ChemicalWarfare

>> Here is the hard thing to swallow: Some people are worth more than others.

I would add a qualifier here - "in some situations". As human beings per se we all are "worth" the same.

When acting in a specific capacity, however, your ability to perform in that capacity determines your objective worth in that role. And of course it's pretty obvious that some occupations are better suited for ppl with different abilities. Master programmer will (most likely)be a worthless pro running back and (most likely)vice versa.

The thing is - ppl are very accepting of the physical differences between individuals but contrary to what the article is saying - intellectual differences are way more of a taboo.

in some circles it is considered "cool" to be admixed or foreign. there's also a fair amount of virtue signaling attached to that as well.

how far of a distance before the line is drawn? by that logic chimps are also " a group of humans that genetically differ to an unexpected degree from modern humans."

>> We don’t describe speeders as “illegal drivers.”

that's not apples to apples. "illegal driver" would be someone who is breaking the law by the very fact of them driving - ppl with no DLs for example. same with illegal immigrants - they are breaking the law by the very fact of being present in the country they are not permitted to be in.

I'll just pick on the low hanging fruit here:

>> Conservative media does a very good job at keeping at least 50% of the country comically uninformed...

goes both ways depending on your "camp". it's funny though how this contradicts your point about US being "divided" since clearly this statement is as partisan as it gets.

>> The "American Dream" gives people the impression that working hard solves everything and that their country is the best in the world period

what's wrong with that exactly?

debit cards(not to be confused with bank cards) are closer to credit cards than ACH. in some cases - for example "signature debit" vs "pin debit" - just about identical from the flow perspective.

which is why you can use debit cards in most situations where you would use a credit card where instant check of funds availability and hold is required - e.g. hotel incidentals etc.

>> but has a delay for clearing...

not only is there an ODFI-clearing house - RDFI delay caused by the actual "clearing" process - the whole flow starting from the merchant->payment processor step is a sequence of nightly batches with cutoff times factored in to boot.

from the merchant perspective, however, ACH payment is cheaper to process than a credit card payment and is way less likely to end up in a chargeback.

>> Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency.

not really. it's a "...peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution..." according to Satoshi himself.

depends on your definition of "career". there's nothing preventing you from getting to a senior architect/staff engineer/senior consultant etc type level working from home.

if your goal is to be an actual manager (not to be confused with a PM) then yea wfh can impact that prospect. most companies I've dealt with (not all though) explicitly required anyone who had direct reports under them to either be in the office every day or at least be located within a reasonable distance from the office and come in couple of days a week.

Speaking of backups :) We had a very large mission-critical system that we developed and hosted for a fortune 50 client. Long story short - prod DB with tons of records took a crap, proper RCA was never done I suspected HW failure of some sort.

The kicker was - the client grudgingly OKd the restore understanding that they will loose few hours worth of data. BUT. When a DBA attempted to restore - the backup was corrupt lol. They went back day by day - all of the recent backups were corrupt, the "freshest" working backup was about a month old. Some heads rolled as a result.

From my personal experience (which probably has to do with working in industries where incoming data has a wide array of clients who need it ASAP) - the biggest challenge with any distributed DB system is the problem of "reading your own writes" and how the system approaches it. Not to be confused with tx isolation levels.

It's a balancing act between two extremes - locking everything down and ensuring the tx has been committed on all nodes/propagated to all consumers on one hand and sending an "ack" back to the client with a loose promise of eventual consistency on the other.

Not sure why he's getting downvoted. for a "decentralized" currency bitcoin is quite centralized and is not that hard to control "IRL" so to speak. We're talking like 10 subpoenas/cease and desist orders to bring the whole thing down.

Or one executive order to block a couple of ports on the great firewall of China (I'm oversimplifying but not by much actually).

NoSQL is a great fit for OLAP-type systems where there's tons of high volume writes, eventual consistency (or BASE in general) is good enough, strict schema is not enforced and the consumer - data scientist or a customer service rep etc is not affected too much if they have to wait a few extra seconds for the search results to come back.