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But more broadly, the arbitrariness of the workweek—and the American obsession with how many hours it contains—underlines an important truth about the nature of work: Because an individual’s contribution to a company can be hard to measure, everyone seizes upon time spent working (an easily measurable data point) as a proxy for how much work is actually getting done. In other words, workers’ output can require so much effort to assess thoughtfully that companies focus unduly on bulking up the input—whether that makes workers happy or not.

Source: Why Can’t There Be a Four-Day Workweek? – The Atlantic

In April of 2010, five police officers put Michael Kingsley face down on a cement bunk in a holding cell, shocked him with a stun gun for five seconds, then left him alone, writhing in pain with his hands cuffed behind his back, for 15 minutes. Kingsley sued the officers, claiming they violated his constitutional rights by using excessive force. He lost.On Monday, the Supreme Court gave Kingsley a second chance, ruling that the trial court gave the jury bad instructions. In a narrow sense, the decision turns on a technical question of intent. In a broader sense, though, the ruling is a blast of good news for opponents of police brutality—an emphatic declaration that the Constitution bars police from beating and abusing suspects in custody.

Source: Supreme Court Kingsley v. Hendrickson: A new protection against police abuse.
 
Bravo. Whoever argued this in ths US SC slow clap!!!

OverviewFeatures include:connect to a single server, a replica set, or a MongoS instanceDB ops: create, drop, authenticate, command, eval, …Collection ops: create, rename, drop, find, insert, save, …Document ops: update, duplicate, remove, …Index ops: create, drop, …Shard ops: enable sharding, add shard, shard collection, …GUI Document builderImport / Export data from database to local files in JSON, BSON, CSV format.Support for query options and write concerns (getLastError)Display of numerous stats (server status, db stats, replication info, etc)Mongo tree refreshes to have a real time view of cluster (servers up/down, durability, etc)All operations are executed in background to keep UI responsiveBackground threads can repeat commands automaticallyGUI is identical on all OSOnce GUI is up, just click file/connect and point it to MongoDB servers.

Source: AG’s site / EdgyTech » UMongo
I was looking for a GUI mongoDb and found this!

Yes, we are divided. I am dispensing with the feel-good talk. The other side is battling for their team: older, whiter, more affluent, more married, and more rural. I’ll battle just as hard for my team: younger, more diverse, less affluent, unmarried, and more urban. A vote for me isn’t a vote for ‘unity.’ It’s a vote to claim a larger piece of the nation’s dwindling resources from people you don’t like and who don’t like you. They don’t like me either, but following Franklin Delano Roosevelt, rather than my oversensitive former boss, I don’t care.

Source: Hillary Clinton’s Fighting Speech – The Atlantic
 
slow clap.

Here’s the thing about life: we only have one shot at it. We’ve only got one chance to build a life that’s going to make us happy.We have every right to go for whatever we want: meaningful job, fame, fortune, glory, whatever. But, if we’re not happy in the process, it sounds a lot more like we’re doing it for someone else rather than for ourselves.If success is just a vehicle to happiness, then it seems just a tad bit inefficient to get miserable on your way to success.So let’s flip the equation. Let’s try something radical. Let’s take back control and actually define success for ourselves. Then, at least we know if we’re getting close or totally missing the mark.It’s your life. You get to make the rules. You get to decide what’s going to make you happy.

Source: What It REALLY Means To Be Successful (And How We Got It All Wrong) – mindbodygreen.com
My issue with a lot of self help pips from my country is that they have a habit of thinking they define success. Some people love going to work or at least try to fashion their work to something they love. As if retirement/vacations/fun is all that matters.
I love living in the moment and if I say that being in flow is living in the moment for me then live and let live.

The five-year itch at the workplace—it’s real. Hitting the half-decade mark at the same job seems to be an inflection point, a milestone that causes so many of us to reflect about what we’ve accomplished, whether we’re truly appreciated, how we can get ahead… or if there’s a reason to stay.A report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms these feelings. Taking slices of data over the last 32 years, the BLS has shown the median tenure with a current employer has remained pretty much the same—roughly five years, even during four recessions, when you’d expect the length of tenure to rise. That number has been particularly consistent among people 25 years and older: five years of tenure in 1983, compared with five and a half in 2014.

Source: Know the 5-Year Job Itch? You Can Fight It | SUCCESS

The fruitless search for extraordinary people willing to take ordinary jobsWhen I write about linchpins and people on a mission, I often hear from bosses who ask a variant of, “Any idea how I can find people like that for my business?”It’s unreasonable to expect extraordinary work from someone who isn’t trusted to create it.It’s unreasonable to find someone truly talented to switch to your organization when your organization is optimized to hire and keep people who merely want the next job.It’s unreasonable to expect that you’ll develop amazing people when you don’t give them room to change, grow and fail.And most of all, it’s unreasonable to think you’ll find great people if you’re spending the minimum amount of time (and money) necessary to find people who are merely good enough.Building an extraordinary organization takes guts. The guts to trust the team, to treat them with respect and to go to ridiculous lengths to find, keep and nurture people who care enough to make a difference.

Source: Seth’s Blog: The fruitless search for extraordinary people willing to take ordinary jobs
 
You want awesome developers but give them an over manged crappy work environment? This is the Philippine Programming Context. Programmers need to say enough of this shit.

Before the rise of the religious right in the 1980s, most politicians kept their faith to themselves. In 1945, for example, President Harry Truman wrote: “I’m not very much impressed with men who publicly parade their religious beliefs.” After his election in 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower joined a Presbyterian church, but when he heard the minister was publicly boasting about his new member the general commanded, “You go and tell that goddam minister that if he gives out one more story about my religious faith I will not join his goddam church!” John F. Kennedy discussed his Catholicism only when forced to do so by critics during the 1960 presidential campaign. In a 1964 interview with the Baptist Standard, President Lyndon Johnson explained, “I believe in the American tradition of separation of church and state which is expressed in the First Amendment to the Constitution.” Richard Nixon was famously a Quaker, but what he practiced can best be described as religious expediency—whatever worked politically. Gerald Ford called his religiosity “very personal” and wrote, “I am most reluctant to speak or write about it publicly.” Even the openly evangelical Christian Jimmy Carter prioritized his piety below that of most political issues.

Source: Religion Is Disappearing. That’s Great for Politics. – Michael Shermer – POLITICO Magazine

I couldn’t agree more.

It’s time for most of “Agile” and especially Scrum to die. These aren’t just bad ideas. They’re more dangerous than that, because there’s a generation of software engineers who are absorbing them without knowing any better. There are far too many young programmers being doomed to mediocrity by the idea that business-driven engineering and “user stories” are how things have always been done. This ought to be prevented; the future integrity of our industry may rely on it. “Agile” is a bucket of nonsense that

Source: Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible | Michael O. Church

How do we compare with other countries? In 1995 Thailand and India were “cleaner” than us, and China and Indonesia (the lowest scorer) were more corrupt. In 2000 we got overtaken by China, but at least we scored the same as India. Thailand was still higher than us. Only Indonesia was below us. In 2005 we barely kept pace. Vietnam came into the picture, and it was less corrupt than we were. Indonesia was still lower than us. By 2010, however, all these countrieswere considered cleaner than us. That was our nadir.But look what has happened in the past four years: Aside from being higher in rank than half of the countries on the list, we are at par with Thailand (never since 1995) and India, and are better off than China, Indonesia and Vietnam. I don’t know about you, but that gives me great comfort. It feels good to be in the upper half for once. The daang matuwid has taken root.There will be gnashing of teeth among the opposition, of course. But what can one do?And of course, let us not forget that our CPI is still only 38. We still have a lot of cleaning up to do.   But it is good to know that the combined efforts of government and civil society (who are monitoring and who are yelling when things go wrong) are finally gelling.

Source: Cause for celebration | Inquirer Opinion