It's because the traditional aerospace contractors of red-state areas (Ares was corporate welfare for them) stick to it.

This is why the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed. JPL/NASA scientists use metric of course. The first of the recent successful return-to-Mars systems was Pathfinder, all done by JPL. Worked great. Next one, Congress forced use of outside MIC contractors for some part. They used imperial units, and had a fresh-college hire working on the guidance computations. They passed information back and forth on plain files.

No we don't. Designing good languages takes lots of experience.

We need a fresh start in human cognitive ergonomics as applied to programming. No, actually we don't---there's been plenty of research already.

What we need is for people to actually care about these things, which means appreciation of non-trivial academic knowledge and experience of older people who've been there before. It means appreciating that good syntax, as it relates to underlying semantics, is essential for human performance even if various choices are equivalent to a compiler.

Actually there is a fairly-well used programming language, with a substantial user base, highly optimizing compilers, and a large set of libraries which comes closer to meeting the poster's objections (which I agree with 100%).

It's called Fortran. Modern Fortran (95 through 2008) makes fairly reasonable use of words to express important semantics instead of bizarre combinations of some legacy subset of wordlets and punctuation. Fortran uses additional words when it adds additional concepts.

REAL, POINTER :: a(:)
REAL, ALLOCATABLE, TARGET :: b(:,:)

b is a two dimensional array of 'real' (single precision float), which is dynamically allocatable, and a potential target of a pointer.
a is a pointer to a one dimensional array of reals.

What do these look like in all the 'web-scale' programming languages?

And yes, the difference between FUNCTION and SUBROUTINE is there. VB just swiped it.

It's possible the older programmer considered this person's input, thought about it and rejected it. Certainly about concurrency, a wise programmer might recognize the continued difficulties and subtleties in writing such a code, no less maintaining it and remaining clear about subtle semantic assumptions. The right choice is, in many cases, "avoid". There's a difference between clever and wise.

And then the version control stuff could just be a dumb mistake. They do happen.

If those younger managers are unable to achieve results without generating significant personnel disruption, why do they deserve employment at all?

A bit more maturity reveals that everybody, yes everybody, has varying skill and knowledge levels on all sorts of tasks. There is somebody better than you at something. Do you think it's reasonable that this other kid wants to get you fired?

Good management maximizes compatibility between person and requirements. If the older co-worker doesn't know how to program concurrency very well, and you do, then you should take on the concurrency-programming tasks instead of bitching. Yes, you should get a better bonus.

It hasn't been.

| Because it's "duplicate" or because it's never been done before.

These are the indefensible reviewer comments which can be applied at liberty to any grant application. Unlike publishing a scientific paper, where usually reviewers require some scientific justification for their negative comments, getting funding is arbitrary.

Here they are:

1) Application is too similar to applicant's previous research
2) Application does not show sufficient preliminary results to suggest feasibility.

Nearly always you get one or both of them from a reviewer. I've gotten them from the SAME reviewer, one following the other just like that list.

Of course Lamar Smith isn't going to do anything remotely sensible to help NSF, quite the opposite. Now in addition to the criteria #1 and #2 which the review committee can fling at any thing they don't like (or just happen to not be one of their buddies), NSF program monitors themselves will start rejecting applications because of some vague feeling that it would be damaging politically. The political constraints will never be made explicit on paper, of course, but they will be enforced with inexplicable "early retirements" and undenied rumors, which makes them more powerful.

| will mechanically drain its operating fluid into a vessel where it will just sit there.

Until the rain and floods come in after the accident in which case you have steam explosions and radioactive waste in a highly water-soluble liquid combing to make all sorts of fun.

A LFTR is a chemical reprocessing plant with astonishingly racdioactive liquid (since it just came out of the fission core) circulating at hundreds of degrees with caustic chemical properties. There will be leaks. There will be breaches. Every drop is a huge problem. There will be----well anything that can go wrong in a hot chemical plant---now add in the fact that humans even in suits can't go in there for decades if something is wrong.

Nuclear reprocessing plants are the nastiest ones, because of the combination of liquids and radiaoactivity. I do not trust a utility with such an installation, and only want a tiny number of them, not every power plant to be one.

A liquid flouride thorium reactor has exceptionally radioactive fission products dissolved in a caustic, very hot liquid. Every nuclear plant also has to be a chemical reprocessing plant of 700 degree radioactive liquids sufficiently dangerous that humans cannot get close to them for decades.

This system also happens to be very water-soluble, so that a breach and flood similar to Fukushima would be extraordinarily dangerous---most of the waste would have entered the environment instead of a modest fraction.

Conventional reactors have fission products encased in zirconium steel.

| A single friggen massive algae bloom could eat up all the CO2 produced in a year and turn it into O2 in a few weeks, and die dropping the carbon safely at the bottom of the sea.

Empirically, why hasn't this been happening to keep the CO2 concentration stable?

What makes one believe that such a circumstance could be engineered to happen every year for the next 300 years?

Right on.

The Black Panthers were a rare example of a militia who procured weapons motivated by the original intent behind the 2nd amendment.

Sure, the roles do require "math literacy" which is a lower standard than "sufficient mathematical and comptuational capability to independently produce results for a research journal."

Just like natural language literacy is a lower standard than powerful, skilled writing.

There is an explicit federal statute against unregulated coinage intended as 'current money'.

Liberty "Dollars" used the word "dollars". In practice the notion was intended to be primarily profitable for the coiner, essentially selling metals for USD at a price much higher than the commodity price by calling it a "dollar" and encouraging its use as money in contrast to numismatic value.

"So: what is illegal about buying securities that your bank didn't authorize you to buy?!?!"

It's illegal because banks own the government. Defrauding a baker is a civil action, defrauding a banker is a Federal crime.

In reality, companies would hire more US residents because the burden of working very remotely lowers productivity and engagement.

They might start opening offices in Cleveland, Denver or St. Louis and pay US citizens the same wages which they pay H1B in San Jose.