I've seen, again an again, deploying to Staging and integration testing in that Production-like environment together with the software of other teams, reveal problems that we did not saw in Dev, thus saving us from deploying into Production software that broke or, worse, corrupted the database.

This was certainly very important when I worked in environments such as Investment Banking where Production being down because of integration issues or, worse, sending bad data to other systems or the database having to be rolled back to the overnight backup, might mean the business losing millions of dollars.

It's not a foolproof mechanism but it certainly catches most integration problems, which are often most of the problems in complex environments where multiple teams are responsible for multiple highly integrated software systems,

Granted, little teams doing small software systems in simple environments were their software has little or no integration with other software, can probably get away with not having a Staging environment if their Dev environments has the same setup as Production (same OS, same database and so on) since they're going to have very little in the way of Integration problems with other people's software.

The Guardian is indeed more to the left than any American mainstream newspaper (though not some smaller publications). Still center-right (for example they overtly support the LibDems and New Labour whilst detesting traditional - leftwing, pro-Worker, pro-Union - Labour, and are big fans of privatisation), but relative to the mainstream US Press, they're indeed to the left of it. This is because the Overtoon Window is so far to the Right in the US and UK compared to the rest of the World.

I also entirely agree on your points about the "merit" of those billionaires.

The point I was trying to make above is twofold:

• Judge people on their actions, not their "style". Judging people on style is in my world the kind of thing teenagers and superficial intellectually lightweight adults would do. Sadly an excessive concern with keeping up appearances and presenting the right image (whilst empathy or ethics are second plan) is a very English upper class thing and The Guardian is very much a bubble of people who were born in that world and close to it, so they'll tend to resent those who don't share such "values". In my eyes, not maintaining appearances like wealthy English people would is the lesser of Musk's and Zuckerberg's sins, if at all sins - it's what they do that damns them not their style.
• They are being "two weights two measures" about it, or in other words, hypocrites. They do not apply the same standard to their very own ultra-rich as they do to foreign ultra rich (and, believe me, having lived in the UK I've observed that there is a very large fraction of extreme sociopaths amongst their own ultra rich, though they do indeed tend to present a posh gentleman façade all the while destroying the lives of tens of thousands and subverting what little real Democracy there is in Britain). Criticising foreigners is a far lower barrier than criticizing locals in the UK, because a large fraction is not most of the English commonly have the idea that they're superior to other people merely for being English.

So a center-right English newspaper which is basically the voice of the English upper and upper middle class criticizing rich foreigners for essentially not presenting themselves the same as rich English, is totally the wrong vehicle and angle of criticism of people who definitely deserve being criticized, but for their actions not for their lack of proper presentation whilst they do them.

Since I'm an European, lived as an immigrant in the UK for over a decade and was a regular reader of The Guardian for most of that time and even for some time afterwards, your ad hominem missed the target by a huge distance.

Your post says a lot more about you given that you've jumped to such a conclusion about me from what you read and chose an ad hominem as "counter-argument" than it says about me.

I've lived in Britain for over a decade, so maybe your own confident judgment of my lack of familiarity with the place is a little off, unless you think a decade there, speaking the language, following the local press, meeting people at all social levels in various contexts and even being a member of one of the political parties there, is not enough to "know Britain".

I just don't keep up with Most Rich List of the country, not even when I lived there much less now that I don't so don't really know the exact order at the top right now. Further the wealth of the Royals is subject to much controversy since how much it is depends on things like whether the Crown Estates are considered part of it or not, since the income on those goes to the Treasury but it then gives them part of that money (so they get almost £100 million per year).

Last I checked (when the Queen was still alive) the Royal Family where personally filthy rich AND had exclusive use of very expensive properties owned by the State AND even got a couple of millions every year as a stippend.

Compared with, for example the Dutch Royal Familiy (a country were I also lived for almost as long as Britain), it was like night and day.

Also if you need more examples of how Wealth in Britain is linked to the Monarchy, look up just how wealthy the Duke Of Westminster is (mainly due to how much of London he owns). You can also go down the list of hereditary peers in the House of Lords and check their wealth.

I mean, one needs to very purposefully and very strongly be closing their eyes to not see how a large part of the wealth in Britain is in one way or another in the hands of people linked to the Monarchy (again, a situation which is a veritable night and day contrast with The Netherlands and their Monarchy).

Well, I try to make it clear I'm not defending Musk or Zuckerberg.

I just generally think judging people on their style or lack or it is the simpletion young-teen take on people and that it's on their actions (which in the case of these two are pretty damning) that people should be judged on.

The Guardian, being a product of the Society it is in and the quite narrow slice of that Society it tends to represent (possibly because they're very much a bubble were people from a narrow range of origins in that Society almost invariably select their peers to come work with them), ends up doing the whole judging on image and words and putting it above judging on action often, probably because the upper classes in England are very much all about presentation first and foremost (the English Gentleman stereotype is all about presentation and not at all about taking others in consideration when chosing what one does or doesn't do) to a level that in most other Societies would be seen as fake and hypocrite.

They criticise posh politicians, what they seldom, if at all, criticise are their puppet-masters.

And don't get me started on the shameless subservience they show to the Royals, who last I checked were the richest family in the country.

If it's English old wealth The Guardian are pretty much silent about it.

Cool and Good aren't the same thing.

Some of the best people I've ever met were pretty low key and definitelly weren't overly concerned with presenting an appealing image to others.

What's percieved as coolness usually is just dressing the part and acting the part and in my experience "cool people" are often people who just take the whole maintaining a public persona thing to quite extreme levels, pretty much playing a role as if life was a Theatre play.

This being a weekly columnist in The Guardian, a newspaper whose journalists are almost all upper middle class people who went to very expensive private schools (curiously callled "Public Schools" in the UK because theoretically anybody can send their children to one, if they can afford it) as are the editors and the board - so they're almost all from roughly the top 11% of the UK population wealthwise - I expect that her real problem with these present day overlords is that they're neither posh nor English.

If they had the kind of "proper" manners, soft discourse, cultivated look of detachment and posh dress sense that are taught at the "right" schools, they would be alright.

You don't see this kind of critique there against posh English super-rich (especially not "old money"), even though they're just as sociopath as Elon and Zuckerberg.

The "Party" sits above the "Money" in their power structure, unlike most of the Capitalist countries nowadays were (after 4 decades of Neoliberalism) Money is a power above that of the State (and remember, the State is what the voters supposedly control in Democracy, so that means that Money is a higher power than Democracy, which is why many have pointed out that countries like the US are Oligarchies not Democracies).

And, for reference, in Fascism too (or, in fact, all other Autocratic systems) the State sits above Money, so I'm hardly saying that by itself that is enough to make that system good

The real hypocrisy of tankies, IMHO, is that the "Communist" nations they support in a tribalist way still have elites, they're just not chosen via Money but instead via ability of climbing up the Party ranks (so Cronyism and Sociopathy) whilst genuine Leftwing thinking is about Equality, the very opposite of there being people who get privileged treatment for any reason other than need (that reason being money as in Capitalist system or something else is quite irrelevant in Leftwing thinking)

If you just see them as tribalists wedded to an ideology shaped by a specific kind of elites who use a specific kind of slogans around Equality to support the continuation of the structure that maintains their elite privileges, (which is parallel to what's done in Capitalism which similarly has the whole bullshit about how wealth is the product of merit to justify discrimination based on wealth) you can understand why tankies would think what they do about China.

They're still mindless simpleton tribalists, but it's interesting to understand how using as foundation for ones own judgement an ideology controlled by somebody else without doing at the very least some analysing of it just as easily yields a tankie, a Fascist or a (Neo)liberal depending on which ideological bundle of slogans they've unquestioningly adopted.

Yeah, I have a similar situation with Borderlands 2 not running on my machine with Windows 7 but running just fine in Linux with Proton (which is Steam's branch of Wine).

It seems to me that Linux with Wine is actually better at backwards compatibility for Windows applications than Windows itself.

PS: Also a handful of old games I have from GoG that wouldn't run on Windows run just fine with Wine on Linux.

Indeed.

If every time the press quoted somebody they gave right alongside it a count of past occasions when they were caught lying, there would a lot less lying because people would be reading their quote, looking at the count of lies next to it and mentally going "bullshit!" for the big liars.

The excess lying going around is because the liars take advantage of people being physically unable of keeping track of the liar-levels and lies they've been caught on of all the "media personalities" (humans are only capable of managing at best around 200 relationships with other entities, so not just family and friends but also personalities one has an opinion about and even brands).

Part of the reason the Press won't do that is because so many of them are also liars (in the sense that they're actual vehicles for Propaganda rather than having Journalistic integrity) but also in many countries legislation such as Anti-slander Legislation means that if they point people's lies out they can get sued, which is costly even if they win, whilst if they say only good things they get no legal costs, so the whole field is tilted towards painting well know personalities wi the the means or influence to sue news media in a positive light - in other words, the system is designed to protect well connect or rich liars and conmen from being exposed in the most widely circulated media.

Yeah, I didn't read the article and just went from the headline, which is misleading.

For the rest, your comment is pretty much what I meant or things I agree with.

(My example of the French pensioner couple isn't about the kind of people who come over and live here, it's about the ones for whom Portugal/Spain are just investment playgrounds and who will never get hit by the societal side effects of a house price bubble in the countries they're "investing" in - one could say such people are like poluters who don't have to live with the consequences of their own polution)

I've been thinking about this for a while since my country, Portugal, has a very similar problem as Spain in terms of a gigantic housing bubble fed in large part by foreign "investment" money making offers at levels that the locals can't match (and, worst, a bubble eagerly pumped up by local politicians via things like making Golden Visas available for those who make a €500k "investment" in realestate) thus pulling the prices up far beyond what would naturally happen if the market was purelly local and even causing problems such as a massive brain drain (as young people, not being able to afford a home on local salaries, just leave the country in droves, especially those with Degrees).

As I see it, the solution should be based on Residence rather than Nationality - so the restrictions should be based on people being or not a registered Resident of Portugal (say, for 2 or more years), independently of their Nationality (and hence would also apply to Portuguese nationals not residing in Portugal).

This would not only be entirelly fair for people such as immigrants living in Portugal who are just as much a part of helping the country as the rest, but would also not fall foul of the EU rules that do not allow an EU country to treat citizens of other EU countries differently, because a Residence rule applies to everybody equally (including Portuguese nationals).

It would be a way to block just as much the Well-of middle class pensioner couple from France as the American venture fund from playing the realestate market in Portugal and pulling prices up beyond the reach of the locals because they can much more easilly outbid the locals.

It's funny that smelling the spices and the food as I cook it to see if they'll go well together is my main method of figuring out which spices to use.

Love it!

You even quietly corrected my error in using "gamma" for the letter G rather than "golf" :)

"LAX Approach, Canadair Charlie Gamma Bravo Eight Niner, Requesting long approach, sorry, thank you, over, eh"

I bet the canadian pilots ending every single radio communication with "thank you, over" must be tiresome for the American control tower operators...

Most of the Democrats were just as much into Surveillance Society and Creeping Authoritarianism post 9/11 and their subsequent use to serve the interest of the 1%, as the Republicans.

For example, the "patriot" fervor around Bush's lies that justified the Invasion of Iraq was just as big from the Democrat-linked Press as from the Republican-linked one and from the Snowden revelations we know that the NSA expanded their operations just as much under Democrat presidents as under Republicans.

Trying to pass the creeping authoritarianism and surveillance society as a partisan "it was the other tribe that did it" thing is being a bit of an usefull idiot, IMHO.

In all fairness, their 9/11 attack was massivelly successful in getting the US into a spiral of increasing authoritarianism and propaganda which in turn accelerated the pillaging of the wealth of must of its population that really took off in the time of Reagan: basically people so easilly accepted massive levels of surveillance and complete total subversion via things such as anti-Terrorism legislation of the balance of Rule Of Law, that the elites just started squeezing people more and faster with total confidence that people wouldn't rebel or be able to do anything about it.

I mean, Neoliberalism would always naturally end up in a new Gilded Age only worse, but the rush away from fundamental elements of Democracy (you know, not to be under surveillance by a Stasi-like structure or be treated as a terrorist because of being a member of an Environmentalist group) - which in turn resulted in situations as we see now with UHC and Luigi and the vey open "in service of the 0.01%" behaviour of the Ju$tice System and the Press - was anchored on using 9/11 as an excuse.

A family of software development processes for teams, which focuses on cycles of quickly building and delivering smaller blocks of program functionally (often just a single program feature - say: "search customers by last name" - or just part of a feature) to end-users so as to get quick feedback from those users of the software, which is then is use to determining what should be done for subsequent cycles.

When done properly it addresses the issues of older software development processes (such as the Waterfall process) in siuations where the users don't really have a detailed vision of what the software needs to do for them (which are the most usual situations unless the software just helps automates their present way of doing things) or there are frequent changes of what they need the software to do for them (i.e. they already use the software but frequently need new software features or tweaks to existing features).

In my own career of over two decades I only ever seen it done properly maybe once or twice. The problem is that "doing Agile" became fashionable at a certain point maybe a decade ago and pretty much a requirement to have in one's CV as a programmer, so you end up with lots of teams mindlessly "doing Agile" by doing some of the practices from Agile (say, the stand up meeting or paired programming) without including other practices and elements of the process (and adjusting them for their local situation) thus not achieving what that process is meant to achieve - essentially they don't really understand it as a software development process which is more adequate for some situations and less for others and what it actually is supposed to achieve and how.

(The most frequent things not being done are those around participation of the end-users of the software in evaluating what has been done in the last cycle, determining new features and feature tweaks for the next cycle and prioritizing them. The funny bit is that these are core parts of making Agile deliver its greatest benefits as a software development process, so basically most teams aren't doing the part of Agile that actually makes it deliver superior results to most other methods).

It doesn't help that to really and fully get the purpose of Agile and how it achieves it, you generally need to be at the level of experience at which you're looking at the actual process of making software (the kind of people with at least a decade of experience and titles like Software Architect) which, given how ageist a lot of the Industry is are pretty rare, so Agile is usually being done by "kids" in a monkey-sees-monkey-does way without understanding it as a process, hence why it, unsurprising, has by now gotten a bit of a bad name (as with everything, the right tool should be used for the right job).