Amazon "adds value" to ebooks purchased / downloaded from them by allowing you to highlight sentences, bookmark pages, add annotations, and continue reading from your last viewed page on another device. Evidently they can only do any of that if what you do with and within a book is tracked and uploaded to their servers.

That's called ideology, which is a useful distinction. You can have religion as ideology, and a-religion as ideology. Conversely, you can have non-ideological religions and a-religions.

About Japan, not really. The Japanese religion was forcefully changed by the state for the purposes of ideological indoctrination. Temples were closed, split, merged, priests reallocated and replaced, official doctrines for the specific purpose of mass submission developed, non-related philosophies (such as Bushido) reinterpreted and inserted into the mix etc. It was a religion constructed top-down for reasons of state. Ditto for Nazism. So, in both cases the use comes first, and the religious formulation later, as a byproduct.

Whether for this they use preexisting cultural elements is a matter of ease of manipulation. Reworking something is easier than developing something from scratch.

You've confusing causation with correlation. Religion is a good way to make people do thing for you, but your actual reasons are different. From the current conflicting parties, only ISIS is really driven by religion first and foremost, so I'll concede on that one. As for the others, nope, the driving impetus is non-religious even though religion is used for gluing purposes.

Monarchism (+Communism in Russia), Fascism+Capitalism+Communism, Communism+Capitalism, Communism+Capitalism, Communism+Capitalism, Merchantilism. You forgot: all the current Middle East wars (Fascism+Capitalism), all the current African wars (Tribalism+Communism+Capitalism), and all the many single-country revolutions of the 20th century (mostly Communism, with a few Fascism and Capitalism thrown into).

Replying to undo incorrect moderation.

Thanks for the link. It seems quite interesting!

Intel did something as much evil and it went through undisturbed. Everyone there was invited to move to Portland if they wished to keep their jobs. Those who didn't accept moving were considered as having resigned, so without any right to severance packages. After all, Intel didn't fire anyone, right? It's the employee who "unreasonably" didn't "want" to move to the other side of the country. And the sociopaths who thought of this plan undoubtedly earned huge bonuses thanks to the "economy" they caused the company.

Americans, it seems, love their corporate overlords. That's the only explanation I can think of for something so absurd to be allowed to happen.

It is. You were lucky. :-)

Too many people mistake experience for competence. The OP has "just reached a senior level in a tech career and I've been doing pretty much a bit of everything, e.g. software architecture, full stack dev, eng. related specific dev, consultancy, etc." The question should be: is he actually an expert at anything? If yes, then he has nothing to fear from downturns. If no, he's going to be out of a job in the next downturn.

So should he try for management? Well, if he has no real skill at what he's been doing, a management role where he's unskilled and learning the ropes won't help him.

The problem is that schools don't teach science. They "proclaim truths" (without actually going to the trouble of step-by-step proving every single one), then require students to repeat those memorized proclamations to "pass". Teaching science is teaching the scientific method, and teaching it in practice.

Want students to learn evolutions for real, to the point of never, even, being ABLE to believe religious bullshit? Here's how: help them discover evolution themselves. First make them know falseability better than their own names, by guiding them through discovering newtonian mechanics or something like that. Then, when they've mastered the scientific method, switch from classic physics to classic biology, presenting them the same raw data Darwin had collected, and require them to figure that one out by following the same standards. And presto: now you have a generation that both embraces the scientific method and cannot deny evolution.

Until educational standards are that high though, sorry, but for the vast majority of people science and religions will remain similar and roughly interchangeable: someone in the pulpit speaking about esoteric stuff, and listeners blindly accepting (or pretending to) it as such "because authority", and because that's what's socially expected from them.

The solution to this is to have universities certifying your autodidactism. Allow autodidacts to come and take tests, charging reasonably for them. If they pass all the tests, they proved they know what's required from full time students to know, and get the equivalent degree.

At no point you should stop what you're doing just because you're earning enough. You should stop what you're doing when this that you're doing can only be properly described by the words "sociopathy" and/or "psychopathy". Given that, you can however certainly continue doing all the other non-sociopathic, non-psychopatic stuff you've doing that earns you huge and ever increasing profits. Those are fine.

Then you can make a ton of money right now by buying WTI futures or options. The consensus Memorial day price is under $60 - you can clean up to the tune of 1000%s of profit if you put money on your "almost definite" knowledge.

I was starting to wonder about that, then realized we at $BIGCORP are already generating ASTs from your input buffer, unifying those trees with a bunch of patterns, and telling your editor to flag questionable constructs. You type "if not foo in x" and 50ms later you get a proposed improved snippet. It's pretty rare to see quirky style in our codebase.

"C++ is a three-way compromise between good object oriented design, backwards compatibility with C, and high performance. Stroustrup has never billed it as anything else."

Yeah, so when Bjarne wins the "sucks cocks for money with a smile, never billed it as anything else" award, we should all cheer?