I know, Occam's Razor would explain this by simply having all airline employees be psychic, but in fact, when you call and talk to someone, they note what you talked about, then when you call and talk to an entirely different person who magically knows what you talked about before, they're just reading that note. OMG!

I've never actually had this experience when dealing with an airline; I typically have to explain the situation to each employee, often more than once.

I find it also exceptionally hilarious that this attack is coming from the Tea Party, considering that they are nominally libertarian. Buffet, Gates, and Adelson ARE their masters of the universe - at least, they would be, if the Tea Party or the libertarians had any sort of consistency in their beliefs. Instead, this diatribe exposes them for what they really are: run of the mill politicians who are just more xenophobic and nativist than the other politicians.

The idea that the Tea Party is libertarian is silly. The idea that Warren Buffett is libertarian is ludicrous. He's the guy who is well known for claiming he doesn't pay enough in taxes.

It's like the new CEO is bragging he purged more workers than the last CEO.

He is. Main Street isn't the audience; Wall Street loves downsizing.

At which point they bring a foreign worker over and train them in J2EE and Joe Bob's Serialization Framework

Nope. They bring a foreign worker over who already has, on paper, the required (and often impossible) experience in J2EE and Joe Bob's Serialization Framework. The foreign worker then fakes it. And that's assuming the job ad wasn't just a phony to substantiate a green card application for the foreign worker already in that position.

The problem with UI design is it is subjective, it depends heavily on who your target user is. The "good designers" of the past were catering to a particular type of user who no longer makes up the majority of customers. They were indeed good at what they did, but the market has shifted and thus a new crop of designers are trying to work out what serves the majority of user now well.

This is the UI design version of "the lurkers support me in email". The new crop of designers is enamoured with particular design principles which are simply bad. Pretty much every technically sophisticated user hates them, and many of us can explain in detail exactly why they suck. So the designers claim they're designing for a new kind of user who isn't technically sophisticated in order to silence their critics. Management is perfectly willing to buy this line of bull... at least until the bad design hits the regular users who may not know exactly what is wrong, but they DO know it is wrong, and out come the torches and pitchforks.

The good designers of the past were _already designing_ for the same sort of user the new designers claim to be designing for; that's been the case since about 1984. This new user who likes the new stuff... basically doesn't exist.

"You must be stupid if you believe that" is not a logical fallacy. "You are stupid, therefore what you believe is false" is a logical fallacy (ad hominem). "People who believe things that are obviously false are stupid. That is obviously false and you believe it, therefore you must be stupid" is valid, assuming you accept the premises.

"ChickTech Brings Hundreds of Young Women To Open Source"... where they encounter Richard "THAT'S FREE SOFTWARE TO YOU" Stallman , Linus Torvalds, and Theo De Raadt and vow never to touch a computer again.

In the future, they will have sensors that optimize the flush cycle, and use a pressurized system to automatically clear clogs, while using far less water per flush. They will use electrically actuated valves...

And you think all that will make toilets MORE reliable? Haha. Most problems with the mechanical parts of toilets result from wear to the valves, wear to the flapper, and debris clogging the valves. None of that is going to be improved by adding all the doodads you suggest; they're just new things to break.

And of course most of the problems with toilets aren't in the mechanical parts at all, they're just caused by people putting stuff in it that shouldn't be flushed. None of your doodads are going to help that either.

This is the sort of material which could be used for artificial hearts for lawyers, bankers, and politicians.

with stuff that's crappy but incredibly cheap in 3...2...1...

"I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can't afford to live here anymore."

Ha... cause and effect is a bitch sometimes, isn't it? No doubt she thought all those things would be paid for by other people. If she thought at all.

They're gaining access to high-cost cities like New York or San Francisco that offer so much more than good jobs: more restaurants, better schools, less crime, even cleaner air.

There's more restaurants because there are more high-income college grads to spend money there. There's less street crime because Johnny the Finance Douchebag isn't likely to do anything worse than public urination. (white collar crime is another matter)

As for better schools, hasn't happened yet at least in NYC -- the system is very uneven and the lengths parents will go through to get their kid in a better elementary school are legendary. Lose the battle, and welcome to the suburbs. If it does happen, it'll again be because the well-educated wealthy college students are there.

Cleaner air is mostly because there's little polluting industry left. Which means fewer blue-collar jobs.

The implied narrative that those rich overeducated scum are hogging all the good places and leaving the poor in high-crime areas with bad schools, dirty air, and no amenities gets cause and effect completely wrong.

Most of it is empty business-speak; I especially like "Today I want to synthesize the strategic direction" for pure meaningless noise. However, there is one meaningful part: "We'll use the month of July to have a dialogue about this bold ambition and our core focus. [...]Over the course of July, the Senior Leadership Team and I will share more on the engineering and organization changes we believe are needed."

Meaning? They'll take July to make up the lists, then layoffs in early August.