freerobots

This is why I'm skeptical of claims that Putin won't get what he wants here. The West is politically incapable of rallying people to do the right thing if it comes at any degradation to their livelihoods. US/EU banks still want their bonds paid and US oil companies don't want Russia seizing their investments. The incumbent party, especially in an election year, doesn't want any more economic risk, and the donor class won't stand for any losses.

I would prefer that China plays a more active role in resolving the situation so I sort of hate to play devil's advocate here but...

The missile defense systems we deployed in SK could be used to track Chinese missiles. My point was imagine the outcry from the US if we perceived that the Chinese were tracking our missiles under the guise of tracking Mexico's.

That the US is taking advantage of the NK situation to "ring China".

I consider NK to be a serious threat to the US and her allies but I think the Chinese do not consider NK to be a serious threat to the Chinese.

Imagine if Cuba decided to start allowing Chinese anti-missile defense systems at the US' doorstep because we weren't willing to deal with our ally Mexico regarding a conflict that didn't threat us.

I think you hit the nail on the head.

Mandatory spending was 65% of our budget last year the majority of which goes to healthcare, pensions, and social security. Defense was over half of our discretionary spending. I'm hopeful that the US could make changes in defense spending but healthcare and pensions will screw us and it will be our own fault.

The second you open a conversation with "We are going to reform pensions" or "We are going to guide health access in medicare" politicians have stepped on too many voters' toes and the system falls apart.

If the US adopted a policy for medicare similar to the UK's NICE it would be derided as "death panels".

I think we all want an easy ride and regrettably the people who will end up paying for it are going to be the people with little to no say.

Supporting your opinion the BLS puts the job outlook of a programmer at -8% between 2014 and 2024.

I hold the same opinion as you. I think that new languages and tooling will empower people to do more with less while being easier to learn. Combine this with globalization plus stagnating economies and the outlook of programming as a career seems less lucrative.

I go back and forth between your perspective and the previous posters perspective. In terms of the scope of the universe my behavior is impact-less but as I limit scope my impact grows.

I prefer this perspective because it avoids self importance - an attribute that in my opinion does more harm than good.

It is odd how people are pretending everyone has the same health goals. Some people need extra calories most of us do not. Don't want too many calories or sugars? Order an egg mcmuffin with no muffin.

Both of my dogs have the Whistle GPS. Whistle was originally only a fitness tracker. Last year they acquired the company Tagg which was exclusively GPS for dogs. After the acquisition, Whistle redeveloped the app and the underlying tracking service. Many Tagg users (myself included) felt like Whistle made the GPS capabilities worse at the expense of fitness tracking and social features.

In my opinion the criticism is valid. Whistle solved a dumb problem (fitness tracking for dogs) and made a dog GPS service worse.