I'm actually curious as to why we don't just build our own search engine - PageRank is out of patent, it's a pretty simple algorithm. Yes, of course. Scale... *but* I've not seen anyone *attempt* to do this even at small scale, just as a proof of concept. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

Just by coincidence, I live in Highgate in London, *literally* neighboring Highgate Cemetary in London where Douglas Adams (and Karl Marx) are buried. Visiting graveyards alone is a socially acceptable activity during lockdown (if a bit morbid), but as it so happens next week is my 42nd birthday. I already booked tickets, and on my 42nd birthday I'll be spending at least some of the time with Douglas Adams. If I can't spend time with alive people, I at least hope that wherever he is -- or isn't -- or will haven en been -- DNA would appreciate the gesture. I will be bringing a towel, naturally. If it's not too morbid or tacky, I'm hoping that I can get a selfie.

First, my background: I dabbled in coding as a teenager, but didn't really learn to code until age 35. Now at age 41, I'm a Sr. Engineer at a Global 500. So - here's the problem with teaching kids to program at age 5. No matter what programming language you use, (even Scratch) the basic building block of programming is the function. And functions are a concept that are *hard to understand,* so much so that 4-5 year olds, even the *really gifted* ones, aren't going to understand it. Gifted 10 year olds? Maybe, but then you have to start teaching Algebra earlier, and I don't think you can understand programming functions until you understand the concepts behind mathmatical ones. Once you understand the function, I don't think it matters whether you understand it better mathmatically (whether you go on to understand higher order functions as mathmatical or as parameter based pointers) but programming is about as complex as Algebra. At age 4 or 5, you're not really doing programming - which is problem solving.

The best you might be able to do is to get kids to memorize formulae and apply it, but that's not *actual programming* (and if I'm going to be honest, one of the problems I see from junior programmers that were primarily educated on the Indian subcontinent is that they tend to 'cargo cult' a lot, applying rote methods without really understanding how to create their own solutions to problems - though it is not universal, and tends to go away after year 1 or 2 on the job)

Honestly, we could always use more STEM grads but if 2020 has taught us anything, it's that there's still need for competent scientifically-literate lay people to go into the social fields -- we had all the scientists in the world telling us what we needed to do, but nobody bothered to listen.

Wages are lower, taxes are higher, economy is smaller, opportunities are fewer.

But no Trump.

I punch those numbers into my calculator and it makes a happy face.

> Determining which one is more evil is a pointless exercise. No, it really isn't. I used to think the way you did, but: Clinton: * Maybe isn't the best candidate. * Pretty much a Republican. * Made some shady, but not illegal, deals to get her campaign financed. * Has a first-instinct to cover everything up, even the innocuous things. Trump * Openly stokes racist and xenophobic fervor to the point that the secret service is having to protect the press. * Is currently being (credibly) accused of raping a child, and the only reason that criminal charges have not been filed is because the statute of limitations elapsed. * Has openly bragged about how it's "smart" that he doesn't pay taxes. * Has openly lied on several occasions * Has the support of the American Nazi Party and the KKK. * Has put out an anti-semitic final ad right before election day * Fails to pay out his contractors on his many businesses, putting people out of work * Has made horrible business decisions * Has bragged about sexually assaulting women. ... and the big one * Has threatened to withdraw from the international agreements which has kept the world from falling into the hands of Russian conquest for 60+ goddamn years, while *increasing* the proliferation of nuclear weapons. And that above list doesn't include all the shit he's done that I can't remember right now. Do I want Clinton as my next President? Hell no. But we are now in game theory mode: One of two options is bad, the other is worse, and one of them *will* come to pass. So yeah, "Determining which one is more evil" is about as point-ful as it gets.

What was interesting is that the U.S. Military posts in West Berlin were not necessarily there to actually stop any real Soviet advance into the city, but to be used as effective human shields. That is, if the Soviets invaded West Berlin, the death of American troops (a certainty) would give America the justification it would need to go to war with the Soviets. Therefore, since the Soviets didn't want a full-scale war with America, they would not start a small-scale war against West Germany. It was the geopolitical equivalent of letting your opponent know that you'll go all-in if he tries to steal the pot.

If I say something that's considered to be insensitive in certain contexts, or a word that has been associated with hate and bigotry, that's political incorrect. It is "politically incorrect" to call black people "colored," even though the octogenerian users of that term may not have even seen anything wrong with it's use, it wasn't always seen as an offensive word, and in fact, is part of the name of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). That's political incorrectness. And you treat political incorrectness with stern correction that the behavior is "not appropriate," and you try to educate, if possible. Hate speech is when you *know* how hurtful your words are **and that's the entire point of why you say them.** The stuff Reddit banned during Pao's tenure absolutely, positively qualified as "hate speech."

I'm the amateur programmer who first programmed the code for Lawrence Lessig's Mayday PAC. I don't know if you remember this, but the site went down on May 2, for about 8 hours, when we were raising roughly $10,000/hr. I had built everything on a LAMP stack and sent everything through a single MySQL database, which just didn't scale. (I was - and still am - an amateur). Luckily, pro developers stepped up and staunched the bleeding, and eventually we moved onto a Ruby-on-Rails system for the front-end and a NodeJS/Google App Engine solution for the backend.