If and when I see actually-doing-agile fail, I'll change my mind. But so far I've seen a direct correlation between the extent to which an organisation was actually-doing-agile and the effectiveness of that organisation, across a wide range of industries/environments/countries.

Push back on that. Agile says other things are more important.

That's not agile.

> A project where all the work comes directly from tickets with no overarching, agreed-upon document on what the end goal is supposed to be sounds hellish.

Maybe this is why so many people can't even try to do agile. It sounds bad. But it works great.

> The solution can never be at fault, it's your execution, or your devotion to the process (in this case) that was faulty.

This isn't some religious premise, it's the lesson of bitter experience. It's like how when two trains crash into each other the inspectors start by looking for which one went through a danger signal, rather than questioning whether signalling systems work.

When the circuit court rules the ruling is binding on that whole circuit, which is a pretty huge area and population (bigger than most countries). When one judge in one county rules the ruling is binding in that county, when the supreme court rules it's binding on the whole country. Isn't that kind of how it should work?

It will become harder for advertisers to deny responsibility for ads that violate their stated policies if they have to submit the ads ahead of time. Also site operators will need a certain level of technical competence to do this.

Because one judge in one county shouldn't be defining the laws for the whole country? Sure it's great when they issue a ruling you like, but what about when it's a ruling that you don't. If it's a knife-edge situation then letting several judges rule and having the supreme court sort it out is the right thing; if there's an obvious right answer then every court will rule the same way and it doesn't matter.

> Why should rights be so dependent on someone in my particular part of the country having sued?

Your rights are always dependent on your willingness to sue to defend them. It's nice if someone else does the legwork and sets the precedent, but you shouldn't depend on that.

You can prove that the program implements a specification correctly. That doesn't require proving a negative, but it does prove the absence of bugs. (I think you know this argument is weak, since your next paragraph is a complete non-sequitur)

> Or if you try to formally verify your formal verification then you're just translating the problem to a new layer. It's just a chain of proofs that is always ultimately based on an unproven one, which invalidates the whole chain.

All proofs ultimately rest on axioms. That's normal and not really an argument unless you want to doubt everything, in which case what's the point in ever saying anything?

Sure. As long as the end result is the same grid, it shouldn't matter. But in a CSS world you switch your table for grid-layout divs (or vice versa) and suddenly one corner case thing that is in one grid cell somewhere in your app gets its styling flipped.

Is made up of table tags, which the CSS people will tell you is wrong/impossible/has different semantics.

That tells me which styles apply to an element. You also need the converse - find which elements a given style applies to - and there's no way to do that AFAIK. It's very hard to ever delete even completely unused styles, because there is no way to tell (in the general case) whether a given style is used at all.

> This way, your styles shouldn't need updates that often unless you change the semantics of your DOM.

In my experience the DOM doesn't have semantics, or to the extent that it does, they change all the time.

I tried that and it was an absolute nightmare. There was no way to tell where a given style is used from, or even if it's used at all, and if the DOM hierarchy changes then your styles all change randomly (with, again, no way to tell what changed or where or why). Also "minimizes clientside processing" is a myth, I don't know what the implementation is but it ends up being slower and heavier than normal. Who ever thought this was a good idea?