Just as a suggestion, Elon Musk is about a hundred times more entertaining right now.

It is impossible to come up with an objective measure of programmer productivity. It doesn't matter what I come up with, a critical mass of programmers will find a way to game it within a week.

I know it's a good day at work when the codebase is both smaller and less buggy than it was at the start of the day. I don't know how you measure that.

Speaking as a nerd, this is precisely the behaviour I would expect from someone who understands machines very well, and human beings not at all.

If your productivity was measured in lines of code, how would you initialise a 1 million element array?

You have a good point in that political "facts" are rarely objective. But these strongly left people are correct from their own perspective.

"Trump is okay with pandering to and courting racists" is observably true, and from their perspective, that in itself is racist.

Part of the context of this debate is the leader of a supposedly democratic nation inciting insurrection against that nation and its democratic institutions. Perhaps it's a partly metaphorical usage of the word "violence", but it's not that far off.

If by "freedom from speech", you mean "freedom to control where your personal attention goes", then yes, this is sorely needed in the social media era. It is something that Twitter is particularly terrible at, and it will only get worse under Musk.

At the risk of stating the obvious, if you have a spare $150k to drop on this, you're probably doing okay in the salary department.

Australia says nothing of the sort, because it doesn't measure height in inches.

And how do we know it isn't AUD?

What the current culture seems to be finally acknowledging is what programmers have known for years: what people think they want and what actually makes them happy are usually different..

The Middle East and Pacific Islands.

That might explain the US, but it doesn't explain obesity in countries which don't have a crap diet, or wild animals (yes, ones which don't forage human food). The obesity epidemic is universal and very weird.

Of course, the research that went into it was already paid for by everyone.

I believe it was a company that sold iced tea.

I have to admit, if you could do Proof of Work using power solely generated by burning down banks, that would seem to be more ethical than the way crypto is currently done.