Are you kidding? So what if he's an engineer? The guy's a lunatic and this is nothing more than some weird publicity stunt. It's a cry for attention, nothing more. This whole race has become a circus.

you guys need to take things a little bit less seriously.. leojg was using the "Trust Me, I'm an Engineer" meme http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/trust-me-im-an-engineer

yeah... but it seems that HN users lack of sense of humor :(

Sure, because this article is the most serious in the world... and all the HN post are extreamly serious... come on dude, re read yourself, you are talking about "normals" what are you, some kind of godlike being?

Humor is not intellectually stimulating, and has been optimized away in favor of elitist posturing. Memes are for the normals on Reddit. Hacker News is serious business.

Nah, HN is totally fine with humor. But it has to actually be funny.

Unfortunately, for unfunny people, it's easy to confuse this with "no humor allowed."

Not quite. I think that HN is such a diverse group, its hard to tell sarcasm from a straight answer. Especially in a text forum. So its darned confusing.

I'd say both. There's lots of sarcasm that gets missed, and also lots of unfunny attempts at humor that are obvious in their nature.

id rather have a lunatic engineer than a lunatic politician, but that's just me.

"This whole race has become a circus"

>has become

Engineers think we need an Engineer for leader. Businessmen, a businessman. Soldiers want a soldier king. And so on.

What do we really need for a leader? A leader. A consensus builder. A decision maker. And inspiration.

Eventually we'll realize, we don't need leaders. At least, not leaders who stand above us and make decisions. Inspiration is fine.

Except in times of war (and even then), you really want someone who gets out of the way. Things run themselves pretty well.

What is it about engineers that make you think they are generally qualified to lead a country?

The entire politbyro of PRC is made of engineers. Xi Jinping is chemical engineer, for example.

They seem to be way more competent running their country than bunch of lawyers ru(i)nning US.

Yea... the Chinese stock market is doing so great right now.

Stock markets go up and down, so what? Governments can only do so much to keep the economy positive. The real problem with China is repression of its citizens and the complete lack of protections and "safety nets" that is taken for granted in civilized western nations. I don't think that has anything to do with leadership being engineer-heavy rather than lawyer-heavy.

Yup and their human rights and pollution records are excellent, too :) </s>

People forget that civic leadership is a requirement for running a country. Just like managers have to "herd cats," politicians have to herd a more diverse group of roles. I'm not trying to garnish sympathy for politicians, I just want to point out that their requirements are not easily translated from any one field, such as real estate, engineering, business leadership, chemistry, etc.

Also, their decisions are constantly compromises. Most people cringe when they have to compromise b/t two things such as cost and quality. Politicians typically compromise b/t about ten things like: legacy, human rights, quality of life, cost, reputation, longevity, state of relationships at local, county, state, region, national and international level, etc, etc. They even have to compromise against themselves in order to stay in power. It would make me completely ill to have nearly all of my decisions play out with a near 10% net efficiency :)

guys, come on, its gonna be fun as hell