rclayton

As someone wisely pointed out, the only person possibly going to be jailed in the #MeToo movement will be Harvey Weinstein. Many comedians and politicians have recovered. Look at Al Franken - polls show he’s electable in his state (by the group that ostracized him no less).

More importantly, if cancel culture had any teeth, this President would have been cancelled.

As for regular people getting cancelled, there only seems to be a handful - particularly those that might actually have committed a crime (thinking of the Central Park Karen).

The overt acts of patriotism and congratulatory acknowledgements of soldiers has certainly been ratcheted up over the last 40 years, but I think you can contribute that to guilt over how services members were treated during and shortly after the Vietnam War. I would liken it to “asking forgiveness”, which in some respects is shallow given that those that are most patriotic are likely to vote for politicians that will send the military into more needless wars.

My point is, the nature of our patriotism is complex and nuanced. You can be disgusted by it, but understand that there is a history behind it.

Worse yet, we now have a sizable portion of our population that honestly believes that the economic damage is worse than losing 1% (or more) of our population. Given the unpredictability of how people cope with this virus, you are telling me I should risk my family because we are too stupid and/or lazy to do basic things like wear masks and observe a quarantine?

I’m sorry but that’s not how the Gallagher case went down. To specifically reinforce the point:

“ It is an unspoken rule among their teams that SEALs should not report other SEALs for misconduct. An internal investigation could close off choice assignments or end careers for the accusers as well as the accused. And anyone who reported concerns outside the tight-knit SEAL community risked being branded a traitor.”

“ The platoon members told investigators that they tried repeatedly to report what they saw, but that the chain of command above them was friendly toward Chief Gallagher and took no action. Finally, in April 2018, they went outside the SEALs to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Chief Gallagher was arrested a few months later.”

We do still have the FBI and federal Dept of Justice that is supposed to provide some semblance of oversight. However, as we have seen over the last 4 years, they are equally susceptible to political influence as local law enforcement agencies.

The military may have laws/rules to report misconduct, but structurally, units are incentivized to hide misconduct (e.g. “handle internally”) because they don’t want the embarrassment. More importantly, failures by subordinates are often seen as leadership problems (you can make an argument that in many cases this is true) which mean officers and SNCOs are likely to sweep them under the rug if they can.

I saw many, many cases of this in the USMC. DUIs turned into “wet and reckless” because it involved a SNCO (an NCO or lower would have lost rank). NCOs (rightfully) pressing charges against subordinates for misconduct, only to be pressured by company/battalion leadership to accept “alternative punishment” (which often amounted to nothing). A let’s not even talk about all the case where there was sexual or physical abuse that went unreported despite everyone knowing it was happening.

The only time the military is motivated to act on misconduct is when it can’t hide it.

It’s also hard to build an engineering culture when you don’t engage with your coworkers often. You have to build credibility so you can work through difficult issues - that’s hard to do when your primary medium of communication is Slack.

Either way, I’m intrigued by the outbox pattern. As long as it is transparent to developers, it does seem like an ideal CDC mechanism.

I still can’t get behind using CDC via a DB watching tool unless I have little control of the system writing to the DB. There is so much context lost interpreting the change at the DB (who was the user that made this change, etc.) — unless you are sending this data to the DB (then yikes your DB schema is much more complex).