oldprogrammer2

Iran is on the tariffs list because of Trump's maximum pressure policy (an official National Security Memorandum) against Iran. This is coupled with Trump's willingness to get Russia to cooperate in the ceasefire.

I'm not claiming his administration's logic is 100% sound, only that there is an explanation that doesn't assume the rather farfetched theory that Trump is an agent for Russia.

I'm not particularly well-versed in this area, but searching for the topic on Google easily found this information on sites such as Wikipedia, WSJ, Newsweek, and whitehouse.gov.

In my opinion, this was decades in the making. Most Americans are sick of the two party system that can't seem to get anything done, as well as with a political system owned by the elite. As odd and bizarre as it is, Trump was able to channel that disgruntlement into a voting bloc. And it certainly doesn't help that the Democratic party has been unable to put forth a charismatic candidate since President Obama.

The US has trade sanctions with those countries.

Systems don’t remain constant, though, and every system gets “gamed” once the incentives are well understood. I’m 100% for investment in scientific research, but I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds. We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions, and a publish or perish model that encourages that bad behavior as well as junk science that will have minimal impact on their fields. We pay taxes to fund science so that universities or corporations can claim ownership and make us pay for the results.

People are reflexive. In a different context, driven by someone else, many of the people currently defending Harvard would instead be pointing out that Harvard and the other elite institutions are part of "the problem". In general this year, it's been interesting to me to see Republicans become protectionists and Democrats become neoliberal free traders, both parties flipping their talking points to either align or disagree with Trump.

Yeah, his reasoning is suspect to a lot of folks, but I’m not sure why everyone is so comfortable with the consolidation of wealth at these elite institutions.

I've led startups running Rails and Python/Flask, but I do all my side projects in dotnet. And I haven't had a Windows machine in years, fwiw.

Deployment and Cost: For solo projects, I do 1-click deploys to a load-balanced Azure App Service. I was using GitHub Actions for a while, but it was slow and I kept pushing up against the need for a paid plan. I keep things local.

Dotnet is dramatically more scalable than Rails or Django, which means much simpler infrastructure for a lot longer. Poor performance leads to the need for more complexity. More servers, caching, queueing, etc. Then you need things like docker and k8s to manage all that infrastructure. For me, I can scale up or out by changing a single flag, and entire apps are just single dotnet apps (aside from the DB), so there's no need for docker.

Batteries Included: My team that ran Rails was burned by the magic, repeatedly. Over the years, developers made decisions that turned into maintainability nightmares. With Python/Flask, the lack of structure was like a Wild West after several years of rotating contractors. In some of my older solo-dev work with Flask, it was nearly impossible to come back to because all the disparate dependencies wouldn't play nicely any longer. And in both Ruby and Python, the lack of static typing was also a source of inscrutability (so please use type annotations in your Ruby and Python projects - your future self will thank you).

As for why people don't use it more, I think it's largely due to "resume driven development". It's the same reason every startup thinks they need k8s or they need to be using React. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Choosing dotnet is definitely not going to lead to job opportunities in the startup world. But, in my opinion, any startup that chooses dotnet will have a competitive advantage over those that choose Rails, Node.js, or Python because of simplicity and maintainability.

As for the argument that "time to market is faster with rails or python", I disagree. The biggest factor will be using what you know. The second will be the complexity of your infrastructure, which will be much simpler on dotnet. Avoid analysis paralysis as much as possible.

Other folks may have very different opinions, but as someone who has worked on several major platforms, each for years at a time, I have found dotnet to be the best option. However, no choice will be perfect, and dotnet has many warts. My recommendation if you do choose dotnet, is to go with MVC + HTMX. It's not sexy, but it's stable and mature. I don't recommend Blazor, yet. I think it needs another version. Last note: I've never bought any third party libraries/controls to do anything in my dotnet projects.

This looks great. There have certainly been times in my life where all I had was my phone, and I needed to check on a few things. I could see having an app like this handy "just in case" (assuming secure connectivity, of course). Good luck!

But it’s not the same as K-12. I can’t send my kids to an expensive private boarding school and expect taxes to pay for it.

The amount of complexity people are introducing into their infrastructure is insane. At the end of the day, we're still just building the same CRUD web apps we were building 20 years ago. We have 50x the computation power, much faster disk, much more RAM, and much faster internet.

A pair of load-balanced web servers and a managed database, with Cloudflare out front, will get you really, really far.

Even worse, this feels like the goal was actually about reclaiming their resumes, not the stack. I expect these two guys to jump ship within a year, leaving the rest of the team trying to take care of an entire ecosystem they didn't build.