You don't need a water bottle at the gym: they have a fountain. And if you're too exhausted after a gym workout to drive home then you're really doing something wrong.
Right a single point test is meaningless unless it's way out of the reference range. Values can fluctuate based on time of day, recent physical activity, stress level, and other factors.
There is no one optimal planning horizon. If you have a small team and rapid requirements flux then you might not be able to plan more than a day ahead. But if you're trying to coordinate a huge program with a geographically distributed team, multiple suppliers, hardware components, regulatory compliance issues, etc. then you might have to plan even more than a quarter ahead to avoid complete paralysis.
In the USSR, engineers were effectively paid less than laborers in meat packing plants. The latter could steal food to sell on the black market. Engineers couldn't walk out with much more than pencils.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? MRI machines are expensive, but very useful for certain conditions and with zero radiation exposure. We see a lot of affluent Canadians coming to the USA as medical tourists for imaging procedures and elective surgery due to long queues at home.
It's an indicator. By many accounts, the US drastically overuses imaging. For instance: it's not unlikely that a patient presenting with persistent back pain will be imaged quickly in the US. That imaging service is itself expensive and a cost driver, but far worse are the procedures the imaging results drive, most of which wouldn't be prescribed over the border in Canada. We do not on the whole get better results for back pain here!
Another example, though with a less comical indicator than the MRI thing: at least up until recently, hernia repairs in Europe were all inpatient procedures. The US innovated on laparoscopic hernia repair that's done outpatient. This is by itself a very good thing! But the knock-on result is that the US now delivers way more hernia repairs; we do medically unnecessary hernia repair because we made it so easy to do.
None of these are my insights; they're just things you learn about if you read and listen to podcasts about the problems with our health care economics.
Genocide is a terrible thing. But that doesn't mean the USA has any obligation to directly intervene in foreign conflicts. Most of these aren't worth sacrificing the life of a single US soldier, and even when we do intervene it often makes the situation worse. Unless critical US national interests are involved, our actions should usually be limited to sanctions and diplomacy.
(I am commenting on the general US policy and not making a statement about the current situation in Gaza.)
Most of the time US sells the weapons used to do the genocide. This time they're just giving them away, and that is what a lot of Americans have a problem with.
It really depends on the industry. In a narrow vertical market with only a limited number of large customers, the vendors pretty much have to roll over and do whatever the customers demand regardless of product vision. Give the customers what they want or else they'll find a more pliable competitor. The power dynamics are different in more horizontal markets.
If the customer has people on the other end that knows about their processes and cares, you can push back.
We landed our largest customer by gar a few years back, and we pushed back hard. However we had good arguments why, and explained why changing their workflow would be much better or offered some other approach to solve the problem that didn't involve a new bespoke and brittle feature.
On the other side were a team that knew the processes well and understood our arguments.
After they went live, the management thanked us for helping them improve their organization.
On the other hand there have been cases where decisions is made by leaders so high up they have no idea what's going on by those that need the tool, and aren't interested in spending time or effort on it. Not much you can do then.
edit: Though sometimes they learn. We've had a few customers who we said no to since their wishes were not really feasible, and who selected others and failed, and failed again, before finally ending up with us, on our terms.
Right so there's currently a mismatch between higher education and industry. Ideally Computer Science is a branch of Applied Mathematics primarily concerned with the theory of computation. But due to demand from students who want to get industry jobs instead of doing research, many schools have "polluted" their CS majors with more practical programming courses. This confuses the issue and doesn't do anyone any good.
A better approach would be to have separate majors targeted towards students who want industry careers. I would suggest two separate tracks: Software Engineering which would take a disciplined, analytical approach and Software Development which would treat software construction for like a fine art, akin to sculpture or music performance.
To me, Computer Science is about the theory of computation, and the analysis of algorithms, and to some degree about the design of computer programming languages.
Software Engineering is about the efficient[1] production[2] of larger-scale programs that adequately meet the need[3].
Software Development as a separate topic... maybe, for some things like games and UI. I don't really see it as a separate field, though.
[1] "Efficient" is actually a lie, but the sentence was already long enough as it is. I really should have said "somewhat less inefficient". You can never make it efficient. (The fundamental problem is that brain-to-brain transfer of technical information is slow, inefficient, and lossy.) But if you don't control the inefficiency, it's going to destroy your project.
[2] Production and maintenance. Larger-scale software also tends to be longer lasting; if you don't build something maintainable, you fail.
[3] This does not mean bug-free! But it means that the amount and severity of the bugs do not destroy the usefulness of the software.
Low cognitive load is not a good design goal for most software. I mean it's fine for something simple that sees only occasional, casual use. But for applications that enterprise employees use for hours every day the design must be optimized to maximize productivity over a wide range of use cases. The decision makers don't care about cognitive load.
The type of education in fundamentals that would allow users to flexibly switch between office productivity applications requires a fairly high level of abstract thinking. Not everyone has that cognitive ability. Some struggle with anything more complex than executing a set procedure and would require years of remedial education to break out of that mindset.
You're really missing the point. Most clerical jobs don't require that specific way of thinking. Major changes to office productivity applications are quite rare and it would be silly to hire for those jobs based on abstract cognitive abilities. Ability to reliably follow instructions is usually sufficient.
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