McAlpine5892

> 1) the average American is heavily dependent on equities in their 401k for retirement,

> 2) so the stock market has to go up

This is why I've come to despise 401k's replacing old-school pensions. Yes, pensions had their problems but with 401k's workers must fleece themselves to have any sort of retirement opportunity.

Want a shot at retirement? Now we all have to run ourselves into the ground to make number go up. It's insane.

Makes me think of notices around adult clubs I've seen such as:

"CONSENT: A clear and unambiguous agreement, expressed outwardly through mutually understandable words or actions, to engage in a particular activity. Consent can be withdrawn by either party at any point."

and

"No means No"

What I'm about to say is strongly worded and I understand not a _perfect_ analogy by any means. However, it does sum up my feelings on this issue.

If Person A makes repeated unwanted advances towards Person B, we have words to describe that. But if Person A, a company, makes repeated unwanted advances towards Person B we call that business.

> If not, expect lower levels of safety.

Citations.

Have you ever been to Portland or do you just believe Trump? There were few (not many) Trump flags in Portland during the election and I don’t recall a single person being hurt for it.

It’s a bizarre tactic. The DNC plays very dirty with their own members. On the outward public stage they “take the high road” and seem to constantly neuter themselves to prove how much they care.

Democrat voters didn’t turn out this past election cycle. Even in the face of Trump. They’ve truly made their base apathetic. “Hold your nose” is a tough strategy to sell long term.

I will never forget what they did to Sanders. Maybe he would’ve lost anyways. It’s likely. But that whole take the high road thing is only messaging. Internally they function nothing like a democracy.

This pains me so. Every time I have to hear "individual contributor", "leadership", or "the brand" I die a little inside.

Please just call me an employee or engineer. As for "leadership", I am somewhat convinced that the word "management" would lead to a mid-life crisis. Such inflated egos. As for "the brand", they are my employer.

This Newspeak has benefits though. Mainly that it hides in plain sight the top-down hierarchy of power that exists. Despite that fact that some employees are on food stamps while others make millions, it _sounds_ like everyone is on on somewhat equal footing.

We already have solutions for this called trains, buses, subways, etc. Public transportation. Yes, America is huge but look at China building out high-speed rail at an incredible pace. The amount of money dumped into self-driving could have built out an impressive amount of infrastructure for public transportation.

Not to say this isn’t a worthy problem to solve or that cars have no use. They’re great for rural life. But maybe 80% of the use-case for self-driving cars is pretty much solved by trains. They’re fast, generate no traffic, are very safe, and reduce pollution in urban areas. Even electric cars produce noxious break dust.

Addendum

The “America is too big” argument drives me nuts. (1) Again, look at China. (2) The EU is decently large and connected very well by rail. (3) We’re America. We went to the frickin moon. Defeated the Nazis. Etc. We can build trains. Not to mention what a boost it would be to the economy with all the jobs a project like that would create. Sure, we wouldn’t have an Elon but that’s fine by me.

My bad! Learned a new expression today.

> Meanwhile, the left out there pointing at Obama's extrajudicial killings, Bush's whole post 9/11 fiasco, Clinton's "Superpredators" nonsense, etc. etc. and making tons of noise about how this was all going to end.

I had a whole comment written up but, meh. The noisy people are made out to be conspiracy theorists, even when someone like Chomsky brings all the receipts. People want to believe the person they voted for is the "good guy" in a superhero sort of way.

Trump is partly able to do what he does because of these extreme expansion of powers from previous presidents. This is why "but my guy good!!" is among the worst forms of reasoning for justify $bad_thing.

> You're being evaluated on whether you can perform the role of someone who could theoretically build Google.

I can't agree with this enough. Companies want to believe they're Google or going to be Google. As a result they invest time, money, and engineers in problems they quite literally don't have and likely will never have.

> Then Drop the Act...

This, in my experience, depends. KPIs, goals, or whatever goofy games usually require the appearance of doing something impressive. Doing things that make sense isn't impressive.

Giving me dreams of a conversion on an old Volvo 240 station wagon :)

> To update today's government to be an Apple Store like experience

Please, no. There are few things worse as a consumer than going to the Apple Store.

The overall design is…lacking. It’s fine for a regular website one might stumble upon. For a demo of America’s prowess in design it’s pretty bad and bland. The GIF loop (as mentioned by another commenter) is borked. The text goes to the edges of my screen. The italicized blurb towards the bottom has weird commas and capitalization. The copy just reads weird too.

18F walked so that we could, uh, regress back to crawling around on the floor babbling?