I always claimed in job interviews to be good at debugging, but there are no certifications for debugging and there's really no way for an interviewer to verify such a claim. So even though it is an incredibly important skill, companies just do not look for it. There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there's no need for debugging.

I grew up in a town in Ohio where the famous abolitionist John Brown (hanged in 1859 after his abortive raid on Harpers Ferry) had built a tannery in ~~the 1840s~~ 1835 that was still standing in 1976. To celebrate the bicentennial, the city council had it condemned and torn down, to make way for ... a parking lot. Hilariously, the council claimed it was a danger because it was about to collapse, but it took three days to demolish and they had to bring in special heavy equipment to do it after their wrecking balls failed to make a dent in it. This thing had been built with massive 40-foot long oak beams with 12"x8" cross-sections that showed no signs of rot (my dad salvaged a piece of one of these beams and set it up as a bench in our garden, and it was still in good shape in 2012 despite being outside the whole time), so it could have easily been preserved as a historical site. In fact it had been declared an official historical site by the state just days before its destruction but the town council simply ignored that.

Pic

And the people who say "loud pipes save lives" often don't wear helmets, which statistically are safer. Not all motorcyclists are full of shit, but a hell of a lot of them are.

I wish police would simply enforce noise ordinances

I live next to a catholic church/school and sometimes on the weekend or near sunset a local kid rides his motocross bike all around the church yard. Annoying as fuck and it chews up the yard and everything. I've called the cops three or four times but they've never bothered to send an officer out. I called the church and all they did was install a bunch of super-bright LED lights which are on 24 hours a day. Kid still rides his bike there and now I can't sit outside at night anymore because of the fucking lights.

I was a teen in the '80s and I never heard the origin of "Joy Division", just knew the band. DJs on the radio (or on MTV) back then never discussed bands' names or what they meant, so it wasn't easy to know about that stuff. I also never knew what "Dead Kennedys" meant although that's pretty obvious if you just think about it. Hell, I never knew Freddie Mercury was gay despite the band name "Queen".

I also thought Boy George was a woman, but everybody did.

I don't really understand how cats even can get this large. I've kept a number of cats and always just fed them dry food in big bowls or auto-feed dispensers where they could eat as much as they wanted whenever they wanted it, and they always stayed a normal weight.

One thing I always liked about the various flavors of BASIC was that nobody ever pushed that shit as a religion.

I used to work for a software development company in Louisiana. At company meetings the CEO would always close with a prayer to Jesus, which was certainly the only time in my programming career I had to deal with that. Maybe 80% of the company were Christians but the rest of us were Jews, Muslims, Hindus and atheists (just me) and it was always weird to be looking around at each other while everybody else had their heads bowed. Unfortunately, this company was pretty much the only game in town for programmers so nobody was willing to call the CEO out for this shit.

They don't think that. They don't have morals.

I was talking to a guy with an $8K bike the other day and he was proud of the fact that he could calibrate his shifters with his phone.

Romans were food snobs too, though. One common insult was "chickpea-eater" because roasted chickpeas were poor people food. Thing is, roasted chickpeas are fucking delicious - I really wish fresh chickpeas in the pod were easier to find (in the US).

Not since the 17th century.