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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • First, this post is about social security disability insurance, SSDI, not social security retirement benefits. The disability fund is paid into by current workers to pay the benefits of currently disabled people, which may or may not have worked previously. Someone born disabled receives benefits as an adult even if they’ve never contributed.

    Second, your statement isn’t valid for SS retirement benefits either. Current SS taxes pay the benefits of current SS recipients. The taxes have never been saved to pay for future benefits. The more you pay in the more credits you receive for your future benefits, but nothing is actually saved on your behalf. If benefits are reduced, it’s not your saved money you’re being denied… it’s a promise being denied.









  • I know I’m a heretic but I’m a huge powershell fan. Once you work with an object-oriented shell you’ll wonder why you’ve dealt with parsing text for so long. Works great on Linux, MacOS and Windows, it’s open source, reads and writes csv, json and xml natively, native web and rest service support, built-in support for remote computing and parallel processing and extensive libraries for just about anything you can think of. It takes a little getting used to but it’s worth it.


  • Same. Suffered from chronic tendonitis in my shoulders. Cortisone shots helped tremendously but it kept coming back once I resumed lifting. 11 months off lifting and it immediately returned once I resumed and thought I was going to have to give up lifting altogether.

    Read some studies about Tumeric and thought… what the heck, easy and cheap enough to try it out. Absolutely unexpected results taking 1000mg daily. Tendonitis gone and hasn’t returned after years now of constant heavy lifting. New PRs and blood work show extremely low inflammation (c reactive protein).

    Later found our my friend, a house cleaner, thought she was going to have to retire early because of arthritis in her hands and she couldn’t afford to. She too tried it with low expectations but she swears by it like I do.

    Maybe it doesn’t work for everyone and maybe they’ll figure out why someday… I don’t know. It’s absolutely changed my life though. Simple and fairly inexpensive, and for me at least it works.




  • As a long-time bash, awk and sed scripter who knows he’ll probably get downvoted into oblivion for this my recommendation: learn PowerShell

    It’s open-source and completely cross-platform - I use it on Macs, Linux and Windows machines - and you don’t know what you’re missing until you try a fully objected-oriented scripting language and shell. No more parsing text, built-in support for scalars, arrays, hash maps/associative arrays, and more complex types like version numbers, IP addresses, synchronized dictionaries and basically anything available in .Net. Read and write csv, json and xml natively and simply. Built-in support for regular expressions throughout, web service calls, remote script execution, and parallel and asynchronous jobs and lots and lots of libraries for all kinds of things.

    Seriously, I know its popular and often-deserved to hate on Microsoft but PowerShell is a kick-ass, cross-platform, open-source, modern shell done right, even if it does have a dumb name imo. Once you start learning it you won’t want to go back to any other.


  • That’s all good info and explains some of the problems that could be resolved for us programmers if we were on UTC, but for the most part these are programmer problems and the computer handles it for everyone else. Additionally, it makes a few issues clear that won’t be resolved with a UTC switch.

    First, as mentioned countries all over the world decide for themselves what timezone they’re going to follow. Even if countries were to switch to UTC, we know they all won’t do it nor at the same time, so programmers will have to deal with that added complexity too having some on UTC, some off, some switching on this date or that… if the movement got serious we’d have another Y2K frenzy, but not one that ended on a specific date… it’d linger for years as various countries came on-board. Additionally, we’d still have to deal with all the historical calendar, timezone and DST switches he mentioned. Those wouldn’t go away… in fact we’d be introducing a bunch of new ones.

    Fact is timezones are understandable and work pretty good for normal people and their day-to-day tasks. Normal people aren’t going to want to understand UTC and then have to translate their normal day times to and from others around the world. No matter where you are I understand what you mean when you say your morning started at 6am or you eat at noon or you go to bed at 11pm or 23:00 for that matter. With UTC I don’t know what 23:00 means in Australia, Germany or India relative to your day… not only programmers but even normal people would have to know how to translate that to a time they can relate too, so you’d have to know timezones anyway. So while I’d know 23:00 was exactly the same point in time for each of us, I wouldn’t know how it relates to your day the way it relates to mine… is it morning, night, mid-day? It would actually make today’s programmers problems - which isn’t too common for most of us - a problem for everyone.



  • My understanding is DST did still save appreciable energy until we replaced incandescent lights with fluorescent and leds. Longer daylight in the evening when people are awake and less in the early morning when people are asleep means lights aren’t being used as much. The average light bulb used to consume 60 watts or more and also let off significant undesirable heat, so with a house full of lights DST really did cut back energy usage. Now though with led lights low consumption and virtually no heat, it’s not nearly as significant.