Make threats to intimidate and milk them for money (extortion) and not actually go to court. I know the lawyers have a legal term for this kind of bad faith, but I've no idea what it is right now.

IANAL, but I think the word you're looking for here is "barratry."

Maybe your refrigerator could run instead.

As an older dev, allow me to translate: We're sick of seeing the same old dysfunctions at job after job. It's like the Groundhog Day movie. We want to spare our new team from committing the same kinds of fuckups, and therefore spare ourselves from having to relive them yet again. But being closed to outside perspectives is the "dynamic of the team", ergo older devs don't "fit".

Now I don't know why I couldn't have gotten all that from wheels and tires. ;) Too bad getting you to actually deliver your message requires prying it out of you with a tire iron! Some advice: Don't run for political office! :)

I'd beg to differ somewhat, but your playing hard to get (as in understand) wore me out.

Dunno, I have those two hidden. At some point ya gotta decide who's worth your time and who isn't. AFAIK it's something we do every day in meatspace. Nothing about someone choosing to hang around in Slashdot journalspace means one has to have them as friends. (Even if there's otherwise not many left to choose from.)

On your wondering, why would you that it could only be that? I believe it's both, that in some, rather significant ways I was indeed asleep in my 20's and 30's, or rather content and believing everything was fine and just living my life, and that the degradation of America in general and the inside communist threat in particular didn't just start when I finally woke up.

For example (!), the Snowden revelations broke in recent times, but then we started finding out that the illegal bulk government surveillance, on citizens and not terrorists, began not recently but started over a decade ago right after 9/11. You're not going to like this but, my position is that, in general, things are much worse than we know. As least that's been my experience. Same with computer (in)security. And lest you be confused, I'm not a Luddite, and don't wish to throw out that which I've made and still need to continue my career on. I'm just making a point; I'm not saying what should (or can) be done about it. That's perfectly valid; there's no rule that I'm not allowed to state a truth if I don't include an attached action plan with it.

p.s. No one can parse things like "the Anglosphere has a rounder wheel, and everyone else is out to deflate the tire thereof." You're very poetic, and incomprehensible.

p.p.s. I've seen that author a few times as a guest on FNC. I wish I had time to/could make myself feel like I have time to read political books (and not just my huge backlog of computer books). I wonder if that chap posits *why* (since I don't really need any help accepting the premises) non-Anglosphere cultures are out to deflate it.

You sure are easily distracted by examples. Examples are not the primary point, they're only there to (it is hoped) help illustrate the point. My intent (as it is often) is to (try to, given my limited experience and education) explore broader issues like the state of morality in America or the level of communist advancement here, and not to analyze in-depth any particular one manifestation of them. At least, that seems like an entirely separate set of topics to me, being on an entirely different level. I'm not without opinions on them, they're just not what I thought was actually being discussed.

Well I can see now that you've just been phoning it in, and I've been misinterpreting the existence of responses as wishing to engage and cover some ground. Sorry for being so slow, but you could've told me.

An interesting variation on humanism there; the belief that we can and will always come up with a way to solve our problems.

Technology doesn't always happen. Where's my flying car? It can also not happen not because we haven't invented it, but because your other savior there, the market, took it out of most everyone's hands, like super sonic travel. Are you really that trusting in humanity and the blessed so-called hand, or is it just that your needing to be optimistic about everything leads to grasping for whatever's there?

I don't know if the anti-capitalism mindset is winning per se yet, at least here in America, but the problem is I don't see the continuing further advancement of it stopping. I don't see feasilbly how, as the Left is too dug in to our institutions. They may still be a minority numbers-wise in America, but they've got superior position. That they're not about to give up. Because they didn't exactly acquire that position accidently.

With no foreseeable force powerful enough to alter the current trend -- this trend not being just like a fashion one, but old enough and widespread enough to be one of the world's major religions -- one has to assume it's going to continue. How can the market and inventions save us when we're soon to forget the mindsets of entrepreneurship and independence? We can't be saved by what we no longer believe in, and have abandoned.

Oh, I see now; because in my mind I wasn't talking about software piracy, I didn't make the mental jump to music piracy.

One could argue that a good politician gets things done, and to get things done requires being able to compromise some, I think. Until we've spent time in a major legislative body, it might be out of ignorance that we dismiss all of them as spineless. Can't bargaining room, if pressed, on some positions theoretically be considered compromising, without going so far as crossing over into the territory of only possibly being called corruption?

It's not fun to think about, the making of sausage, but if say I were faced with passing a bill that outlawed abortion except in cases of rape, incest, and the life of the mother, to get the Keystone Pipeline approved, I'd probably vote yea, even though my solid beliefs on abortion are that it should be allowed in cases of rape and incest as well. I think I would see it as a net win.

So would that make me mushy, because I voted differently, technically, than my (truthfully) espoused beliefs? What if I did it for money, to help keep myself in the political office I was in, as a defense against being defeated for election and being replaced by someone with significantly different beliefs?

Then I'm commenting on just this cycle of human stupidity and rottenness; I haven't lived forever, and I believe the Bible, so I'm fine with human worthlessness being relatively constant over the long haul, and being rippled upon close examination. So I'm decrying the current ripple/this ripple's particular manifestation(s) of that constant wretchedness and lameness that is people.

Like for instance driving. I've had to drive on average a half hour one way to work, for better than the last 20 years. I assure I haven't just been asleep on the roads for all but the last several of them. The negligence and stupidity of commuters has dramatically increased. You just didn't used to see what now you see almost daily.

Not everything can be just deeply flawed perception and curmudgeonliness. I think that takes a greater leap of faith on your part than what you're accusing me of. ("There is nothing new under the sun" is not only a brainless statement on its face, it's statistically highly improbable).

p.s. I'm still curious what you were referring to with the "recording of performances" bit.

I agree with him that specialization is dehumanizing, but it seems like we couldn't have all been rural farmers and craftsmen; population expansion means we needed the Industrial Revolution and compacting workers into new kinds of jobs in the cities.

What I wonder is now that we've done that, people are still cluelessly having babies, but what's going to accomodate those generations, so that they can find work and have a decent life (and maybe even be able to mix some investor class in with their being working class).

If I wanted to join Marx in his madness here for a moment, I'd say the proletariat stupidly screwed themselves out of bargaining position by profligate proliferation of the species. But I don't think things were planned as (Marx's) groups; individuals just did what they wanted, there were no great conspiracies.

Until later, when those afflicted with the same madness, of seeing economic class conspiracies where there was just synergy of individual choices, formed an actual conspiracy.

Recording of performances? What kind of performances?!?

AFAICT you're the one that brought technology into this. I was just making a comment about our apparent collective moral maturity level. And then later it occurred to me that if most of us no longer advance very far in that way, it's probably because we don't need to to make do in modern society. Character no longer matters; that's an antiquated virtue now. Being self-centered and morally stunted serves one even better now. Not in relationships (and I think that shows in the statistics), but certainly in the workplace. That puts me at a disadvantage; not only am I not willing to compete in screw-the-other-person-over games, but I visibly don't engage at that level, and I think that makes me look out of place, to everyone else. And my perception is that the workplace has become much less about job performance and more about "team fit" (based on how interviewing has changed over my career). Because I think, and have principles, I'm the freak nowadays. Maybe it's a perception problem on my part, and I've just blissfully assumed that most people were at one point like me, when maybe you're right, maybe they never were, if that's what you're trying to get at. It's just that the optimist in me doesn't want to believe that people always were worthless, stupid boors. I was happier when people weren't so stupid and rotten, and I naturally want to think my happier outlook in say my 30's was based on validity and not just some cluelessness on my part.

We're aware of each other. There have been times if I'm in a really bad nightmare, where it's probably taken me up a few levels from deep sleep, my consciousness becomes available to me and I decide I'm tired of the stress and the madcap situation and decide to wake up and kill it off. So I guess I have been known to interfere in his world at times. Still, for selfish reasons, I want to have the advantage.

Doesn't being able to remember part of a dream right after waking from it qualify as being aware of your subconscious?

Maybe this'll help: It's human nature that makes us not want to grow up, but it's modern life that makes it possible for us not to have to grow up.