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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

C'mon, it was a casual joke and no harm done. Also punching someone weaker is a simple act, but taking on someone stronger requires courage.

Does it fit the somewhat quirky (but by far not unusual) interview process? Yes

Is it a sign of a moral flaw? No

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Unless, of course, you work for that government. Kind of the same one that put people on the Moon, made the atomic bomb, invented the internet, and other things less extraordinary than repackaging Debian ;-)

I have talked to him a couple times while working for Canonical and, while I knew his reputation of being a very Steve Jobs person, he was never an asshole with me. And the CEO was a real sweetheart. I'd think twice if he called me, but wouldn't blink if she did.

The Bush Administration did not do any of those things. Reading his comments as a dismissal of those things, rather than the guy running the White House when he wrote it, seems uncharitable.

Words like “Bush” or “current administration” do not occur in the article. Rather, it was just a link. You don’t have any particular reason to be this charitable.

He linked to the White House website. The occupant of the White House at the time was George W. Bush. I am not even trying to be charitable, that's just the most likely reading to me. Basically every talk show host made similar jokes all the time because Bush was widely considered to be an incompetent nepo baby, so I'd need a reason to read it any other way, and I don't really see one here.

They also interned Japanese-Americans, caused the Arab Spring/Syrian Civil War, made the atomic bomb (oh, you mentioned that one!), ran numerous undisclosed human experimentation projects, imposed multiple central banking systems on the United States, caused the mortgage crisis, and gave China most favoured nation status.

You still can't really say the US government doesn't do things that are deeply impactful, many times very negatively impactful.

The US government serves the US's interests. I have no illusions as to how well it behaves towards other countries.

Except most of the things I mentioned hurt Americans first and foremost. You didn't catch that? Gulf War syndrome, Tuskegee, MK Ultra, Fannie Mae/Freddy Mac/Lehman Brothers, destroying Detroit, enriching an adversary totalitarian nuclear state with Mao Zedong on its money, confiscating gold, devaluing the dollar... literally putting American citizens in camps.

The US government serves the US government's interests.

It is controlled by the people elected. The only solution is to elect better representatives who need to push for stricter regulations on government behavior so that worse representatives have fewer opportunities for making a mess.

it's nominally controlled by the elected. until someone accuses the elected of threatening the independence of such and such agency and then the intelligence community (permanent Washington) has six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. stories are planted in all CIA/State Department-aligned i.e. major newspapers. classified information is selectively leaked by the heads of the agencies to their friends in academia. lawsuits fly. the ACLU finds a couch surfer to testify that bees are fish. and it's over before it started.

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