It's just so frustrating that people are so easily distracted from the real problem. All I see is hand-wringing about solving the wrong problem:

Do we need a basic living income?
Maybe, but you're getting distracted. This is a complicated solution to a simple problem.

Minimum living wage?
Again, distracted by trying to give just a little bit more to a lot of people.

More education? Will that fix it?
Of course not. How ever much education we subsidize, the rich will always pay for their kids to be in more exclusive schools for longer. But we just lost focus dealing with the issue...

How about racial eqality? BLM?
Maybe, but again, you're getting distracted. It's not the color of your skin that's got you downtrodden. It's that you're poor. There's nothing worse than identity politics to get people barking up the wrong tree.

***This is the problem***, and it's easy to solve.
WE NEED TO START BY TAKING A VERY LARGE AMOUNT OF WEALTH FROM A VERY SMALL NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS!!! With firebrands and pitchforks if necessary.

All this hogwash about tariffs and trade deals, subsidies, creating jobs, blah blah blah... It's all just to keep our attention occupied while very froth on top of the "cream" of society is bending us all over.

I really don't understand why it's so hard for console manufacturers to get this right.

6 buttons on the right. 2 rows / 3 columns. Labeled as follows:

Jab Strong Fierce
Short Medium Roundhouse

FFS Steam.

...over all these wonderful features of both languages. And here I am, a mobile developer on the vanguard of technology, still stuck with dumbshits that suggest maybe we ought to somehow shoehorn ourselves back into JS.

I can hear them now: "Here, just use this mile high stack of libraries with hipster names and it'll be workable, I swear. It really is a functional language, and the New Assembly, after all. P.S. CSS3 Sucks Less(TM)!"

Forgive the troll.

We should try to get up to 100% utilization of this planet as fast as we can, because we're not going anywhere until we do.

Can't agree with you there. People don't give a shit about money. You can't eat it, you don't build your house out of it, and you can't fuck it either. What people care about is what money can get you: Resources. ...and that gets back to your original point. We all want resources, and short term ones at that. It's pretty hard to care about the long-term since we don't really live all that long anyway.

So you can say it's human nature, and that we're basically like a virus, or just that it's a problem of incentive. Either way, most people find it hard to care about what happens after they're dead until they're relatively close to dying, by which point they're off to a very late start for making change.

It follows that there's 2 semi-steady states for humanity. A: Where we exist in an environment where we don't consume all the resources, in which case we compete & grow. B: Where we are limited by the resources in our environment, in which case we suffer and try very hard to get back to state A.

Alternate ideas are unlikely to be stable. For example, "The hippie state of humanity" where we all suddenly stop caring about resources would probably mean humanity's stagnation, as we would sit around smoking dope until we run out. Another good one is "Slashdot Utopia" where scarcity ends, and again we stagnate, gorging ourselves off the products of our 3D chocolate printers and devolving into an "Idiocracy" like society. Eventually we pass through 'B' back to state 'A'.

Never be ashamed of who you are.
-Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg

Trust me: You will thank yourself every day.

It baffles me why we in the western world are still walking around with dirty backsides.

...if you've already got one. If you really think you're a candidate to be laid off, get going while the going's good. Shoot for a more senior or mgmt position at a smaller firm, get some experience in that role, and then rise with the tide when / if it comes back in.

That sounds like a pretty big project. Let's break it down into action teams, and have each one run with a scrum, and do the scrum of scrums at lunch.

I'll see you at the sprint planning...

I think it's safe to say that such a thing as "developer culture" exists, insofar as it is reasonable to say that something called "culture" comes into play any time humans interact, and "developer culture" is something that goes on when developers interact.

...but if desirable developer culture is anything like any of the other big concepts in software dev that we've been figuring out over the last couple decades, (such as how to plan things well and how to satisfy our customers) it almost certainly can't be brought about by a silly HR campaign, conferences, breakroom snacks, or passing around the CEO's favorite book. Rather, like everything else, I expect the foundation of good developer culture is in communication and conversation.You might notice that I'm cheating here because this, like most discussions of culture, is highly self-referential. Good developer culture would seem to both imply and require good planning practices & satisfying customers, etc.

Anyway, this is all just a lot of hot air to say: be cool to each other, really try to listen for what the other person needs to know or cares about before offering your own opinion, don't get angry, don't be an ass, don't try to assert yourself over others, strive for empathy, recognize merit, don't let others into your club unless they can meet the bar, and try to foster these notions as shared values though effective communication. If putting foozeball in the breakroom looks like it might be a useful tool to help you do that, fine. But if the foundation isn't conversation, you're not going to really get what you want, IMHO.

+1 For this & link included.

I was huddled under my desk in fear that I'd get rolled into a massive corporate JS goose chase, but then Dart gave me a ray of hope. I just tried it out for the first time yesterday and it held up to its promises: I was productive within 30 minutes of downloading the SDK, and it didn't relieve me of all my most powerful tools for fighting complexity (like proper OO, and by 'proper' I mean non-prototypical).

It's still pretty bleeding edge, and there's some ground left to be covered, such as reflection and JS library integration, but it's a damn sight better than the alternatives I've seen (Ember, Backbone, etc).

Can we answer any sensational headline ending with a question-mark with the word 'No' !?

Ernest Evans has a special message for you.

Oh, I think they did something smarter than that.

Having benefited from a Series 7 Slate loaded with the procession of Windows 8 since January, I can honestly say now I 'get' Win8. I have a tablet big enough to be a tablet, and then I throw it into a dock and have a full-blown PC, replete with all my desktop applications-- no syncing, no fuss, one set of applications, and a generally seamless experience. I know this is giving them too much credit, but it seems to make sense that they'd call their tablets 'Surface' as well as the up-'til-now-silly table. Tablet, TV, Table, Phone... it should all just be one platform: Surface (If you go with Microsoft's option). Which brings me to my point:

Apple has to get iPad and iOS up to par with desktop, but at least they have a shot. Microsoft actually stands to be ahead. Google is is releasing a 7" tablet? Now?! That's big news? That's idiotic. This is sad for me, since Android is by far my favorite mobile platform to develop for.

Google doesn't have desktop OS play. ChromeOS flopped. I don't want all my apps in the cloud, fuckyouverymuch. If Google doesn't make a grab for some serious traction in the tablet market with a translation to a full desktop experience _right now_, Android will be budget-phones only in 5 years. Up 'til now I'd rip on M$ with the best of 'em. I fear after this posting I'm gonna have my /. licence revoked. Still, it needed to be said.

Technically, a peacock is also neither.