I'm not as senior as you, but a lot of what you say rings true with me.

The single biggest advantage of having an experienced engineer is they have seen the many mistakes over the years that shouldn't be repeated. Lots of the hot-shot but lack-luster younger engineers I've seen are so caught up in the areas they are talented they ignore the lessons they can learn from the older. I'm still on the young side, but I wouldn't be where I am without the many mentors I've had.

Other than the philosophy of younger think differently (for good or for bad), some management can be eager to benefit from young, eager engineers with less family responsibilities.

The other problem is that when you're regarded as being an expert and and 2 & 3 don't apply, giving an estimate that hedges for realities to happen doesn't satisfy management. You get accused of padding hours, being difficult, or playing favorites (if there are multiple approaches being evaluated). What's weird is that after this song and dance, they still expect you might run a week late...

Nothing against owning, but this job is best done with a shotgun with #8 shot. You're going to have a hard time hitting a flying target with a rifle and the round will travel for miles (most have effective distances of at least half a mile... a high angle shot will send it farther). #8 and other skeet shot loses it's lethality very quickly but should pack enough punch to take out a non-ruggedized drone.

Not just right around launch time, but for over a year.

Some long-established companies are failing after the recent downturn. Wealthy families that have inherited ownership have seen large portions of their wealth disappear as their target market no longer had money to spend. Word either hasn't gotten around or the incidents are too isolated and those who remain simply look down upon those fallen from grace.

If your business depends on lots of consumers with disposable income then your business depends on the middle class.

Intelligent doesn't always equal rich. Some people are just born that way.

Nope, you hit the nail on the head. No spending measure gets put in a bill in Congress without a district to benefit from the expenditure (even if the expenditure is a worthy cause). Big defense bills often get broken up in funny ways because of this (even if the DOD says they don't need the whatsitcalled built in the first place).

When making such a bold statement, you should back it up with a line drawn from "HUD use" to "less ticket revenue" other than less drivers looking down and crashing.

The backbone of the internet should survive as it was intended, but the more local components (ISPs) would probably fail. Many customers only have 99% or 99.9% uptime, and this is with the power grid working more-or-less correctly.

For this to actually work, we would probably find ourselves switching to a loose-coupled wireless internet (at least for the ISP piece), which is something that has been researched.

I get one about every other month. I think I'm not living in the right neighborhood...

The best example was the debate on national security. The best Romney could do was say "I would have done the same" over and over. The only difference between the two is social and fiscal, but even then the difference isn't all that large.

I don't disagree with most of what you said, but this part stands out to me. I've seen it mentioned by people who identify themselves with the Tea/Republican party but I don't know what three wars they speak of. At best, I can think of our involvement in Libya (where most of Europe got involved too) and possibly a reference to Syria (where in truth we are sitting and watching the government kill it's people). I don't believe we got involved in Mali (yet).

Sounds like someone's bad software application.

Probably close to it is service done by the laborer where all revenue goes to the laborer. It's nuanced and has plenty of counter examples. My example is someone sets up a nanny service where they are the sole laborer. They provide a service to customers and 100% of the revenue (minus expenses) goes to them.