ataturk

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.

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.

My observations are as follows:

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.

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).

Seems like everyone "knows a guy" that does that but when I attempted the same thing it failed miserably. I took a paltry three months off and then every recruiter and hiring manager was immediately suspicious of me when I started going on interviews again. They all suspected I was in jail or something. Meanwhile, I literally just took three months to catch up on my life.

In my current role, I could probably work 3 days a week and meet my same obligations. Our scrum master could be fired and nobody would even notice.

There was a fair bit of teetotaling going on in the late 1800s, but I think they probably just got sick and tired of high assholes running all over, dangerously operating heavy machinery, crashing their carts, and falling off their horses. Oh, and a father who is drunk/stoned all the time isn't much good to a family.

We're going to re-learn all those lessons all over again.

Not just Mexico, but also countries in Africa with very sophisticated production facilities.

But I have to go begging for working cold medicine.

Sure, except the bill rate for my services hasn't changed since like 1998. It sucks, dude.

Reading through the comments, people already said it all, but I came back to vent. After 20 years in this shitty business I can vent if I want to.

I currently work in the US Midwest with a lot of foreign colleagues. They're pretty good people, OVERALL, but the ones that aren't are super-shitty, but that's true of the pastey-white native born Americans, too. But when the going gets tough, and when you need to be creative, the folks from, let's call it "that other place" just don't have any solutions.

Many of the people I work with wait for me to build a solution, then they literally copy and paste it into their project whether or not the design suitably fits their problem. A lot of projects here are a mess because of this "square peg in round hole" behavior. Worse, many of those guys get promoted above their mental capacity and now they're calling the shots and making horrific decisions because they networked with each other and shut out the truly competent people. This is the tippy top of the Fortune 500 here I'm talking about, btw. This is not some Mom & Pop podunk shop and the stakes are high. And so if this constitutes "best and brightest" we're in deep doodoo.

What you describe is exactly the problem I have with index funds. I manage a decent amount of money through Vanguard. The index funds in my portfolio fell less and recovered sooner, but at the cost of raw gains. The managed funds I have basically fell apart because apparently the fund managers are idiots who didn't even try to keep up with market trends. I do expect those to recover quickly and have some decent gains again, but we'll see. More risk, more reward. 2019 better be good for the premium I'm paying.

I noticed awhile back that a lot of my funds were very Apple heavy, and so not as well diversified as I would have hoped (index funds included). They disclose this, mind you, but you have to read what you are buying. Anyways, I moved more money towards international and mid-caps to try and offset risk. Index funds have a way of being frustratingly constrained. It's not a silver bullet is all I'm saying.

Don't get me started on bond funds. Total, total crap the last few years. REITs same way.

The only really decently reliable returns I have gotten were from my own portfolio of stocks (not a fund) and some high-dividend yield funds. But even dividend paying stocks nosedived last quarter (Q4 2018), which I attribute directly to the FEDERAL RESERVE and its fuckery with the funds rate.

Everything is manipulated one way or another, never forget that. It's hard to be a small investor with others moving billions around all the time.

If you're still reading, I ditched a lot of bond funds in 2018 and went towards shorter term individually purchased bonds and even brokered CDs until interest rates settle back down.

Vanguard's bond funds are just kind of trash and don't do what they are purported to do for your portfolio which is try to solve the ever-elusive correlation problem. Many times, I've watched bond funds move in lockstep with equities because the Fed is king. Not a safe haven during a big drop, just smaller losses?

The people on Bogleheads will hate me for saying this stuff. If you're new to investing or naive or don't care, just do a 2-fund portfolio with total stock and total bond and call it a day. There.

RIP John.

That whole thing was so stupid, though. A tempest in a teapot. US emissions regs are ridiculous and gaming them was the last possible outcome. The US brought this on itself as we always do, but it was more enterprising to blame the people tasked with pleasing both their corporate overlords and the regulators, a Faustian situation.

While I am against cheating, of course, I have to think that having all those cars junked just due to that scandal was a far bigger waste and far worse for the environment.

Not sure why downvoted. While I object to "everything I don't like is racist" bullshit, this one is actually true--unions are not only xenophibic, by misogynistic. The union my Dad was a member of bragged about how it ran women out, usually via overt sexual harassment.

Everyone thinks unions are some great system but they suck in actual practice. The absolutely suck--it's just more egos and personalities in the way of you making a living. The best thing about tech is the low barriers to entry--that is populist, not unions. If you are good you succeed, if you are not good, you become an architect or a manager or leave.

The state of Illinois, the state of California, probably most other states, too, all in the same bad situation. If you look at the budgets for school districts, same thing--a lot of $$$ going to pension obligations, starving the rest of the organization. Our taxes keep going up, but no level of tax can fill this void. Pensions were pretty much a ponzi, they spent the money and what they invested failed to perform as projected.

Every city, county, local municipality, and school district over-promised on pensions while underpaying salaries.

Well I'm glad somebody does! Regular people are losing big time here--facial recognition tech has a huge false positive rate, and probably a ridiculous false negative, rate, too. It's junk, but they keep pushing and pushing for it like it is some miracle tech.

I always thought the weird face makeup in those dystopian sci-fi films like Johnny Mnemonic were just there to make the street hacker type characters look edgy, but in fact, even back in the '70s and '80s, the authors were on to something.

People have choices. You don't have to be a beat down slave all your life. You can revolt. It's just that the will to revolt hasn't risen in recent times. But it would be interesting to see it happen again because I simply can't see how contemporary culture can continue a whole lot longer.

What I basically found out trying to "retire early" is that there are the "high" paying career jobs in offices and everything else is $10-$15/hr. crap work. There is barely anything in between, mirroring what is happening to the middle class--it is being hollowed out so that there will only be rich and poor and nothing else. Places like Mexico are already like this. It is sad and completely avoidable, but oligarchs and autocrats don't want it that way.

So revolution it will be. Only a matter of time and hunger.

Just because WaPo and NYT are more verbose doesn't mean what they are feeding you isn't lies you know.

Which of Trump's tweets do you take issue with? That the Mueller investigation is a witch hunt (it is)? That FBI agents were used to infiltrate Trump's campaign in an attempt to submarine it (they were)? That all of this behavior was highly illegal (it is). That foreign spy apparatus (5 Eyes) was engaged to spy in the Trump campaign (it was)? That anyone who colluded with 5 Eyes committed treason in doing so? This is what is really at stake, this is really what took place.

And oh, by the way, I would really like to know who murdered Seth Rich and how his attempted leaks about the shenanigans by the DNC got him killed, because you know, that guy was a hero to bringing to light that corruption. Which, by the way, NOTHING has been done about.

What is most disturbing about everything going on right now is how muddied the waters are and it is the MSM doing the muddying. Journalism has failed us. If you can't see that, you are part of the problem. The media needs to follow the story wherever it goes, even if it implicates their friends and colleagues. If they don't, our next step is an uprising to right this ship.

Exactly--I don't care if people downvote me because I understand a lot of my opinions are unpopular. But I think as a marketplace of ideas, the Internet exists to help open minds and tear down foregone conclusions. I like to think I am helping that process along.

I understand that young people, especially those brought up by disgusting leftist indoctrination, may be reviled at many of my ideas. In my defense, I've lived long enough to know how those policies are ultimately destructive (see: Detroit) and have been paying taxes and listening to mountains of bullshit excuses from politicians for decades now, so I have experience with the passel of nonsense that serves as public discourse these days. I'm sure they'll perfect their idiotic ideas any day now, though.

Open your minds, dare to live free(r) and stop being a pussy about everything!

What does concern me is the rampant censorship these days, though. It's one thing to downvote, quite another to delete and pretend nobody has a different viewpoint than your fragile, nonsensical one.

I spent my 20s getting a PhD. I don't think I've ever gotten the most out of my degree professionally, but as a way to spend one ones 20s, it wasn't too bad. I never had more than about $10K to my name until sometime in my 30s. Having a career in tech certainly helped--I took very few loans, but the ones I did have were paid off within five years of exiting academia and smartening up about my career.

I just wish I had gotten patents for the things I worked on in grad school, even if those patents belonged to the university.

These days I strongly advise young people to just get a bachelors and forget the rest unless it's required (e.g. for teaching).

"Elbow grease" isn't going to fix major structural or infrastructural issues. I'm sure you were being funny, but most of those structures are tear downs.

Yes, but it is upgradeable again, so Apple listened a little to us raising a stink about it.

I'm teaching it to my kids already:

Lesson #1: Everything you see, hear, or read is someone else's agenda.

I don't buy it. Facial recognition has had as many failures as successes, probably more because we only hear about the times it works, not all the times it fails. It seems like it is something ridiculously easy to fool. I know you all love fancy tech, but there are and will be amazingly low-tech ways to defeat these systems.

As far as developing profiles of every living person with a goal of knowing which ones will become spies, all I can say is good luck with that! Spies have been recruited from all walks of life, it cuts across all socioeconomic strata and all personality types. There isn't just a James Bond Type A personality type that becomes a spy and to think that betrays how little you have thought about this subject.

Also, probably every person from China who comes to the US has been evaluated as an asset and may or may not be one, so figure 100% potential there.

We are living in another "Gilded Age" whether we realize it or not.

And when populations hit a tipping point, the elite will start a big war to thin out a few hundred million people or maybe 3-4 billion this time.

It is the same as it ever was.

Google, Facebook, and all the other big tech companies could have helped liberate humanity--we were talking about privacy and open government in the late 1990s. It was all set to be implemented, then 9/11 happened and a new Iron Curtain fell on the US. All by design by those who can't allow the rabble to have any true freedom.

When I look at what Google and the others have become now, I just feel ill--this is a major power play where they are aiding and abetting outright tyranny in China and will happily aid and abet the same crimes in the West as long as it suits their goal of power consolidation. Worse, they are now aligned with the far left, which makes utterly no sense except from a "gaining total domination" mindset. It's sick. The left is not "for the people." Show me one historical example! That talk was always a false front for naked brutality.

Before you downvote me, realize what is at stake here. Read some damn history books and come to understand what happened to the Greeks and the Romans and why.

Does no one else find it deeply distressing that all our tech has been so completely co-opted by outside agents? How can we live this lie that we are free while every day we see how we are controlled and watched?

This whole bull market was built not on growth but on stock buybacks by the companies themselves, using free money printed by the Fed. There has not been any real growth.

I hate to sound gloomy, but the more I look around, the more I see the swindle, the bezzle, and the veneer rather than real value and real wealth creation. I also see a lot of cheapening of formerly great products--Macbook Pro newer models come immediately to mind. But of course, hardly the only example!

The Fed operates on a razor thin ledge and is right to be putting rates back to normal levels vs. the 0.01% or whatever we dropped to--they were even working on how to operate at negative rates, and some bonds (Swiss?) actually paid negative coupons for awhile. Maybe they still do?

Anyhow, I am in favor of reasonable interest rates because that is a major lever that controls price inflation. People think very one-dimensionally about interest rates, as in, how much they are paying to maintain their ridiculous debt loads. Me, on the other hand, I have no such debts to pay off. Freedom is not being a debt slave, being able to walk away from any job at any moment and not suffer a bit for it.

I would like to see banks pay savings interest rates again. They cranked them down very fast, but have never restored them to anywhere close to where they should be right now. My checking account pays a paltry .25%, my bank acct, maybe .7%. Meanwhile, even 3-months CDs are in the 2-2.5% range right now and longer term CD rates are halfway decent again. Long term T-Bonds are up around 3%. You can find Munis and other riskier bonds with decent coupons as wells.