the judiciary system not understanding statistics (5 percent of all nurses have a statistically-significant high death rate)

There was a study years ago in Norway where they wanted to see if there were correlations between any disease and living underneath high-voltage power lines. They found that 5% of all diseases were so correlated … when using an alpha of .05.

Where I live (Philly suburb) there was an incident where a guy driving a 12,000 gallon gasoline truck pumped out 4000 gallons at his first gas station stop and then decided he just wanted to go home rather than making the rest of his deliveries. So he ran the hose to the back of the station and dumped the other 8000 gallons onto the ground. This happened to be right above a creek and about 200 feet from an elementary school.

It just doesn’t make any sense how anybody could be this stupid. He got 20 years in prison for it or something like that. He certainly deserved it, but meanwhile executives who manage to create far worse disasters never see a day in jail.

TBF this was all more than 5 years ago when the job interviewing process at most IT companies involved just putting a moistened finger underneath the candidate’s nostrils. Apparently the programmer job market is pretty horrific these days, although I wouldn’t know since I drive a school bus now.

How about an example from the last 40 years?

MS is waaaay too big to fail.

I was thinking Microsoft employs clever people

As a programmer, I’ve had numerous colleagues who have ended up as software engineers at MS. They were mostly either unbelievably lazy or extremely incompetent. The rest who were both ended up there as managers.

“Comedic” is a better title for this than “Tragic”.

I was a mobile developer and worked on Windows Mobile and Windows CE (un-ironically called “WinCE” by Microsoft themselves) applications some twenty years ago. It was basically just Windows with a lot of unnecessary cruft stripped out. The basic UI was indeed absurd, with the standard Start menu and utterly dependent on the fucking stylus to work. But for applications it wasn’t actually necessary to even use that shit. You could actually write applications that ran in kiosk mode and had nice big buttons so that users never had to deal with the Start menu or use the stylus at all. And in that mode it was actually extremely powerful – you could do anything that you needed to do programmatically. I never once encountered a situation where something that I needed to do programmatically wasn’t still available in the stripped-down WinCE API.

I have no idea how an engineer working in a software company could trust that thing

Because many of us are fucking morons. I had one colleague who was writing the control software for a baseball-throwing machine. Despite being way past the deadline and way over budget, the client asked him to create a special version of the software so the machine could be used with Little League teams. He decided to do his first test of this version on a field with actual Little Leaguers on it, which resulted in a 125 mph knuckleball (no spin at all so incredibly erratic in flight) a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head. Which resulted in the only time in my programming career that I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight between two people (my boss and the client).

When I read that shit as a kid, I thought Asimov’s laws of robotics were like natural laws, so that it was just naturally impossible for robots to behave otherwise. That never made any sense to me so I thought Asimov was just full of shit.

Limbed Lugubrious Motherfucker

I want my AI to sound like a Speak & Spell.

Excuse me? Comcast belongs on that list.

Stalin’s regime was really reactionary

Even this is a charitable description. The best term for Stalin’s regime is “despotism”.

Same shit, different assholes.

Orangutans are pretty chill.

My local Target has a serious Kmart-at-the-bitter-end vibe going. Lots of empty shelves, stuff sloppily displayed, sullen and unhelpful workers etc. etc. Everything in the grocery section is way more expensive than it is at local grocery stores. I just don’t get why anybody shops there. I only go there because I’m a school bus driver and a good chunk of the tips I get from parents are in the form of Target gift cards. But all I can find worth buying is cheap bicycle gear.

Ergonomic AND energy efficient

FWIW I don’t think it’s really all that energy-efficient. Air, being much less dense than solids, contains comparatively much less heat energy. The “cold” of a refrigerator is mostly stored in the things inside it, not in the air inside it, so letting all the cold air out to be replaced by warmer air does not have a huge effect on the overall temperature of the fridge. I think you’re right that having a door which interferes with the insulating envelope is going to be worse than just opening the main door once in a while.

some products are already as good as they can get and no longer need innovation

I just saw a poster for a sort-of cool fridge innovation: It has a door-in-the-door that you can open to get out commonly used things without having to open the main door and let all the cold air out. It’s called a “Conservadoor” refrigerator.

The kicker is that I saw this on Antiques Roadshow and it’s from the 1950s.

Even cheaper to tape up a piece of paper that says “GO BUY SOME USELESS BULLSHIT”.