Coming to terms on politics

There are two terms which get bandied about in modern politics. They are "conservative" and "liberal" and they're often used to describe a person's political leanings. However, I think we brutalize them.

According to dictionary.com, the definition of the word conservative is "disposed to preserve existing conditions... and to limit change", while the definitions for liberal include both "favorable to progress or reform" and "open-minded", "tolerant", and "not bound by traditional or conventional ideas". The point of note here is that the definition of "conservative" does not include "closed-minded", however, in modern thought, this definition seems to be implied. Conversely, the word "liberal" does not mean "revolutionary" though more than a few might disagree with me.

You will note here that neither term comes with any sort of financial connotation. Liberal does not mean "out to discharge the contents of the public coffers for 'the greater good' at the drop of a hat" nor does conservative mean "willing to part with the blood and lives of 'the underprivileged' rather than spend a dollar to help them". So, why do we use those terms to describe a person's financial tendencies?

I have a feeling that there isn't a lot of competition in this market space...

Because my Dad would have appreciate things like this too… Matthews International

I like the pitch line: Standard of Excellence in Cremation Solutions. However, the informational videos, as well as the name of the equipment -- the SMOKE BUSTER -- are just too damn funny.

Tell us, why is that a good thing?

Once upon a time, programmers had a mantra which went "if it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand". Said mantra was used to justify the sloppy programming practice of not commenting your code. This "enlightened" behavior made it difficult when even the original author went back to update their own code a few months later (and I won't even discuss the chaos and confusion that ensued whenever some poor soul, who did not write the code, ever had to go through it to make updates). The ultimate goal of the "zero documentation" approach was to ensure job security. If you were the only one who could understand some arcane application that was mission-critical, then you were indispensable.

Today, we ran into Java's Spring Framework.

Now, for those who don't know, a framework is a structured approach to abstracting general elements of an application in development and they can range from a set of guiding principles (such as MVC) to a full set of programming tools (like Hibernate or Spring). However, after looking through the code, we decided that Spring seems to be nothing more than a product of the old programmer's job security approach coupled with years of evolution.

Of course, we're engineers so, in an effort to make sure that we weren't missing anything -- especially the obvious -- we were "off to the cloud" to see what could be learned about this new adversary.

The first stop wound up being our last. Right there, about halfway through the first page, we saw a gem that not only summed it all up for us, but let us know that our initial thoughts were correct.

"The Spring Framework is the only framework available in Java which offers managed data access environments outside of an application server or container." - Wikipedia page on the Java Spring Framework

That's like saying Microsoft Windows is the only operating system that provides the blue screen of death when the kernel encounters a fatal error.