The author's argument about SoC is not convincing. He: "is, in my polite opinion, completely wrong". The graybeards are right on this one.
For those of us who remember working with "DHTML" before libraries like jQuery proliferated, and then jQuery became ubiquitous for a few years - many of us recall the messes that the simplistic technique of using intrinsic events gave us.
When intrinsic events were introduced (e.g. the onclick attribute), they were meant to wire up some simple DOM behavior to Java Applets. Then somebody convinced the W3C people that it was a neat idea, and it needed to be in the HTML 4 spec.
1. "Did you mandate COVID-19 vaccines for employees?"
2. "Would you allow an employee who has acquired a concealed-carry license to arm herself on company property?"
3. "Do you donate to the Democrat party? How much? And what have you done to funnel company wealth to it?"
Rationale:
1. Coercing people to receive a medical treatment that they may not desire is a clear sign that the CEO lacks a moral compass - this is Nuremberg trials material. The groupthink in 2021 was: "the vaccines are effective and safe." Any skeptical CEO who resisted that groupthink, and respected an individual's right to remain in the control group for that medical experiment, demonstrated moral trustworthiness.
2. Respect for an individual's right to self defense is a clear sign of a moral compass. Individuals who have acquired CCLs must submit to background checks, complete a training course, and know the law on the use of lethal force in defending oneself - they as justified as police officers in carrying firearms. A CEO who has come to this understanding, and NOT established a policy contrary to it demonstrates moral trustworthiness.
3. The Democrat party has established itself as the party of moral erosion, for whom a consistent, universal morality does not exist. It is the party of moral relativism. And moral relativism is defined by it un-trustworthiness on morals. Soros and SBF are/were the two biggest donors to this party; they are walking examples of moral un-trustworthiness. We can probably nitpick, and ask a similar question about the Republican party, but those people are all about morality...right? That's a big reason why libs pick on them.
We're lying to ourselves if we believe anything Google claims about respecting privacy. Unless your data is encrypted when you give it to the monster, and you can know with certainty that it is, then it's not private. The monster will know what the data is, and it will sell it or trade it for power from governments, etc.
Who else has taken note that you can no longer create a Google account without a mobile phone? Google is linking accounts to individuals. Anonymity and privacy are no longer a reality when dealing with Google.
The cardinal virtues - prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance - help protect the "mind and character" from addiction or disordered attachment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_virtues
I try to help my son understand and cultivate these virtues. He is 11, and is home-schooled.
Practically, right now we use several exercises specifically intended to combat screen attachment:
1) he is supposed to set a timer when getting on his iPad (totally up to him, but HE chooses to use it)
2) two regular days a week when he can Skype with his best friends (looks forward to the social time more than the game time)
3) typically a once-a-month screen detox for 3 to 7 days (no screen time, period.)
The most effective exercise is the screen detox. Within a day his attitude changes for the better: he practices his piano more eagerly, he acts sweeter, he finds "real" things to get into, and is more creative than usual. We're doing a detox right now; he learned backgammon from a friend at his chess club yesterday, made a backgammon board this morning before school, and taught me how to play when I got home from work. ...typical example of what happens during a detox. In the summer it was usually things like playing football or collecting bugs and lizards outside that happened when the iPad was put on the shelf.
I'm ashamed (and humbled) to say that I need a detox more than he does. But I grew up not being taught to develop virtue, and I have a lot of self-correction that I'm working through. Setting my son up to not have to deal with addiction in the first place is something I can give him that I wish I had been given. His generation also has (soon to be "Saint") Carlo Acutis as a role model.
I need to set up a Pi-hole, and filter out adult website URLs for our home internet.
I regret hearing the lies spoken during sex education when I was in fifth grade in 1987. The public school I was forced to attend brought in a sociologist to do the damage. She told us that we had to release our libido energy regularly - either by having sexual relations with another person or by masturbation, and that this was okay and healthy. Self control and abstinence were presented as being unrealistic.
This provided me with moral license from an expert (and indirectly from my parents, who had to sign the permission form to attend the lecture). One thing led to another, and it undoubtedly resulted in addiction; the endorphins and oxytocin produced by the human body and released during orgasm are worse than heroin. Bad habits form easily, and it's scary when you can't stop doing something that you believed would be just an experiment at age ten. The shame / guilt was hell.
If I could change anything anything about my past it would be to erase the immersion into that addiction at such an early, formative age. All other attachments of spirit have been easy to deal with - this one has not.
* Getting Real, by 37signals:
Gave me confidence to side-step a lot of the bs I saw in software development practice
* The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks:
Provided an argument against inexperienced managers who errantly assert that they need more developers to get projects done quicker; perhaps more importantly, it gives as a model for a programming team with a "chief programmer" to whom these managers need to report
* The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander:
Taught me the original (perhaps better) concept of design patterns, which helped in talking to colleagues about the parts of software we build and reuse
* JavaScript: the Good Parts, Douglas Crockford:
Led me to a solid understanding of how to make good use a crummy scripting language that was only really meant to glue DOM behavior to Java applets
The page has been removed from their website, but it's archived:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230927000839/https://www.cmglo...