I'll take that as a "yes".

Ahhh... so you believe only subjects with a credulous & servile attitude should be included on a jury?

Yes, that's a good little Centrist - lick that boot. No one could possibly have an experience with the legal apparatus that contradicts the fairy tales you were taught in high school Civics class...

Regardless of your baseless opinion on why I was removed, the fact is at least 11 of 12 original jurors were removed. The attorneys cycled thru something like 18 of the 30-ish potential jurors by the time I was excluded. Jury selection continued after I left.

It's pretty obvious juries in my city are not juries of the defendants' peers, but rather juries of select persons favored by attorneys.

Sorry, too late by about a decade. The old Republic was sick for a long time, and died an inglorious death in 2001. Long live the Empire!

When I was called for jury duty (in California), the attorneys had something like 10 peremptory challenges each. Everyone who wasn't a slack-jawed dimwit was removed. This was only for a traffic accident case - I imagine the lawful-corruption would be even worse in a more serious case.

In Centrist America, it's only a jury of your "peers" if you ride the short bus.

There are no honest cops. Any decent, non-abusive, non-corrupt person who joins up is drummed out of the force within a year.

Yup - pure banditry.

Since we're on the freeway to neofeudalism anyways, maybe we ought to look into how bandits were dealt with back in the bad old days....

The best-run company I ever worked with took what I thought was a sensible approach to optimization:

We were working on a complicated production system with hundreds of individual components and intense uptime requirements. The vast majority of the programmers (about 1000) were to focus on writing "robust" code that worked in an "obvious", easy-to-maintain way. The Performance Engineering team would look at system metrics (everything was instrumented) to find the actual performance bottlenecks. Then they would send in a crack team of commando programmers to do trippy, non-obvious optimizations on very small pieces of code.

The idea was, in a complicated system it's very unlikely that your specific piece of code is going to be the limiting factor in overall system performance. So it's better to have less performance-optimal but more robust code in most places; and to use fast but brittle code only where absolutely necessary.

FWIW, the company in question is outlandishly profitable, and their software is widely considered the best in their industry.

Amen.

Imho,

coding : developing software :: typing : writing literature

Buildings large & complex enough to require a structural engineer generally aren't built by carpenters. Afaik (I don't work in construction) for large steel frame or ferroconcrete building there is role equivalent to the master carpenter on a wooden project - a single person who in theory could build the entire building by himself.

The considerably majority - tho by no means all - of the CS majors I have worked with couldn't design a clean, elegant API if their job depended on it. Alas, it never does.

Depends where you are. In my experience, what you say is very true on the East Coast. However in California it's not true at all, and I think out here not having a CS degree might even be a slight advantage.

Can we stop using the pejorative term "coding" as tho it were equivalent to "programming" or "developing software"? Coding is for code monkeys.

It's the vast majority of our first-hand experience. Covers at least five major American cities, both coasts and the Rustbelt.