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Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

Where is Congress, the FTC, state Attorney General, and DOJ on this kind of stuff?

I bet you if one of these tricks was a problem for the donors that run our government it would be taken care of.

Trusting bureaucracy to handle anything except its own preservation?

If our representatives weren’t all so old, they might have a concept of these types of issues. Unfortunately without age limits we’re stuck with candidates so old that most lack an awareness of the most common issues of living and working with the internet.

It’s not about age (nearing 67 here, so I bristle at such mentions). Probably even the youngest members of Congress wouldn‘t have a clue about some of these items. It comes down to things like what their staff knows and what they’ve actually experienced themselves. One doesn’t generally reach public office and/or the staff of an office-holder through a path even remotely like what a typical HN commenter has followed.

The ageism in the reply makes me bristle as well. A little past 65 here. Currently employed at my third startup gig in my thirty eight year embedded systems career. Ignorance spans all age levels.

70 here, and working on an automated order taker for restaurant drive-thrus.

My role is part Developer Experience Engineer (making sure our developers are happy and productive), part Roving Troubleshooter, and part whatever else needs to get done.

One of our most important metrics is obviously how many orders we complete on our own without crew intervention. So I spend a lot of time looking at our chat logs from the stores to figure out why we had to escalate to the crew - or why they decided to take over the order.

"Welcome to McDonald's. What can I get for you?"

The running joke on our team as that most of us don't eat at McDonald's that often. But there is one sandwich I really like, you just have to customize it a bit.

"I'd like a fish filet, no cheese, with lettuce and pickles"

They use real fish in this, wild caught Alaskan pollock.

"Got it. Anything else?"

"A guava pie and that's it."

The guava cream cheese pie is really nice. A friend suggested we try it, and I was skeptical. But I would order it again any time. Not overly sweetened like I feared, and good flavor.

Disclosure: I work for IBM on this and currently our exclusive customer is McDonald's. (And it should be obvious that I don't get paid extra when you order one of my recommendations.)

As a 45 year old trying to break into the industry this gives me hope!

Your theory is that legislators mainly write legislation themselves about problems they have personally experienced? Because my understanding is that legislators are just the most visible person on a team, with much of the work being done by staff, who range widely in age. Based, of course, on input from constituents, lobbyists, civil society organizations, and government agencies.

I think it's pretty weird to jump right to "the olds know nothing" when the problem is a niche and relatively new scam. Scammers are always finding new scams. Would I like the lag time between scam creation and scam elimination to be faster? Sure. But I'd guess that legislator age is well down the list of factors causing that.

And by staff you mean lobbyists.

That's not an "internet" issue, that's a contract issue. The vast bulk of our representatives are fully credentialed with some credential that says they understand that, and the remaining few that don't can't have failed to pick up the super basic level of understanding it takes to understand that. Moreover, I'm sure quite a lot of them have been personally screwed at some point by a contract. Old they may be, but they're nowhere near as old as this sort of trick.

Give the nature of their previous work and their credentials, a good number of them have probably written contracts that have one variant or another of this trick in them.

Blatantly ageist. Even if legislators entirely relied on their own understanding of technology to make policy decisions, it would not apply here— replace that e-mail with a letter, phone call, telegram, or any other sort of communication and you’ve got the same exact problem. Unfair sales tactics and shady long-term contractual obligations aren’t exactly a new problem. When you get a few more years under your belt, you’ll realize that the advantages afforded by a young person’s perspective can be valuable but are more ephemeral and superficial than those brought by experience and wisdom.

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