Eric Entzel

[Yishan @yishan]

Software needs to be maintained less than hardware. It is possible to have software that operates for decades without maintenance. This is not true for hardware.

The reason software appears to require "maintenance" is because software is usually acting on some other system (usually via hardware, with users). The attributes of the hardware and requirements of the user both drift over time, requiring the software to be changed. The change is not usually major enough to be an "upgrade," so it's called maintenance.

There are some instances (generally rare but they exist) where a software system functions for decades because the user requirements and hardware genuinely don't change.

[Mason @webdevMason]

As a woman my very reasonable position is that I'm completely fine with any paternity test I never find out about

Don't insult me by making your very poor read of the situation my problem

[Eric Entzel @eentzel]

@wrowclif I kind of like them!

[Eric Entzel @eentzel]

I'm confused. Do your grocery stores just not have a deli counter?

https://t.co/LcQy5igIj8

[Wow, He’s Tsonga! @_aboihasnoname]

Can someone please fix bacon packaging. There has to be a better way.

[Bella Rudd @BellaRudd1]

the state of the market will render
depressingly pricy provender;
discovering that
scotch costs have stayed flat:
be frugal! each lunch is a bender!

[Vicente Fox Mulder @WASPmexicano]

"Oh bro, I would die for my wife. I would use violent force to defend my family & my home. No you don't get it bro, I would kill for my wife & kids."

Cool man, anyways, how about you help out with the dishes? Start with that.

[My Friend Don @TheDonStein]

It is an utter shame that Christians have fallen under the sway of these NAR charlatans and heretics. These are the real “shepherds for sale.”

[Luca Dellanna @DellAnnaLuca]

The reactions of many researchers on finally being held responsible for having read the very paper they submitted are... something.

[Rob Doar @robdoar]

Bipartisan public-safety policy does not become stronger when it is stapled to divisive gun-control proposals. It becomes expendable.

6 of these 9 proposals could pass the #mnleg tomorrow. But the goal isn't to have them pass.

The goal is to make Republicans vote against gun control, then pretend they voted against safety.

Campaign mailers trump public safety... again.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

There's a clay tablet with the founding charter of a 12-partner company on it. Twelve merchants pooled 33 pounds of gold to start the firm. The contract has the partner names, the starting capital, the profit split, and the penalty for cashing out early.

The tablet is nearly 4,000 years old. It was found at a site called Kanesh, in central Turkey. Archaeologists have dug up 23,500 of these clay records there, most of them business documents: receipts, loan contracts, shipping orders, lawsuits. The houses they were stored in eventually burned. The fire baked the clay solid and preserved every record.

The merchants came from Assur, in modern-day Iraq. They loaded donkeys with tin and cloth and walked them 1,000 kilometers across mountain passes to Kanesh, roughly the distance from New York to Atlanta. Each donkey carried about 180 pounds and the trip took two to three months. They came home with silver and gold.

The company ran for twelve years under a merchant named Amur Ishtar. A third of the profits went back to the investors. Pull your share out early and the firm gave you four kilos of silver per kilo of gold, half the normal rate. Locked-up money was meant to stay locked up.

That one company was just a tiny piece. The tablets show a complete economy with partners suing each other in commercial court, husbands writing home about prices, and wives writing back complaining the husband had been gone too long. A woman named Ahatum quietly lent silver to four different men over nine years. People bought up other people's loan documents and used them as collateral for new loans, the same thing Wall Street does today with mortgage-backed securities. One merchant got caught smuggling tin in his underwear to dodge a 10% import tax.

In 2019, four economists from Harvard, Sciences Po, Chicago, and Virginia ran the tablet numbers through a gravity model, the math economists use today to predict how much two countries will trade based on size and distance. The Bronze Age numbers matched modern trade numbers almost exactly. Trade fell off with distance at nearly the same rate it does between countries today. The paper ran in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

There was no economic theory yet. The idea didn't even have a name. The word "capitalism" wouldn't be coined for another 3,800 years, and Adam Smith was 3,700 years away from writing a sentence about markets. Just a guy named Pushu-ken writing a clay tablet to his business partner about a shipment of cloth, and a woman in Assur recording who owed her how much silver. Capitalism was already there, doing its full job, almost four thousand years before anyone wrote down a theory of how it worked.

[Eric Entzel @eentzel]

@brim006 Sloped the top of that quikrete I hope!

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

@david030x @StatisticUrban We should give young people lots of exposure to lots of different jobs so they can make the tradeoffs between wages, flexibility, and enjoyability that are right for them. But the end goal can't be 'every job is 50% male and 50% female'.

[Swizec Teller @Swizec]

You thought tech debt is hard?
Wait till you experience product debt!

Last year we shipped these 5 quick easy features, now a different 10% of users deeply relies on each one of them and will leave if you remove their fav feature.

Please add a 6th incompatible feature. This 8-figure client demands it. Good luck!

[Eric Entzel @eentzel]

@bwesterb "Shor of Damocles" - the man's a national treasure!

[Paul Schofield @pschofie79]

Anyway, I think they’ll probably try to screw kids over on a technicality with this Book It thing, too. If your kid is considering reading, I’d recommend against it.

[Eric Entzel @eentzel]

@devth Yes! Would love to find a place where this still happens. 'twas a more civilized age.

[Neil Shenvi @NeilShenvi]

And isn't it possible that "evangelical elites" don't exist not because evangelicals lack ambition but because they have a strong amibition for callings that the world regards as foolish: translating the Bible, fostering kids, being a rural pastor, etc?

Worth considering. 6/6

[Adrian Hilton @Adrian_Hilton]

Thank God for the unelected zealots who defend the weak and vulnerable.

[url of sammich @dotsammich]

🎵Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be pinkos
Don’t let ‘em rob Whole Foods and electrocute pups
Let ‘em be liberals and centrists and such🎵