Ididntdothis

I watched closely when Obamacare was debated. If Obama had only had had the courage to pound the table and tell his democratic senators to get in line, maybe Obamacare could actually have worked. Instead it turned into a half assed attempt that was flawed from the start.

Same with the bank bailouts. He was in an excellent position to get some real change but chose to keep Geithner who gave the banks what they wanted. And a precondition for anybody who administered the bailouts was to have worked for an investment bank.

Winning the popular vote means that a lot of people voted for that candidate. To me it indicates that it was a very close election.

“So after 6 years at his position, Holder put restrictions on a certain type of civil asset forfeiture“

It’s the same with a lot of rules that Trump revoked and people are outraged about. A lot of them were put in at the end of the Obama administration’s term.

“You do know that most Republicans feel the same way about Republican politicians”

I know that. And that’s what gave us Trump. Both parties have to pretend doing something for the little guy while being dependent on pleasing their big money donors. That’s why they can’t take a clear position.

Trump just upped the game with his rhetoric. Most Trump voters I know like him because they think he isn’t part of the corrupt establishment. You can argue whether that’s true or not but that’s what people think.

100% true. The amazing thing is that Clinton’s program of “I am a woman. I am not Trump. It’s my turn.” already won the popular vote. Now imagine if they had a candidate who people actually wanted to vote for.

He didn’t even try.

Traditionally the ruling class has voted against the first and hoped the second wouldn’t happen in their own lifetime.

The Democrats are the spineless party. They have no courage to take a position. It’s all wishy-washy trying not to offend anybody (especially not their donors).

I would vote libertarian if I didn’t have to buy into their vision to eliminate “burdensome “ regulations like environmental protections and their pipe dream of free market healthcare.

Democrats haven’t had the courage to take a real position for a long time. Their program is basically to run as the slightly better Republicans.

Obama wrote a really nice article a few days ago. But when he was running things he basically did nothing to improve the situation although the issues with police were well known.

The problem is that change can take decades or centuries and the end result may not be better or even worse.

If you could do it in 4 months i seems to be a relatively simple system. It's also not clear how your new code will adapt to changes in the next few years. It may end up in a big mess again.

Just avoid touching anything complex :-)

To some degree that's matter of luck. Sometimes all your assumptions are correct from the start and the requirements don't change much. But often a lot of things change over time until the first architecture doesn't fit anymore. I would agree there are better and worse architects but luck definitely plays a role.

I am starting to wonder if this is what it means to run "government like a business". Corporations are basically authoritarian dictatorships that don't tolerate dissent or only within a narrow range and it seems that government is run the same way.

As a systems engineer you probably also know that building something complex from the ground up will have very buggy rollouts for the first versions :). Rewrites also have a pretty good history of bankrupting organizations. The current system is very fixable if somebody actually had the political will. Compared to building something new it will be easy.

This reminds me of the discussion about terraforming Mars. It’s deemed to be too hard and expensive to reduce our greenhouse emissions on a perfectly fine planet like earth so people think it’s easier to terraform a barren planet.

One thing i have noticed is that “security conscious” people are very good at criticizing things and pointing out flaws. But they are not as good at proposing clear and workable solutions that don’t add huge burden to users.

It should be no surprise that people do insecure stuff under deadline pressure.

Very badly and inconsistent in my company ! We have a lot of people raising concerns about whatever you want to do. But not many actually have any contributions for how to do it right so every team rolls their own little solution.

I will be very interested in hearing how others do it.

Makes we wonder why li-ion AA batteries weigh so much less than Nimh rechargeable. What’s the difference?

This makes sense to me. I think it’s really important to be able to predict what the software will do under certain circumstances. You can do that only if you have a pretty good concept of the thinking behind the code. I usually get nervous when something doesn’t behave as expected because it indicates that there is a mismatch between the theory and its implementation.

This would explain why a lot of corporate software isn’t good. There is no shared understanding and a lot of people make changes without understanding the big picture.

I don't want to excuse the abuses but I think in a sense the cops are the victims of bad politics and management. Obviously shooting innocent people is not acceptable but on the other hand they are being thrown into a bad situation and don't get much help coping with that. I know a guy (very nice guy) who started as a cop two years ago. Since then he had to shoot somebody in the leg who attacked him with a knife, had to deal with a teenage girl hanging herself, lots of domestic violence and a lot of other really bad stuff that's very tough to deal with. They don't get any psychological counseling so a lot of the old-timers are either alcoholics or have some other kind of psychological damage.

In the end politics needs to have the courage to address the underfunding and also address the training and management situation. They don't want to do either because it may cost money so the bad situation just keeps going. Reminds me of the healthcare situation where even the most blatant problems go unaddressed because it's more important to do partisan fighting instead of addressing issues. I think it's well understood that the drug laws are damaging so it would be a good start to clean them up.

Isn't that a failure of the framework developers that not more stuff is in reusable libraries? When I did some Angular I thought that at 70% of the framework should be in libraries that are independent of the framework and reusable.

They also get a nice pension and can retire early. At least in California being a cop is a pretty nice gig.

An example is custom hardware not working as expected. To debug this you may need five different people on the line at the same time. If you do this in an async manner it will take days or weeks to resolve.

I am sure there are legal reasons but if I had to set up a remote company I would probably try to restrict the timezones. My current company has dev teams in South America and India. They are all good people but dealing with India [13 hours) is a big pain because somebody has to make calls during his personal time instead of work time. It’s a real burden. And in my view you absolutely have to make direct calls from time to time. You can’t resolve all issues with asynchronous communication.

I tend to agree. Seems dealing with expiration dates is just another burden without real security. If something goes wrong you have to revoke now and not wait for another year until the cert expires.

It would be nice if churches were a moderating voice but they often do the opposite.

It depends. Either iterate over the vector and delete the objects or just call clear(). Obviously you have to be sure that nobody else is accessing it at the same time.

Would you have to keep track of these threads in Rust? I have done a lot of desktop development where you have to be aware of what happens during shutdown. Seems a lot of server guys write their code under the assumption that it will never shut down.

"Indie" has been marketed into meaninglessness like "Agile", "Hacker" or "Mindfulness". These terms usually lose their meaning once they go mainstream and become cool.