it could just be that, in the author's role, the only people that articulate a need for help from him is his management chain.

I've had roles where my job satisfaction came from largely ignoring my management chain and helping people outside of my org for whom I was the point of contact for a set of services offered by my team's internal platform, and this piece really resonated with me.


Genuity was also bought out. Domo seems alive and well.

I am a Texan and no, I didn’t vote for who shall not be named.

> Is there actual public support in the USA for demanding territory from Denmark?

I don’t think so. Americans are notoriously ignorant about geography; I doubt many can place Greenland on a map.

> To us in the Nordics, this is baffling.

As far as I am concerned, the same person threatened to execute US Senators for treason for telling US military they should refuse illegal orders. The US military swore an oath to defend the constitution; disobeying illegal orders is what is required in the US military code.

> Why is annexation suddenly considered 'vital' when the current alliance has worked for decades?

It is not vital. I personally believe he is trying to derail NATO and make our allies turn against us.

> Are we just witnessing a train wreck in the making on both sides of the Atlantic, with no option to stop it?

Yes. Congress and the Supreme Court are acquiescing to his driving US foreign policy into the toilet.


Nobody trusts the polls now. They have been comically wrong for a while.

She lost for the same reason Hillary lost. She came across as Marie Antoinette. Oblivious to the anger of the working class. Touting how great the economy was going and ignoring the resentment felt by those who believed the “liberal elite” betrayed them.

Frankly, bullshit. This was not about working class in the slightest. Working class as such supported and voted for democrats. The thing is, women are working class too, not just men. And farmers are frequently effectively rich owners - in unstable business bu owning a lot.

This was about all thosw isms and hierarchies we pretended dont exisr anymore.


From https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/democrats-...

“As we move into the endgame of the 2022 election, the Democrats face a familiar problem. America’s historical party of the working class keeps losing working-class support.”

“This year, Democrats have chosen to run a campaign focused on three things: abortion rights, gun control, and safeguarding democracy—issues with strong appeal to socially liberal, college-educated voters. But these issues have much less appeal to working-class voters.”

“They are instead focused on the economy, inflation, and crime, and they are skeptical of the Democratic Party’s performance in all three realms.”


>From https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/democrats-...

You conveniently left out that the author (Ruy Teixeira[0]) of the piece you quoted is a senior fellow at the right-wing think tank that authored the Project 2025 roadmap.

Should we ask Stalin to critique US Cold War policies? Or maybe ask Xi Xinping to publicly assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of Taiwan's defense posture too?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruy_Teixeira


False analogy. The Atlantic is a Democratic mouth piece and they posted his message because we Democrats will keep losing if we don’t wake up. Here is an article from another author with a similar message.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/democra...

Quote: The February 18 focus group, in a state that saw deep Democratic erosion last year and will elect a new governor this fall, was the first stop of a new $4.5 million research project centered on working-class voters in 20 states that could hold the key to Democratic revival. American Bridge 21st Century, an independent group that spent about $100 million in 2024 trying to defeat Trump, has decided to invest now in figuring out what went wrong, how Trump’s second term is being received, and how to win back voters who used to be Democratic mainstays but now find themselves in the Republican column.


> Working class as such supported and voted for democrats.

I live in coastal CA, and a healthy majority of my “working class” friends are Trump supporters.

The ones in the trades, who are relatively high earners, are all Trump supporters.


Well. I try for a middle ground. I am currently ditching both airflow and dbt. In Snowflake, I use scheduled tasks that call stored procedures. The stored procedures do everything I need to do. I even call external APIs like Datadog’s and Okta’s and pull down the logs directly into snowflake. I do try to name my stored procedures with meaningful names. I also add generous comments including urls back to the original story.

I forgot to mention in Snowflake, besides chron scheduled tasks, you can add dependent tasks that only run if the previous task succeeded. I have 40 tasks chained together that way. Each of my task calls a stored procedure. Within each procedure, I have Try Catch and a catch-all clause that Raiseerror.

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