Not sure why the downvote when it is abundantly clear that in every corner of the USA there is this general trend towards decay with very little offsetting it. All our infrastructure is falling apart. I blame the pension crisis. All available monies are going towards pension obligations. Not much is left over for anything else.
All your comments are marked [dead] and hidden. I've 'vouch'ed for this one because there seems to be nothing obviously wrong with it (and selfishly because it agrees with me).
Am tired, just dead bones tired of all of it. It's all just this or that money making scheme with guys like me caught in the middle. I despised Waterfall, fell into scrum and in the past ten or so years kinda sorta saw one project where agile basically worked right. The rest has been mostly waste. I've worked on billion dollar systems on down to just little nothings. Doesn't matter, companies are struggling to make anything work. I think there's just too much complexity and they all believe IT solutions can manage that complexity. It's failing like never before while expectations have never been higher.
Message to the Fortune 500: Just get rid of anyone with the title "scrum master" they're dead weight. You were fooled, deal with it. I am trying to move my team over to Kanban right now, but we have all this reporting crap up the chain all designed around CA Rally, the worst productivity tool ever made.
I wouldn't say "let things go" but let's face facts: The US has bases all over the world. We occupy dozens of countries for nebulous reasons. If global security is that fragile, when is it ever going to not be?
My second thought is that the US MIC is out for itself. It would be one thing if we had a defense system like the Swiss which I look at as pretty sensibly invested civil defense infrastructure (which, btw, the Swiss are rapidly losing as they forget the lessons of the past). Instead, we spend billions on expensive, fancy technical weapons systems that don't necessarily measure up. For example, the Littoral Combat Ship that has an aluminum hull that cracks in cold water. Or the F35 which has to be one of the biggest aeronautical boondoggles in history. We just keep pouring billions down rat holes because of corporatism. I currently work in the health insurance biz and it's the same tune--billions going in all kinds of odd directions in order to make money but outcomes haven't changed or have gotten worse. But our stock price is great!
Watch Louis Rossman on YT, he pokes his finger in Apple's eye constantly.
What's most unfortunate is that millions of professionals want and need solid computers to do their work on. This is why we went to Apple from the horrible PC experience. Both Windows and the laptops from Dell and IBM weren't holding up because "made in China." Now Apple has chintzed out in a big way.
I'm typing this from a 2018MBP. The keyboard sucks, I barely use it. My company has hundreds of these in service and the failure rate of keyboards is quite high. One of my colleagues is on his 3rd unit in just under a year and we quip that he should torture test these things for Apple. Have seen numerous motherboard failures, odd issues with the screens, and a couple of bricked units. The battery thing has not happened to anyone I know personally.
I have had zero problems with this current one, but a 2016 model I had in 2017 had to be repaired, it just completely died.
The dongles are a plague. I have one attached to the back of my screen with velcro so that when I go to meetings I can hook up to the A/V equipment without having to run back across the building to get the damn part that should just be part of the whole computer.
TV was very mysterious back then. I would not see most of the episodes in a series as I had no way to record anything nor any idea when they were on besides having a TV Guide (which we never bought) or the local newspaper tv listings which got thrown out more often than not. TV was more of a random access experience back then. You got what you got. Saturday mornings were pretty awesome as far as cartoons went, but in some ways they weren't--it felt like not a lot of thought or effort was put into that programming and it was mostly about toy commercials. I watched a shitload of Saturday morning cartoons. I would usually get up at 6am and watch the national anthem which played both verses, and then some goofy local show involving a very fat lady and her dog would come on and she would talk about local scene stuff that I had no idea about. After that wa PBA bowling (TV Tournament Time). Cartoons came on around 7:30 or 8am, I think, and ran until about 11am. Maybe bowling was after, can't recall.
For most people, especially kids, shows had no continuity at all. I remember trying to watch Robotech (re-runs?) in the mid '80s and once in awhile I'd see two episodes in a row that were in the correct order. Doctor Who was the same way except that was on PBS and often times I could see a couple in a row. Things didn't change until my parents got cable sometime around 1985 or so.
One more anectdote I'll share: My kids both loved Scooby Doo so we bought all the old episodes on DVD. What strikes me most about the cheap animation is how few characters there were in Scooby Doo. If the gang was walking in a town or an amusement park, there were almost no local color--no people at all. That gives the show a creepy, xenophobic vibe. The gang is always all alone in an alien landscape, sort of like they were transported into an alternate reality.
1) Vice.com, so it is automatically edgy, scant on actual facts and details, and often just completely wrong.
2) SV has a lot of people who work too damn much.
3) Not everyone in SV has "money" as in "Fuck you money" and for those who do, it should not be hard to purchase intimacy in some form.
4) All these cuddle parties, eye gazing, and what have you events are a poor substitute for actual intimacy (not that I am against holding them) in a loving relationship, which makes me think the substitution must mean something--people there are desperate for any human contact. We are PC-ing ourselves to death.
5) Every generation thinks they invented sex. This current go around is risk averse while attempting to appear edgy and yet at the end of the night, I'm sure there's the same hurt feelings and sense of rejection we all have had. It doesn't matter how inclusive everyone is, the hot chick is not going home with the fat, bald guy (unless he has #3).
By the way, I went to an engineering school, I know quite a bit about problems dating and how that all plays out. Seems like things are just a bit worse these days.
It doesn't matter. It didn't matter for all the people in East Germany the communists took away and tortured and often murdered. It certainly didn't matter in the Soviet Union, either. Your silence and self-censorship won't matter in the end. The Soviets often just targeted random people because it chilled dissent overall.
Silent or not, party member or not, you will be dragged from your home in the night and never seen again. This is the reality of what it was like.
So you might as well be brave and speak out against it because that's the only actual defense you have.
> Your silence and self-censorship won't matter in the end. <...>
> Your silence and self-censorship won't matter in the end.
Very true, but you cannot reasonably accuse me of that (read my posts carefully)! Few are as vocal and critical as I am about the subject.
In my original post I was suggesting that on SOME politically sensitive topics that it's stupid to fully speak one's mind about even though one can still do so; that is if one's views are well against the established orthodoxy. I don't have to spell out what those topics are, as everyone except those with room-temperature IQs are well aware of them.
This is not the case here about privacy and data theft by Google et al. I'm glad to say they're not off limits with governments yet (I hope not anyway—or I'm in big trouble). ;-)
Which billionaires came from "dirty poverty?" List them, please.
Extra credit: I'm a lowly millionaire, how do I get a seat on a Board of Directors? I have a PhD, 20+ years in the technology field. Am more than qualified for any kind of corporate governance role, etc.
I work in Big Data at a Fortune 10 company. We don't even do what you suggest. There is very little appetite for niche languages that are difficult to just hire for. For example, we have a ton of Scala code due to a misguided belief that Spark must use Scala because it was written in Scala. We can't even go to the market and find people who have used Scala before. It's all Java developers, and many (most?) are not very good developers. So then I say we need to train organically if we want to have good Scala (and Java) people in the organization. Oh man! You would think I took away their birthdays! Train people? Dear god, no!
It's all optics and bullshit. Scala is pretty easy to pick up, as is any programming language. The problem is you have to spend the time. Time for most people, me included, is extremely limited.
In some parallel universe, I'm sure Clojure is the #1 JVM language. It's great and Rich taught me so much about functional programming and many other things. But at the end of the day, Clojure here in this universe didn't take off and I'm not sacrificing my career to beat that drum anymore. I tried hard, I really did: 2013 & 2014 were the years that were make or break. The wave didn't crest. When the people maintaining the plugins to Eclipse faltered, it broke down hard. IDEA never had solid support, either. Then, when the support tooling faltered, it was really hard to make the case to management, especially when other asshole developers were arguing for their pet tools. Type safety, meh! I don't need it, never have... So I write Java Streams and it pisses me off every single fucking day.
There is nothing more to say than "if you can find a job doing Clojure you are extremely fortunate."
I'm glad you're still earning income from it. It was my favorite of the JVM alt-languages, but it just seemed to have died around 2015 with all the others.
I say "died" but I know that people still write in Scala and Groovy, but how many new projects are you seeing in those languages?
At one point I set out to find work doing Clojure, but not much turned up in my locale. I did one professional project at a former company and only got the green light for using Clojure because it was basically a throw-away in a couple years when a new business process was coming in anyways.
Good luck to you, but it's not a niche I would want to be in. You have to mold yourself to the market, not the other way around (usually).
I think 2015 was the year that Node started getting popular on the backend at the expense of some of the JVM technologies, but Clojure fortunately runs well on that platform too.
F# and Clojure are notably ranked as the highest paid languages for the past 2-3 years in a row. Trust me - market is shifting towards FP and Clojure one of the best choices.
I can easily speculate that not for the same reasons. F# and Clojure are the most payed languages because today they are the most used FP languages in fintech sector.
