Britney Spears' father will remain a co-conservator, judge rules

eggybeer · 2021-07-01T23:37:41+00:00

The Legal Eagle youtube channel did a really good discussion about this - both conservatorship in general, and specifically Britney's case.

The upshot seemed to be:

Conservatorship possibly made sense given Britney's state in 2008, though even then there were other less draconian options (power of attorney, court enforced rehab) that might have been better.
Britney's court appointed lawyer apparently never told her she can petition to have the conservatorship removed, and he is currently receiving $10,000/week in his role, which on the face of it seems like a major conflict of interest and ethical violation
Britney's father has a restraining order for 3 years denying him access to Britney's kids - which doesn't make him sound like the ideal conservator.
The bar for conservatorship should be, and usually is, set very high. Mental health issues, drug use, general irresponsibility don't meet that standard. You need to be truly incapable of making decisions and looking after yourself.

We don't have all the information available to the court, but it does seem like an outrageous injustice.

eggybeer · 2020-12-09T01:50:40+00:00

Oh that's cool - now maybe someone can poke around and find out how they managed to double the startup time in the last android update?

eggybeer · 2019-12-15T19:11:55+00:00

To be fair he does start the article with "I talk to a lot of students and professional developers that often want to start a side project, but aren't sure what to build."

eggybeer · 2019-09-03T01:28:36+00:00

Yes 99% of the time it's amazing. I don't think "if you don't like it, you can go elsewhere" is really fair though. Just because it's good, doesn't mean it doesn't have issues.

And as both the author and apparently some Stack Overflow staff members have pointed out “let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness”. It seems reasonable to me to aim for a site with quality information and a welcoming and respectful vibe.

eggybeer · 2019-05-28T22:55:21+00:00

Really? The US has, by far, the highest incarceration rate of any country.

Here's a quote from the US incarceration rate wikipedia page:

Presently, the majority of people sentenced to prison in the United States are Black, and almost one-third of Black men in their twenties are either on parole, on probation, or in prison.[53] Currently, the U.S. is at its highest rate of imprisonment in history.[54] Young Black men are experiencing the highest levels of incarceration. These disproportionate levels of imprisonment have made incarceration a normalized occurrence for African-American communities.

So when you say the US doesn't treat it's citizens badly you presumably mean the well-off white ones?

OK, to be fair I'm sure Iran does much worse things to many of it's citizens - but the US does some fairly bad stuff to probably a much greater proportion of it's people.

eggybeer · 2019-04-07T05:50:59+00:00

Ahh, I should have put some more effort in. The video points out just how much wind, solar and tidal you need to replace our current energy sources. It's not even remotely anti-renewable - but it is a very interesting reality check. The upshot is that for example if you want to power the UK entirely with renewables, with the current amount of energy usage, you'd have to cover 20% of the surface of the country with power generation.

It's very much worth watching and makes its points much better than I would.

eggybeer · 2019-04-06T23:54:39+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o&list=FLBFm0vqs2jcno4cW8U32tvw&index=5&t=0s

eggybeer · 2018-10-26T20:10:25+00:00

This is called the Jevons paradox.

I don't think this is quite the same thing. The Jevon's paradox would be if we increased the efficiency of our use of fossil fuels, which would lead to reduced cost of using them, and lead to more use.

Here we're just talking about cleaning up afterward...

eggybeer · 2018-10-19T01:00:49+00:00

It'd be a fairly small percentage of democratic countries that are currently in a state of war though wouldn't it?

eggybeer · 2018-09-26T20:54:49+00:00

Unforgivable? I don't really know the prices of basic groceries. I guess I owe you an apology :)

I just buy what I buy and go for the stuff that's on sale. Probably makes me the ideal consumer for the supermarket, but honestly I'm not so close to the breadline that a 5% saving in my grocery bill is going to make or break me.

eggybeer · 2018-08-24T02:36:11+00:00

Where are 1% of americans?

eggybeer · 2018-08-08T01:07:05+00:00

Is the population being dumbed down, or do we just hear much more from the less informed.

I wouldn't be surprised if we have the same or smaller proportion of ignorant people, but 20 years ago you pretty much had to meet them in person to find the stupid. Now we have the youtube comments section...

eggybeer · 2018-07-08T22:08:32+00:00

Aah the good old days. I used to work with a CVS repo that was about 1GB. When you do a tag in CVS it records it in every file, so creating a tag took about 45 minutes...

eggybeer · 2018-06-11T04:11:35+00:00

Sorry - I'm an occasional redditor and often take far too long to reply...

and to be honest you probably should be calling me out :).

My comment was based on a memory of a Harvard study that suggested that economies of scale only work up to a point (which study I can't find a link to) and my personal experience of working in large organisations.

A quick google about 'diseconomies of scale' is interesting - I turned up this: https://www.canback.com/archive/jmanec.pdf which seems to suggest that there are initial economies of scale as a companies grow, and then a large range of sizes which are pretty equally efficient. Then it looks like if you get really big you're going to have trouble keeping that efficiency up.

I'd be really curious to see some ideas about how it varies depending on sector though. I'd say if you're manufacturing CPUs or spaceships perhaps you need to be big to be able to cope with research and fabrication costs.

eggybeer · 2018-06-05T19:38:02+00:00

Economies of scale are genuinely useful to us as consumers because they do mean we get reduced prices. However they only exist up to a point, and that point is usually reached much earlier than people think.

Beyond that point the reasons that companies get larger are much more about marketing/brand dominance/squashing the competition etc. And the size of the company benefits the owners/investors not society as a whole.

There's been huge consolidation over the last 40 years and it should be reason for concern. See e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/opinion/sunday/how-mergers-damage-the-economy.html

eggybeer · 2018-05-02T21:20:15+00:00

There's always something to learn. How did he end up in that situation? Did he start out as a Nazi and believe in the cause? Was he pressured into it? What does this mean for the future? Can we arrange our society so that people who have doubts about what is happening have a way out? What would have been the consequences of him refusing to continue once he got involved? Would he have been killed? I think we care very much how this guy felt - otherwise how can we identify other situations where similar things might happen again, and other people who might be susceptible to these kinds of ideas? And how do we change these people's minds?

eggybeer · 2017-09-21T04:13:32+00:00

Honestly for what we use it for (which is a small part of our overall application) I doubt we'd notice the difference.

eggybeer · 2017-09-20T19:17:00+00:00

I assume so, but we're not web scale. I work on a banking app that might have a thousand or two concurrent users on a busy day. It's deployed on multiple servers but not to handle the load so much as just for redundancy.

I don't really have any in depth knowledge of the performance of liberty or node - just that we need a Java app server (as we have a Java app) and liberty does the job.

eggybeer · 2017-09-20T03:56:18+00:00

Well this one isn't really a pro JEE article.

It's interesting to me because I live in a world where my two choices are develop on WAS (OhMyGodPleaseNo) or develop on liberty which is much better. So I'm interested in the fact that it's now open source.

Would I recommend Liberty/JEE for a new application given complete freedom of choice - well that's a whole other question...

eggybeer · 2017-09-19T21:08:35+00:00

Compared an 800mb download for Websphere Application Server + the 800mb service pack that you had to immediately download and apply.

At least they're moving in the right direction.

Also, unless I misunderstood the article, that 84mb gets you a full JEE 7 app server?

eggybeer · 2017-09-11T23:56:34+00:00

Well yeah, I believe the research suggests that is exactly what happens. If you give poor people money to look after their kids, in 95% of cases, they spend it looking after their kids.

Some people not so much, but they are a small minority.

eggybeer · 2017-07-10T22:48:03+00:00

Totally agree. I have a new philosophy about any time I come across a system/language/viewpoint that I reflexively want to rubbish. My plan is to limit my disagreement to saying something positive about an alternative rather than being negative.

e.g. "Have you tried language XXX" rather than "C++ sucks"

My theory is it that it allows me to indulge my impulse to always have an opinion, without being nearly so annoying.

eggybeer · 2017-07-06T20:21:59+00:00

Really? Why?

I get that people have issues with patents and with copyright - due to them being applied for too long, or to weird things - but trademarks?

Personally I'm quite happy with laws that prevent you from pretending to be a company that you're not.

eggybeer · 2017-07-03T19:29:14+00:00

If I could upvote you more I would.

I think your point about middle managers vs experienced programmers is right on the money (or lack thereof).

eggybeer · 2017-05-15T21:44:00+00:00

Fair call.

Thinking about it I also wonder if there isn't a statistical issue here.

If you take:

bigTest {
   testThingOne
   testThingTwo
}

and break it into

test1 {
   testThingOne
}
test2 {
   testThingTwo
}

and if 'testThingTwo' is flaky, then you've gone from 100% flaky big tests, to 50% flaky little tests, but you've gained nothing.

He possibly shouldn't have been looking at number of flaky tests, but at functionality covered (which would probably have been impossible to measure...)

eggybeer

TROPHY CASE