NASA has contributed more to our society far more than most (e.g. plastics, ceramics, things that we rely on for our daily lives, that sort of thing), and we spend FAR less on space exploration than our cluterfucked government GAVE to the financial industry as "punishment" for fucking over the entire nation.

That is, sadly true.

Why else do so many americans believe that we ever had a democracy even though our government wasn't set up as such?

This is the clusterfucks in charger realizing that they found yet another way to steal money from the people, and people being fucking stupid enough to elect these asswipes in the first fucking place. It's bad for everyone in the long run though... like most things that politicians do.

My first interview with a google dude went terribly, also -- it made me not want work with them. After he described the solution that he wanted me to code OVER THE PHONE I started by describing a utility function that I knew I'd need then started describing the algorithm... and he derailed me complete when I basically "just swap these two" and he said you can't do that! My first thought was, "Yes idiot, I can, since I anticipated this obvious need and planned for it." After that I just couldn't motivate myself to bother.

More significantly, I suspect that the definition of "top talent" still in reality just means people who put in the most hours. That's the standard for corporate america, after all.

Don't forget, someone VOTED for the same idiots who are now denying climate change, even while their own state is experiencing first hand the effects of the rising seas, yet they're so incredibly stupid that they refuse to account for the rising seas even when planning new development.

What would make sense is shutting down the pentagram, reforming the government contracting process (for example, stop giving contracts to companies that consistently fail to deliver), cutting the pay of the monkeys in the senate, congress, and the white house (etc), and put an end to subsidies for large, well-established corporations that have no need for subsidies (e.g. oil), and start taxing corporations like microsloth, giggle, crapple, and so on.

Modern society is incontrovertible proof that we weren't designed by an intelligent being. If we were, we wouldn't be constantly trying to poison ourselves for short term profit.

The cold, hard truth about faith is that man created god to control the weak minded.

Profit kills innovation. I agree with you, but even private companies tend to become increasingly risk averse and therefore innovation resistant when their profits grow.

The most obviously visible example of the death of innovation as a direct result of profit is hollywood.

It won't happen. Ever.

First off, the engineers work for managers, which is why all engineering shops turn into stagnant messes sooner or later. The managers are leaches by definition - they're working on overhead, which means that the engineers' work is paying them, yet the managers are the ones making the decisions. Hence the decisions will shift toward what gets the manager promoted, and that leads to a conflict of interest, because what's best for the product usually isn't sexy enough for the manager to get promoted.

Second, it will lead to engineers who want to do good, innovative work to move on to other projects and/or companies that are worth their time, and you'll end up turning into another expedia or amazon, where 90% of the work work available is maintaining the code other people wrote, and if you want to do anything cool you need to put in overtime.

If you lose the sugarcoating, you'll realize that the actual productivity metric has nothing to do with whether or not a given employee is doing what their job describes. It's simply based on how many hours they're on the clock.

The management has yet another incentive for having staff under them working overtime consistently: it gives the management an excuse to recruit more people for their team, which leads to their getting promoted, so they can leach off of even more people.

Google is yet more evidence that profit kills innovation.

It's you that is lacking understanding of the word respect. Respect must be earned and never given, and there is no reason that one should respect an employer simply because they're an employer.

Some of the worst code and the most idiotic engineering I've ever seen have been from american coders.

The indian coders generally seem to be far more interested in pointless and overly complicated optimizations that partially solve terrible design decisions than the american coders, who seem to like throwing more hardware at it.

At amazon I watched an upgrade that increased the computational throughput of the cluster our crapware was on by a factor of 96 manage to nearly double the software's actual throughput. Those were some of the worst engineers I have ever has the displeasure of working with.

This is proof of idiocy. If everyone around the hapless victim stands around in silence, they're complicit in the crime. If they all walk, the employer's fucked rather than the other way around. Americans are too stupid to realize this.