Also known as snooggums on midwest.social and kbin.social.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • When I say something is “wrong” I mean something that is not like the average individual of that species…

    Being different is not the same as being wrong. That view is the foundation of racism and bigotry.

    I’ve never said anything negative about gays or trans people.

    You called them ‘wrong’ in this thread, so yes you have. That is an extremely negative thing to say.

    I guess I should call it a mental differentiator instead of a mental disorder.

    Or you could just stop trying to come up with a label that tries to separate them from the general populace. Maybe you should stop talking about them at all and spend time observing how they see themselves and how society treats them negatively by focusing on how they are different as if being different was inherently a bad thing.


  • Being gay to the point of not having any interest in the other sex is clearly a mental disorder too…

    So there’s this thing called nature where tons of species have members that have same sex partners because it is actually a completely normal thing. Humans happen to be one of them. Not every single member of a species puts reproduction as the highest possible priority as long as enough do to maintain the population.

    In fact, the vast majority of things we consider to be mental disorders are only categorized that way because they cause disruption to people’s lives without an outside influence, and being gay is only disruptive due to outside pressures by bigots and small minded people who consider it ‘wrong’.






  • You are thinking of unhealthy. Between healthy and unhealthy are neutral things that our body simply processes and expels as long as we don’t get oo much. The whole point of discouraging any consumption of alcoholic drinks is to counter the myths that alcohol provides health benefits.

    A small amount of alcohol on occasion doesn’t cause harm to the body. It is processed and expelled. That is why fermented foods, which contain trace amounts of alcohol, are not unhealthy.

    Most spices aren’t healthy in the way that the majority of people use the word for food. They don’t provide nutrients our bodies need. Pepper doesn’t improve our health, but it doesn’t harm us either in reasonable quantities. It is something our body simply expels, just like small amounts of many other things that our body processes and expels.

    The point is that the level of alcohol that is not harmful is really low compared to what people think.






  • So not closed off as in non-federated, just invite only? So a barrier like the ones that have applications, but based on something other than fiktering who joins the community?

    Not only is that counter to the entire point of federation, but invite only approaches only works for closed systems. Nobody is going to wait for an invite when they can just join any server.

    Using invites as in outreach to spread awareness without being a silly restriction, sure. Maybe aim at getting people’s interest by promoting some server. But exclusive invites makes zero sense. At best it might work on people who are already here who want a very specific server in their name, not attract new users.



  • This makes more sense. But even then they would surely transfer data from the old system over.

    All you gotta do is snap your fingers!

    Moving data from system to system is a massive undertaking. It probably needs to be restructured, and decisions made during the process will be found to be imperfect and adjustments will need to be made along the way.

    Then you have to change all the connections to other systems and recreate the existing reports and by the way the changed structure impacts all of that and you need to revisit why you have all this stuff snd why don’t we just leave it alone after all.

    There is a reason that legacy systems stick around. I’m sure they have legacy mainframes with financial data. At my state office we have a financial mainframe we have been wanting to get rid of for over a decade and while we have peeled off what processes we can there is still a ton left to do. Nothing about it is easy compared to creating something new from scratch, in fact transitioning to a new system to replace an old system is probably ten times as much work. Not to mention you still have to use and maintain the old system the entire time!


  • His post (if we believe it) demonstrates he must have access to both pieces of information.

    At best he is referring to an older mainframe he is aware of not being sql while being completely oblivious of all the government systems that are in sql.

    Which isn’t giving him any credit, because in that case he is atill running his mouth based on being ignorant about other government systems.

    I submitted data to a government database yesterday that I know for a fact is sql because we have had an ongoing years long relationship that involves improving that system and aligning our state level sql database. The government absolutely uses sql frequently, even if they still have older mainframes with some other database architecture.


  • That all makes sense, except if someone’s SSN changes (which happens under certain circumstances), doesn’t that invalidate their primary key or require a much more complicated operation of issuing a new record and relinking all the existing relationships?

    Yes, in the case of duplicate SSN assignments for two people (rare) l you would need to change their records to align with the new SSN while not changing the records that go the the person who keeps the SSN. We do it with state identifiers and it is a gigantic pain in the ass.

    If two numbers are assigned to the same person merging them to one of the two is far easier.


  • The thing is, there are a large number of different reasons to store an SSN as a long int or a string depending on how it is used with the rest of the data. For a phone number, there can be a valid reason to store the area code separately to speed up data queries that narrow down by area code instead of all in one field and peeling it apart. There are also reasons to have additional, seemingly redundant, columns that can be used for optimizing searches or simplifying how queries are written.

    A common one is that using 1 and 0 instead of Y an N is often faster for massively large dataset optimization, but isn’t as easily human readable.

    There are complex reasons for choosing different approaches in a database, and the most important thing is generally consistency within the database. His point is meaningless without context beyond consistency, and the different government systems will have had different priorities, not to mention trying to update all of the databases to make them consistent is a MASSIVE fucking undertaking. And the systems can stay the way they are as long as they have APIs or other methods of transferring data that ARE normalized and consistent.

    I have personally been working with reporting data to federal systems for 15 years as a semi knowledgeable technical person. This is what I do for a job. What he is saying is pointlessly small trivia used to justify tearing things down instead of improving them.