Predicament? A regular Joe beat a career politician for local representative. In what world is that a predicament?
Or are you so completely partisan that having an R next to his name makes him obviously the wrong choice, even though he was liberal enough to be palatable to New Jersey voters (not exactly a paragon of conservatism)?
Reality creates scarcity. The "current system" produces a modern society with so much abundance that people like you have forgotten that scarcity of everything is the natural state and the "system" is responsible for artificial ABUNDANCE, not scarcity.
Yes, there are edge cases like intellectual property but "no economy please" is the kind of thing someone who is completely ignorant to the nature of reality would say.
Can you explain what you mean by "the natural state"? Your argument assumes an understanding of what that is, but the picture I have in my mind when I read that phrase is not scarcity of everything.
Imagine waking up in a forest with your tribe. One of your cousins has an infected foot after stepping on a branch a few days before and it is known that he will soon die in agony. Everyone is hungry and there is nothing to eat, so you prepare hunting and foraging parties and hope that you will find food before starving to death.
A dystopia with fewer people in poverty than ever, and the ability to communicate instantly with people around the globe, while we wander to the supermarket and buy plentiful food sourced from all over the world at prices normal people can afford, to go home and sit in climate controlled homes and entertain ourselves with endless games and have our housework eased by machines that wash our clothes and dishes with water that flows freely into our homes and doesn't need to be fetched, and we choose when our next child will be born
A dystopia where the White House was stormed and 703,000 Americans are dead from Covid while 56% of the population is fully vaccinated. A dystopia where the world seems more divided than ever, and I attribute a very large portion of the blame on the tech giants that are profiting from human misery.
The world is more connected than ever before. White house getting stormed by unarmed protestors is much better world then presidents getting shot (and dying) like what happened in the 80s, 60s.
Global warning may feel hopeless but compare that to the threat of ozone layer disappearing or acid rain or..
Covid has kill 700+ h1n1 killed 575+. wwi+ii millions
People are so much safer and less likely to die but we have so much more media so we invent things to be scared of because people want you to pay attention to their ads.
i) facebook has not contributed an iota to the consumerist utopia you seem to cherish. it is the result of a long period of scientific / technological development. communicating instantly with people around the globe can be done perfectly well with, e.g. Signal. you do not need the apparatus of surveillance capitalism to deliver it.
ii) said consumerist utopia is neither available to large fractions of humanity, nor is it environmentally sustainable for those who currently enjoy it beyond a few more decades
More fundamentally, if we do not develop "social media" that are trully social: actually promote global mutual understanding, support fact based consensus, promote the genuine empowerment of individuals instead of exploiting and aggravating their ignorance etc. many of the real gains and progress (<ref>Hans Rosling</ref>) achieved in the past century will be squandered, never to return
Facebook hasn't contributed one iota? Facebook has contributed an immense amount to the developer community, small businesses and literally everyone else.
Free communication with almost any human on the planet: check. Advertise alongside industry incumbents with any ad budget: check. Oh yeah and React, React Native, GraphQL, pyTorch, and a whole lot more.
"Free communication" in... exchange for personal data. But thats a price that is invisible to fanboys. Exploiting those who either can't understand or who can't afford the tiny cost of communicating with data privacy.
As for small businesses, its walled garden simply cannibalized their earlier websites and made every small trader dependent upon opaque and arbitrary discovery algorithms that can wipe them out without warning.
The open source projects you mention have multiple alternatives, many from genuine community projects that will sustain irrespective of a corporate sponsor.
> they have a problem with racism and sexism? Which would have been unusual because it was a lefty place.
I'm sorry but the critical theories of gender are incredibly sexist, especially towards mothers, so I would personally expect a "lefty" place to be all about erasing biological womanhood, which personally I view as incredibly sexist.
In addition, EPA rules made it impossible to build sedans and wagons with the performance desired by consumers, which is what caused the death of the station wagon and the birth of the SUV, which according to the EPA is a light truck and is subject to different emissions rules.
Now everybody with three or more kids is practically required to buy a van or SUV because you can almost never fit three car seats in the backseat of an EPA approved sedan.
So families buy larger vehicles, which have the problem described above, and the EPA doesn't even succeed at regulating the market
> In addition, EPA rules made it impossible to build sedans and wagons with the performance desired by consumers,
To elaborate, current CAFE standards have a gap where station wagons used to be, that basically makes it impossible to make a modern station wagon. By declaring SUVs as light trucks, they aren't impacted by the same rules as a station wagon would be.
tl;dr light weight high volume cars are literally not legal to make[0] and [1] unless tiny little baby engines are put in which would put these cars down market.
I'm hoping moving to EVs resolve this entire issue.
I'm also hoping that EVs encourage a bigger reinvestment in alternative form factors like the station wagon/estate car/shooting brake. So far most of the manufacturers of EVs are sticking to existing truck/SUV trends playing it safe, but now that enough of the major manufacturers are using standardized platforms where they can easily play with the form factor above the "skateboard" core we'll start seeing more EV diversity than ever before sooner rather than later.
(VW Group has an EV station wagon Porsche now [a variant of the Taycan EV], and that's probably wildly out of most family's budgets, but if VW Group is playing with that on the MEB at the luxury end, hopefully that means they are already considering how to play with that on the low end as well.)
> There are plenty of less stressful work environments in technology that will pay someone a decent salary and will be much less demanding.
There are?! Could you list some examples? I would take a pay cut for fewer responsibilities if I could stay in tech and if it didn't pay like thirty grand, which is what you will make in support.
How do I transition from a high stress high pay software engineer to a medium pay low stress other kind of technology worker like you have described???
Go work for some bigco that is coasting on a great market position of a SaaS project and you can definitely find software jobs where you can work about 30hrs a week, make around 130-180k a year, and chill hard.
Only problem is that after a while you'll get really complacent and your skills may suffer. If there are layoffs and you have to find another job, you might be in trouble.
You shouldn't worry about falling out of the technology rat race. Everyone's stack is different, you would be lucky to time learning a technology with a particular job opportunity that is using it. You may as well just research it the weekend before the interview and be upfront about your ability to learn it.
You can't know every technology and in 5 years you will probably be applying for jobs with tech that doesn't even exist yet.
I'm not at all talking about knowing the latest tech when I say your skills may suffer. I'm just saying that in my experience, sometimes in a chill job your fundamentals as a developer can suffer. You can literally get worse at programming if you aren't challenged.
However, if you are an internally motivated and driven person, you can take that extra time and energy you get from the chill job and learn all kinds of things and become a much better engineer. The situation is whatever you make of it.
Well I think my skills suffer more because of work: after a day of "being productive" at work, I no longer have the time and energy to explore and learn new stuff, which is how I gained and expanded my skills in the first place.
Yes, the extra time you get from the chill job can go either way. It's whatever you make of it. If you use the time to learn, you can definitely learn more at a chill job than at a hard job.
In certain parts of governments, non-profits and academia, can be found jobs which both (a) have lower stress / better work life balance, and (b) use innovative tech which keeps one's skills sharp and up to date. These jobs don't typically pay amazingly, but sometimes have a good pension plan, and the option is always there to go back to well-paid higher stress workplace later to fix finances if required....
> How do I transition from a high stress high pay software engineer to a medium pay low stress other kind of technology worker like you have described???
Work literally _anywhere else_ but Sillicon Valley. These jobs are aplenty; they are probably at least 2/3 of all programmer jobs everywhere.
I've only actually worked for one company (1/5) that emphasized productivity and graded people on it. My default answer would be most of them. I would say the majority of tech companies are work/life oriented, especially compared to other industries.
Software Engineers and Data Engineers have one of the best leverage positions in the work force. If you don't like your current employer's practices, find another one.
I don't think working support is less stress, just less pay.
And I think many people think working 40 hours a week counts as a good or decent work/life balance, which is frankly absurd, even if one is working from home or has no commute.
A 5X8 work week is still essentially living to work. Unfortunately it is often the minimum one can get away with.
> The anti-cancel-culture people make it sound like they are being horribly oppressed. But for what? The color of their skin?
At work last week, our "diversity and equity" team announced that our company is "obviously" not diverse enough.
This is a company in the US with employees across North America and Europe, with some employees in South America, Australia, India, and even Africa, and not just South Africa, either.
The company does have more employees in Europe and North America than elsewhere, and those employees share one thing in common: skin color. They do not share a nationality, a language, a cuisine, or a mindset.
The only possible interpretation of the D&I&E officer is that there is too much white skin at our company.
Is that horrible oppression? No, but it is racist and prejudiced AF and I would 100% lose my job of I said a single word.
Skin color is one of the characteristics that influences our lived experience, and a lot of companies are seeking a diversity of experiences in their staff and leadership. They may look around and feel like they have a significant diversity of backgrounds and experiences, but not in one particular and very important way. So they want to correct this.
I'll readily concede that many companies do this for image reasons alone, though I'm sure some do it out of a genuine belief that diversity can lead to better business outcomes, or create a more desirable workplace for attracting new talent. But in the end, this is the decision of a private company and they are not being coerced to make these decisions by any authority, nor does it sound like they are breaking any laws.
I'm fairly convinced that the pharmaceutical companies want Uncle Sam to buy and mandate 350 million shots per year and that's why the boosters are being pushed and combined with flu shots, while Dear Leader figures out the best way to dictate the health choices of his subjects without so much as first having Congress vote on it.
Oh, Fediblock! The list of based instances. It's amazing to me that the people who maintain these lists don't seem to realize that they're maintaining a useful directory for all the people they don't like to help them find places to congregate, meanwhile isolating them from more moderate influences.
>consider if someone is a proponent for privacy, but isn't sure if the're joining software created by activists they disagree with .. the folks behind Gab
Gab is a hilarious example because it is a non-federating fork of Mastodon.[0][1] This is especially noteworthy because the ActivityPub "Fediverse" is full of antipathy between camps of users who run Mastodon (more Left) and those who instead run Pleroma (more Right) to the point where you can predict a user's politics by the software their homeserver is running. Is this the future of FOSS that we want?
If you support the right of individuals to run social networks, and if you believe in libre software, you have to understand that sometimes people will use the tools you release for free to do things you disagree with.
An analogy: if you're a manufacturer of hammers, you have to accept that someone could use your hammer to commit a murder.
Or are you so completely partisan that having an R next to his name makes him obviously the wrong choice, even though he was liberal enough to be palatable to New Jersey voters (not exactly a paragon of conservatism)?