Off-site, though not really off-shore. The concept is the same - don't deal with the problem locally with local experts, let someone else deal with it.

Also, when there has been UN action that wasn't vetoed, the UN forces mostly did nothing. Certainly they didn't protect the peace in Rwanda.

This is the year of Linux on the crankshaft!

Well, you're assumign these incremental changes are advances. Very often they are not advances. When they are advances they're often just rediscovered ideas from the past.

The reason old folks with experience are seen as negatives naysayers is because we see the same old problems being reinvented and rediscovered. Learn from history before repeating it. The younger generation would not be able to even use computers if people before then had not invented them!

This sort of leads to a bit of a style of thinking that is sometimes common: the assumption that there is an elite cabal out there that invents new stuff and improves old stuff, but they're super advanced beyond our capabiltiies therefore we must only be followers. Ie, the mantra to never write new code because there might be existing code that does what you want somewhere out there for re-use. I see this in interviews - I ask a linked list question and the candidate says "just use a library". I respond that we need to debug that library and the candidate responds with a blank look of incomprehension.

Yes, old farts like me will say "that's a badly thought out idea", but that doesn't mean we're just always negative, it means that experience tells us that some things are not good ideas. We've seen the "cloud" before they called it the cloud. We've seen ten thousand frameworks that all claimed to be the silver bullet to solve all problems, so when someone who's voice is still changing tells us that we should try framework ten thousand and one we are rightfully dubious.

I've been at many companies where the twenty year old product is what earns 90% of the revenue. All the newer products never really caught on, or had endless cycles of refactoring and never got off the ground, the Project X to rewrite the original product using an outsourced team of highly motivated people is bogged down in refactoring, or the product that actually got going and is working but isn't selling because the designer deliberately rejected backwards compatibility with the old product... The bread and butter of most companies, at least in my experience, are the older products that the younger engineers dont want to work on.

Yeah, I'm overstating things a bit. I'm sure there are a certain percentage of people who aren't in power who want peace. But the problem is that the people with power mostly don't seem to want peace if it comes with any strings attached, and most of the people voting for them are too blinded by the rhetoric from their leaders to realize that both sides are the problem, not just one.

Until the overwhelming majority of people are willing to do what is needed to actually bring about peace — specifically, throwing out the people in power, running for office against them, amplifying the voices of the sane and reasonable, and speaking out constantly against abuse, oppression, prejudice, and violence, without regard to who is being abused or oppressed or being prejudiced against or committing the violence — I don't expect anything to change.

People have to not just want peace, but want peace badly enough to choose moderate leaders, knowing full well that their long-time enemies could easily take advantage of reduced militarism to do them harm. And that's hard. I get it. That's really, really hard. The tendency to "other" people who are not like us is so ingrained in human nature that even when we're taught not to do it, most people still seem to go out of their way to find different ways to do it. And that's doubly true when your actual life could be on the line.

But that's what it takes to have a lasting peace. That's the only way. One side has to take the first step by standing down, and given the lopsided power dynamic, nothing the Palestinians do will change anything, because all it takes is one bad seed deciding not to do so and killing some Israeli settler while shouting some anti-Israel chant, and Israel will send in missiles again. Israel, being the side with all the power, is the only side that is truly in the position to end this long-term, by actively choosing not to use their enormous military might against the Palestinians on an ongoing basis — actively choosing not to overreact — actively choosing not to punish all Palestinians for what are presumably the actions of a few — and instead using diplomatic means to coerce the Palestinian government into bringing the responsible parties to justice.

But that also depends on there actually being a functioning Palestinian government that isn't a branch of an extremist group. And that's not going to happen unless a whole lot of things change, and that change will take decades, and it only takes a single aggressive response by Israel to set such changes back by decades overnight, losing any goodwill that might have been built up prior to that point.

At this point, I don't see an obvious way out that doesn't involve massive third-party intervention. The Israeli and Palestinian governments have simply both done too many bad things over too many decades, creating an environment of distrust that won't be easily fixed. IMO, the threat of international action against both sides would go a long way towards pressuring both sides to come to the table in earnest and to stick to their promises for once.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe in the near future, Israel will stop this latest wave of attacks and will begin working to help the Palestinians rebuild (without putting Israeli settlers and businesses in the newly built houses and buildings). That would at least help repair trust a bit. The longer this goes on, however, the less likely a positive outcome seems.

Instead of offshoring workers to save a buck, the cloud is offshoring hardware to save a buck.

but before 35, the employee has very little experience. A workforce of 25s is just fine, if you're willing to reinvent the wheel a thousand times, but be utterly baffled at the first flat tire.

Not if they're allowed civil autonomy. I'm not suggesting a plan where they would be *governed* by someone else, just one in which those governments don't have an active military or police force, relying instead on a neutral third party for all security for an extended period of time. And yeah, they might eventually grow to resent the rest of the world subjecting them to that, particularly if policing isn't even-handed. But them not being happy about it isn't in and of itself a good reason not to do so.

Realistically, neither side will trust the other side's negotiation to be in good faith, because both sides ignore any agreements whenever it suits them. Nothing short of a neutral third party tying their hands militarily can realistically fix this unless both sides *want* to change.

I thought it was dark humour genre. Unless someone is taking it seriously?

The Perl in many linux instances I've used often do not have all the pieces needed if a script relies on a third party module. Sometimes these modules are pre-installed in some distros, sometimes they require an optional package, sometimes they just aren't there unless you grab them yourself. Though I find it vastly more common to have a stand-alone Perl script that has no additional requirements on packages or modules than with Python.

Bourne Shell (to be pedantic as it's more portable), and Make are two tools that are quite often written by people who don't understand how they work. It kind of drives me crazy, but I see how it happens. You learn a little bit, then write a small script. Then you make it bigger. Then you change job and the noob that replaced you makes it even bigger. Then you've got an ungodly abomination that is now critical for production and nobody dares to touch it.

I see people attempting to write shell scripts in csh! I thought it was common knowledge to never attempt such a dangerous act, but apparently not. "But it's what I use for the command line!" is not a good excuse.

Make is very powerful, very SIMPLE rules, and yet it gets abused and molested by people who never bothered learning more about it. Ie, they use Make to do things that a shell script would do more easily. Then you get those so fed up with shitty Makefiles that they demand everyone use CMake which has difficult rules and requires even more training to be good at.

But... Bourne Shell and Make are already there on the vast majority of systems by default (even Windows if you use wsl). They're portable, they work, they do the job well. Perl is nice, but Perl is not pre-installed everywhere. You have a Perl script you want others in the organization to use means that you will not become Perl support person for the organization, fixing up broken installs, making sure everyone has the right version, etc. Ugh. Python is great, but Python is fundamentally incompatible with itself, if broke backwards compatibility in a bad way. The mantra to always upgrade is flawed, because the day job is not to continually tweak the Python so that you can get back to the real work. Even worse if those scripts were written assuming the pre-installation of optional modules from third parties. Overall, I've found production Bash scripts to be much easier to maintain than Perl or Python scripts.

To the other points, "script" to me means replicating an automated process. Taking what you would normally type, add a few other things, and now it can be effectively repeated and reused. Although I normally type things like "for f in *.txt; do", although I never normally type a command line for Perl or Python or Lua or whatever. (whenever I do accidentally type "python" and end up with a prompt and I type "quit", "exit", an explative laden sequence of Ctrl-Cs and so forth, I clearly see the difference between script and language)

I'd be happy with a 75% salary after being laid off. If the company feels that non competes are so important that they can hire a large team of lawyers and be willing to pay court costs to retaliate against past workers, they can afford to pay something to the workers directly as a carrot rather than a stick.

I did an internship at the navy department in high school. I am partially aware of the things you describe. But Google Cloud isn't becoming a defense contractor at least as far as I can understand. They've simply decided that Israel isn't so evil that Google refuses to sell them the same services that they sell to pretty much everyone else. The two are a far cry apart.

Because Google might do many things that you can/would/should support. Google Maps is incredibly helpful. Even if I didn't like Google's set of cloud customers I could still work on Google Maps with a clear conscience. The alternative is that you have a purity test for everything and everyone in your life that nobody can pass. That's more like carrying a picture of Chairman Mao around. You're never going to have 100% consensus with the world.

Yes. But it's not sexist to say that all of those men in China are going to be frustrated. If the roles were reversed and it was the women who were frustrated it wouldn't be sexist to say so. Creating a gender imbalance guarantees this and it's not sexist to say that gender imbalances cause problems.