Surely the greater good would be dubbing in Mandarin, rather than English subtitles.

An unfunded mandate is entirely punitive. If we as a society valued it, we'd be paying for it.

This company isn't offering voting rights nor planning dividends. What's the benefit of owning shares, other than trying to choose the right moment to sell them to other speculators?

The benefit is that you might receive dividends later on, after a period of revenue growth.

Granted, it'll be years if not decades before SNAP pays a dividend, if it succeeds at all. But on the flip side, SNAP's future dividends could turn out to be worth much more than the current price, even after discounting for risk and the opportunity cost of your capital.

It's a kind of tragedy of the commons. If two languages are basically equivalent yet incompatible, neither of the authors did something wrong, but it's a shame about the missed opportunities and problems that didn't need to happen.

What missed opportunity? There is little reason to suppose someone that got motivated to create language A would have spent their time on language B if only they hadn't got involved in creating A. They could have spent that time learning to play chess or fishing.

Reading and writing CPP macros is awful, but it's still not as bad as reading and writing the mind-numbing boilerplate that they replace.

If you can't build and deploy your own system without a piece of code, you should not be relying on the goodwill of any third party to keep it available for you with no SLA. A good build system is a deterministic function of its input (a commit from your repo) and can run offline.

Why do that? If your screening test says they're both qualified, interview them both. Hire them both if you possibly can.

You don't have one "your screening test" in that scenario, you have two.

What happens when your production system blows up at 3 AM? Does your team have a list of who can and can't be expected to assist?

Lots of good vendors offer free trials or guarantees without it harming their reputation. In fact most customers object to shouldering all the risk.

I wouldn't hire a frontend-only guy instead of a qualified developer, for the same reason I wouldn't hire a guy who can only mount wall outlets instead of a qualified electrician. Everything he didn't care enough to learn is a risk.