The point is mostly a bitcoin scam. The primary/immediate beneficiary of this proposal is "Blockchain, LLC". The location is in the general vicinity of the Gigafactory. A big swath of land with 100% sunshine about 320 days/year. Best guess is a solar power farm, solely for mining bitcoin. They've been making promises about a "city of the future" with everything on a blockchain. In addition, the county its located in is mostly 99% private land with almost no actual residents, just data centers, distribution centers, the gigafactory, etc. There are more wild horses than residents.

As near as anyone can tell, this seems to be a bunch of NYC lawyers that got into bitcoin early and have too much money. And the existing "government" of Northern Nevada are mostly just shills for developers. fwiw, these developers actually are promising a "high tech community" as you describe. However, I suspect most prospective residents will quickly realize the fancy high tech community with big glass buildings in the stinkin' desert in the middle of nowhere is still in the stinkin' desert in the middle of nowhere. (I wonder how many bitcoin it will take to buy the water for this utopia).

Also keep in mind the timing: Nevada is probably the state hardest hit by the economic impact of COVID, so the governor is desperate for money, and as mentioned, this outfit is likely flush with bitcoin bucks.

Since Rush is not long for this world, maybe he'll just slide into Rush's seat ? Would seem a natural replacement: a lying racist idiot. However, I'm not certain the wardens of the New York state penal system will provide a studio for his broadcasts

According to another source (alas, I can't find the link) the 4a 5G sortof *is* the 5XL. Apparently 5XL is a victim of COVID supply chain issues. I was actively looking to upgrade my crusty old original XL, but the 5 is a hard to justify at $700. If the 4a 5G had gorilla glass, thats the way I'd go. So I'm probably going to sit on the old XL, hope Fi supports more/better phones from other brands, and see if the 5XL makes an appearance in the spring (maybe Sundar P will pay attention to the tepid response and push it forward ?)

Wish I had mod points, this is one of the best depictions of the real LA I've ever seen, esp for a pseudo sci-fi cult film. "A repo man's life is always intense!"

Great post. Other important considerations:

• China has a debt problem: there's been noises about a significant debt bubble in China (including ghost towns with massive empty buildings). A modest drop in their GDP could trigger cascading failures (ala the West's credit default swaps scheme that nearly destroyed the global credit system about a decade ago). Score +1 for Trump
• China is the significant supplier of rare earths. Without them, a lot of goods (including your smart phone) aren't possible. If China decides to cut those off, things will get ugly. +1 China
• China is a significant supplier of prescription medications to the US. What happens if they decide to cutoff the US ? India *may* be able to take up the slack, but there could be serious mortality here. -1 for Trump when grandma can't get her meds for *any* price
• (Probably the nuclear option)China holds/buys a lot of US Treasury debt. They could either dump much of what they have, or refuse to buy any new issues. In either case, the US would have to pump up rates to attract buyers, which could lead to a debt crisis (jacking up rates at a time when everyone else is moving to zero or negative rates). Hard to float $1T deficits if no one wants to buy your paper. -1 for Trump and the poor generations to follow us.
• Trump's prospects to get re-elected get dimmer with every passing tweet. China has been around for about 6000 years, and their President Xi just got himself elected for life. This episode is just a minor blip for them, and they can wait until January 2021 before engaging (and who would blame them?). -1 Trump

I'd think a trained chicken strutting on a table of resumes, pecking at acceptable candidates and shitting on the others, would be superior to most human HR I've witnessed.

Yes, you can delete your repos, and your account. But those bits on backup storage are persistent. And for those of us with private repos, its a serious potential breach, given M$FT's lifetime of "innovation appropriation".

1. Its not real money, just MSFT stock. I'm sure many shareholders are shaking their heads, but most of them aren't devs, all they know is Satya says its good, and the stock price is up today.

2. Given MSFT's basic nature (remember, DOS was just a bad knock off of CP/M!), they're not buying the service. Even MSFT could build their own github knockoff for a few million. Given the performance of the gitlab site today, I'm guessing MSFT may not be getting the audience they thought they were buying, but they had to know many/most serious devs would bail out PDQ (as I'm doing today). So the only value left is the content.

"When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

Its actually much worse than that now (at least in IT). I've recently been casually looking for work, made the mistake of posting a CV on a couple of the usual sites, and am now bombarded with emails/texts/phone calls entirely from Indian offshore boilerrooms. Some of the voicemails are laughably tragic: the din of background noise from an Indian call center, and the caller's accent so thick I can't understand a word of it. I'd be surprised if any self respecting candidate - qualified or not - would tolerate such nonsense; I know I don't.

As bad as that may be, I'm more perplexed by the hiring companies that would use such a process. If that's how they run their hiring process, imagine how bad the work environment must be!

I don't know when the tech recruitment process went so completely off the rails, I'm old enough to recall a time when high tech candidates got pretty special treatment, even if the recruiters were lying through their teeth much of the time. Now it seems dishwashers at Denny's have a better recruitment process.

This. I've had to completely rewrite code like this that performed dismally, and was shocked when I saw how deep the crap was. It was obviously just a shit-throwing exercise, and when the wall was full, they shipped it. I've also had the joy of managing offshore groups, only to learn that the team had no experience with the product they were hired to code/test. Where I come from, that's called criminal fraud. Yet the shit keeps flowing...

One particularly memorable episode was an offshore team hired to write some integration code. After 4 months of silence (except for billing, of course), we finally dragged them into a demo session...which lasted about 5 minutes, ending with their team arguing heatedly with each other in Hindi, because they obviously hadn't done more than hacked a "hello world" app during their 4 billed months. Suffice to say lawsuits soon followed.

But that also raises a question I've pondered for awhile: why isn't there more news about the lawsuits against these "firms" ? I've personally witnessed several, yet I don't recall hearing anything similar in the news (tech or otherwise). Do these outfits just suck it up and settle silently, with the plaintiffs keeping silent as well, to cover their arses ?

Scaling Scala

I don't have a particular opinion, other than the common concerns about its performance and resource utilization. But I tend to code at the traces anyway.

FTFY. If you've ever reviewed some of those H1B resumes, or interviewed the candidates, you know they've already been making stuff up for quite a while.