Recent Comments

1. about 18 hours ago on Luann

   Yes! I rather enjoyed Moby Dick. OTOH, I tried several times (it was required reading one summer in high school), but wasn’t able to get past the first 15 or so pages of Tale of Two Cities.

2. 4 days ago on Doonesbury

   Zonker was the wide receiver; BD was the QB. Zonker being high in the huddle was a running gag in the first month of strips. I’m pretty sure BD (Mike’s roomie) and Boopsie were in the very first strip.

3. 5 days ago on Doonesbury

   Working just from memory here: Boopsie and Zonker both appeared in the first week of Doonesbury (IIRC, both in the very first strip, but I’m not sure). She was a cheerleader, and he was a wide receiver who was only depicted as high (often in the huddle on-field) in the early days. She eventually married BD, Mike’s roomie in that first strip (cheerleader and quarterback, how original), who, as is frequently the case, was great friends with his wide receiver, and was the glue connecting Boopsie and Zonker at first.

4. 6 days ago on Doonesbury

   > If she actually offered 10 cents, she would be legally bound to pay that if the seller accepted the offer.

   The seller refused that offer, which is universally understood (in court and out) to invite another offer. There is no law saying the subsequent offer must be higher. Dropping the offer is sometimes used as a way to try to get the seller to accept reality, especially when the initial offer is seen (by the seller) as generous. If there were any other buyer (that the seller could find) who would pay more, he would have hung up on Alex with her second offer.

   Regarding waiting for an offer in writing, it is a common practice in many businesses, in many places, to first come up with a verbal agreement, then write up a contract detailing the actual legal agreement along the lines of the verbal agreement. In those cases, the verbal agreement is considered semi-binding, that is, any eventual contract must contain the things agreed to verbally, but it is entirely possible that the parties will not come to agreement on the (other) details, in which case the deal is said to “fall apart,” with no liability to anyone.

5. 8 days ago on Doonesbury

   When people allow a free market to be “unfettered” (especially when it is paired with easy access to legislation for corporations), society as a whole will suffer, increasingly.

   It is no wonder that social unrest has grown, pretty much in lockstep with the unfettering of the free market, which simply gives the wealthy more and more ways to transfer wealth from the poor to themselves. From BLM to stay-at-home to SJP to whoever will be in the news next month, the bulk of the people at protests are usually more “just protesting” than advocating for the specific cause for which they are showing up. A recent study found that most of the people who showed up for a BLM protest also showed up for a pandemic stay-at-home protest!! It’s pure social unrest; you have an alternative explanation?

   Please note that I am not advocating transferring wealth from the wealthy to the poor: if the U.S. simply dismantled all the systems that transfer wealth the other way (even if they kept state-run lotteries), that would probably be unnecessary.

6. 8 days ago on Doonesbury

   > Isn’t this how the unfettered market is supposed to work? Supply and demand determine price, and when a monopoly interferes with that mechanism buyers look for alternatives and new sellers, attracted by those profits, enter the market.

   Except that the patent (and other) laws have been bent to the will of the monopolists, who discovered that money for lobbying is extremely well-spent. Even John Adams believed a Capitalist system needed to be well-regulated to function for the benefit of society, and ours has become remarkably dysregulated, in all manner of ways.

   An acquaintance of mine ran a company, and at one point, “needed” a law changed, so he hired a lobbyist, “bought” a congressman and got his law. He told me he wasn’t surprised he was able to do it easily, but he was shocked by how cheap it was. Big corporations almost invariably find that their “return on lobbying” is just astronomical: you can give lobbyists $200k to get a law passed that will net you hundreds of millions: that’s a 100,000% ROI. Real examples of this abound, sometimes with numbers even more extreme.

7. 8 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

   This is basically why Hollywood has such an aversion to producing comedies now: the “foreign” revenue is much scarcer than for movies where you blow stuff up and/or beat people up.

8. 8 days ago on Overboard

   I respectfully request you take a look at my reply to saltylife16, above.

9. 8 days ago on Overboard

   > The enjoyment of escaping reality.

   I very much enjoy escaping into the comic world. Then some goober complains that Louie wouldn’t be able to float because the average density of a dog exceeds the average density of air.

   I was trying to point out that there are plenty of things in that world that aren’t logical (like every comic), so complaining about something that’s not logical is (…wait for it…) not logical.

10. 8 days ago on Doonesbury

    A surprising amount of commercial software, even in the 21st century, is spaghetti code. But I’ve found, especially with the rise of Java and particularly the Spring framework proliferating in corporate settings, that ravioli code is more of an issue.

    “Ravioli code” is when your codebase consists of thousands of tiny methods (or functions), maybe 1-10 lines each, that each only do one very specific thing. On the one hand, you can tell almost at a glance that the function itself is correct, but on the other, it can take a lot of work to figure out what actually happens when the program runs, and whether the function is being called at the right time or in the right situation, because the logical connections between parts of the program are so obscure, and there’s just so much code to wade through for even the smallest action.