Or, rather than being pugilistic, as both you and the GP are wont to do, it can simply be that you use it as way to make pleasant conversation to pass the time and potentially to learn something about something you hadn't much thought about before. But don't let me stop both of you guys sparring - it's quite entertaining.

But I understand from your explanation that environmentalism is a special brand of religion whose dalliances must be overlooked for the greater good...

Well, no, but if you can show me the true Scotsman organizations of your world that somehow achieve their goals without stepping over the line into hyperbole and "active fundraising" I'm sure I can poke holes in those, too. You're just being a pedantic douche at this point.

And 77% of all self-started businesses fail within the first ten years - not shut down - fail. Even at that, self employed people, on average, make less money than those employed by businesses owned by others. And this is what you promote as a strategic choice for peoples' careers? Not to mention that many people don't have the entrepreneurial skills necessary to successfully run their business (see the first report - incompetence and inexperience are the top three reasons for business failure).

I thought probability of success figured into any proper decision calculation. You aren't a Republican by any chance, are you? Not being part of the "reality-based" community seems to be an indicator for that.

The WP ecosystem is affected by fragmentation in an Android-like fashion because of how the operating system is rolled out to the devices.

To be fair, the "devices" word of your post is actually small enough in quantity so as to be hyperbole. Although I guess that makes it easier for Microkia to manage the "extensive" fragmentation of its "market".

Well, that's about par for the course. An oversimplified example that gets the domain knowledge wrong. Almost no one looks for "peaks" like that in finance. They are either looking for mismatches in market prices from multiple sources or for trends.

Your example is stupid. You might want something like that for a domain needing signal detection, though, so good try. You just didn't know enough about anything in the real world to get it RIGHT.

They were called actor-based programming systems. They came about in the mid-to-late 1960's and incorporated into languages in the early 1970's (look up Hewitt's work on Actors). Pros: Decentralized computational agents connected by message-passing can increase resilience in a system. Cons: Non-local flow of control and unknown state/functionality within remote computational agents (which always inadvertently leaks out) makes understanding what is actually happening in the system overall difficult, leading to problems in debugging; lack of state within systems (monads, which are a difficult concept for most programmers to fit their head around, notwithstanding) leads to extraneous message passing load, potentially killing performance.

So, TL;DR (OK, so I did read it, sue me...) and tells us stuff we knew fifty years ago. About par for the course.

Fine, the reactive document is a manifesto describing a set of architectural principles that supposedly has benefits in the current world. The agile document is a manifesto describing a set of project management principles that supposedly has benefit in the current world (although, in reality, it's twenty years old now and the people who are now promoting it are becoming just as rigid and annoying as the UML/SEI/PDP/heavy doc assholes they replaced). Conflating the two as related (other than in name) was incorrect. Not only was the agile manifesto, short, pithy, and to the point, the reactive manifesto is just another TL;DR page that looks like it hasn't had enough work by actual smart (as opposed to successful) people to be short. Does this help?

Frankly, we need more manifestos released more often. The good ones will be followed; the stupid ones will evaporate in time.

Christ on a shingle, what's up with the "Will it be a pointless venture?" You already answered that when you said you wouldn't be the next Neil deGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan. If that's your only limitation, then there's a lot of room between doing nothing and being in the top 100 recognized members of the pack.

And, even if it is a pointless venture, who cares? A person doesn't need to justify his choice of hobby and we all need our recreation time. Astronomy and astrophysics seems to be a place where an amateur could potentially still contribute - there's EM radiation coming down in a lot of different wavelength ranges and not a lot of coverage for what seems to be a very big sky. Sure, it'll be a lot of work, but what worthwhile isn't? Besides, you'll be entertained and you don't seem to have anything else better to do.

OK, let's put it this way - if you don't show up in uniform, you're sent home and don't get invited back to the party. The employer gives you a list of place(s) to buy your uniforms. How you pay for those is up to you. This happened at the first low wage job I had (as an orderly in a nursing home), as a construction worker (you couldn't show up in tennis shoes), and I'm pretty sure that's the case in almost any place in this country where low-wage employees are hired. And it's completely legal. So legal that you're allowed to write those off as a tax deduction. So, yeah, it's not "paying for a job" per se, but it does put a financial burden on people who are just starting one.

Yeah, but luckily you haven't told him the "2. ???" part of your strategy yet. So STFU quick, unless you want to be poor and not keep the "best" goats for yourself!

But if they are actually stupid enough to do that they'll have made an enemy of an economy much larger than theirs, their largest export market, a country they're heavily dependent on for the basic infrastructure of running a government...

I have no dog in this fight (not that it's not entertaining theatre), but I also know that capitalists have very few enemies they will not sell to. If they were willing to deal with tinpot Central American dictators, you know they'll have no issue whatsoever in dealing with the Scots. You're probably overestimating the actual level of dislike between Britain and Scotland, even in the face of divorce. And you're especially overestimating the dislike of bankers cozying up to whomever they can make a profitable deal with - sharks have no national loyalties.

That being said, if the Scots really wanted to piss off the British, they could apply to France to become a protectorate and then keep the nukes.

What happens to Scotty in this universe? Instead of engineering, will he go all Braveheart on the Southerners in the UK? My world is so confusing...

Fine, Wrong, why do we have doctors? After all, a bunch of sensors cameras and pressure monitors guiding a functional idiot could do the job if backed with the proper knowledge base. After all, it works so well with Comcast.

Be happy she's an ex-wife. Besides, one of my ex's sisters would have been fine for boinking, if not any sort of long-term thing. At least that's the only reason she'd be in my bed.

Because they don't need to succeed, they need to DISRUPT. And disrupt one of the largest and most entrenched institutions in the world - the higher education system, which has been around, adapting, and surviving since the mid-15'th century. Plus they have to do it with a minimum of money to pay for decent course materials. But it needs to DISRUPT! Simple success is not enough. Investors don't pay for success any more. You must DISRUPT the dominant paradigm or you're rubbish. Whether this is a problem with the education system or financial system can be decided by the casual observer.