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x is a private company and it can do what it wants

There's this bad thing, terrorism. Worry not! We have the solution which is warrantless mass surveillance of Americans. If you aren't with us you are a bad person.

It doesn't help that powerful entities use it as a trojan horse to further less noble agendas, think of the patriot act as an example.

Social media algorithms are designed to capture your attention. It turns out humans can't help but click on and watch softcore porn of teenage girls dancing, thumbnails with cartoonishly expressive faces, and videos with jump cuts every 2 seconds. The companies behind them say they are just giving people what they want. In my opinion they are exploiting the subconscious human brain, much like how food brands make their junk foods hyper palatable by loading them with sugar and oil.

Lawyer up! Delete facebook! Hit the gym!

Being economically strained is relative. Middle class people clutch their pearls at the thought of having children before they have completed their master's degree, have their 4 bedroom house in a safe neighborhood with good schools, maxed out retirement accounts, and a membership to Whole Foods. Broke people have a different idea of what necessities are so they have no problem pumping out kids.

Sounds good, except that fertility rate correlates inversely with income. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

If you gave a population a $10k raise (in a hypothetical world with no inflation) the birth rate would probably DECREASE

You don't pay and don't generate ad revenue. They won't miss you.

>Leverage experience and expertise where it matters most without paying a full salary with benefits.

Someone that useful would be worth bringing on full time.

Reminds me of https://money.cnn.com/2015/02/27/technology/security/iran-ha...

Many people, when given a hypothetical scenario, say what they daydream about doing not what they would actually do. It's a subtle brag saying something like "If my boss asked me to do X, I would quit on the spot!" In reality you might have bills to pay or worries about being able to find a new job quickly so you won't be so eager to quit when you have to put your money where your mouth is.

Me? Of course I would love being able to choose where I want to work from. The ideal would be a hybrid arrangement where I can come and go as I please to the office (although going to the office to sit in virtual meetings is silly).

Self taught programmers come in different flavors but people tend to think of one type when talking about them so it is hard to have good discussion. There are classic self taughts, like George Hotz who had an interest that naturally developed into a career. There is also the newer self taught, like the 40 year old fry cook who realized one day they needed a career and saw a bootcamp ad or a story of someone in their position brute forcing leetcode for 3 months and landing a 200k job at google. In some way even people with CS degrees are self taught programmers. You learn programming by spending hours in front of a computer just like you learn to drive a car by driving not just by sitting in a classroom.

>who cares? If you are hiring or working alongside programmers, you probably want those that "will" be "good" rather than those that "can" be "good enough"

Time is a terrible metric for judging how hard a job search is. "I've been looking for a job for a year" says almost nothing. For all we know you applied to a job every other week. My first offer came in at 4 weeks of job searching. That sounds good until I add that during that time I sent out 500 applications.

It seems to me there is a chicken and egg problem with (non-car) infrastructure and the demand for that infrastructure. Nobody wants to get on a train full of homeless people or a bus that's always late or a sidewalk that has no shade. There is little incentive for city leaders and planners to invest in things that nobody uses.

Good luck. Even with a CS degree it took me months and hundreds of applications to find a job.

Where is the outrage like when spaceship man started charging for Twitter's API?

If your mechanic gave you a 1 month estimate to fix your flat tire, they'd deliver on time every time

It is infuriating that Google seems to be doing nothing about scam ads. For years I have been seeing "Click to install iPhone update!!!" ads on YouTube mobile. Easy to have huge profit margins when your company hires no humans to do things like customer support and ad vetting.

I saw a discussion about tech layoffs few weeks ago. Someone had noted that layoffs should have come as no surprise when you had employees bragging about how little work they were doing. This comment stirred up a lot of people calling the poster heartless and saying things like "these people have families".

That is such a naive perspective of the world. These are businesses and their goal is to make as much money as possible. That means they strive to be as efficient as possible. I don't know where the expectation that they should function as charities or job programs came from.

If you become a novelist not because you want to tell stories but because you want to sell a few books, don't be surprised when nobody likes your novels