It is much harder to love someone when you realize one day they gave you a virus. ;)

"You get discounts on other goods and services."

So that is what you call CEO perks, bonuses, and severance pay.....

Most of what you complain about is due to insufficient tax revenue or due to Congressional attempts to actually interfere with good governance and good stewardship. As the other poster said, move to a country without a strong government such as Somalia or Mexico. Just watch out for the gangs, militias and death squads. A few taxes are a low price to pay for the benefits of civilization.

"Corporation demand the right to sell your personal information for the benefit of others"

Fixed that for you. Remember, civilizations have long existed and thrived without corporations. The last few hundred years are an anomaly.

Is there a word for that even? Where you pay somebody and they unwelcomingly shag you? Only thing I can think of is "taxpayer."

Nah. I don't know your situation but I get, or have received; roads, schools, fire protection, cheap food, clean water (unheard of in many places in the world), airports, railway travel, national parks, national forests, state forests, public parks, heavily subsidized university education, cleaner air, cleaner water, and public libraries. By pooling my tax money with others I we use our combined cash to create a civilization. Which is why I hate tax cheats and dodgers, they are parasites.

And they don't even kiss you first.

Moderated 'insightful'? Seriously? To me it is blindingly obvious.

private cash only transactions.

Well, you cannot buy stocks directly, just derivatives which I do not trust. You could directly lend or invest in a company there but the cash out mechanism can be highly restricted. So good luck with that.

face it. tech has the shelf life of fresh fruit.

True.

BSD

Who needs Windows to run a word processor? Who needs Windows to run TurboTax when the preparation companies own web based products work just fine in almost any web browser? Who needs Windows for games when there's a BSD running PS4?

I don't need Windows:

[CronoCloud@ ~]$ uname -a
Linux 3.19.1-201.fc21.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Mar 18 04:29:24 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[CronoCloud@ ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Fedora release 21 (Twenty One)

1) Honestly, who doesn't? Everyone is biased. I am just telling you how I judge how people will integrate with my team. I have a rubric. Most people have some bias, e.g. 'no girls allowed', but try to hide it or are in denial.

2) but there actually is not enough information to appropriately judge
There never is. I can only look at resumes, references, and any public postings. How well a person *really* performs is only shown over a matter of time. But there have been time when I was not as critical as I should have been and it blew up in my face. My gut said 'no' but my brain rationalized things. I then spent 90% of my time dealing with a troublesome employee or team member. By the way it cuts both ways. I use the same method when interviewing employers.

3) The guilty verdict would come down, before the defendant even got to made their case repudiating all the apparent "evidence" from the prosecution.
If you want to find out what a person is really like observe them in unguarded moments. Not the front they put up. That is how you screen out sociopaths.

That is a VERY good point, and you are technically correct, but I think the "real programmers" would laugh at me if I called that bit I did with sed, programming. We have to draw a line "somewhere".

Well, sed IS Turing complete, true. But again, we have to draw a line "somewhere". Don't ask me where, I'm not a programmer! Yes, yes I've given sed, bash and BASIC examples in this discussion, but I can't program my way out of a paper bag.

That said, I think a course in scripting or computing concepts would be more useful to more people than teaching them Java (Personally I think they should use python). Knowing the very basics of if/then/else/do/while/for/next concepts has been useful for me. Heck just teaching people that there's more to computing than their web browser would be good.

My PS4 would like to have a word with you about that "should run Windows" bit.

O'Reilly is that you?