"proles voting idiots into power without understanding what those idiots' policies will do to them" is what people always think about the people voting for one of the other sides though.

No, it's like saying that digital photography with the first wave of digital cameras is more artful than digital photography with the most recent professional cameras. What the author actually means to say is that his "art" in working within unnecessary limitations to produce a very artful result is not appreciated by people who mostly think "that picture would have been much better at a higher resolution".
I read TFA (I know, I know) and the whole thing basically boils down to "good art is better than bad art, but most people don't recognize bad art". It has always been that way. Even more, most people these days will have trouble appreciating even the classic black-and-white movies, even though they know a-priori that it is art. Past a certain point it's very difficult to see past the outdated technological limitations.

Just because you personally don't need that much music doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people who do. I'm one of them, and that's why I'm a Spotify Premium user. It is a very useful service for me, especially because my taste varies from melodic rock over technical death metal to classical, and I can find 90% of the kind of stuff I like right there, right then, add it to a playlist, and download it to a device that I can then listen to offline. I have it on close to 8 hours a day.
And I really like the "discover" feature that allows you to check out music that is considered similar and/or liked by the same people. I have found some great things that way that I'd have been unlikely to hear of any other way.

Most sites work fine once you enable their main URL. The ones that show up with a list a mile long of script sources are the ones where you just click the "X" instead.

Oh Lithium... it was so bloody awesome, grappling-hook jousting in big open levels.

As long as the 10x programmer is making less than 10x the salary of a 1x then ceteris paribus it is financially impossible to become "a wash". You can never match the productivity per cost of the 10x with "level 1" programmers. That is scary, because it means that no sensible company with a serious productivity need should hire 1xers unless they really had no other choice.
Say a 10xer commands triple the salary of a 1xer, then the 10xer is still less than a third of the cost of 10 1xers for the same productivity, or you could have triple the productivity for the same money (and still give yourself a single 1x salary as a bonus for being so clever).

I think this is one of the most important things to hammer into software engineers - never assume anything is simple. There are a great many things that seem extremely simple to humans but turn out to be much less simple when trying to get a computer to do it. The example I tend to use is shoelaces - e.g. do you know how you tie your shoelaces?.

I've long lost count of the number of times a customer has said something along the lines of "but you can just see how it's done!" when describing a difficult problem, often involving parsing of vision and heuristics to find a probable solution.

Real threats by people they already knew were potential terrorists and yet they failed to stop them from carrying them out. In other words, they had all the intel they could have wished for and it didn't help. This push for more intel/less privacy has bugger all to do with stopping terrorists.

The converse was true were I've worked. I've seen more older people walk out on jobs than young people. The young people kept throwing themselves at practically impossible tasks until they burned themselves out. The older people warned three or four times and then quit when their warnings went unheeded.
The interesting thing is that both approaches have their place: in nearly all cases the older engineers were right in the long-term and the project they left ended up being a very expensive failure. In some of the young people's cases they ended up against all odds finding a solution to the problem. I'd estimate that 9/10 times the old guys were right, 1/10 times the young ones were right, but the company got blinded by the success of that 1/10, ignoring the many people that had been lost along the way.

I'll add one: I've always enjoyed working with the few "older" engineers in the places I've worked. They were never stingy with advice or stories and generally had less "me against the world" attitude - they knew their value and were past their own insecurities.

And that's wrong. The job and how good a person is at it should dictate the salary, not the person's age or "years of experience". As we get older we MUST let go of the idea that our income evolution can only be in one direction.

Or to explain it with a car analogy: Chevy Nova.

You can fix the room without drilling holes in anything.

The really cheap ghetto solution is to buy bales or rolls of rock wool, just leave them in the plastic, and stack them in the corners of the room. Ugly, smells a bit funny, and not everyone likes the idea of being in the proximity of bare rock wool, but it works.

More expensively you might get something like Auralex Promax stands and put them in the corners.

It kind of sounds like you might all be on the same side of the microphone, or at least have that option by moving where you stand or moving the microphone. In that case you could get one of the Reflexion Filters (e.g. the Fame Reflexion Screen Premium for a cheap option) to screen off half of the room. I've used one, and they work surprisingly well.

Kinda difficult when that person isn't even in the same country.

It's assuming spherical software engineers in a frictionless vacuum, durr.