"I'm really the one who's 'work makes the company work' and it is really my work that the company is selling and turning into profit."

You couldn't be more wrong. Try doing your work without someone selling it for you. Try doing your work without someone in the back office making sure that the customers pay for the software sold by sales, so you can get a paycheck on time, like clockwork. Try doing your work without someone orchestrating, adjusting, and aligning your work with everyone else's, so the company actually delivers something the customer is willing to buy. Try doing your work without someone else looking over your work, checking and cross-checking for errors, so customers get delivered a good product that we know will work. Try doing all that without someone making sure you have a table to type on, a chair to sit in, and a functioning bathroom when you need it.

What you need, my friend, is to get out and start a startup company. There you will learn the value of teamwork, I guarantee it.

States rights won't survive gay marriage.

Every software developer should have their own company, even if it's just a company of one. Nothing teaches you how to be a better employee than being a boss, even of just yourself. You should have your own company in parallel with your day job until you can support yourself fully.

Virtually everything important I've learned about how to deliver working code came first from working on an outside project, which I then perfected by applying those techniques as part of a project at work. Everything important I've learned about what people are really like -- the good, bad, and the ugly -- was formed in the same way: in my outside "company" first, then finished within the context of my employer.

The big takeaway about business I learned is that a good business is a stool with three legs: one leg is sales, the other is operations/development, and the third is administrative/executive. Every one of those legs are equally important, the company is only as strong as the weakest leg, and if any one leg is failing badly, it is only a matter of time before the company will fail.

It is an astonishing, breathtaking failure when viewed with any expertise in how things should be done. You log in and the screen just turns blank with no error message. Or you get an error message that literally just says "Error!" in red and nothing more. Or it gives an error that indicates what can't be the true cause. Or it says we're too busy ... at 3 a.m. Or try again later (but not how much later). Or a bunch of Java code gets splattered onto the page in literal text. Different errrors in every variety of browser. No evidence of version control or other error tracking. No indication of status, good or bad, no list of active problems, no advice when to expect resolution. There is no documentation or explanation of any of this from the authorities or the contractor. The authorities will not report usage statistics, how many succeeded, or how anyone succeeded if there is a specimen anywhere in the universe to copy. One has to question whether it has worked in a single instance.

Here is an acid-core example: every single user has to confirm via email. Yet the email is flat-out RFC-violating non-compliant, and can't be read in email readers that don't know how to handle this non-conformity. Specifically, this violation appears in the email headers:

Received: from . . . service.govdelivery.com
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
. . .
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

This is not an example of bad Java, but it does show the kind of foolishness passing for system-building everywhere you look. This garbage came from govdelivery.com who are apparently the choke point for the entire system. If they fail, or if you fail to deal with them, you are SUNK.

They do have a pretty girl smiling at you from the home page. Puh-leeze.

These are not bugs or glitches or the overwhelm of success. This thing is utterly defective. A FAILURE. One must question whether it will ever work, and if it won't have to be abandoned for a do-over. Nobody expected a smooth rollout, but this is head-slapping incompetence.

And the law is, you must succeed with it, or ELSE! You cannot mail in forms, or call on the phone, to get this done. It all happens on the Web.

And when has the federal government ever appropriated non-government technology and property in this way, and used it as the sole means to enforce something against the citizenry? With the income tax, they at least give you the paper and a post office to send it back and forth. The government will depend completely on the Internet now to keep you from being fined or put in jail?

Great advice. In picking what is both "basic and essential" I simply look at dependencies, using two perspectives: first, gating dependency -- what, if it doesn't work, would prevent other things from working -- then, structural dependency -- what is the thing that other things are built on.

First satisfy yourself that there are several approaches to meeting the gating dependencies, this will actually give you the best all-around sense of what the design of your application will likely become. Then, start from the bottom of the structural dependencies and work you way up. Happily, in most languages you'll find that library support is strongest at the bottom, so your useful level of work will proceed very quickly, and you will be satisfying all the gating dependencies early in the process.

Done like this, it gets increasingly easier to call in extra hands to help with the work, because what remains is more obvious/common.

To a believer, evolution doesn't "undermine" the idea of divine creation, it is just a wrong-headed idea. When you present them with facts and they dispute with you, they aren't being "neurotic" or "irrational", they just don't agree with you. That you describe this as "profound intellectual dishonesty" and their arguments as "obvious defiance of objective reality" shows that you are simply prejudiced.

God's existence cannot be objectively proven one way or another, not because God is lacking, or we are lacking, but because by definition you can't use the intellectual tools of science to operate on a philosophical conclusion. If I say the world was created because God loves us, one cannot apply the scientific method to test the truth or falsity of such a claim. There is no test you can devise, nothing to measure, it is an opinion.

Philosophical opinions are not illegitimate, they are simply not able to be objectively proved. Opinion may be informed by science, for example, to look around at the universe we see, one might understandably conclude that it was made by God, and point to many objective facts in support of that conclusion. But the central opinion itself cannot be disproved by them.

Very close! To correct one line of reasoning, however, it is a mistake to think that evolution "threatens" the doctrine of creation. The Bible can't become "fuzzy", it is the revealed truth, and people who don't believe are simply blinded to it. To rail against God isn't an "existential threat to civilization", it's simply a wrong path being taken. If society becomes less Christianized, it won't cause them to "lose all spiritual direction", it will cause society to lose that direction.

Pretty good advice. There are actually quite a few capital investments that produce a profit for individuals: housing that is appreciating in value (not that hard to come by, there are deals out there), higher education at public universities, and starting your own internet-based business, to name a few. For most people, though, you're absolutely correct that paying down debt should be job #1. Use the snowball method, you'll be amazed at how quickly it works.

This would all be much easier if the NSA would simply set up automatic transfers from our bank accounts to the Treasury so the feds can just take what they need.

It's called customer service.

I've got an Acer Chromebook running Crouton and XFCE4. Best little devbox I ever had, especially for $199 bucks. It used to be that you had to give up verified boot (and the automatic patching that implies), but no longer.

"Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming." Nature

The cause of climate change is also not really under dispute either. We only care about catastrophic anthropocentric climate change. And even within that category, we should only really care about things we can realistically and economically do. For example, Australia apparently has a huge carbon tax that will have an impact on the climate so small, it cannot even be measured.

We need to make dirt-simple to encrypt messages and files, then start spreading the word to your personal support circle (you know, the people who rely on you to keep things running for them) that "everybody encrypts these days". If you see an unencrypted message or file, say, "ugh, don't touch that, that's like spam". We engineers have a lot of influence on the ground, where it is hardest for any government to interfere.

It will be an order of magnitude easier to overrun government's spying capabilities than it will be to thwart them.