Very likely that statistics is hiding reality here. If most people read 0-2 books per year, but a small but not insignificant amount of people read 50 books per year, the average will be 12.

I suppose you've not heard of the Pinkertons then? Hired by corporations to violently suppress labor strikes in early 1900s. Corporations world-wide have hired private security forces to impose their will on whoever opposes them, typically in countries with weaker central governments in Africa and South America, but it really happens everywhere. In the US they typically use armies of lawyers rather than military, because that works for them so far in our corporate two-party duopoly, but make no mistake how corporations would behave when deeply threatened, history tells us exactly what they do.

"Government" is too abstract a term. We're really talking about who holds the power. What you and the parent post both are concerned about is someone having power over others -- in other words, unequal power. Inequality comes from centralization, we empower one individual (or a small group) to have more power and authority than others, and any time that happens, there is the possibility that someone will take advantage and use it to coerce people.

The real key difference is democracy. The typical corporate structure is extremely top-down, centralized power in a CEO and board of directors that essentially act as dictators (maybe oligarchs is the better word) within the company. What they say goes, and even if middle management or workers or even customers disagree, the CEO is under no obligation to care at all. You don't have much recourse against a centralized authoritarian heirarchical power, what they say goes, and if fight too much they'll simply fire you or cut off service to you. At best you could quit and find a job somewhere else (or as a customer, "vote with your wallet" and go elsewhere), but that is only at best supporting one dictatorial corporation over another. Over time, capitalism encourages corporations to merge and become monopolies (to lower costs and maximize profit since there is no longer competition), which makes the top-down centralized power even worse.

To be fair, some governments evolve this way too. I absolutely hate the recent trend of "we need to run government like a business" because implicit in such statements is that top-down centralized corporate power. It breeds this attitude that the president and Congress are like CEO and board of directors, that what they say goes, and that's the end. That is the pathway to authoritarianism and government dictatorship, and we really need to reverse that trend.

But in principle, we value democractic governments. Why is democracy such a big deal? Because rather than centralizing power in a small group (or even just one person), democracy puts everyone on a level playing field. We ALL have a say so, we all have a vote, we all have the same legal power. There is little to no power inequality between individuals because every individual's concerns can be heard and address as the group deliberates and decides together. Recent history has made representative democracy (a slight oxymoron but we'll overlook it) more feasible because of the large amounts of people in each country (and the distance necessary to travel to Congress before cars and airplanes!), but I think modern technology and methods allow us to lean more towards pure direct democracy. Do you always get what you want in a democracy? No. But you are guaranteed a voice and a vote, which is more than you are guaranteed in today's authoritarian corporate structures.

What we really need are more democratic structures that protect individual rights. Government absolutely needs to move more democratic and decentralized. Empower localities and states to make more decisions (a centralized federal government is necessary for some things, we saw what happens when we decentralize too much with the Articles of Confederation, but we should lean toward decentralization whenever possible). We need to expand voting rights, reform our elections systems, and ensure everyone has a right to speak out and right to vote on issues.

But we also need these same democratic structures in business. Rather than a CEO and small team setting all of the rules, keeping all of the profits, and basically acting like royalty, everyone with a stake in that business needs a say. Unions are sort of on the right track, but still keep the CEO as a top-down power they negotiate. What we really want a flatter hiearchies, more decentralized management of the business, with management and workers all owning a share in the company and voting democratically on how to manage the business so that all are satisfied. Many businesses utilize natural resources, and so the customers and communities they take from should be included in those decisions too. Such is the only model that ensures everyone's rights are protected, because everyone impacted has a say so. Anything other than democracy means that one group has more say-so -- more power -- than others.

tl;dr: I believe your concern is with centralized authoritarian power, whether in government or business, and the antidote to it is decentralized democracy, both in government and business.

Without knowing more about the statistical distribution, this is a somewhat misleading statement due to the way averages work. Is the starting salary for new teachers $20k, but there's enough teachers with seniority making $80k to shift the average? Is that average calculated only with teachers in classrooms, or does that include principals and other administrators?

My understanding is that many states currently facing a budget crisis are attacking our new teachers. Basically, they can't cut pensions of current retirees or near-retirees, partly due to contractual reasons and partly due to not wanting to anger older voters. So they're instead negotiating contracts for new teachers at low pay, low benefits, drastically reduced (if existent at all) pensions. It is completely logical to say that Walker and GOP don't want to pay a living wage (to new teachers) while still maintaining contractually-obligated good pay and benefits to senior teaching staff, there is no contradiction. You have to know the details and the distribution.

Sir, you have this backwards. Government regulations are not granting permission, they are there to set a process that ensures everyone's rights are protected during the negotiation process, and to enforce penalties on those that break their contracts.

Without regulations, why should a billionaire CEO of a multi-national company give a shit what *you*, sabri, think about their policies and contracts? They can tell you anything you want to hear and then say "nevermind" after they've gotten your money. And what are you going to do as an individual?

Our government is of the people, for the people, by the people, because together we are strong and can protect ourselves and our rights. Individually we are weak, particularly in the face of a strong business adversary.

Our court system is effectively broken for most Americans. Have you been to court? I have. It's a lot of legal fees, meeting with lawyers, filing paperwork, waiting months for a court case, only to have the decision appealed by a defendant with way more money and time than you. It is extremely delayed justice, if you get it at all. The working and middle classes are typically hugely disadvantaged in court. We could fix it by requiring speedy trials, hiring more judges and public defenders, and other tweaks, but that would require a more expensive court system and likely higher taxes, which many completely flip their shit when they hear the word "taxes" so we've not been able to have constructive discussion on the topic.

It would be nice if we directed our ire at sociopathic executives of multi-national corporations that have no allegience to country or the people, rather than indirectly defending them when we attack government regulations and actions. No level of government did any of this to you; there is no law that says "no one should ever hire sabri for a permanent position". Corporations decided to do this because they are sociopaths, obsessed with forever increasing their profits regardless the consequences to people, the country, the economy, or the planet. Please note, I am in no way saying they shouldn't be profitable or well compensated for their work. Being executive is a lot of stress and hard decisions I'm sure, so sure, they're entitled to profiting from any hard work they do. What I'm criticizing here is their need to always make *MORE*, that their million dollar bonuses are *not enough* for them, so they have to make more by taking it from their hard-working workers by giving less hours, less pay, less benefits. There's plenty of money floating around that we can *all* do well, not just top executives while the rest of us starve and default on houses.

I encourage you to look up the American Gilded Age. This was the period after the beginning of the industrial revolution, when technology and industry quickly changed and economic power was concentrated into the hands of a few top executives and businesses. Effectively, a couple people owned entire sectors of the American economy, and used this power to put competitors out of business and become monopolies. Once they became monopolies, there was no reason to hire workers to produce more or to keep prices lower, because people had no choices anymore, and so monopolies quickly raised costs astronomically as they laid off huge percentages of their workforce. The workforce that kept their jobs often worked for extremely low pay, for 12+ hours per day and on weekends, and often in dangerous conditions without any protective gear (such as coal mining). Since the big business trusts owned such huge chunks of the economy, politicians became afraid to challenge them for fear it would hurt the economy and jobs, and so politicians became at least accepting of the situation if not out right bribed by corruption. In fact, many elections were accused of bribery and fraud, as industries began paying local candidates and parties to support candidates friendly to the industry. Does any of this sound familiar?

So how did the Gilded Age end? It ended as people stood up to corrupt government officials as well as the big business. Labor unions were born during this era, and workers went on strike to try to hurt the bottom line of the companies to get them to come to the table to negotiate reasonable salaries and working conditions. At first, businesses hired private armies to violently attack the strikers (who began as peaceful strikers that quickly had to defend themselves), and when battles broke out, national guard units were deployed to stop the fighting. In politics, the progressive movement was formed, perhaps most personified by Teddy Roosevelt who came out very strongly against big business and led the "trust busting" movement to break up big monopolies. Unions worked with government officials to get labor laws passed that now provide us the working conditions we are used to: the 40 hour work week, workplace safety regulations, etc. In a nutshell, unions and progressive politicians fought and won lots of concessions from business, that led to many of the rights and protections we take for granted today. And it was necessary to form unions and government to protect us from the strength of big business that was chipping away at our rights and our democracy.

I think similar to the industrial revolution, the "tech" revolution of computers and the internet and robotics has been just as big a jump, and similar to during the Gilded Age, new tech companies are taking advantage of the sudden shift in technology and culture to abuse their power, form monopolies (think Google or Facebook), and attack your rights. Just as we did during the progressive era, we will need to update our laws and regulations to match the realities of today's economy, to ensure everyone's rights remain protected. Of course these new tech companies will fight those attempts and feed workers propaganda, companies are not people and so behave sociopathically, they work to protect their profits, the end. "At-will" or "right to work" laws are *not* in your favor, why do you think business likes it so much? Can you survive waiting potentially months for the next job to come up? This is why we have safety nets, but those nets have been slowly dismantled and defunded too. Most Americans have less than $500 saved. Not because they're dumb or don't plan, but because most don't make enough money in the first place to even build a savings.

tl;dr: the problems you see are the result of sociopathic businesses abusing their powers and our rapidly-changing economy to attack your rights, because exploiting others is how they make more profit; government and unions work to protect your rights and have actually won you the workplace protections that you take for granted today. We can and should demand businesses work for America and its citizens, not just themselves.

Because you're making a detached economic argument in favor of business interests, and they're making a "I need enough food to survive" argument in favor of community interests and human rights.

In most areas of the country, especially near big cities, the cost of living is approximately $15 if not much higher (I've seen estimates of more like $20-25 in New York City, for example). This is the cost of basic rent, basic utilities like electric and water, food, transportation to a job (whether by owning a small used car or taking the bus - what you think buses are free?), and replacement clothing (nothing fancy, just new pair of jeans every once in a while as old one rips). Basically, inflation is increase in cost of goods and services, and if you took the minimum wage of the '60s and '70s and adjusted it for inflation, it really should be something like $15 per hour now. With the productivity gains of the average American worker due to increased education and technology, it should probably be even higher, but almost all of the profit gains have gone to top executives rather than increased the salaries of those that actually do the work.

So what does this mean? It means any job paying less than approximately $15 per hour is NOT LIVABLE. You will starve, or end up homeless, or some sort of big problem. It's not sustainable. What I don't understand is why people make the argument of the don't "deserve" $15. Who says? Who decided some arbitrary number is the cap? The REAL issue is: does every person deserve enough to meet basic needs in modern society? I think the answer is unequivocally YES. Every American deserves the dignity of basic needs met, especially when they're willing to work full time to do so. No matter what the work is, if it takes up a full week of work, then they deserve to have basic bills covered, end of story. Full time work is opportunity cost -- if you're working full time, it means you don't have free time to take other jobs, attend school or training, etc. IT HAS TO BE WORTHWHILE. It has to be enough to survive.

Having "more jobs" that pay starvation wages is not really an improvement. It makes job numbers reports and corporate profits look better, but those aren't the only metrics of the success of a society. In fact, I think they're bad metrics; a much better one is: do we ensure every American that works hard can take care of themselves, and has opportunity to improve their lives? By that metric we are failing disastrously.

In my view, businesses that cannot budget for and pay living wages are FAILING BUSINESSES. A business that requires its workers to starve for its owner to make a profit is a FAILING BUSINESS and deserves no sympathy or respect. They should have to drastically change their business strategy or go out of business and be replaced in the free market by business owners that DO pay a living wage.

As far as automation goes, do you think they'll ever decide "Nah, I don't need more profit!"?. At best, low wages slightly delay automation, but make no mistake: it's coming. It's the story of the industrial revolution and the Gilded Age, big business grew larger and larger until it controlled the economy and could automate or improve efficiency, and laid off many many workers once they were unneeded. The poverty and starvation was great, which is what lead to so many of our labor reforms and formation of unions. We have to start putting human interests first over corporate interests. Don't fall for their propaganda. Every American that works hard deserves to live without fear of where the next meal will come from or how to pay rent this month.

And really, we should be taking advantage of automation to work LESS. Lower the amount of hours for full time work. Give everyone more time to raise their families, get involved in the community and local politics, take classes and improve education, volunteer, etc. There's more to life than wage labor. We can make that happen if we stop obsessing with letting big business take more, more, more for themselves.

Completely seriously, which extensions are those? What do they do? Are they absolutely necessary for your work? (As in, are you sure the useful features haven't been integrated into Firefox at this point? if you are a developer, have you checked if the Firefox Developer Edition meets your needs without all those debug/dev extensions?).

And if those extensions really are that important, and there is no replacement or change to your current workflow/processes that can address it, how does switching to Chrome solve those problems? Why not write a new extension yourself? Help fund another developer to do it? Contribute to improving the community, rather than jumping ship to a proprietary competitor and giving them even more of a stranglehold over web standards. With Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, all using Chromium engine, Firefox is really the last free software engine we have to prevent a Google monopoly with closed proprietary standards like Internet Explorer did years ago.

Firefox is jettisoning their old insecure extension code, this is a good thing. Transitions are always painful even when done correctly, but sometimes they need to be done. Help them if you can.

We're several months from release still, of course not every extension will be updated yet. I expect the number to grow as we get closer. Mozilla is even working directly with some high-profile extension authors like uBlock to get WebExtensions right; Firefox's implementation will have more features and power than Chrome's. Better extensions will be coming, and I hope it will actually push Chrome to innovate and improve their implementation too! Has Google ever added the missing features that made Firefox extensions better in the first place? Maybe this is the kick that will make them do so.

And for plugins that have not been touched in years: do you feel comfortable running code that is no longer maintained? That uses an old plugin/extension system that is insecure, part of the reason they're switching to WebExtensions in the first place? Mozilla announced this upcoming change last year, it's not like they're surprising anyone. I'm skeptical to use any software or extension that I can't confirm is maintained in case of security or other bugs.

This could be related to all of those old extensions you're using. I've seen reports that a lot of the memory leaks attributed to Firefox are actually from poorly-written extensions and not core Firefox itself. They've done a pretty good job at improving core Firefox's performance in recent releases, and the changes in 57 should improve it even more significantly.

This is exactly why 57 is a big release! They're switching to a new web content engine that will improve performance and security, and it was written in a new programming language Rust that they researched and developed themselves. I think designing your own language to improve security and performance is about as innovative as you can get, and I really appreciate that managers at Mozilla encouraged experimenting with Rust rather than shutting it down with "just use C++" or whatever argument. I encourage them to keep experimenting and innovating!

Plus not to mention the WebExtensions you're complaining about are refreshing the browser. But they're not just implementing Chrome's features, they're working to improve WebExtensions to make more powerful extensions possible than are capable with Chrome. They're implementing multiprocess support to combat crashes, and sandboxes for security, but they're doing it differently than Chrome to allow it to be more configurable and hopefully more performant. That's also innovation. I think they've done well recently, and hope to see them continue on this track.

Taleb's 4-part Incerto series (see http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/247576/incerto-4-book-bundle-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb/9780812997699/) is fantastic reading. Changes your perspective on the nature of randomness and how much control we actually have over our system and our environment. Not just control, but how little information we even have about the situation! (it is easy to get "fooled by randomness"). Antifragile is particularly a very good concept we should follow in all of our systems; it occurs to me so often now how fragile our systems are, and many steps we take actually make it more fragile, not less.

I believe Taleb is working on a 5th book, I am looking forward to it.

Let me ask a question. When you receive your electric bill or winter gas bill or water/sewerage bill, do you call it a forced bill "at gun point" from the utility company? Or do you just pay it because you're paying your fair share of bills for what you used?

Taxes are just our bill for our fair share of government and government services. It pays for military defense, a court system to allow you to file greviences against neighbors businesses or even the government itself, roads and bridges and other infrastructure, inspectors that ensure our buildings are constructed to code and food is safe to eat, and way more than I can list here. You use plenty of government services every day and don't even realize, so yes, you need to pay your bills for those services.

Now you could argue that our taxes are not always used wisely. I'd personally love to see our taxes go more to domestic programs rather than more middle eastern wars. And you might argue government is wasteful, and sometimes it is. But then I have a news flash for you, have you ever worked at corporate? Corporations are *at least* as wasteful as government services in many circumstances, so it's not particularly unique to government. If you'd like to see changes and waste cut, contact your representative and vote against them next election if they do nothing, that's why we're a democratic republic, we can vote and change things. At least you can do that, with private corporate control you have absolutely no say about what the CEO does.

If you've never been poor I suppose you don't understand inequality, so let me give you a brief overview. Income is a huge part of it, but not all. Neighborhoods gentrify and rent increases meaning you must leave your long time neighborhood since you can't find a better job, because you don't have free time between 60+ hours a week job at several stores or money to attend college to get new skills. You might ask why they don't just buy a house. Good question! When your income is that low, you don't have the credit necessary to buy. Except landlords need to make money off of you, so their rent is almost by definition *more* than a typical mortgage (it has to be more than the mortgage to make a profit, right?). So you have to pay a lot and need more jobs. Many jobs are not on bus routes in my area, so you need a car. You get a cheap one at a used car lot, but since your credit is low, you don't get the typical 2 or 3% interest middle class gets, you get 8 or 10% interest, again having to pay *more* than middle class. But it's used car so you can make small payments over time so you try to make it work out. Then you get to work and your boss tells you to go home. They found someone new, or just plain don't like you, and they fire you on the spot. They can do that in many states because "right to work" really means employers have the right to fire you at any moment. Or even if you're not fired, it's a slow day, so he sends you home. Now you're short a day of pay, and your bills are stretched thin, so you can't make the car payment until the next paycheck. Now you're late and have penalty interest, and they possibly come to repo your car if you wait too long and they don't want to work with you. Or, you decide to take a payday loan on your next paycheck so you can have the money now rather than waiting two more weeks, so you pay your bills, but your payday loan was at obnoxious 25%+ and has to be paid back immediately at the next paycheck, which of course you don't have, so you sink into more debt. Which means your credit score dips lower, you have to pay even higher interest rates, now you don't even qualify for car loans and even rental units start to decline you (because they check your credit now before they even rent to you).

Our system is *heavily* unfair to the poor. It squeezes you into a negative debt spiral from which almost no one can return. And it can easily happen to anyone middle class if you make even one bad financial decision, or even if your good paying job simply lays you off and you can't find alternative work quickly. And the financial industry is ok with this because whenever someone has to bankrupt, they get bailed out by the government. They *make* money on pushing people into poverty.

If you want to restore the American spirit of fairness and everyone having an opportunity to make something of themselves, you should support UBI. If you want to see a thriving free market and private competition, you should support UBI. UBI makes sure everyone has a stable basis to live off of, so they can pursue schooling for new skills, they can negotiate better jobs and salaries rather than taking the first thing that comes along in a horrible race to the bottom, and they are now more confident to start their own businesses because they know they won't starve if the business ends up a failure (so they're more likely to experiment with new ideas for businesses, which is where the next Google or Facebook will come from).

Well I can't speak for Zuck's motives, but in general advocates say it comes from restoring taxes that used to exist on the wealthy. We've had decades of reduced taxes and tax loopholes for the rich that they pay hardly nothing anymore. During the most prosperous periods in modern US history, the tax rate was as high as 90% on the top tax bracket. Plus, there's plenty of infrastructure and environmental problems that have to be paid for by the people despite the fact that private interests caused it and profited off it. They must pay their fair share commensurate with the amount of money they make as well as the resources they take from the public (when you harvest things like oil now, it's gone for future generations; don't they owe something to our grandchildren and future generations who never get an opportunity to build that industry themselves?) and the infrastructure (trucks cause something like 10,000x the damage to roads than cars, do they pay for the roads?) and environment (many oil pipelines leaks over the years, not to mention all kinds of other runoff, a lot of it comes from agricultural pesticides too) that they damage in the process.

Is there enough work for each skill set? Can we mandate that work? What if someone wants to change careers later in life and doesn't *want* to keep that skill set? What about people with little technical skills in a computer-dominated world?

My fear is that mandating employment will reduce down to people being assigned to unnecessary jobs just to fulfill the requirement. Extra secretaries, building extra housing beyond our population needs, etc. Plus, this assumes that people are happy working these types of jobs -- many people will be miserable working some jobs and you will have still not addressed the psychological health issue OP brought up.

No I think Universal Basic Income is the win here. We all earn it from corporations buying our publicly owned property (forests, parks) and privatizing it. It's time we started collecting royalties on it. We're not talking a giant income here, but enough for very modest housing and food. But those are the big stresses in life, worrying about if you will have enough to eat or will go homeless. Without those in the equation, people can decide their own lives.

With UBI, you can always eat beans and rice. Nothing fancy, but you can survive. But surely you want more from life than that -- a rewarding career, to volunteer in the community, to become an artist or actor or scientist, or at the very least enough money to get that big screen plasma TV and sometimes go to a football game. You need more income for that stuff, UBI only covers the bases, so most people (unless you are happy to live a spartan monk-like lifestyle in a studio apartment with beans and rice all day, and if so, more power to you) will want more and seek more employment. That isn't a problem.

Except now you've opened up an ACTUALLY free market. Right now corporations hold all the cards, many are forced to take low paying jobs with low/no benefits precisely because they're concerned if they wait any longer they won't be able to afford food or a house. Now with UBI, workers can pass on terrible job offers. They can survive so they don't NEED to work a terrible job for super low pay. They can wait for a better offer. So now corporations have to compete on the best pay and benefits that makes their jobs worthwhile rather than a race to the bottom.

Furthermore, with the UBI safety net, even more people can open that business they always wanted to but were afraid to do so. Open a restaurant, retail store, handyman shop, whatever. Previously people worried about the business failing and how they would get money to survive. Now under UBI, sure ideally the business would excel and make lots of money, but if it goes under, the person feels confident that at least I have UBI to cover my house and food. If the business fails, might have to cut expenses a while, but it can be done. It takes the pressure off, allowing more workers to become confident business owners, which further increases market competition.

Plus UBI allows things not possible before. Look at the people willing to donate their time to open source projects for free right now. If we had UBI, no doubt some programmers would choose to live on UBI and maybe only part time work to dedicate more time to open source. Remember, it's not a job for money necessarily that's healthy, it's having any sort of community contribution. There's plenty of non-profit volunteer positions that currently don't get many applicants but would likely see surges under UBI as people have more options to take less crappy jobs that give them enough free time to volunteer more. These volunteer positions are not any less jobs than paid ones; in fact, some volunteer positions can be very important to the community! Again, with UBI, workers have some restored bargaining power with employers, and can negotiate for shorter work weeks or part-time work if that's their desire and they want more free time to do volunteer work, politics, or whatever. Some will still want 40+ hour work weeks, but not everyone does. Everyone should be able to decide and negotiate what's right for them. UBI makes that possible. Anything less and we're still stuck in a bubble thinking that jobs and careers come in only one flavor, which was really designed for corporations to make maximum profit, not to better society.

There's a few dimensions to this that are important.

First, not everyone is a verbal learner. Some pick up concepts much easier from reading than listening. Sometimes a book diagram can enlighten much better than any hand-drawn diagram on a chalkboard; of course, the professor has the upside of of being able to adapt the drawing based on questions. So really, the two go hand-in-hand. I've actually always felt the opposite of you: the lecture gets me excited about things I should pay attention to, but I don't really understand it until I read the book and do some problems. Your line about getting confused is exactly me in lecture; if I have a question about the lecture but the professor moves on (which often the professor has thought he answered my question, and maybe even I did too), then the rest of the lecture can leave me a bit confused until I read the book later. It's a style difference I think, not making judgments because I don't think either way is "better".

Second, I suspect it depends a bit on the topic. It's difficult to understand a mathematical proof in a textbook for the first time simply by reading (often you need an expert to walk you through it), but there are other subjects that are well-suited to simply reading.

Third, we must separate the ideal from reality. A good lecture will inspire and be very dynamic based on questions and feedback from the students. However, I had several professors at my alma mater Big State University that would walk into class and flat out tell the students "I didn't want to teach this class, I'd rather being doing research, but the chair said I had to". As you can imagine, some professors look at lecture as something you just get through... and yes, they tend to regurgitate textbooks. Even when the professors care, if they wrote the textbook, they're a little partial to that style of presentation obviously and so will mirror much of the material in the book.

So much information is online now (or in books) that it does seem easiest to read books or watch videos outside of class, then use your class time with the expert in the field (the professor) to clarify questions. It's good to have someone walk you through the problems until you get it. Lectures - in video or book format - don't usually do that, instead leaving examples to the reader, which is what really misses the point.

I'm glad to see Devuan gearing up for a release. While Debian is not my favored flavor of linux, and I personally don't see any problems with systemd, I also recognize that this is exactly why different distros exist: we all have different needs.

So cheers to the Devuan team on this upcoming release, and best wishes for many more.

I hope this will help end the systemd "debate". I get a little tired seeing the constant re-treading of which one is better. If you like systemd or don't care, you have distro options. If you don't like systemd and DO care, you also have at least one distro to choose from. Use the tech that makes most sense for you.

The linked article never said anything about rude or impersonal, where did you get that? It just said the phone is most convenient, and that's kind of a 'duh', isn't it? Not just texts, but email and websites can be accessed by mobile phone, at any time.Of course people are going to say they prefer that to sitting around at home staring at a landline or PC waiting for the call/email. I'm sure people in the '90s were saying "These young people can't live without their internet and email, why can't they just pick up the phone and call? Phones are much more personal!".

One of my biggest gripes with job applications these days is the complete lack of communication. I have no idea if my resume is being process, was rejected, or simply fell into a black hole and was never received. I'd like some feedback since I put some time and effort into applying for a job they took the time and effort to post for, especially because I might get an offer from a different job that wasn't my first choice and it would be nice to weigh the options if I have a chance at both. I think texts would be a perfect communication channel for this. A quick text of "Your resume was received and we'll get back to you", followed up with a request to set an interview time or a generic "Thank you for applying, we filled the position!" would be fantastic just to keep me in the loop. Wastes less time for everyone. Again, the article didn't say they expect interviews over text message, just that applicants feel more positive when texts are used as part of the process (which I interpret as the communication channel for updates as I said).

Who says its pandering or coddling, or that millennials are too lazy to go in? There's plenty of reasons for both sides to enjoy video interviews: easy to schedule around a busy schedule (no travel time or sitting in traffic, in a rush to get back to another job or event; after all, interviews take place during the work day, so who can go on interviews easily when you don't already have a good job with paid time off?), saves money (interviewee saves parking fees, bus fare, gas, etc., and interviewer saves money particularly if the candidate is out of town and they don't need to pay to fly them in for an interview; remember also that every minute spent in the interview is the employer spending money on the salary of the interviewer, video interviews can be used as quick screening much easier than bringing someone in for a full day interview), and maybe using such tech is now an important skill in a now global economy (do you fly people half way around the world for a business meeting, or just video call them?).

Millennials are adapting to changing economics and job market, as well as technology, cut them some slack.

When is there 0% inflation or rate of return, ever? Do you know of a way to predict that over the say next 40 years that millennials have to work, because I sure don't. The problem with all this economics stuff is that we like to pretend that it follows scientific laws but there isn't a Newton's Laws of Economic Motion. It depends greatly on unpredictable technological and social factors. You can do everything "right" and bust, or you can do everything "wrong" and get lucky and be a millionaire. While I think this advice is a good starting point and encourage others to do it if possible, I strongly disagree that everything will be fine just because you do so. It's a crap shoot.

Do percentages care if your income is minimum wage (about $15k annually)? Because when your rent, food, transportation (bus fare if not car), clothing, take up all of your salary and you live paycheck to paycheck (some relying on insanely expensive "payday loans" just to try to not default on payments), where is one supposed to get the 10-25% of one's salary to save? And even if that somehow happens, are you really suggesting that $15k/year will be a livable wage 30-40 years from now? It's not even a livable wage *now* in many cities.

These sorts of discussions leave out the fact that large amounts of Americans will never be able to retire with even a bit dignity. (I'm not talking about luxurious life, just a roof, food, and healthcare as they get older without the need to continue working with illness). Many will need some level of assistance: food stamps, Medicare, Social Security, etc. Either business needs to start paying livable wages so that all can retire without government assistance, or they need to pay higher taxes so that assistance programs continue to exist -- either way, this problem comes largely from corporate greed, and none of us have a safe retirement until that is dealt with.

I think this is exactly the kind of comment that Shuttleworth was talking about.

Let me put it this way: if this software is such an obvious 'polished turd', why haven't *you* coded up a replacement? If it's that easy to enumerate the things they did wrong, why isn't it easy for you to just do it the right way without bugs? (Please don't take this personally, I'm using the universal 'you' for all people reading this)

PulseAudio is not perfect, but it is improving, and is itself a big improvement on older sounds systems that often didn't work at all for many setups. Systemd is not perfect but it is a huge improvement on the old script init that couldn't handle modern features like hotplugging devices and sleep mode. The desktops are not perfect but are trying different design philosophies out, because honestly, user design is not a 100% solved known problem, but the latest GNOME 3 and KDE/Plasma 5 releases are very nice and polished (your comment including KDE4 suggests you haven't tried KDE in a while; I encourage you to do so). Were those things buggy at first? Sure. But I suspect many distros rushed (possibly a bit too fast) to switch to them precisely because the older systems were not working, and they were ready to get them fixed. Even Windows 8/10 have parts that I dislike (mostly the telemetry, and 8's inconsistent mix of metro with the old GUI) but they deserve kudos for massively improving their default security posture and modularizing the system (I have way less crashes than XP/7!).

The answer is that modern software engineering is a VERY hard problem. And like many things in computer science, there are lots of trade-offs -- you often must sacrifice one thing to win at another. Many of the issues people complain about are design decisions that are not necessarily the result of bad programming practice, but rather the trade-off, and the developers are showing they might have a different priority than you. And that's ok. No one has to agree 100% of the time on anything. But that said, you can respect someone's work and decisions while still holding your own differing opinion, and that often gets lost in the arguments. Shuttleworth had a not-invented-here problem on some issues, but the community's response was sometimes just as bad. Both sides had merit to their arguments, and both sides have made mistakes. It happens. Let's not demonize anyone for trying to see their vision through.

I'm in no way condoning laziness of course -- I expect all projects and developers to quickly address security issues and release but and security patches promptly, for example. The privacy issues that Ubuntu and especially Windows brought up are worth a very critical eye. But let's remember that software is hard for anyone, no matter how much experience you have, and stop tearing each other down. In fact, in true open source spirit, contribute bug fixes ... or start your own fork!