In 2004 I was at a company that dedicated a team of people to rebuilding a bunch of tables (lots of financial data) in to styled divs because... "tables are depreciated". The fact that they couldn't pronounce or understand the word "deprecated" should have been enough of a clue to ignore this person, but they were the 'lead' on the web team, and... had been there longer than other people. Obviously they must know what they're talking about. Weeks later after having converted dozens of spreadsheets to divs (instead of just using tables) they were 'done', but it was a tremendous waste of time that ignored all the semantics of tables. I was asked to 'help out' on that project to meet the deadline and refused, citing that it was not just stupid, but a big waste of time and against web semantics.
"table" was never deprecated in HTML at all, but was discouraged for general layout (we were aware of this even in the early 2000s). But for representing tabular data - like... data in rows/columns from spreadsheets (with column headers and such)... HTML tables were absolutely the right (only?) way to present this.
> and without evidence either way it's a matter of opinion
The absence of evidence is used as evidence of the thing (hostile deep state actors) existing, because they're so good they can hide their tracks so well that they can't be found. They must be stopped.
When lack of evidence is the proof... I'm not sure there's much room for rational discussion.
"...and just assume they are just randomly pulling triggers...hinder our own ability to predict and prepare for the future."
Speaking about the current politics and US administration, much of what's coming doesn't need to be 'predicted' - it's unfolding from the project2025 document. Not everything happening is from there, but quite a lot is.
> Instead of firing the commissioner, the president should be giving the agency a raise in the form of a bigger budget. The goal should be to restore public trust in government statistics, not undermine it.
When you believe that government should not be providing many services, or doing most of what it currently does overall, why would you want to bolster trust in government statistics? Those statistics might contradict the administration, which is not a goal of the administration and its backers.
> I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.
99% of the folks I interact with usually just use whatever size the browser opens in initially, then maybe resize it if they're reading for a while, or need to see more info. If half a pic shows up, they might try to fumble to grab a handle to resize to see more of the pic; sometimes it works, sometimes they end up giving up.
Going 'full screen' may be different than just 'as wide and tall as the monitor', because 'full screen' mode gets rid of the window chrome, which causes confusion.
The only folks I know who consistently use browsers 'full screen' are on mobile devices where that's generally the only option.
> I think the total reliance is a legitimate concern that needs to be addressed.
> I still think this approach to addressing that issue is complete madness.
You're assuming the 'total reliance' argument and corresponding actions are being done in good faith. The original 'emergency' declarations justifying large initial tariffs in February were because of a 'fentanyl crisis'. Which then morphed in to 'well, we should be manufacturing here for defense purposes' and assorted other arguments along the way ("we're getting ripped off!", etc).
There's a danger in being cynical about this, but also danger in taking everything at face value. There's been no coherent communicated policy with justifications and expected outcomes or timelines ever put forward the same way twice from this administration.
$252 million was collected from excise tariffs on May 6. You can look at this PDF day to day.
EDIT: adding on to this... most days are between $150m and $300m. There's been a few days north of $300m this calendar year. There was also one day - April 16? 17th? - with $11.5b coming in. Under 'excise taxes'. I have to assume that was something to do with early April tariff announcements? But haven't seen anything remotely similar since.
So this "billions of dollars are pouring in from tariffs!" is... simply not true. There's not been a huge shift one way or the other yet.
More to the point, if high tariffs are GOOD, we should be embracing them and the WH should be working to promote 'pride in tariffs!' messaging. Show how much you love your country and leader by how much in tariffs you pay! It'll be great, because you won't have to pay $3k income tax, just... an extra $5k in cost of living every year. Forever. Even when you stop working.
And for things that can not be manufactured or grown here... we just suck it up and pay the extra 10-20-30% anyway?
If the 'intent' was to spur manufacturing, you'd enact laws with long term financial stability planned in. Few are going to commit to spending millions equipping factories when the 'tariff moat' that might make those factories sustainable will go away if Trump sees a movie in six weeks that says tariffs are bad.
The 'intent' seems to be to create financial instability and chaos, to allow Trump to position himself as the financial savior, and we are concentrating huge amounts of economic power in the hands of a single person.
If a business in France uses tech X imported from China, and a competing US business uses the same tech X imported from China but has to pay 145% more than the French company, is that not an advantage they have over the US company?
I watched the UK/US press conference this morning. Lutnick is infuriating. Anything remotely resembling an explanation or justification for 'tariffs' devolves in to obsequeous praise of how great Trump is. It's as if they can't function for an hour or two without overtly proclaiming the wonder of Trump.
"Jamison and I working together couldn't have put this deal together in 3 years, but President Trump was able to pull this off in less than 45 days!" (paraphrasing but IIRC it was pretty close).
I just can't believe your take on this. The White House press secretary has directly said, multiple times, "this is the most transparent administration ever". /s
In reality, this entire process is insanity. We've had examples of government spending overhaul in the past - early(?) 90s - both sides worked together, cut lots of spending across programs, downsized tens of thousands of federal workers, and balanced a budget, to the point where we had a surplus. It was tough, took time, wasn't perfect, but was deliberated and debated and far far far more open and transparent than all this. But their goal was actually improving government (even if that meant reducing some areas). The current 'leadership' goal is to dismantle/destroy as much as possible, as this is led by people who think government in general should not exist.
I need the audio streamed in - usually white/brown noise. This blocks out distractions. 30 years ago perhaps people could do 'knowledge work' without these, but most of the people I know who did knowledge work years ago - lawyers, accountants, architects - they all had private offices they could go do heads down work in. 'Open office' plans seem to have ruined this. I spent years in the late 90s in open office plans trying to build web applications, sandwiched in between ad sales and project management people, constantly on the phone. Worked fine for them - they were often on phone calls. But those phone calls bled over in to my ears - unwelcomed - and created constant interruptions and context switching.
The 'underlying anxiety' might be because there's far more noise in our environments - inside and outside - than there was a couple generations ago? More traffic, bigger cars, leaf blowers, lawn mowers, more airplanes. More people in smaller open plan offices... None of these are really under my control. Wearing head phones to block that stuff out is under my control.
Listening to actual music with words or podcasts while trying to work would, in fact, be worse for me, and I think for many folks. Unsure how people do that, but white noise blocking does help many folks.
After that, I need to be using my hands more - washing them, putting stuff in the locker, tying shoes, etc. Standing there for 20-30-40 seconds is one of the few times one or both hands are free and my brain can go do something else for a bit (read, get a podcast, etc).
I do it. Typically just checking a few message alerts, or finishing a news story, or starting a podcast download. It's less disruptive than checking those items in front of someone else, when you should be giving the other person attention.
Do I have to? No. Do I always do it? No. But just today at the gym, I used the 30 seconds or so there to start downloading a podcast to listen to during my workout. Every button click takes a couple seconds, pause, wait, etc... Why not stack those non-productive times together?
I'd tried to put together an RFC years ago to introduce groovy-style accessors in PHP.
$this->foo
would look for a getFoo() method, and execute if it existed, or not if not. Felt like that was easier to reason about, fwiw, but I couldn't get it off the ground. Even then, there were multiple C#-style get/set proposals floating around, so this style seems to be the one more people like. Not a fan of the style, personally, and probably won't use these much directly any time soon. If it helps people maintaining libraries that I use to deliver code that is cleaner and more productive to them... I'm OK with that.
"table" was never deprecated in HTML at all, but was discouraged for general layout (we were aware of this even in the early 2000s). But for representing tabular data - like... data in rows/columns from spreadsheets (with column headers and such)... HTML tables were absolutely the right (only?) way to present this.
I was at that company less than a year...