sp4rki

I agree... but not at the engineering level.

This is, IMO, a leadership-level problem. You'll always (hopefully) have an engineering manager or staff-level engineer capable of keeping the dev team in check.

I say it's a leadership problem because "partnering with X", "getting Y to market first", and "Z fits our current... strategy" seem to take precedence over what customers really ask for and what engineering is suggesting actually works.

I'm sorry but that assertion is a farce in itself in my opinion. I enrolled in the best University in my country for Civil Engineering and dropped after my second semester. I did the same for Computer Engineering and International Business. I made a boatload of money selling final projects (I know...) for people from year one to year five. It's pretty easy to go through the motions and get those three to five years done if the paper motivates you.

My experience (YMMV) is that all these "Engineers" go out into the world as rookies anyways. I've dealt with rookie Civil Engineers that couldn't understand the blueprints for a two story house and "Computer Engineers" that couldn't code their way out of a React Todo List.

Experience trumps all if you ask me and if we really want to regulate the "Title" then it should be based on experience and achievements vs a paper that says you went to X or Y.

I might be biased because I decided to drop out and go build experience, but I've hired from both sides and I've come to the conclusion that raw talent and experience dictate how much of an "Engineer" you really are.

So what are the speech-impaired to do then?

When I'm driving I find it less distracting to adjust the AC or the music via knobs, than to use the voice activated calling function. Mind you my cars speech recognition is quick and superb, but skipping a track, adjusting a mirror, or setting the air conditioner are automatic and don't require me to focus on anything else but driving. I doubt voice everything will make anything safer.

It's very easy to end up with messy/unusable history or even lose work when you have multiple people working on related parts of a project with outdated branches and limited git knowledge.

I have been bitten by coworkers submitting preposterous pull requests because of a lack of understanding of what you can do with git and how it works that could have been avoided by taking the time to really grok git.

Buddy you seem to think I don't for the most part agree with you. That couldn't be more far from the truth!

Yes if you are in that situation that might be your only choice, or at the very least the only choice you believe you have. That being said, there's an argument (OP's argument) that if not most of this situations at least a big chunk of them would be avoidable via financial education.

And yes if your partner skipped town or got cancer the government should be helping you out IMO. A person shouldn't be punished for any of it, but that doesn't mean that those situations are not at some level influenced by making bad financial desicions.

While I don't particularly agree with OP's premise that only education can solve this problem, it can also be argued that the situation you describe is a result of a set of choices made that directly correlate to bad personal and financial desicions.

Barring physicial or mental health reasons, being a victim of criminal activity (rape, theft, et. al.), or "acts of god" (natural disasters), a person ending up in this situation most certainly screwed up somewhere along the line.

This is in my opinion the first place where taxes should go. To help out people that have been screwed by chance and bad luck so they don't have to rely on predatory lending.

I'm gonna piggyback on your comment to ask a question I'm not clear on. Am I correct in that if I don't set a recovery email there is absolutely no way for anyone to get access to my account unless they get my password? If that were to happen I could recover my account by proving to you I am who I say I am (perhaps gov ID plus DNS records), but my previous email will be forever encrypted?

I ask because that is what I want. I want my account to autodestruct if compromised and when recovered I want to be assured that all my personal data has been safeguarded by effectively throwing away the key into the depths of Mordor.

That is a total strawman argument buddy.

The argument "gun ownership serves as a deterrent of crime and has been known to spoil criminal endeavours, therefore we should allow citizens to carry guns" has never been about vigilantism. Vigilante behavior is actually a quick way to get yourself locked up and/or your permit revoked.

There is a BIG difference between defending your home with a firearm, and looking up a thief and paying him a visit with a gun in hand. Likewise there is a BIG difference between keeping attackers out of your servers and collecting thorough forensic evidence, and going all out guns blazing with your 0day collection trying to outhack the hacker.

To make matters worse a lot of the times those situations are direct results of cultural and biological differences between the sexes.

Every single woman I've ever heard negotiate a salary has done the research and tried for the market median. Most men ask for a bit above the median, but are willing to accept numbers under that. Men with stronger egos will, in general, start from the very top of the salary range and walk away if their ideas of self value are not entertained.

I recently coached a fellow female coworker for a salary review. The main idea was that if she wanted the big raise, she needs a big ego. No one will give you a bunch of money if it doesn't look like you actually believe you're up there with the top performers. She actually got a couple of thousands more than the top number she had in mind. Now she eclipses all her male equivalents.

But vim is really not that hard to use. The initial learning curve might be steep, but as a whole vim is in general easy to use once you 'grok' it.

Anyways I do agree with you on one thing, this articles convey the idea that vim requires plugins and magic to be usable, which in my opinion is a disservice. People get on the bandwagon and install 50 plugins and then complain that vim is unusable when sshing into a server because it doesn't have the plugins they use.

This is of course my personal opinion, but I think you're suffering from exactly what OP mentions. I'm not trying to be conflictive or anything, but this is in my experience the same argument that every language evangelist uses.

I started with C in my early teens (first book I found, lucky me) and I've gone through the VB, PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, and Javascript phases. Honestly I've seen great engineering in all those languages (maybe not VB) and those projects have all been easy and pleasurable to work with (maybe not Java). I've also seen hideous stuff that's a total sanity destroyer. At least for me the main contributing factor to language dislike is dealing with shitty code. Except Classic ASP... That stuff is poison.

By that logic then it makes even more sense to use the credit card over both cash and <whatever>coin. If the transaction price is getting bundled into the overall price of the article I'm buying, why would I pay in cash and lose credit cart protections and loyalty points? Or even worse, why would I pay in bitcoin and lose the same as above and incur a transaction fee myself?

As a self taught guitar/piano player, programmer, and investment trader I couldn't agree more. I learnt by reading and playing/coding/investing as much as I could when I could.

As to how to get a job as a self taught anything? Being persistent.

Panamanian here.

> Without it, Noriega would certainly still be in power.

That's debatable. Thankfully the US took care of the situation efficiently, but the general climate was pointing towards a bloody civil war.

> Under Torrijos–Carter Treaties the US has a right to intervene militarily to protect the canal.

Thankfully in my opinion. Though you could argue that it also makes the Canal a target.

> Remember locals were outraged and protesting in the streets that the US dare attack their beloved bloodthirsty dictator. Dies hards still exist

This is the only part I truly disagree with. A very small minority actually protested in favor of General Noriega. Pretty much the whole country was on board with removing him from power with the obvious exception of people that followed him to power of their own. Panamanians were not outraged because of the removal of their dictator, but of the methods used to do so that left a bloody trail and piles of dead bodies.

December 20 is a national mourning day in recognition of the people that gave their life during such turmoil, not in the name of a power hungry and greedy Noriega.

EDIT: The US soldiers where super nice to me as a kid. I even got to drive in a tank and they gave me a shitload of soda.