This war has cost us so much, and gained us so little. To the surprise of no one. It looks like our geopolitical rivals are smelling blood in the water now. I don't think it will be long until other great powers start testing us. Admittedly, I thought Ukraine would be the war that telegraphed America's decline as a military power, but I was wrong. This could very well be that war.
> Like buying off Trump, which probably had a lot to do with us starting the Iran war...
Oil companies have actually not benefited from America's middle-eastern wars. America's regime-change wars have made the region less profitable for US oil companies. Why invest in infrastructure in countries with unstable regimes, or risk of infrastructure becoming a target?
If anything, energy companies would benefit from the sanctions on Iran being lifted, so they could invest in infrastructure there, or buy gas from Iran.
I hope one day this silly 'war for oil' meme will disappear.
My employer isn't particularly bad for society, but let's pretend they are.
My company is a large employer of foreign workers. I already live in fear of being priced out by foreign bodyshop firms. If I decided what we were doing was immoral, and dug my heels in. I'd just be replaced by a H-1B worker. If everyone else in my company decided they wouldn't build the torment nexus, we'd all just be replaced by H-1B workers. It'd be a minor inconvenience to the company, but they'd weather it just fine. Under this system, any kind of collective bargaining becomes impossible, moral, financial, or otherwise.
Like many Americans, I am from a European immigrant background. For what it's worth, I have spent a lot of time in x-land, and I speak x-ish. But I am an American. My ethnicity is mixed. I grew up in America. You would never know my heritage unless I told you, which I probably never would. Because I hate hearing the "Me too! I'm x-ish too!" spiel from another American who can't even pronounce their own surname correctly.
It irks me because it usually manifests as embracing cartoonish stereotypes of the most superficial aspects of the culture: "I'm 1/64th Italian, so I like pizza. I'm 1/16th German, so I like beer. etc."
It doesn't keep me up at night, but I think it's tacky and vulgar.
I'm so glad someone brought this up. It irks me when I hear Americans detail every minor fraction of their genetic makeup: 1/4 Italian, 1/8 German, 1/16... etc. But they don't speak any of these languages, they've never even visited these countries. It's such a matter of pride for a lot of Americans, but it's just a costume.
A quote I found here on HN, that I really liked:
"Americans will say they are Italian because their great grandma ate spaghetti once, but God forbid someone is American because he was born there" -
mvieira38 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43930642)
Some people's jobs might be 'meaningless', but we're on the verge of lots of people's jobs being outright 'useless'. Anyone who's worked in a large corporation knows how small some people's useful output is already.
I've been wondering whether increased automation is going to cause some kind of employment crisis in western countries. It's possible we're on the verge of a "second industrial revolution" because of AI. I'll confess that I totally underestimated AI, and figured that by the time AI was writing decent code society would have formulated a plan for what to do when white-collar workers start becoming redundant. This obviously isn't what happened. What is going to happen to the swarms of Uber Eats riders on ebikes? Or all of the new immigrant truckers? Western governments have been keeping immigration relatively high to keep the service sector packed with unskilled, lowly paid service workers. What are we going to do with them all if drones replace Uber Eats riders, or self-driving trucks take over logistics? What I'm seeing now makes me doubt that we're going to look after all these people.
AI might not have much actual impact on software engineering, but AI (Actually Indians) has. Companies are using AI as a justification for layoffs, and then just replacing those roles with cheaper engineers employed by bodyshop companies.
The laundering of data on US citizens into the private sector, and overseas, through this company is truly horrifying. Especially how fast it happened, and how little say we had.
Assuming this claim were true, which it isn't, the modern Israelis have genetically nothing in common with the Jews of the old testament. They don't have the same culture, religion, language or genetics.
I find something really gross and dystopian about the idea of Ozempic. Developing the willpower to resist short-term gratification, and the ability to make long-term decisions about your diet and health are some of the most important ingredients to living a good life. The idea of letting a drug do the thinking for you because you just can't trust yourself really horrifies me.
Obesity is not an adaptation. It's a total aberration. Storing energy in the form of fat is an adaptation. Becoming obese is overloading your entire system.
If the role was advertised on LinkedIn, out of those hundreds of applicants there's probably only a small minority that have appropriate experience and right to work.
It's really tragic that lots of Americans think this kind of garbage is a healthier alternative to other kinds of breakfast. It may actually have less sugar than pancakes drenched in some disgusting syrup, but it's still garbage. There's a real problem with nutritional literacy in this country. The manufacturers of these products really aren't helping here either. Cheerios have a big 'CAN LOWER CHOLERSTEROL' plastered on the front of the pack, but the contents are still literally 24% added sugar.
I just searched for modern images of Smithfield market, and what on earth is that ghastly awning they've bolted onto that beautiful historic (presumably Victorian) facade?
Agreed. It's clear that most people don't understand basic nutrition, and most people have a very distorted view of what the human body should actually look like. The average American is very overweight. If you raise your arm above your head in front of the mirror, you should see your ribs, and you should see the clear outline of your latissimus dorsi. If you can't see these two things clearly, you are overweight.
It's really hard for me to answer this question. In hindsight, I feel like I should always have been more stubborn, more intransigent, more uncompromising. However, who knows how things would have really turned out if I'd have lived life like a wrecking ball.
ACE 4. I generally feel like adult life is very difficult for me, but I'm a fully functional adult. I'm in my 40s, married with young children. I suffer from depression, but I've come to terms with the fact that I'll be living with it forever. I'm totally functional otherwise. I have a career in software, a mortgage and I'm in good physical shape. I've spent a bit of time lately thinking about how childhood trauma may have affected my adult life in negative ways. I get bored and disillusioned easily in jobs, and find myself changing jobs every 18 months on average out of sheer frustration with how unfulfilling they are. I find myself annoyed at bureaucracy, and get impatient with less competent people. I never express my frustrations with them, but I feel a lot of negative emotions about my coworkers. One day I'd like to make some effort to address my frame of mind.
What "competitive-with-west devices" is China making? It might be the world's leading manufacturer, but the only item I can see right now in my office that was designed there is a cheap EPROM eraser. China isn't leading the world in manufacturing because they're the best either. It's because they're cheap.
How will your portfolio benefit from React? Portfolios are usually just static content. By all means use interesting technology like React and Sass to develop it, but compile it all to static HTML/CSS, unless you really need dynamic functionality.
Thank you for the suggestions. Unfortunately, the only reason I'm writing React at all is because so many companies want React experience, and I figure I'd better stay up to date. If I was given the opportunity to choose technologies for myself all of the time, I'd steer clear of React at this point!
Is this how other people feel about NextJS? I've been trying to keep an open mind about it, but its entire design seems so antithetical to what I'm trying to accomplish. Is there a better mainstream alternative? From what I've seen NextJS is pretty commonly used.
The situation with the tooling constantly changing isn't nearly as bad as the front-end frameworks themselves. I've been updating my knowledge of front-end, and it's an absolute shambles. The official React documentation(https://react.dev/learn/start-a-new-react-project) is telling me that in order to use their framework, I need to use another framework to solve (quote)"common problems such as code-splitting, routing, data fetching, and generating HTML"... At their suggestion I've picked NextJS, which is a "full-stack" React framework. This means that it has its own back-end which does most of the heavy lifting. So not only will our company have a traditional back-end, we'll also have a BFF (another thing the kids nowadays want), and a back-end that is actually our front-end application. At this point I've forgotten what problem we set out to solve.
NextJS' documentation is also *terrible*. This situation is made all the worse by any material online about NextJS that's more than 3 months old being totally inapplicable because the framework changes so often.