I am required by the government, over penalty of a large fine to do business with corrupt insurance companies. I MUST purchase their product, that provides me nothing that I can't provide on my own. I like how now we equate having insurance with having access to health care. Currently I pay about 10,000 dollars a year for insurance that provides me about 5000 dollars in services a year. What could I do with that additional 5,000 dollars a year for the next 10-15 years that I am running a surplus to create a saving account that I can pay for services when I am older and running a deficit.

To make it more plain. On average the country pays more to insurance companies that they are provided in medical services... otherwise the insurance companies would go out of business.

So, yes currently the government compels me to do business with a company that I don't want to

What do you expect... There is only one person that MIGHT have a computer background on the paper... This is pure academic fluff, compare an in-memory database with a spinning rust based database and see how many operations you can get out of each one performing the same operation.

Here is how you make the results faster.

Compare:
1) Calculating 1MB of data and writing it to disk
vs.
2) Calulating 100K of data, writing it to disk, repeat 10 times.

If the time to write to disk is what takes most of the time, then getting the operation started early and writing to disk in parallel to calculating your data will always win. In their case - what they have done is made the in memory operation exceedingly stupid so it takes too much time. I could trivially write C code that blows their operation out of the water, unfortunately - their Java/Python code are hiding a LOT of inefficiencies in the in-memory operation. So compare their disk operation, with a cache line optimized in-memory calculation and a disk cache optimized disk write operation... It won't even be close.

I'm Cured

There are two ways of approaching the problem... Get a tool and make your process conform to the tool, or document your process and get a tool that can be modified to support the process. One of these ways works, the other never does.

That said - most engineering organizations have documented a process and adapted one of many tools to support this process. Sounds like in this case they don't even know what the process is - heck, everyone probably does their own thing so there is likely to not even be a process.

Try this
Step 1: Determine how you want issue tracking to work
Step 2: Get everyone to follow this process without bringing in a tool, your process will change during this step
Step 3: Document the final process from Step 2
Step 4: Bring in any tool that can be lightly customized to support the documented process

Note the hopefully lightly customized part above... Yes there is probably work to do here, regardless of what tool you choose. Most likely you want to pay for the tool that will require the easiest/lightest customization - it will be cheaper than trying to get a tool for free and using a small team to massively customize it.

Austin Lounge Lizards

But not as we know it.

A tear just left my eye.

Yes, most women I know keep a bottle of it in their purse for usage. Not quite what you were thinking - but a much more common usage

Please don't tell me you placed a monster ad, or even worse Craigslist. Are you working with a GOOD recruiting firm? Are you big enough to have an internal sourcing team to bring you candidates?

So many people think this is easy and won't pay for the expertise to hire "the best" (Everyone wants the best, everyone also wants to pay industry average wages... Moneyball doesn't work in Tech). A good recruiter will be able to talk to you to find what you are looking for, find you a couple candidates - listen to you on why you didn't like them and change what they are sending to you, repeat until you find what you are looking for

Honestly it sounds like you have a specific set of filters you are looking for that you haven't applied (cryptographic systems, security maybe) and are bringing in generic candidates that weren't screened for these skills. I can trivially answer your questions - but then I have been in that area for 20 years, don't ask me how to write a database query or setup a JSON parser.

The trouble with the maples
(And they're quite convinced they're right)
They say the oaks are just too lofty
And they grab up all the light
But the oaks can't help their feelings
If they like the way they're made
And they wonder why the maples
Can't be happy in their shade

And of course the sad ending

So the maples formed a union
And demanded equal rights
'The oaks are just too greedy
We will make them give us light'
Now there's no more oak oppression
For they passed a noble law
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet, axe and saw
--- Rush 1978
Remember, you can never make yourself better by having someone else chop the other person down. Very powerful song - still resonates today.

I would be happy if the Senate shitcans it and actually votes on something else. Would be better than what H.R. has done for the past 6 years which isn't to even to bother voting on a budget, much less one that could actually pass. Lets hope the Republicans can do a little better and actually vote on a budget, even better if they can get 6-10 Democrats to vote yes (and even better if 3-4 Republicans vote against it)

Have to disagree with you a bit here.
If my preferred college has 100 openings there is a finite number of successes (people allowed in). If I allow people who aren't as qualified as I am into the college, and I don't make it in because I am not a particular color, sex, sexuality, etc. then I have been pushed back and must go to a less desirable college. This is happening today in MANY college admissions (with colleges being sued because they continue to discriminate on the grounds of sex and race/ethnicity).
Now lets throw in other factors where sex and race are used to determine winners and losers and it is demonstrably provable that for every person you push forward, you must push another person back.
If you believe a rising tide raises all boats are you a firm believer in trickle down economics as well?

I don't care that you traffic shape my traffic -> But it is immoral and should be illegal to change it. Why do we allow ISPs like this to change the traffic flowing through their systems to the destination.
I am not talking about adding an MPLS tag that gets inserted on insertion into the provider and stripped before it leaves the other side, I am talking adjusting my traffic to add content to the L4+ content. The ISP should only adjust things at L3 and below. Everything above that should never be touched (Ok - Large scale NAT I can live with - Lets move that to L5+)

Really, My company requires me to book the LUF (Lowest Usable Fair) +10%. I had to argue when the darn computer put me on a flight that included an overnight in Phoenix, that would have included a 100 dollar a night airfare because it was going to save them 50 bucks in airfare. My boss bought that argument and I got to come home a day earlier.

Airfare is driven off of the cheapest flight between two places - saving a couple hours isn't going to be a commercial success, look at the example of the Concorde.

The funny thing is most animals in captivity live 1.5-2x as long as their peers in the wild. I am going to love this, ape goes back into the wild without any real survival skills and either dies of starvation, or gets hunted by the first Jaguar that comes close to it.

Once an animal is taken out of the wild and held in captivity it is almost impossible to put them back into the wild - they just can't survive. This is why you are very careful with taking animals out of the wild - it is a one way street.