Code Retreat for JavaScript and Ruby Developers

I'm thinking of putting together a little meetup where I can help developers who prefer Ruby and JavaScript improve their focus and discipline.  Both languages have critical flaws in them that make it harder to adhere to object-oriented principles and, as a result, developers who choose these languages must require a far greater amount of concentration in order to do a good job.

To that end, I'd like to announce my plan to create a JavaScript and Ruby Developer Concentration Camp.

Any takers?

So Long, Old Friends

This is the complaint I submitted to Starbucks and my final communique with them, I suppose.

I terminated the auto-reload on my card because of the changeover to La Boulange.  Of course, it doesn't bother me that you added their products to your offering - what reasonable person would be bothered by that?  However, in so doing, you took away all the good food items. 

Worse, there was basically no warning.  We just walked in one day and, boom, there was all this new stuff.  Then we tasted it and it was much, much, much worse than what you had before.  The chocolate croissant was pretty much inedible and the cookie I tried on my next visit was exactly inedible.  I threw it in the trash, which is where I feel it should have been placed before finding its way into your display case. 

Starbucks was a big part of my life.  It was a little ritual in which my wife and I have regularly engaged.  That ritual has been defiled, now, and I no longer partake.  Right now, it is difficult to imagine ever going back to a Starbucks.  Even if you got rid of La Boulange, I feel so betrayed that I'm not sure I would consider coming back. 

Goodbye.

Everybody who hates the La Boulange changeover, which is probably most of the people who think for themselves, should boycott Starbucks.  It won't change their behavior.  They're so big and have so many people snowed into believing this is a good thing that there's no way they'll pivot on this.  What it might do is amass together enough demand to create a supply-vacuum, sucking a new entity into existence that can fill the role that Starbucks once did.

Ender's Game

I'm certainly not the first one to this party.  I remember one of my childhood friends being very excited by this book long ago.  I was skeptical at the time, as I am always skeptical about basically everything.

When the movie was announced, I resolved to read the book before I watched it.  Now, I'm reticent to watch the movie.  Unlike the case of The Great Gatsby, it's not because I was bored by the book.  Quite the contrary, I thought the book was so good that I cannot imagine the movie living up to it.

The Great Gatsby

Before I watched the movie, The Great Gatsby, I wanted to read the book.  I'm glad I did because now I know I don't need to watch the movie.  The book was boring, slow, and pointless.  I highly recommend doing something else with your time.

Nuh-uh!

I just read this blog entry.

It's so full of holes I don't know where to begin.  I'll start with this paragraph:

As for the history lesson. The twentieth century is full of examples of people that exploited the fears and insecurity of the massess [sic] to satisfy their own ends. From Hitler in Germany to Pol Pot in Cambodia, there are numerous examples of where the powerful have used propaganda to get the masses to perform their biding.

Nonsense.  Hitler and Pol Pot both applied a heavy use of coercion to get their way and anything they didn't coerce is the fault of the doer, not the suggester.  We only want to see things another way because it is easier.  It's easier to imagine one wizard with magical powers could be evil than an entire country.  The ease of accepting something has no bearing on the degree to which it is true.

Let's look at another sample.

Mind control is real. The question is as a society what do we want to do about it?

No.  It isn't.  It's unsubstantiated nonsense and a result of magical thinking.

This post is fraught with false assertions an irrelevant appeals.  Here's another one:

US elections have become affairs that can be bought.

This is not true.  It is true that well-funded candidates tend to win.  That does not mean that people can buy elections.  It means that the American voter is unprincipled enough that he just votes for whoever the advertiser tells him he should.  That's not the advertiser's fault, nor is it the fault of the person who is funding the advertisements.

The blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the people who vote that way.

The person who posted the entry in question has made the claim that, for instance, brainwashing is a scientific fact, so coercion is not a sufficient criterion for the determination of wrongdoing.

This claim is both unsubstantiated and irrelevant.  True, effective brainwashing typically includes a corresponding physical component.  Cults use sleep and food deprivation to cement their grip.  Despots use and enforce threats of death, torture, and incarceration to get their way.

Paul, I would recommend that you visit and peruse this site on logical fallacies if you ever hope to convince anyone of anything.  I do not feel these discussions are a good use of time and do not wish to continue them.