The whole thing was started as a deliberate meme by /pol/ to take an innocent, commonly used hand signal and make the left treat it as a white supremacist dogwhistle. So it can mean anything ranging from "ok" to "this will make the libs angry" to "I am an actual nazi among like minded friends". Which one it is must be discerned from context, meaning that the symbol itself is largely meaningless.
Such a thing has never existed and never will. There's not much space at the top.
>demonstrably false
Then demonstrate it. And don't use spurious derived measures like some abstract social mobility index, argue an actual case. The US is still the place where you move to if you want to truly make it big in life, even if you've got lottery odds of success. I say this as a resident of a fairly well off European country.
I used to use music this way, until I started noticing that when I really got into flow I wouldn't even notice if the music stopped for hours. Then I started using white noise, and eventually just stopped relying on any kind of audio aid at all. Unless you work in a noisy environment you can train your focus.
Knowledge on how to make things is ephemeral, is constantly lost and has to be rediscovered even in the modern world. People whose day job is playing meaningless language games don't have any appreciation of how much idiosyncracy goes into doing even simple technical tasks.
Historians are typically people with an utter lack of technical skills or any understanding of what actually goes into making anything work. A dry surface level analysis of literary accounts and archaeological finds doesn't mean much if you lack the mental context for it.
Nothing about the past decade of American politics suggests that escalation by any extremum of the political spectrum will do anything but deepen the polarization of their political system.
The protests/riots aren't that bad IMO, this kind of stuff happens. What is bad is the root cause - an elected official fighting tooth and nail to retain power after being voted out, and finding real support among a large fraction of the population.
90% dominance of what is increasingly a small niche market. Apple controls a large fraction of the mobile device market, and everything else runs linux.
In case you have forgotten, last year saw literal insurrectionist leftist communes that took over parts of cities, and were left unsuppressed for weeks. This is definitely quite an escalation, but to me, a European looking from the outside in, it looks anything but unilateral.
An engineer's job is to solve a problem creatively, not execute a rote technical procedure. The people who are just fed detailed instructions to execute are called "technicians" in the traditional industries. If you want to claim the title of an engineer, act like one. If all you can do is write code to spec, you are a technician.
Can't have pesky engineers with their pedestrian technical concerns mess with the business decision makers' thought process. A good engineer takes whatever the creative, smart visionary comes up with and implements it down to the smallest detail.
>it doesn't address the initial problem of finding a problem that a company needs solved and will pay for, but wouldn't solve themselves internally.
Duh. If a general way to find such problems existed, everybody would be using it - meaning every problem would already have people on it. Which means no problems for you.
There is no way to know ahead of time what kind of contractor you are. And if you're not making an active effort to bill as much as humanly possible for the minimum amount of actual work, you are bad at business.
You might (think) you know how long it will take you; we don't. We don't even know if you're being honest, or deliberately underestimating/overcharging for work. Because an hourly rate means you have every incentive to do so.
You agree on a very explicit set of deliverables upfront. Whenever the client attempts feature creep simply tell them that it's gonna cost extra time for you and extra money for them. If they persist give them a quote for it.
Isn't the incentive structure for hourly completely ass-backwards? If you're a consultant there is an implied information assymetry - the client doesn't know what you are doing and has a hard time judging the amount of work required/being done. How do you handle the inherent and justified suspicion of padding billable hours?
I just can't charge hourly because I just can't imagine trusting someone who charges hourly.
You don't need a backend server to make a smart doorbell that pings your phone over Wlan. You only need one if you want to add loads of non-trivial functionality for non-technical users who might not be on the same network. You're welcome to build your own device with a wifi capable microcontroller and a simple phone app directly accessing the socket interface.