If you honestly think the people who want to rob tourists need to see you using glass in order to know you're a tourist, you've probably never been more than 100 miles from where you were born, let alone a foreign country. Trust me, tourists are obvious, and you can ALWAYS figure out their economic status very easily without judging their headgear.

Only an absolute fucking idiot would steal a device that will destroy itself (except for functions related to calling the police to report itself stolen and help them locate it), and only an absolute fucking idiot would do that with a device that is expensive enough for the theft of it to be a major crime, and only an absolute fucking idiot would rob a tourist bringing the wrath of their local authorities down on them HARD. The only people who harm tourists aren't doing it for petty shit like robbing them of a (soon to be useless) item like glass.

Much more likely is someone will spot you in glass and think "Oh, look, an asshole."

What's funny is that the person you are quoting barely even mentions the TECH mishap - he sums it up as "numerous huge IT errors" but then goes on a rant about things that have NOTHING to do with the fucked up launch of healthcare.gov, but you want to claim that other people can't seem to separate their politics from their ability to assess the success or failure of a tech project. What the ever loving fuck does someone saying there will be doctor shortages, or a 2% tax, have to do with the website sucking? Nothing. Stop projecting your partisanship onto other people.

Personally I hate the ACA because it isn't single payer and all it will wind up doing is delaying actual healthcare reform in this country by decades while simultaneously keeping a useless industry alive. In any case, this story isn't about politics, it's about tech fuckups in 2013. So:

As an IT project, Healthcare.gov was an abortion. You had project management that was behaving in a fairly schizophrenic fashion (namely, political leadership who were battling over the ACA trying to repeal/defend it) leading to delays in starting implementation, you had incompetent contractors hired to put it out, you had incompetent developers building it (my god, the amount of pointless data streaming up and down was staggering, the front end code we could see was incompetent at best, the whole mess was completely non-performant) and then to top it off, as a post-mortem it seems that most were trying to assign blame and score political gotcha points and throwing up all kinds of irrelevant shit rather than just dealing with reality and trying to do a solid job implementing the law of the land.

I do agree there can be no doubt that Healthcare.gov is the absolute biggest fuck-up of the year.

Though my vote for worst tech issue of the year definitely goes to the NSA stuff - I'll take a thousand shitty websites over big brother any day.

If the shoe and underpants bombers had been intending to actually succeed, they would have gone to a lavatory to set their bombs off, they would not have done what they did in plain sight of other passengers. It's not really reasonable to think that the intent of either of those incidents was to actually take a plane down, since if it was, they would have been instructed to go to a toilet to do it.

The idea behind those "attacks" was to get us to enact even more incredibly stupid security tactics, and they succeeded perfectly.

Totally, because as history has shown time and time again, only people who were really great in a particular subject as kids go on to bring anything great into the world, and there has never, ever, not even once, been someone who was initially thought to be very bad at a subject who later became a true giant in the field.

I just assume people willing to stick around in an abusive environment must have low self-esteem and/or be REALLY bad at what they do, to the point where they feel they couldn't get involved elsewhere.

Even if we take your reasoning as valid, it's still pretty icky; you're advocating for it being a good thing to have projects stuffed with people willing to accept a ration of shit as some kind of ideological purity test.

Think about how absolutely fucked up that is for a second.

Your problem is you imagine somehow that hurling abuse at people is effective at getting them to be better at their job.

There's a difference between a thin skin and not wanting to work in an environment where people feel like being an asshole and abusing people for making mistakes is a virtue.

Honestly, every time a story like this pops up here, I have to think most of the folks here have Stockholme Syndrome and miss being bullied when they were kids, given how willingly they support abuse in the workplace.

For what it's worth, when I make a mistake at work, I'm already beating myself up much more effectively than my co-workers could, so them being assholes wouldn't add anything. Much better would be working together to identify and fix the problem and then to put a plan in place to help avoid similar issues from happening in the future.

But hey, if it works for you - if you honestly feel like taking abuse is some kind of virtue in the workplace, or something that is completely unavoidable - then far be it from me or anyone else to suggest there might be a better way.

The person I was responding to said that it was impossible to take control of a plane since 9/11, PERIOD. It is not. People have taken control of planes. Whether or not they got what they wanted as a result is not relevant - they took control of the plane in, according to you, at least 2 cases, even if they were arrested on the ground.

The OP didn't make any claims about US airlines or anything else - just that hijackings since 9/11 are impossible PERIOD, which is demonstrably false as you have just agreed.

The person I was responding to said nobody would ever take over a plane again, period.

People have taken over planes since 9/11. It originating from the US or being a US airline is completely irrelevant to the comment I made or the comment I was responding to.

Why do people keep saying this? There have been hijackings since 9/11 in which the plane was not destroyed and the hijackers took control of the plane.

For an assuredly incomplete list, check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings

Pay particular attention to the 10+ ones listed after September 11, 2001.

Except "this generation" isn't some monolithic block of people. Some will get fucked over by their openness, some will thrive from it, just like anything else.

I don't go about broadcasting my information, but I have made the conscious choice to accept that ANYTHING about me is potentially knowable by anyone, and I have made a conscious effort to arrange my life in such a way that even if my deepest, darkest secrets were known to the entire planet, nothing terribly important to me would be all that negatively impacted. It actually has been a pretty nice exercise in sorting out what is ACTUALLY important to me vs. what I only thought was important due to convention.

I disagree. In 1992 Clinton had to say he didn't inhale, and now we have a president who said that was the whole point and happily admits he dabbled. We've gone from it being an absolute career killer for any politician to even be *suspected* of being gay to it not being THAT big a deal if someone is openly gay. On stuff that people used to be scandalized by, we've gotten better because it's become more common to the point where people are more easily able to relate. So, I really don't think that the same standards you or I or other people of whatever the "older" generation will hold with younger people, especially those who have grown up in a more permissive world.

Seriously - years ago when Clinton was being hounded over *GASP* a blowjob from an intern (and lying about it under oath) would you have felt confident saying that a half-black, half-white guy who admitted to smoking weed ("Did I inhale? That was the point") with a really foreign sounding name would be elected President of the United State not once but twice, and both times with a very solid majority? We're starting to care less and less about dumb shit that doesn't matter - and every year as more and more of the old guard die off we get more permissive.

On your point about felons and acceptance of same, I don't disagree that by and large we vilify (whether correctly or not) those who have been incarcerated, but there is a rather strong trend towards recognizing that just because someone has been imprisoned doesn't necessarily mean it was just or right. A LOT of people in this country who have been imprisoned were put away for drug crimes, and as you might have noticed, states are starting to realize how fucking stupid that is and slowly moving to change it.

Shit is changing, the rate of change is increasing, and I honestly don't see irrelevant shit that people post on Facebook or whatever turning into something career ending for those seeking office or positions of responsibility. There will be exceptions (look at hypocritical assholes insisting that Weiner isn't fit for office for showing his dick on Twitter yet shockingly those same people are completely silent when one of theirs is caught trying to suck some dude off in a men's room despite being staunchly anti-gay) but it'll get better.

You're missing something though - the fact that everyone's indiscretions will be available will mean that indiscretions will matter less. In a world where everyone's got nude pics out there or whatever, nobody will give a fuck because giving a fuck is essentially risking mutually assured destruction, or, if they happen to be someone without easily discoverable dirt, they'll wind up being seen as a busybody asshole for bothering to try to shame someone.

Hell, the way tech is moving, we aren't that far from people being able to trivially find out anything they want, essentially instantly, about anyone they happen to run across with nothing more than a picture and a smartphone/watch/device.

For me, I learned a long time ago that rather than waste my energy fighting a losing (already lost?) battle, I would instead try to learn how to not give much of a fuck if people feel compelled to "violate my privacy" and how to mitigate the damage that could be done by a malicious person who chose to do so. 90% of this learning was becoming confident enough to just shrug and say "what's your point?" when nosy people try to shame me, and the other 10% was doing my best to ensure that the people who matter in my life aren't assholes.

Are you in favor of laws that require emergency responders to render aid in cases of immediately life threatening scenarios, or of emergency rooms to provide treatment regardless of ability to pay? How about the right to due process when arrested and all the people that forces to provide labor? What about polling staff etc. when it comes time to exercise your right to vote?

Helping people who have immediate needs and en encouraging them to learn to be self-sufficient once the immediate needs are met is not cultivating dependency, and I honestly have no idea where, other than your ass, you pulled out the idea that I would think otherwise.

People who are in immediate need tend to make very stupid decisions in order to solve their immediate problem - a person who does not know where their next meal will come from or where they will sleep that day is, by and large, not going to be coming up with a master plan for long-term self-sufficiently.

Further, people who are in programs where they receive welfare often have a very difficult time making the transition to self-sufficiency because idiots such as yourself have helped shape policy to the point where in many situations a person who does get part-time work winds up having their benefits cut more than the part-time work will give them, to the point where they will not be viable. And, of course, idiots such as yourself seem to constantly suggest incredibly stupid policies like drug-testing for welfare recipients (which saves very little, if anything) and cutting programs that will help recipients learn useful skills etc.

You're an idiot who compares human beings to wild animals. I find you icky as a result.