Zen Warehouse

Ross is at it again . He is continuing to run a column where he openly admits his ideas are bogus and really should not be taken seriously. Not sure why the "Failing New York Times", as Trump would say, insists on publishing this, but he has sunken to a new low by attacking minorities. Let's be clear by what I mean by attack. This is not a racist screed about the failings of people of color, specifically African Americans. Instead, it is the carefully crafted Politically Correct attack that he believes the editors of the "Failing New York Times" would permit in the newspaper of record. There is the subtle dig that white ancestors did not need affirmative action.  " After all, what are white Americans supposed to make of a system that offers Hispanic or Asian business owners an advantage never enjoyed by their own Irish or Polish or Scots-Irish forefathers, or boosts upper-class African and Caribbean college applicants whose ancestors never lived in sl...

Truth be told, I don't enjoy Ross Douthat, the NYT columnist. I find his columns about policy to be poorly thought out, and his comments about the Catholic Church to be downright offensive. Ross is a great Republican, but a lousy Catholic. And the only reason he is a great Republican is the depths of depravity the party has sunken to in the last few years. Any shred of logic, empathy, or compassion was carefully pruned from party policy years ago. His latest opinion piece on Sunday dove further into the recent Commentary article  that David Brooks wrote about last week.  First off, Brooks is more of an original thinker than Douthat. Case in point, other than Brooks writing about the Commentary article first, is that Brooks takes the time to make thoughtful suggestions. The point of Sunday's Douthat column is to make illogical suggestions which allow him to hide tax cuts for the wealthy behind a thin veneer of "getting people back to work." I think what I find ...

African Americans make up about 14% of the American population, so here are some basic facts about African Americans and crime. African Americans are about 25% of all sex trafficking victims in the US, including territories African American adults between 20-24 have a 6% chance of being the victim of rape & sexual assaults, compared to 1% of whites in the same age group "Race has always played a central role in constructing presumptions of criminality." Angela Davis It may be impossible to overestimate the impact race has on the American experience. An important aspect of history is lynching in America, about half of which were "inspired" by accusations of criminality or the rape of a white woman. The lynchings were not cruel, or not just cruel; they were an effective way to keep the white supremacist society as the ruling class. No one dared complain; often they were lynched before they could complain. Cognitive dissonance is probably the best way to ...

What is David Brooks talking about? In short, I enjoy David Brooks , but I have to wonder what he is talking about in some columns, especially  today's . He does address issues pertinent to today's economy, but he somehow identifies all the wrong symptoms of the problem. He is relying on an article by Nicholas Eberstadt in Commentary, the extremely conservative magazine. Some clarifying facts.  Brooks writes: If Americans were working at the same rates they were when this century started, over 10 million more people would have jobs. As Eberstadt puts it, “The plain fact is that 21st-century America has witnessed a dreadful collapse of work.” Fair enough. But there is no mention of the dramatic shift as baby boomers start to retire. There is a comparison in the Eberstadt article with the 1982 recession, but this is very misleading. The 1982 recession was a dramatic drop and quick pickup in economic activity. However, the 2007 recession was a credit crunch w...

At the core of Agile development is the sprint. It is key that we communicate to the stakeholders what to expect in a sprint, and to do this we have to have a realistic way to determine the size of a story. Ideally assigning points to a story is as simple as reviewing the amount of work, determining the time expected to develop and test, and to use a scale of small = 1 point, medium is 2 points, and large is 3 points.   You are done!   Yet is not this simple because points are not just used to judge the amount of work on a single ticket.   Ideally we will review all the points on the tickets to determine the amount of work completed in a sprint.   Over the span of multiple sprints, you can review the amount of work the team completes and then predict future work by averaging points completed per sprint. This is velocity and it is used to adjust the roadmap for the project.   Knowing your team's  velocity is key for allowin...