But many others put off their dream careers, or stay in jobs they like, because they’re afraid to figure this out. Being in a job, or staying in college, means that you have someone else imposing work and deadlines on you, and you’ll get fired (or dropped from school) if you don’t do the work. So you put off doing the work until you can’t anymore because of the fear of being fired.
~ Leo Babauta from, Making Yourself Work
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What does it mean to be a software craftsman? You can read the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship and draw conclusions; but if you posed that question to different people across the software industry, you’d hear any number of different responses. And to some degree, they’re all true. Descriptions are ultimately bound to perspective, and there appear to be divergent perspectives on the software craftsmanship movement. What follows are three descriptions that are commonly wielded against the software craftsmanship community, accompanied by an explanation of the craftsman’s perspective on the same issue.
~ Paul Pagel from, What the heck?!
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The reason slavery was able to last so long is that the 13th Amendment has a loophole. (Did you notice it? It went right past me.) The loophole is “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. So if you can rig the local laws and get the cooperation of the local law enforcement and court system, you can convict people of “crimes” pretty much whenever you want.
~ Doug Muder from, Slavery Lasted Until Pearl Harbor
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Eventually, the civilization hit a period of stagflation, typically lasting 50 or 60 years, as the population hit the carrying capacity of the land, and as additional workers did not add proportionately more output. When this happened, the wages of common workers tended to stagnate or decrease, resulting in increased wage disparity. The price of food tended to spike. To counter these problems, the amount of government services rose, as did the amount of debt.
~ Gail Tverberg from, Diminishing Returns, Energy Return on Energy Invested, and Collapse
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I find the harder I work,
~ unknown
the more luck I seem to have.
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Forget for a moment the specific arguments for or against gun control: Does that resemble any process you studied in civics class? Do you think that’s what Lincoln had in mind when he talked about “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”?
There are plenty of other examples where the public has a definite opinion, but has been unable to get the result it wants: getting the NSA to stop tracking our phone calls, sending some bankers to jail after the known crimes of the housing bubble, or even things I disagree with, like prayer in public schools. One current issue is raising the minimum wage: It’s popular, but so far that hasn’t made much difference.
~ Doug Muder from, Democracy By Coincidence
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Fitness, as we know it today, seems to be a relatively modern invention – something that started vaguely in the 70s with jogging and Jazzercise. But physical exercise obviously goes back much further than that, to a time where people wouldn’t have thought of it as working out, but rather a way of life. Centuries and millennia ago, they did not have all the machines and weights and gyms that we have today, and yet they were in better shape than we are. To understand why this is, how we got to our modern fitness culture, and what we have lost along the way, it’s helpful to take a look at the history of exercise.
~ Erwan Le Corre from, The History of Physical Fitness
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Just as human society still envelops everything from pre-agricultural tribes, farming communities, and factory sweat-shops to information-based commerce, in different parts of the globe, so IT today straddles all three `waves’ of development from manual chaos to goal-oriented self-repair in different organizations.
~ Mark Burgess from, CFEngine, SysAdmin 3.0 and the Third Wave of IT Engineering
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Other than photo ID, these are all things the Founders could have written into the Constitution, but they didn’t. And that should tell you something: Levin’s book isn’t about restoring anybody’s “original vision”; it’s about radically reshaping the American government into something it never was and was never intended to be.
Contrast this with the proposals in retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’ new book Six Amendments. Only one of Stevens’ amendments — adding a phrase to the Eighth Amendment to define the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment — would change what Stevens’ argues was the Founders’ original intent. (Hanging and the firing squad were common in the founding era.) He composed the other five to reverse the drift of wrong-headed judicial interpretation.
~ Doug Muder from, Restoring the Constitution Is Now a Liberal Issue
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Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro,1 you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”
System administration sucks too:
… And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.
~ Peter Welch from, Programming Sucks
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hear! hear!
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