PopeOfNope

In my humble opinion, yes, content is not king. But, it's more than just allowing people to put a face to the name. You have to fit in. You have to agree with the political views of the majority. You have to agree with the taboos of the majority. There's a reason Michael O'Church and Zed Shaw aren't on that leaderboard, despite the quality of the content they posted.

That depends on what you're testing. "Blood test" and "health test" are ridiculously ambiguous terms. Something like red blood cell counts don't vary much from day to day, but some things, like blood sugar and cortisol, vary hour to hour.

Wordpress has spent a ton of time on multisite features and (as far as I know) there's no other CMS in existence that handles this stuff out of the box. That's why large media companies love it and, I suspect, why a quarter of the internet runs it still when there are faster and more secure alternatives out there.

When WP was created, their options were PHP or Perl. PHP was by far the hottest thing back then, so what they actually did was use the hot tech of the day and made it work. The reason PHP is supported everywhere is for the same reason; back then it was PHP or Perl via CGI. Python was added later and was also supported EVERYWHERE.

Our main workflow involved using Yeoman, Grunt, NPM, wp (the wordpress command line tool) and vagrant. Locally, we'd run vagrant just so we don't have to monkey around with environment issues (too much). Yeoman, grunt, npm and wp were used in tandem to script the creation of a new wordpress install, install any dependencies needed, run any tools needed through grunt (like sass and JS minifiers), and pull plugins and themes from their separate git repositories. We still had to import the database by hand, though, when setting up our environment as well as add lines to wp-config for however we wanted to handle debugging.

Then we'd write code and check it in via git as with any other project. If you were working on frontend anything (html,css,js) you either ran grunt all the damned time or ran grunt watch. Those of us who had a hard time with the unique programming requirements of wordpress (escaping, sanitizing, formatting) used phpcs to automate that.

As for deployment, we'd just go through the same setup on the server that we do locally. Updates were pushed via git.

The fundamental problem my company runs into with WP is that only a theme can be meaningfully checked into version control. Everything else, including installation of plugins is coupled with entries in the database.

That wasn't my experience. We separated functional features into separate plugins (so they could be disabled or enabled on a site by site basis) and had no problem using version control with them. In fact, one project had some government security problems and required each plugin to be in its own repo. I wouldn't suggest that, but it works.

the database also includes changes necessarily made on the production instance, like comments to blog posts

That was something I found aggravating that was never really addressed at the company I worked at. When new people were brought on to a project, they'd get a mysql dump of the staging environment. After that, as new features were added, you were responsible for adding your own test data to see if those features worked. As for production, the changes made that were specific to the production database were made manually in production. When a new plugin was pushed, you had to log into the production instances manually and turn the new plugin on. Luckily, there are hooks you can use to automate any setup or teardown of plugins when they get turned on and off respectively.

Something else to keep in mind: speaking from a place of authority might help as well. On this matter, you have a serious disadvantage. An anonymous person on the internet will never be able to convince most people that NASA is wrong about space. Unless you're literally a rocket science and can prove you're an expert in the field, most people will believe NASA because they trust NASA.

As for the brain damage scare, it'll pass. Soccer went through it a few years ago[0]. As for the concept of social stigma for playing football, I laugh. If you actually think a concussion scare 'all of a sudden' is going to sway communities with dozens of years of entrenched culture, you're living in a bubble.

[0]: high school soccer teams suffer more concussions than high school football teams do.

Football is also a good way to teach strategy. Unlike other sports where plays are limited due to the ongoing, chaotic nature of most sports, football stops after every play. You can sweep, pass, run up the middle, screen, option, etc. There are lots of options that may or may not work from one team to the next. You have to take a lot into account when coming up with a game plan, including the specific team you're playing. It's why coaches are so obsessive about going over game tapes. As my coach liked to point out, football is the only sport where you need an entire week to prepare between games.

And before everybody jumps on me about 'you can learn these lessons elsewhere/through video games', yes, they probably can. That doesn't negate the benefits kids get from playing football. I won't mention the health benefits you get because you get those from playing (just about) any sport.

Also, a funny anecdote, I only played 2 years of high school football before bailing. I played for 6 years for an independent organization called 'Pop Warner Football'. My coach for pop warner was an entrepreneur who owned and ran three concrete companies in three separate counties. He coached only because his son was playing. My high school coach had no idea what he was doing, which is why I didn't play my senior year.

If high school football got banned, I imagine Pop Warner will step in and pick up the slack, if they haven't already. Back when I stopped playing in the 90's, they had already expanded their program to compete with the Junior Varsity program. That's what I mean about football having too much support in the community. If the insurance premiums and lawsuits increase, they'll just have another bake sale.

To the extent that fans replace football with another sport (instead of meth or oxy)

Yeah, shame.