Hilarious article:
Chip, for example, does what he’s told. He does it correctly. He does it promptly. He does it with good cheer. And I hate him. The number of marriages decimated by those measuring themselves up to this unattainable standard is probably incalculable at this point.
Full disclosure: the last time my wife asked me to screw something up in the kitchen I popped a whole in a hot water pipe.
PermalinkShowing yet again how inept he is, Tim Kaine said what now?
Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine said Monday he was saddened by the “senseless act of gun violence” at Ohio State University, even though the attacker used a butcher knife and a car.
Mr. Kaine, who ran on the 2016 Democratic ticket with presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, was accused of pushing a gun-control agenda after his Twitter post blaming firearms for the siege.
After years of every terrorist act being used to remind us that we need more gun control, Tim Kaine followed the script earlier this week. However, it wasn’t a gun that the attacker used, but a knife and a car. Let’s require people register their knives and highly restrict access to cars and see if that helps.
PermalinkI tried to find a couple of quotes from this article, but I think I need this entire section to sum up where I am as a web developer.
Many web developers have “moved on” from a progressive-enhancement-focused practice that designs web content and web experiences in such a way as to ensure that they are available to all people, regardless of personal ability or the browser or device they use.
Indeed, with more and more new developers entering the profession each day, it’s safe to say that many have never even heard of progressive enhancement and accessible, standards-based design.
For many developers—newcomer and seasoned pro alike—web development is about chasing the edge. The exciting stuff is mainly being done on frameworks that not only use, but in many cases actually require JavaScript.
The trouble with this top-down approach is threefold:
Firstly, many new developers will build powerful portfolios by mastering tools whose functioning and implications they may not fully understand. Their work may be inaccessible to people and devices, and they may not know it—or know how to go under the hood and fix it. (It may also be slow and bloated, and they may not know how to fix that either.) The impressive portfolios of these builders of inaccessible sites will get them hired and promoted to positions of power, where they train other developers to use frameworks to build impressive but inaccessible sites.
Only developers who understand and value accessibility, and can write their own code, will bother learning the equally exciting, equally edgy, equally new standards (like CSS Grid Layout) that enable us to design lean, accessible, forward-compatible, future-friendly web experiences. Fewer and fewer will do so.
Secondly, since companies rely on their senior developers to tell them what kinds of digital experiences to create, as the web-standards-based approach fades from memory, and frameworks eat the universe, more and more organizations will be advised by framework- and Javascript-oriented developers.
Thirdly, and as a result of the first and second points, more and more web experiences every day are being created that are simply not accessible to people with disabilities (or with the “wrong” phone or browser or device), and this will increase as standards-focused professionals retire or are phased out of the work force, superseded by frameworkistas.
I’ve personally been building websites since 2001. The web standards movement was just beginning. In 2004, I was part of a state web development competition through my high school and they required our sites be built in XHTML and CSS. I felt the push back against ugly, inaccessible plugins— like Flash— and bad JavaScript practices from the start. Fast forward seven years and I led the charge for responsive web design at a Chicago-based agency, declaring that we shouldn’t upcharge our clients for something that is absolutely necessary. That was before we reached 50/50 desktop-to-mobile traffic.
Progressively enhanced, responsive, and accessible websites are in my blood. And that’s why it pains me so much to be rehashing conversations from the start of the standards movement as to why we shouldn’t require JavaScript, or assume that our user’s device supports fill-in-the-blank, or even assume our users can see like we do. And I’m having to rehash these conversations regularly with the Angular and React JavaScript frameworkistas.
We fought this fight for a reason and it matters today more than ever. Tomorrow is Blue Beanie Day. I’m old enough to remember why. I will be wearing one to stand for accessibility and progressive enhancement. I hope you do too.
PermalinkI have seen far too many people “mourning” the death of Castro over the last few days. I’m sure that some mourned the death of Hitler too. But good Lord, people, wake up and look at the horrors of Castro’s Cuba.
PermalinkSoledad O’Brien took a shellacking for defending the notion that Fidel Castro’s brutal regime in Cuba was “complicated” on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Monday.
Cuban-American author Humberto Fontova took her to task, saying there’s nothing complicated about the evil he perpetrated on the country.
“Castro regime jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s regime during the great terror. They drove 20 times as many people to die trying to escape from Cuba as died trying to escape East Germany, and we’re hearing about complicated emotions? Give me a break.”
No, I’m not crying! You are. Shut up.
PermalinkJust remember, when your relatives are trying to make you feel guilty for being born white this holiday, most of those arguments are myths and lies.
PermalinkAs someone that follows hundreds of California progressives on Twitter and follows progressive news sources, I have been seeing for the last two weeks— since President-Elect Trump won the election— a tremendous amount of coverage for so-called hate crimes across our nation. The latest being that of Jordan Jackson in Louisiana, a young boy beat up by bullies telling him to go back to the cotton fields. These stories have been very disgusting and none of the conservative, Christian, or Trump-supporting friends of mine like seeing this and are very appalled at it. Every one of them would give their lives to protect a kid like Jordan. I was the guy in school that fought the bullies for kids like Jordan.
But here’s the thing. The Left is swinging this to be a problem on the Right:
This is real. Don’t look away. And next time you see that red election map, I want you to picture a gaping, bloody wound. America in 2016, bleeding out.
The Creole (emphasis added)
When, in fact, both sides are guilty of rioting, assaulting their opponents, and worse right now.
Four people have been charged after a man was punched and kicked as a crowd yelled, “Don’t vote Trump," a day after the presidential election, police said.
[…]
Wilcox said he was about to turn left from Kedzie Avenue to Roosevelt Road around 1 p.m. Nov. 9 when a black sedan pulled up and scraped the right side of his Pontiac Bonneville.
"I stopped and parked. And I asked if they had insurance, and the next thing that I knew they were beating the s--- out of me," Wilcox said.
Police said the four were identified as the people responsible for striking a man during a traffic altercation.
The man was then dragged as he held on to the window of the vehicle. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital and was treated and released, police said.
Those that were involved, which videoed the incident in pride, were arrested and are going to trial. This is justice. And just like with these young men that assaulted a man in Chicago, I want justice for the young boy Jordan in Louisiana. That’s how this works, justice. I don’t know a single person that wouldn’t want this young boy’s attackers to face punishment for their crime.
So, let’s cool down and stop the violence, no matter which side it comes from. We all agree that this is ugly and wrong. We are united on that front.
PermalinkGeorge Takai is fueling the flames of fear with divisive, partisan bullshit:
So when I hear Donald Trump’s transition advisors talk about building a registry of Muslims and his surrogates using the internment of Japanese-Americans as their model, I am outraged — because I remember the tears streaming down my mother’s face as we were torn away from our home. And I am resolved to raise my voice and say, loudly and clearly, that this is not who we are.
George is a man that had spent years of his youth in the absolutely deplorable internment camps of America. I hear his concern. Fortunately, it is completely unfounded in fact.
The statement in question was not made by a member of Trump’s transition team, but a spokesman for a pro-Trump super PAC. And he did not say that the internment of Japanese-Americans was a “model” — in fact, as even the New York Times reported, he said that he would not want to do it again.
Furthermore, there is no proposal to create a “registry” of Muslims, but to reinstate a post-9/11 policy from the George W. Bush and early Barack Obama administrations of tracking immigrants and visitors from certain foreign countries, including Muslim-majority countries, where terrorism is a concern.
The job of a government is to protect it’s citizens. Keeping track of immigrants and visitors from countries that have connections to terrorism is necessary to do so. But president-elect Donald Trump isn’t calling for a registry, internment, or deportation of Muslim American citizens.
PermalinkDevelopment shops are relying on the communications team at a finance agency to know that they should request their code be optimized for performance or accessibility. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that shouldn’t be the client’s job. We’re the experts; we understand web strategy and best practices—and it’s time we act like it. It’s time for us to stop talking about each of these principles in a blue-sky way and start implementing them as our core practices. Every time. By default.
I’ve been in the web industry for 15 years, grew into my own during the web standards revolution, and have a huge heart for a11y issues. Seeing our industry revert to, in many ways, the methods and practices from before the standards movement is disheartening at best. We need, now and always, to insist on core development principles.
PermalinkRacism, real racism, is horribly ugly.
We should hire three or four [African-American] ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the [African-American] is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the [African-American] population. And the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.
And:
Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant … We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.
But before you think those quotes came from a prominent, right-wing Trump supporter: those are from Margaret Sanger. The founder of Planned Parenthood. A woman that Hillary Clinton admired:
I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision. I am really in awe of her, there are a lot of lessons we can learn from her life.
See, racism, no matter which side it comes from is evil. No matter if it is businesses offering bonuses to not hire white men or a woman starting a business with the intent to eliminate the stocks (of blacks) or 200 white supremacists meeting in Washington. We need to remember to judge a man by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
Permalink