> he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.

In observing the current dark political period, we see clearly that the energetic but stupid person can be entrusted to cause damage. He is a type of zealot or fanatic.

If you can marshal groups of such people, especially at arm's length from your own reputation and assets, such groups of energetic but stupid people can do significant damage.

I think I would re-order the Laws as stated:

THE THIRD (AND GOLDEN) BASIC LAW _ A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. Human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid. (The four categories are H, I, B, S.)

combines with

THE SECOND BASIC LAW _ The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

leads to

THE FOURTH BASIC LAW _ Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

leads to

THE FIRST BASIC LAW _ Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

leads to

THE FIFTH BASIC LAW _ A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. The corollary of the Law is that: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

You can call Trump a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them.

> Human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid. (The four categories are H, I, B, S.)

According to the source article, he would clearly be a Bandit ... in combination with the other categories.

I'm sure he would say he isn't stupid, but that's part of the problem. No one is intelligent in all domains (contrary to the article, I'm afraid); Trump's intelligence lies in speaking convincingly to a portion of the population, which at least in November 2016 and November 2024 constituted a majority of voters who actually voted. But when it comes to economics (consider: tariffs, but also inflation and the need for scientific research to sustain our economy), science (especially medicine, in view of his choice of Lysenko Jr), world politics (doing things which push former allies away, sometimes even in the direction of China), negotiating (he's like an amateur chess player who sees a chance to take his opponent's pawn without noticing that this allows the opponent to take his rook), psychology (complete befuddlement when dealing with people like Putin, Xi and the Dear Leader), law (seeing solid cases against his personal enemies where there is no evidence, much less a real case), and...

I could go on. My point is that Trump is really only smart in one area, which he thinks makes him smart in all areas. He isn't: he's dumb in those other domains.

I often tell people without irony that laziness is my super power. Laziness motivates me to put my efforts into finding ways of getting things done with less effort, to the endless annoyance of those around me who work a lot harder than I do.

> One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking

Oh, so true.

Larry Wall: 3 great virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.

Which is both a joke (turning virtue on its head) and kinda true, in that laziness makes you automate things, impatience spurs you to make things faster, and hubris spurs you to make sure that they work.

I’ve always seen the hubris as an essential component of doing things “you didn’t know you couldn’t do.” A lot of great ideas are discounted as impossible and it takes hubris to fly in the face of that perceived impossibility. I reckon most of the time it doesn’t work out and the pessimism was warranted—but those times it does work out make up for it.

I would have expanded on the hubris part. When your laziness and impatience cause you to create something to save you time and effort, your creation will not work the first time (ironclad rule). But hubris makes you think that a little easy tweaking will fix your creation. And hubris fails you every single time, because the "little easy tweaking" eventually turns into a lot of hard work, not to mention hair pulling.

(I'm working right now on a problem my hubris caused me; a variable stored in a database seems to have different values depending on what part of my code it is queried from. Days I've spent trying to understand what's going on...)

Laziness leads us to conserve resources, and impatience to "save time" (which is a resource, but of a unique nature).

Pride also leads us to make our work more robust, so that it "always works well."

Thus, two fundamental principles are respected: optimization and robustness.

Is your problem related to various parts of the code being in distinct transactions? Can you try a version having all parts commiting then immediately synchronizing with each other, then SELECT'ing?

I found a fix to the problem, although I never quite pinned down why it was necessary. It wasn't a commit problem, but rather had to do with two objects pointing to the same third object as its "parent", whereas the third object only pointed to one of those other two objects as its "daughter". When queried from either object about the third object's daughter, it gave an answer pointing to that object, despite the parent pointing to just one of the two objects. The fix was to make the non-owned object point to a different owner. But I still am not clear why that was necessary.

“HLADE’S LAW:

If you have a difficult task give it to a lazy man — he will find an easier way to do it.”

― Arthur Bloch

That amount of wisdom can only come with boatloads of experience. Those are words to live by.