They can both be paragons of different business strategies. It's actually a bit harder to get a job at costco. Because they pay above minimum wage, they have more employee candidates to select from. I used to work at costco before being fired for not working hard enough. It's not like if walmart didn't exist, all the people working there would have better jobs. People work at walmart because they can't do any better. This is true of any job for the most part. I am working as a software engineer, because I can't do any better. It's not that I don't like my job. I love it. But if I could do better I would.
This is why it was a mistake to force employers to be responsible for healthcare. If we made it a legal requirement for employers to buy every employee dinner every day, it wouldn't be anything you'd actually want to eat.
The people who make these laws, while seemingly well intentioned, have some pretty predictable consequences (and some unpredictable ones). That one about employers cutting hours to ensure they don't need to provide benefits was surely predictable.
If we want everyone to have healthcare, then we should give everyone healthcare, not put all the burden on employers.
You asked why a reasonable person might support banning gay marriage. The above explanation is reasonable.
Only in the same sense of "reasonable" that it would be for a white person to support taxing black people 100% to lessen the tax burden of themselves. This however isn't my first definition of reasonable. I would rather categorize it as selfishness / lack of empathy / lack of a sense of justice and fairness.
The fact that it would 'effect'(sic) taxes does make prop 8 a "complex issue" in this case. Most importantly: it would increase discriminatory taxes against another social class.
So let's say we live in a society where black people are discriminated against (e.g. taxes at 100%). Do you think a reasonable solution is to also start discriminating against chinese people (e.g. lowering both minorities tax burdens to say 50%) in order to lessen the burden of black people (while still keeping the taxes on everybody else at 0%)?
Also important: the purpose of the current tax structure is to encourage the nuclear family, heterosexual unions which breed and raise juvenile humans, by decreasing the financial burden on these families to allow for preparation to raise a child. This preparation comes in the form of more money so as to afford to purchase a house on a single income, to afford to take out savings, to afford better health care to support prenatal and juvenile care, and so on; as well as more income (by lower taxes) to afford the continuing cost of raising juvenile humans. Affording the same benefit to homosexuals achieves the goal of giving them welfare money for leisure spending.
I actually don't support these tax incentives, but lets say for the sake of argument that I did. If this were the case, why not give this incentive to only people with children, gay or straight? Why is it that only heterosexual couples both with and without children are given this tax break. This really doesn;t make any sense if the goal is to incentivize procreation (which I don;t think we necessarily need or want to do).
Yes I suppose some people might find this rather complicated because it involves numbers and arithmetic and this is the United States. I personally don't find it very complicated in these examples (though I admit actual tax law is a giant clusterfuck of complexity). That said, prop 8 actually changes the law, introducing more complexity.
Consider: if I want to race cars, I need to obtain my own money independently to upgrade my car into stock or modified-stock or racer class. If I want to play piano, I have to buy a piano with my own money. Why should families get special privileged money because they want to raise children? Why shouldn't they have to work and earn their own money? Why must I subsidize their personal lives? And why, now, must I also bear the additional burden of subsidizing gays?
In my opinion you shouldn't. But that should have nothing to do with whether gay people should be allowed to marry. If you really felt so strongly against subsidies, you could fight against subsidies while fighting for equal rights. Fighting for inequality in order to indirectly fight subsidies is misdirected.
I would rather pay my money for a piano than pay my money into taxes acting as a charity fund for gay people to buy pianos.
I find it a bit of a double standard that you don't seem to have so much of a problem subsidizing straight people. It's not like only straight people are capable of having children. Straight couples, straight singles, gay couples, and gay singles are all biologically capable of having children, and do in practice.
And this would be relevant if there were some reason that allowing gay people to adopt children was a problem...
I suppose there were probably some people that supported the right of inter racial couples to marry, except for the implications this might have on any children they might decide to have or adopt.
I think a better approach would be to assume people are capable of being good parents regardless of their race, gender, or sexual preference, until they prove otherwise.
or when your personal beliefs mean you think you can clearly and simply label someone as a "bigot" because their opinion or beliefs simply don't align with your own
I am labeling him a bigot because his beliefs make him a bigot. It is not because they don't align with mine. Karl Marx's beliefs don't align with mine, but he is not a bigot.
lapping a label on someone and reducing them to a one dimensional object is convenient, but doesn't make it accurate or fair Is someone still a "bigot" if they just feel that homosexuality is unnatural or weird, but have no problem or discriminatory feelings towards other minority groups, be it blacks, women, latinos, asians, etc.. (or even whites for that matter)? I think there's a difference between being "bigoted" towards one small faction, and just being a bigot, along the lines of Archie Bunker.
So what you are saying is that in order to be a bigot you need to be bigoted towards all or most minorities? I really don't see what the utility of this definition would be, apart from the fact that I don't think its accurate. If he thought Chinese people were unnatural and shouldn't be allowed to marry, but only felt this way about Chinese people, I think the vast majority of people would be calling him a bigot with me. What I am saying is that this is not really any different.
Furthermore he doesn't just "feel" that homosexuality is unnatural or weird. He supports passing legislation to give them less rights.
People are entitled to their personal beliefs no matter what you think and that's their private business, it shouldn't affect their hiring or firing unless they're behavior openly affects their work or coworkers;
I think people are entitled to their beliefs. I don't think people are entitled to their jobs. I also don't think people are entitled to have their belief's given immunity from criticism.
they have a right to feel or think as they do, just not a right to act on them (besides, people don't really control gut feelings, just as you don't decide whether you prefer men or women, or redheads or blonds, somehow you just like what you like, and don't what you don't).
Yeah I am not particularly attracted to the idea of 2 guys having anal sex either. This is different from supporting laws that would restrict the rights of gay people.
Before the wild slashdot accusations fly, no, I am not religious. No, I don't believe it's a "sin". But I don't like seeing discrimination used as a tool against something that is subjective.
I think public shaming is one of the best tools for effecting social change. Calling for people's resignations from leadership positions seems perfectly reasonable, especially if you feel uncomfortable working for someone who supports laws giving unequal rights to you or your friends. I think this would be exactly the same situation if the CEO had supported legislation to make it illegal for a particular race to be married.
So hypothetically, if he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and believed black people were inferior, you think that this shouldn't have any bearing on whether he can do his job properly and therefore should not be considered in deciding if he should be the CEO of a company?
We could also ban black people from getting married. This would also lessen the tax burden for non-blacks. Is this really a good reason to do it? The fact that it would effect taxes doesn't automatically make prop 8 a "complex issue". Taxes are complicated by themselves and whether gay people can get married doesn't make that any more or less complex.
What part of this is complex? What are the nuances of prop 8? Why might a reasonable person without retarded religious baggage support discriminating against people based on their sexuality?
I don't agree that blacklisting people based on political associations is necessarily a bad thing. I admit that it can be a good thing, if the political associations indicate you are stupid or bigoted, and your job requires intelligence or leadership of a diverse group of people.
The idea that all opinions are valid and to be respected is not something I would agree with. Plenty of opinions are worthy of disrespect and ridicule, and I think certain people should be disqualified from certain jobs because of them.
For example, I am pretty intolerant of bigots, and therefore I shouldn't be allowed to run a large company that may employ bigots. My previous comments against bigots might make bigots uncomfortable with me as their CEO which would be bad for morale.
A new earth creationist can be a perfectly good evolutionary biologist if they are able to put their personal beliefs aside and do their job presuming that evolution was true while at work.
However, I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that a person who truly believes in evolution as a valid scientific principle is going to be more likely to do a better job than a person who doesn't.
I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that a person who supports prop 8 is a bigot. I have family that supported prop 8. They are nice, well intentioned people who happen to be bigots. I would say that not being a bigot is an important quality for a CEO (i.e. the leader of a company).
You can have personal beliefs. It only becomes a problem when your personal beliefs mean you are a bigot.
I think you can justify firing or not hiring someone for a upper management job if their personal beliefs indicate they are stupid or crazy or bigoted. In the same way that having a shitty GPA might mean you don't understand the material you are supposed to, believing that the moon landing was fake, or that evolution is "just" a theory, or that black people are lamanites, or that homosexuality is a sin, etc, might indicate that someone is a fucking idiot, and maybe not the best choice to inspire confidence of all his subordinates.
Supporting prop 8 makes you a bigot. If the janitor is a bigot it's probably ok as long as he leaves his retarded bigotry at home. If he brings it to work, then his boss needs to be involved to discipline or fire him. It's more important to make sure that the top guy isn't a bigot, or stupid, or crazy, etc
It's not like this guy built his company from the ground up and is also the majority shareholder. He's an employee just like everyone else. If enough people decide they don't want to work for this pro prop 8 mother fucker, then the committee who decides who's hired and fired has to make a decision of whether it is worse to replace the CEO or X employees. If X is big enough, I suspect it makes more sense to replace the CEO.
Obviously the employees speaking out against their new CEO realize they aren't exactly ingratiating themselves with him. Still they decided to do it. It's obviously not the best decision in terms of career stability, but it's not like their making minimum wage at walmart. They have marketable skills and can presumably find a job elsewhere if it comes to that.
I said I wouldn't want to hire a person that tried to get a degree where spending the least amount of money and time were more important than learning the most knowledge or skills.
I also said that getting a degree efficiently in this way does not necessarily mean they will be able to do their job efficiently especially if they lack knowledge that someone who cared more about learning might have.
Do you actually disagree with any of this? Would you really want to hire a person who got a degree in the cheapest quickest way possible?
The contract for the spec and test set will be much smaller then the main one. Duh.
Yes duh, but it still only increases your odds of success rather than guaranteeing it.
Carving out 20% of a project as a separate specification project is only sane. The alternative is to go into the main contract without a detailed spec and test.
Or carving out 10%, or 30%, etc
You might get setback 20%, but that's much better then 100%
and worse than 10%
You don't develop a specification and test set to shield you from incompetent contractors. You do it because you are (presumably) not incompetent yourself.
You do it because you are not incompetent because competent people shield themselves from incompetent contractors. I don;t see how these things are mutually exclusive.
None of this is a mystery and it's not free.
I never said it was a mystery. I said it is possible to get burned by people you hire to do a job, and that is true whether you take appropriate precautions or not, you are just lowering the probability of getting burned by taking precautions.
And lets say you are running a business and you need to hire a software engineer or a team to develop some custom software. Someone tells you that you should also work out a good spec and test set in order to shield you in case the software team is incompetent. So now you need to hire someone to do that (presumably not the software team). You can have a contract for them requiring "high quality" specs and test sets and you have just kicked the can down the road.
If this were a science experiment to try to find a good software engineering team, I'd say the best way to do it would be to hire a bunch of teams and a bunch of independent judges to evaluate the teams, and pick the team that was judged to be the best by the most judges.
Either that or actually become a better software engineer than the teams so that you can be an authority in evaluating software, but then you already know who the best software team is (it's you).
If you are trying to pick a good software team without spending too much money, I'd say the amount of checking you should do is related to how big the job is. If you are making a simple website it doesn't make sense to spend $100,000 vetting the teams you are considering. If you are making healthcare.gov, maybe it makes sense to spend a lot of money on vetting.
OK so why do we have food stamps? Why do we have obamacare? Why do we have medicare and medicaid? Other countries have even better universal healthcare. Wouldn't it be better for the wealthy elite if we didn't have these things? Wouldn't that be just that much more money for them?
If everything you need/want is free or very very cheap to make, then why does anyone have to buy or sell anything?
"We" as a society will be producing a lot, we will just be doing it through automation (i.e. made possible by the initial production of the automatons), rather than through an abundance of current human effort. Sort of like how one person with a washing machine can wash a lot of clothes with less human effort than someone with a washboard and a bucket. Imagine someone with not only a washing machine, but a machine that builds more washing machines, and a machine that gathers the raw materials to build more washing machines.
You want rock solid code that will last for years, eliminate the errors, don't "handle them gracefully".
Good luck writing code that eliminates the possibility that a read on a filehandle produces an error, so you no longer have to handle errors at all.
I learn more reinventing the wheel and there is no substitute to working with code you are sure of and know how it's going to perform.
It's great to learn, but you shouldn't be putting your homework problems into production software.
There is a substitute for using only your own code that you are "sure of how it's going to perform". It's called using a good framework and libraries. If you aren't going to trust any 3rd party code, why not write your own compiler and kernel too? It pretty ridiculous to write code in a way that assumes only you yourself can write good code in 2014.
Well to be fair, the whole thing could probably be explained by adding a comment
// Duff's Device
But this is because it is a well known construct (well known enough to have a wikipedia page). That doesn't mean it's ok to use it (for many of the reasons already pointed out in this thread). I just think it's ok to not to have extensive comments explaining what it's doing because of it's notoriety. YOu could do the same for "//Heap sort", "//binary search", etc.
Slashdot Mirror
They can both be paragons of different business strategies. It's actually a bit harder to get a job at costco. Because they pay above minimum wage, they have more employee candidates to select from. I used to work at costco before being fired for not working hard enough. It's not like if walmart didn't exist, all the people working there would have better jobs. People work at walmart because they can't do any better. This is true of any job for the most part. I am working as a software engineer, because I can't do any better. It's not that I don't like my job. I love it. But if I could do better I would.
Maybe you should just cut your losses, sell your business, and start working for someone else to get all the sweet free benefits.
This is why it was a mistake to force employers to be responsible for healthcare. If we made it a legal requirement for employers to buy every employee dinner every day, it wouldn't be anything you'd actually want to eat.
The people who make these laws, while seemingly well intentioned, have some pretty predictable consequences (and some unpredictable ones). That one about employers cutting hours to ensure they don't need to provide benefits was surely predictable.
If we want everyone to have healthcare, then we should give everyone healthcare, not put all the burden on employers.
You asked why a reasonable person might support banning gay marriage. The above explanation is reasonable.
Only in the same sense of "reasonable" that it would be for a white person to support taxing black people 100% to lessen the tax burden of themselves. This however isn't my first definition of reasonable. I would rather categorize it as selfishness / lack of empathy / lack of a sense of justice and fairness.
The fact that it would 'effect'(sic) taxes does make prop 8 a "complex issue" in this case. Most importantly: it would increase discriminatory taxes against another social class.
So let's say we live in a society where black people are discriminated against (e.g. taxes at 100%). Do you think a reasonable solution is to also start discriminating against chinese people (e.g. lowering both minorities tax burdens to say 50%) in order to lessen the burden of black people (while still keeping the taxes on everybody else at 0%)?
Also important: the purpose of the current tax structure is to encourage the nuclear family, heterosexual unions which breed and raise juvenile humans, by decreasing the financial burden on these families to allow for preparation to raise a child. This preparation comes in the form of more money so as to afford to purchase a house on a single income, to afford to take out savings, to afford better health care to support prenatal and juvenile care, and so on; as well as more income (by lower taxes) to afford the continuing cost of raising juvenile humans. Affording the same benefit to homosexuals achieves the goal of giving them welfare money for leisure spending.
I actually don't support these tax incentives, but lets say for the sake of argument that I did. If this were the case, why not give this incentive to only people with children, gay or straight? Why is it that only heterosexual couples both with and without children are given this tax break. This really doesn;t make any sense if the goal is to incentivize procreation (which I don;t think we necessarily need or want to do).
Yes I suppose some people might find this rather complicated because it involves numbers and arithmetic and this is the United States. I personally don't find it very complicated in these examples (though I admit actual tax law is a giant clusterfuck of complexity). That said, prop 8 actually changes the law, introducing more complexity.
Consider: if I want to race cars, I need to obtain my own money independently to upgrade my car into stock or modified-stock or racer class. If I want to play piano, I have to buy a piano with my own money. Why should families get special privileged money because they want to raise children? Why shouldn't they have to work and earn their own money? Why must I subsidize their personal lives? And why, now, must I also bear the additional burden of subsidizing gays?
In my opinion you shouldn't. But that should have nothing to do with whether gay people should be allowed to marry. If you really felt so strongly against subsidies, you could fight against subsidies while fighting for equal rights. Fighting for inequality in order to indirectly fight subsidies is misdirected.
I would rather pay my money for a piano than pay my money into taxes acting as a charity fund for gay people to buy pianos.
I find it a bit of a double standard that you don't seem to have so much of a problem subsidizing straight people. It's not like only straight people are capable of having children. Straight couples, straight singles, gay couples, and gay singles are all biologically capable of having children, and do in practice.
I forgot which part of the constitution forbids me from calling retarded religious beliefs what they are... please remind me.
And this would be relevant if there were some reason that allowing gay people to adopt children was a problem...
I suppose there were probably some people that supported the right of inter racial couples to marry, except for the implications this might have on any children they might decide to have or adopt.
I think a better approach would be to assume people are capable of being good parents regardless of their race, gender, or sexual preference, until they prove otherwise.
I don't need to give you any reason for my choices. I am entitled to choose to dislike (even hate) Queers of both sexes - that's my right.
Yes it is, and it is my right to be able to call you a retarded bigot.
What the hell gives YOU the right to tell me I have to like butt fuckers and bean flickers?
The first amendment
or when your personal beliefs mean you think you can clearly and simply label someone as a "bigot" because their opinion or beliefs simply don't align with your own
I am labeling him a bigot because his beliefs make him a bigot. It is not because they don't align with mine. Karl Marx's beliefs don't align with mine, but he is not a bigot.
lapping a label on someone and reducing them to a one dimensional object is convenient, but doesn't make it accurate or fair Is someone still a "bigot" if they just feel that homosexuality is unnatural or weird, but have no problem or discriminatory feelings towards other minority groups, be it blacks, women, latinos, asians, etc.. (or even whites for that matter)? I think there's a difference between being "bigoted" towards one small faction, and just being a bigot, along the lines of Archie Bunker.
So what you are saying is that in order to be a bigot you need to be bigoted towards all or most minorities? I really don't see what the utility of this definition would be, apart from the fact that I don't think its accurate. If he thought Chinese people were unnatural and shouldn't be allowed to marry, but only felt this way about Chinese people, I think the vast majority of people would be calling him a bigot with me. What I am saying is that this is not really any different.
Furthermore he doesn't just "feel" that homosexuality is unnatural or weird. He supports passing legislation to give them less rights.
People are entitled to their personal beliefs no matter what you think and that's their private business, it shouldn't affect their hiring or firing unless they're behavior openly affects their work or coworkers;
I think people are entitled to their beliefs. I don't think people are entitled to their jobs. I also don't think people are entitled to have their belief's given immunity from criticism.
they have a right to feel or think as they do, just not a right to act on them (besides, people don't really control gut feelings, just as you don't decide whether you prefer men or women, or redheads or blonds, somehow you just like what you like, and don't what you don't).
Yeah I am not particularly attracted to the idea of 2 guys having anal sex either. This is different from supporting laws that would restrict the rights of gay people.
Before the wild slashdot accusations fly, no, I am not religious. No, I don't believe it's a "sin". But I don't like seeing discrimination used as a tool against something that is subjective.
I think public shaming is one of the best tools for effecting social change. Calling for people's resignations from leadership positions seems perfectly reasonable, especially if you feel uncomfortable working for someone who supports laws giving unequal rights to you or your friends. I think this would be exactly the same situation if the CEO had supported legislation to make it illegal for a particular race to be married.
So hypothetically, if he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and believed black people were inferior, you think that this shouldn't have any bearing on whether he can do his job properly and therefore should not be considered in deciding if he should be the CEO of a company?
We could also ban black people from getting married. This would also lessen the tax burden for non-blacks. Is this really a good reason to do it? The fact that it would effect taxes doesn't automatically make prop 8 a "complex issue". Taxes are complicated by themselves and whether gay people can get married doesn't make that any more or less complex.
What does this have to do with the constitution?
What part of this is complex? What are the nuances of prop 8? Why might a reasonable person without retarded religious baggage support discriminating against people based on their sexuality?
Please enlighten me.
The fact that you think think this is a complex issue doesn't make it complex.
I don't agree that blacklisting people based on political associations is necessarily a bad thing. I admit that it can be a good thing, if the political associations indicate you are stupid or bigoted, and your job requires intelligence or leadership of a diverse group of people.
The idea that all opinions are valid and to be respected is not something I would agree with. Plenty of opinions are worthy of disrespect and ridicule, and I think certain people should be disqualified from certain jobs because of them.
For example, I am pretty intolerant of bigots, and therefore I shouldn't be allowed to run a large company that may employ bigots. My previous comments against bigots might make bigots uncomfortable with me as their CEO which would be bad for morale.
A new earth creationist can be a perfectly good evolutionary biologist if they are able to put their personal beliefs aside and do their job presuming that evolution was true while at work.
However, I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that a person who truly believes in evolution as a valid scientific principle is going to be more likely to do a better job than a person who doesn't.
I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that a person who supports prop 8 is a bigot. I have family that supported prop 8. They are nice, well intentioned people who happen to be bigots. I would say that not being a bigot is an important quality for a CEO (i.e. the leader of a company).
You can have personal beliefs. It only becomes a problem when your personal beliefs mean you are a bigot.
I think you can justify firing or not hiring someone for a upper management job if their personal beliefs indicate they are stupid or crazy or bigoted. In the same way that having a shitty GPA might mean you don't understand the material you are supposed to, believing that the moon landing was fake, or that evolution is "just" a theory, or that black people are lamanites, or that homosexuality is a sin, etc, might indicate that someone is a fucking idiot, and maybe not the best choice to inspire confidence of all his subordinates.
Supporting prop 8 makes you a bigot. If the janitor is a bigot it's probably ok as long as he leaves his retarded bigotry at home. If he brings it to work, then his boss needs to be involved to discipline or fire him. It's more important to make sure that the top guy isn't a bigot, or stupid, or crazy, etc
It's not like this guy built his company from the ground up and is also the majority shareholder. He's an employee just like everyone else. If enough people decide they don't want to work for this pro prop 8 mother fucker, then the committee who decides who's hired and fired has to make a decision of whether it is worse to replace the CEO or X employees. If X is big enough, I suspect it makes more sense to replace the CEO.
Obviously the employees speaking out against their new CEO realize they aren't exactly ingratiating themselves with him. Still they decided to do it. It's obviously not the best decision in terms of career stability, but it's not like their making minimum wage at walmart. They have marketable skills and can presumably find a job elsewhere if it comes to that.
I guess I just don't see what your point is.
I said I wouldn't want to hire a person that tried to get a degree where spending the least amount of money and time were more important than learning the most knowledge or skills.
I also said that getting a degree efficiently in this way does not necessarily mean they will be able to do their job efficiently especially if they lack knowledge that someone who cared more about learning might have.
Do you actually disagree with any of this? Would you really want to hire a person who got a degree in the cheapest quickest way possible?
The contract for the spec and test set will be much smaller then the main one. Duh.
Yes duh, but it still only increases your odds of success rather than guaranteeing it.
Carving out 20% of a project as a separate specification project is only sane. The alternative is to go into the main contract without a detailed spec and test.
Or carving out 10%, or 30%, etc
You might get setback 20%, but that's much better then 100%
and worse than 10%
You don't develop a specification and test set to shield you from incompetent contractors. You do it because you are (presumably) not incompetent yourself.
You do it because you are not incompetent because competent people shield themselves from incompetent contractors. I don;t see how these things are mutually exclusive.
None of this is a mystery and it's not free.
I never said it was a mystery. I said it is possible to get burned by people you hire to do a job, and that is true whether you take appropriate precautions or not, you are just lowering the probability of getting burned by taking precautions.
And lets say you are running a business and you need to hire a software engineer or a team to develop some custom software. Someone tells you that you should also work out a good spec and test set in order to shield you in case the software team is incompetent. So now you need to hire someone to do that (presumably not the software team). You can have a contract for them requiring "high quality" specs and test sets and you have just kicked the can down the road.
If this were a science experiment to try to find a good software engineering team, I'd say the best way to do it would be to hire a bunch of teams and a bunch of independent judges to evaluate the teams, and pick the team that was judged to be the best by the most judges.
Either that or actually become a better software engineer than the teams so that you can be an authority in evaluating software, but then you already know who the best software team is (it's you).
If you are trying to pick a good software team without spending too much money, I'd say the amount of checking you should do is related to how big the job is. If you are making a simple website it doesn't make sense to spend $100,000 vetting the teams you are considering. If you are making healthcare.gov, maybe it makes sense to spend a lot of money on vetting.
OK so why do we have food stamps? Why do we have obamacare? Why do we have medicare and medicaid? Other countries have even better universal healthcare. Wouldn't it be better for the wealthy elite if we didn't have these things? Wouldn't that be just that much more money for them?
someone has to buy and someone must sell.
Why? Why is this necessary?
If everything you need/want is free or very very cheap to make, then why does anyone have to buy or sell anything?
"We" as a society will be producing a lot, we will just be doing it through automation (i.e. made possible by the initial production of the automatons), rather than through an abundance of current human effort. Sort of like how one person with a washing machine can wash a lot of clothes with less human effort than someone with a washboard and a bucket. Imagine someone with not only a washing machine, but a machine that builds more washing machines, and a machine that gathers the raw materials to build more washing machines.
You want rock solid code that will last for years, eliminate the errors, don't "handle them gracefully".
Good luck writing code that eliminates the possibility that a read on a filehandle produces an error, so you no longer have to handle errors at all.
I learn more reinventing the wheel and there is no substitute to working with code you are sure of and know how it's going to perform.
It's great to learn, but you shouldn't be putting your homework problems into production software.
There is a substitute for using only your own code that you are "sure of how it's going to perform". It's called using a good framework and libraries. If you aren't going to trust any 3rd party code, why not write your own compiler and kernel too? It pretty ridiculous to write code in a way that assumes only you yourself can write good code in 2014.
Well to be fair, the whole thing could probably be explained by adding a comment
// Duff's Device
But this is because it is a well known construct (well known enough to have a wikipedia page). That doesn't mean it's ok to use it (for many of the reasons already pointed out in this thread). I just think it's ok to not to have extensive comments explaining what it's doing because of it's notoriety. YOu could do the same for "//Heap sort", "//binary search", etc.