> "...you can't just wreck people's lives for a living and expect no consequences..."
Considering how many people have had their identities stolen and suffered considerable financial damage thanks to sloppy programming and IT practices, I really would not cheer on the pursuit of that line of thought if I were you. The software industry is not exactly loved by the public right now.
That the Democrats lost by a slim margin would not be a landslide if the opposing candidate were an ordinary career politician. That the Democrats lost by a slim margin against one of the most openly unstable and corrupt individuals, never mind his political views, ever to hold high office is what makes it a landslide repudiation of the Democrats.
The Democratic Party's constituency ought to be protesting and doing sit-ins at the offices of the Democratic Party leadership demanding change and accountability with the same fervor they've had in the past protests. Instead, what I expect is impotent mumbling about "voting against their best interests" and accusations about various -isms (lots of luck getting the public to vote when you're calling them nasty names all the time) as they march onward to another loss in 2028.
Democrats generally run on a platform of competent, centrist government. And they generally lose.
They won when they ran a remarkable orator with a short track record, and they were disappointed when he also gave them competent, centrist government. They won when they ran against a man who was in the process of screwing up a crisis, but now that the crisis has been handled, he's back.
The American left wants what the American right gets: a flamboyant demagogue who makes absurd promises that he cannot deliver. They demand change, so we might as well give it to them.
* End all American support for Israel
* Immediately cancel all student loans
* Halve the US military, and put the money into a Universal Basic Income
* Tax billionaires at 50%, and multi-billionaires at 90%
* Bans on fossil fuels and plastics
These all seem like bad ideas to me, but I've got a choice: these bad ideas, or the active harassment of the Republicans. So my best option would be to vote for these candidates, then hope that none of these policies can actually be implemented, or in dramatically reduced form.
At this point that may not actually be necessary. Right now there is a very good chance that Democrats will win in 2028 for the same reason they won in 2008: a failing economy and an obvious incompetent in office. And it's possible that by 2032, demographics will have shifted substantially.
Still, I think that this is the route they need to take. Might as well pander to the left and hope that the result is somehow a sensible policy. Because the idea of offering reasonable government just doesn't get people excited.
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Yes, they'll be able grasp the beauty of Les Misérables or The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire so long as it is fed to them as a stream of <280 character tweets, dohohoho.
Mr. Munroe is falling victim to the unfortunate phenomenon where people believe their popularity means that their opinions outside of their areas of expertise are well-informed. Whether they can spell better or not, minds weaned on little chunks of text laced with memes and emoji are going to struggle with chapters, let alone full books.
Given the comic is an echo of conversations like this, I think perhaps that if he is guilty of that then so too are you and I and all others here.
Myself, I say that to equate the modern proclivity for tweets with a degradation of intellectual rigor is as fallacious as imagining that the concise elegance of Tacitus foretold a dulling of Roman wit. Or something like that.
Will they (kids these days) like the style of old classics? Of course not, just as few native english speakers alive today wish to speak (or write) in the style of Shakespeare — breaking a long thing up into tweet-sized chunks, that is simply style, no more relevant than choice of paragraph or sentence length.
But to dismiss a generation’s capacity for engagement with monumental works (be they Les Mis, The Decline and Fall etc., Shakespeare, Dickens, or any other) on the basis of their chosen tools of communication betrays not only an ignorance of how often communication has changed so far — when Edward Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall, literacy in the UK was somehere around the 50% mark, but still the illiterates could watch plays and listen to tales — but also modern attention spans when we also have binge-watching of entire series of shows as a relatable get-to-know-you-better topic on dating apps.
I mean, I'm pretty sure that more people have read Sam Pepys in the last 15 years than in the previous few hundred, due to https://www.pepysdiary.com (it's a bot that tweets Pepys' Diary in real time; no longer available on Twitter due to API changes, but it's still on RSS, Mastodon and Bluesky. It's on its third run through the diaries).
> "More than any other profession, many of us - as software developers, mathematicians, scientists - have a better grasp of complex systems."
Having read various opinions expressed on HN about politics, history, physics, medicine, and so forth, I'm pretty sure that we don't. Coding is not that difficult and many here are quick to say that they learned nothing of use to them in college.
Not particularly powerful and it's unclear that any amount of engineering can make it deliver more power to each round while still keeping it man-portable.
Hello, I am making a new account, for my business, yes. Do you have some sort of personal vendetta?
edit: wonder who voted this comment down. I would encourage you to make a product and serve customers, rather than freelance "moderating" HN in your leisure hours.
Tech is bigger than just coders. Electrical engineers have not had the cornucopia of job-hopping opportunities that web developers have enjoyed over the past couple of decades.
Considering how many people have had their identities stolen and suffered considerable financial damage thanks to sloppy programming and IT practices, I really would not cheer on the pursuit of that line of thought if I were you. The software industry is not exactly loved by the public right now.
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