nirvana

Everyone not in the Yahoo bay area offices is "remote" to them. Talking to engineers in New York is talking to "remote" engineers from the perspective of someone in the bay area. Does it matter that much if they're in an office in new york vs a home in nebraska? Maybe sometimes in some situations, but should companies all locate into one single building?

If you take this to its logical conclusion, every company should build a massive campus and locate everyone there, in the same time zone, even the same building.

I don't buy that Meyer is "giving up everything". She just had a nursery built next to her office (at her expense) so her infant can come to work with her. Is Yahoo going to give space for all the previously telecommuting young moms with infants to have a little nursery too?

Some companies may "move more effectively" if everyone is at the office, but I'm aware of several that have fully distributed teams, or significant numbers of employees who don't come into the office who are moving pretty fast- Basho and Automattic are two. (I think Couchbase does this too.)

I'd rather have someone living in one of the "flyover states" working for me from their home than the overhead of an office... offices are a cost and the assumed benefit may not exceed the increased cost. Certainly it can't be said that it always does.

The assumption that telecommuters are "less dedicated" is a prejudice. I've seen some evidence that they are more dedicated and put in more time. But further, it's assuming that you don't want to hire people who put in less time (for less pay, say a part time telecommuter.) Which seems silly. There are some people who you'd like to hire, but which you're going to be forced to pass on if you've got this "butts in the seats" policy, some of whome are quite good but due to family situations or simply optimizing their own lives, aren't interested in relocating to whatever big city you located your offices in.

Imagine DHH decided to go freelance. As the creator of rails it's safe to say he's the foremost expert, but this example works for anyone with significant expertise that would be valuable to lots of companies. Would DHH's value be maximized by working for one company 40 hours a week, and having all the work that doesn't require his particular expertise along with the really key stuff...or would it be better for him to work 10 hours a week for four different companies, maximizing his efforts on the areas where his expertise is completely unique? I know this is an even more radical idea, but I think it's the future of work.

I hypothesize that for a ruby programmer, learning elixir would allow them to learn the way erlang works, and then the transition from elixir syntax to erlang syntax would be very easy.

The thing is, elixir is really just erlang with some extra features (which are really compelling to me) and some syntax changes that make it much more readable to non-erlangers. (or at least, I believe it would.)

But secretly, you're learning erlang. And afterwards the transition between the two will be seamless (Because they're really the same language.)

Engineers need to be disciplined. You know there's a problem with the culture when things like MongoDB become popular, despite very highly public failures, and fundamentally bad engineering choices.

It shows the power of marketing and ideology (people like mongoDB because it's fast on a single node and they can use SQL rather than having to learn something new, so they become "believers" in it without regard for its lack of scalability, or reliability, etc.)

...where you don't care if you lose the data. So data sets where you are getting a new version of the data every day and so if you lose yesterday's dataset you don't care.

also, datasets that fit on a single machine, rather than need to scale out over many machines, unless you don't mind the intrinsically broken "scaling" solution that is master-slave architectures.

I love all these "benchmarks" of "NoSQL" databases running on single nodes. Plus you don't name the competitors or any configuration data so... this is really marketing not engineering.

Not that any engineer worth a damn would use a database that loses data in the first place.

Erlang was the first functional language I learned. It took me a couple weeks of pain but then once I got it, I started to love it. The "unreadable" becomes poetry. (And truthfully, the support for concurrency in erlang is why I chose it in the first place, I didn't care that it was functional, and since then I've not heard any suggestions of other languages that would make me want to switch, with one exception: elixir)

You might consider, if the syntax is just too painful, looking at elixir. Elixir is effectively erlang but with a more ruby-like syntax. I think elixir exists for other reasons, but the syntax being more readily accessible to ruby developers is a nice side effect.

http://elixir-lang.org

Not sure if elixir is the best way to learn functional programming, as I knew elrang before learning it, but it is a nice language, it is not a "hipster" language, and it has great support especially given how relatively new it is.

FWIW, In Erlang Land, the "A" release (eg: 16A) is the "beta" and the "B" release is the "finished" release.

So 16B is the complete, ready for production version of 16.

Next release will be 17A, or 16B2 if there are bug patches required.

Also, it may seem weird that a "programming language" is having an update each year. (how many times a decade is C++ updated?) But this is because erlang is really a complete platform. The language is just part of it, but OTP, the platform is a hidden gem that gives erlangers super powers.

This also means, each year, your code gets better as the platform itself gets better.

Back when he was alive, Milton Friedman did a study of the costs of health care in the US from 1900 to the 1970s. (I think the first study was in the 1970s, and it was updated in the 1990s)

What he found was that the funding mechanism of health care over that time had shifted from patients paying out of pocket to government paying hospitals and government incentivized (by making it a tax write off for employers) and regulated (by preventing efficient pools of insured with state-by-state regulations) insurance.

Consequently, not only did the availability of health care go down, but the costs went up 26fold.

Or put another way, despite massive improvements in technology, medicine and productivity over 70+ years, costs skyrocketed from what you could afford out of pocket to what would bankrupt you. To put it in 2013 dollars, if you hypothesize a $100,000 surgery, in 1970[1] it would cost you $100,000, and you'd need insurance or go bankrupt, but in 1900 it would have cost you $3,846 (an amount you could put on credit cards today.)

Command economies don't work, and the change in health care over the last century has been a centralization in control. I with Obamacare this has dramatically ramped up and now there are boards to decide who gets what care based on cost measures, rather than medical need.

Whenever someone talks about the need for socialized medicine because "otherwise people would go bankrupt", remember it is the socialization of medicine that caused costs to rise to the point where people would go bankrupt.

[1] The study was originally done in the 1970s, but I'm using 2013 dollars here so you can understand how cheap things would have been.

Frankly, I think Linus Torvalds may be the next Steve Jobs.

This is very Jobsian. He knows what's right, and he's dressing down people who also knew what was right but did the wrong thing anyway. People act as if Jobs was a tyrant badmouthing random innocent people. He wasn't. He was actually pretty genial most of the time. What would set him off was not when someone made an error, but when someone did the wrong thing and they knew it was wrong at the time, but did it anyway.

Jobs was the keeper of the flame of "do the right thing" (my phrase for it) which always involved the right thing for the customer (which is why Apple doesn't follow trends, and rather than make netbooks made the iPad, a superior customer experience.)

Linus is doing the same thing here. For Torvalds the customer is a different customer, both linux users but a lot of developers and the open source community at large. But he's keeping the flame as he sees it, and history indicates he's pretty accurate.

As to another commentators wondering if this would happened if the submitter was female, it really shouldn't matter. I'd like to think that Linus reacted to the error, not the person. It's true that taking it down a notch or two and being more diplomatic is appropriate, almost all the time. It's clear that Torvalds is this way almost all the time, which is why he has such a lovable teddy-bear image, for the most part. The power of blowing up on someone is not when you're doing it, but in the knowledge that there is shit up with you will not put. That's the power.

Also, there's nothing really that gender specific in what he said. Both men and women could engage in hypothetical "dick sucking contests".

Frankly, the average female engineer I've known is tougher than the average male engineer I've known (who tend to be a bit on the wimpy side, while the women tend to be a bit less wimpy than average for people.) But that's just my experience, and consequently anecdotal. The point being that I don't really believe that female engineers are desperate for people to protect them, and that most of the "software development is So Sexist!" people are non-engineers looking for an excuse to be outraged. Some evidence: all the hate towards "brogrammer" stuff, which it is painfully obvious to everyone inside the industry is an inside joke lampooning male programmers by contrasting those pasty nerds with the tanned jock stereotype that beat them up in high school. To act like "brogrammers" are perpetuating a male sexist culture is to, in the most profound way possible, not get the joke!

However, there is sexism... and the reaction from the sexists would be much different if he had been addressing a female. But that's not sexism on Linus's part- in this hypothetical he was saying the same thing in both cases. But if he'd said it to a female, the knee jerk sexists who want to see sexism everywhere (except in themselves) would have reacted quite differently.

I know exactly where Meyer came from, and a fair bit of inside baseball about her time there.

If you disagree with my argument, please make a counter argument. Snide comments are useless.

TL;DR: Here's the thing: All engineering is "working remotely" because being "remote" is simply a matter of isolation. This is why even people in the same room use headphones, IM, etc. Everything that's not working remotely (eg: isolation) is "meetings" and the overhead of distractions. The only advantage of having engineers in the same office is a lower cost of meetings. The disadvantage is it makes engineering harder.

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This decision shows me that Meyer doesn't respect or understand engineering culture. She's bought into the management BS "accidental collaboration" rationalization for industrial age butts-in-seats ideology.

Engineering culture comes, to a great degree, from the way you treat engineers and the process of engineering.

Treating engineers like cubicle bunnies who just can't wait to get interrupted by their Pointy Haired Boss is not conducive to building a good engineering culture.

In fact, requiring people to be in the office shows an anti-engineering mentality, because engineering, an effort of the mind, requires situations that are best for the mind.

Two key things enable good engineering: Collaboration (which requires communication) and coherent thought (which requires silence or peace or the isolation from interruption necessary to do it.)

This means that even if every engineer is in the same room, they're going to start "working remotely" by isolating each other via the use of headphones, and a preference for non-interruptive working (Eg: send email, or an IM rather than walk over and tap the engineer on the shoulder.)

It's true that in an office getting together in a conference room to has something out is easier and more convenient, but the tradeoff is that even with all the isolation people try to put into effect interruption creep is a real thing- eg: meetings, etc.

Working remotely prevents these interruptions at the slight cost of a higher level of effort needed to have a "meeting" (using a virtual whiteboard or just a phone call or whatever.)

So, if you spend most of your time in meetings, then you need everyone together.

If you value engineering and spend most of your time engineering, then whether people are together or apart physically, they are all isolating each other and effectively "Working remotely".

IM, Email and other collaboration tools that allow engineer isolation work as well whether the engineer is in the office or across the country.

Plus, lets not forget the minimum 2 hours of lost productivity that comes form requiring people to go to an office- either the commute (and the resulting need to get into work)-or the long lunches at those free cafeterias, and the endless cycle of distractions that are accepted non-work in offices. A "15 minute coffee break" at the office really has a 20-40 minute work interruption, because it often involves other people, while that same break working remotely can easily be exactly 15 minutes, and likely will be shorter because 10 minutes is enough to get the same level of relaxation from the day.

Almost everything in an office is designed to distract you from engineering, and the cost of this overhead is significant.

Alas, this article doesn't explain the problem. Ok, VFX companies are going out of business while the films they helped make are having success and winning awards. Why?

Did they not charge enough? Are they left holding the bag when effects go over budget?

I had a short period in Hollywood working with a VFX house many years ago, back then they had racks and racks of young artists doing the work. They were able to hire them cheap and sell the results of their work to the industry for a good price, making it pretty profitable.

However, that business model resulted in a boom of boutique VFX houses... so is this just a boom that has gone bust because too many houses were created to chase too few jobs?

Or are domestic producers unable to compete with foreign producers because they can get even cheaper young artists to do the work? And if so, why not split the work and create overseas divisions to do the more grunt work while keeping the experienced artists at home working on the harder stuff?

Seems engineers have the same potential risk, but american engineers are still able to compete.

Here's the thing that weeds out recruiters for me: If you get far enough to get me to respond, I'm going to ask a couple specific questions in my response. Answer them.

Just yesterday I responded to a recruiter, explained my situation and asked a couple specific questions. The response was a totally generic email that made it clear he didn't bother to read what I wrote, and just was eager to get me on the phone.

One thing I've learned is they want to get you on the phone ASAP so that they can waste your time, because somehow in their minds, the more time they waste on the phone with you, the more likely your'e going to be interested in them sending you jobs. (If I'd ever had a productive, business like conversation with a recruiter that wasn't full of weasely words and them evading questions, I might feel differently.)

I think this must be a Sales 101 tactic.

Well, I'm in a position to be picky. That makes me the kind of person you probably are really desperate to hire.... so why not take the time to read my reply and respond to it?

I mean, I expressed interest. Now I know I'm going to get follow up mails along the lines of "you expressed interest in blah... lets set up a call" for weeks... he'll never go back and actually read my response, I'm almost certain.

Because the OECD has enacted numerous "money laundering" laws, and the IRS has regulations that require foreign banks to report information on US citizens with accounts.

Sure, the foriegn bank is not located in the USA ,but many of them have branches in the USA, or are in one way or another allied with US banks. All of them do business with US banks.

Thus, all of them are liable for "money laundering" which has been defined so broadly that basically anyone can be convicted of it.

So, even though they are non-US entities they are required to file forms with the IRS, and the burden is getting bigger every year, and if they don't they risk censure under OECD rules or being fined as HSBC was, etc.

It's easier to just not do business with US citizens.

It is. And one of the interesting things is, every 3-4 months they bring in another 30 startups.

Five years ago I quit working for other people and started working for myself. At the same time, we decided to start traveling, to get a better idea of other cultures for our products (which are internationalized) and to see if we found a place we liked to stay.

First off, one thing you notice, once you get out of the USA, is how much of a bubble the USA is in. The perspective given by US news sources, for instance, is pretty narrow. Americans tend to think about the same things all the time and have those perceptions reinforced. Just getting out there will broaden your perspective, of the world, of the markets and of your customers.

There are other cultures that support entrepreneurship, and really, the idea that the US is sort of a pinnacle of this is at the least outdated.

The thing to remember, though, is that these other cultures are different and support it in different ways. Some better, some worse than the USA.

During our travels, we've "based our startup" in Venice Italy, Berlin Germany, Amsterdam, The UK, Mexico, and most recently Chile.

All of these are quite viable as a place to stay while working on your startup, though not all of them are good jurisdictions for your business to be domiciled. We travel on tourist visas, though in recent year's we've focused on getting year long visas.

Like others said about the PT / Five Flags strategy, jurisdictional arbitrage is a good idea. One thing to be aware of is that the IRS is getting more and more draconian every year and US government laws are making it harder and harder for financial institutions to do business with americans. It's not that the countries won't welcome you, it's that the US punishes them for it. (At least as it comes to bank accounts.) This makes a foreign bank account a bit of a prized possession for Americans.

Some notable places to consider: Amsterdam- There is a US-Dutch friendship treaty which means that Americans who found a company in the netherlands get residency so long as they keep a certain amount of assets in the company.

Panama- Recently the president of panama signed an executive order giving anyone from "favored" nations (eg: ones panama has good relations with, including the US and UK) the ability to get residency simply by setting up a company in Panama and putting some money in the bank. This isn't just a residency visa, this is permanent panamanian residency.

Chile- I'm sure you've heard of Startup Chile. Chile is a pro-business culture (though also a bit pro-paperwork and things take a bit more time than they should). The Chilean government will give you residency for living and working in Chile, you just have to earn money in the country and pay taxes on it (So you could go there as a freelancer and live.) After 2 years of doing this you can apply for permanent residency that allows you to live there indefinitely.

Singapore- Has two programs, the Entrepreneur Pass and the Entre Pass for employees of companies (it could be your own company) and people setting up singaporean companies, giving you residency.

All these situations give you a reasonably straightforward path to residency. All of them have more or less pro-business environments, though Amsterdam's taxes are kind of extreme.

As for embracing failure, etc, this is really kind of incumbent on yourself. IF you embrace your failure, great.

If you're looking to raise investor money, the bay area is the probably unparalleled for this. I'm speaking more towards someone who wants to bootstrap.

If you're a bootstrapper, you could do it almost anywhere.

Well, you did call a directory structure that is easy to navigate "opaque", and all of your criticisms are like those from someone who hasn't bothered to even try and figure out how to accomplish what you claim to want to do.

It would be better if your tech skills really were sub-par, because that would mean your integrity isn't called into question by the dishonesty in your post.

If OS X hasn't advanced as much as people would like, I suspect that has a lot to do with iOS sucking up a large portion of Apple's developer resources.

However they are over that hump and over the past 2 years with Mountain Lion they're moving faster on OS X than they have in the past.

IF they keep to what they said they intended to do, we'll have the follow on to Mountain Lion announced pretty soon.

This perspective is inaccurate. The auto-save feature is versioned, so if you want to go back to an eariler version, you can, and in fact, it's much easier. In the past if you made changes and saved the file, only the latest save was on the filesystme, now you can go back in history even past the last save.

You're able to get old data back now in a way that you couldn't before... and can't on other systems.

Whoever represented it as some sort of data loss was confused or lying.

Except that in the case of all the data she's complaining about the Apple products DO use conveneint data formats. The MP3 structure supports tags in the files as a standard going back to the 1990s and Apple supports it.

I don't think Linux storing MP3s in a directory is superior to iTunes storing them in a directory structure (organized by artist name).

The idea that Apple has her data all locked up is completely asinine. Frankly, saying so is dishonest. Apple has been careful to not do what she describes. It's hypocrtical to say that Linux which stores stuff in a directory structure is good while, Macs, which do the exact same thing with the data she's complaining about are "opaque"

Mountain Lion was the first of a once-a-year update cycle, and contrary to "not even talking about it anymore" they are updating it more frequently than ever. (we're due for the announcement of the next version in a few weeks.)

iTunes - Stores music you ripped in standards based format, AAC or MP3. It's easy to get at as it all lives in folders on your machine that aren't exactly opaque (it even organizes your music by artist, etc.) The database file is just an index of the music that keeps track of play counts, etc. You don't need that.

iPhoto - Again, stores all your images in standard formats. You can export the photos with all your changes if you want. They, again, live on your hard drive in a reasonable standard directory structure, and if you want you can export within iPhoto. Not only is there no opaque database it is QUITE trivial to get your data out.

iPhone Syncing- you don't need a machine to do that anymore you can do it online, including backing up to the cloud if you wish. Maybe because she deliberately hasn't updated its software it doesn't have that feature, but that's her choice, not a problem with the product.

iCloud- the idea that you'd have to be "crazy" to do that is BS.

Her saying the mac isn't good for development makes me question her tech skills. Either that or she just cant' be bothered to discover homebrew or to notice that all the open source projects support the mac for development these days.

Sigh, just another mindless, dishonest, ant-Apple rant.

The thing is, if Apple was so bad, you could bring up legitimate criticisms, rather than use "I can't be bothered to spend 2 minutes goggling therefore it cant' be done" type claims.

Whatever happened to Atlas? I thought cappuccino was dead.

It seemed clear to me that it needed an Interface Builder equivalent, but Atlas was in perpetual beta and ignored for years, motorola bought them and the 280 north guys went to "hot" startups.

I was really interested in Cappuccino for quite awhile, still would be if it could deliver a working system that was in reasonably good shape. (I'm not saying it can't, but it's apparently being abandoned years ago made me believe I shouldn't invest time into it.)

This is good stuff and he covers a lot of important indicators.

One thing I discovered in 2001, and validated from 2002-2007 is that monetary policy is a massive indicator of the direction of countries. Once you understand economics (Economics in one lesson by henry hazlitt is a very readable place to start, but Austrian business cycle theory is the real deal) you can see how things are going to go pretty clearly. Which is why in 2001 when the mises institute was predicting a housing bubble (long before even Krugman advocated creating a housing bubble) ABCT let me know that it would eventually pop. I put this theory into practice with a variety of financial instruments and profited from it.

The thing about real science is it lets you make predictions. Oil is very critical and this guy is onto some really good stuff... but economics in a broader sense and monetary theory in specific, is also hugely relevant.

The biggest tragedy of this kind of knowledge, though, is watching people make bad decisions (like buying houses they couldn't afford) based on nonsense they were told (essentially propaganda). Even someone who knows you a long time and thinks your a genius will believe CNN, politicians and their own desire to buy a house and "get in on the action" over wise counsel.

Which ultimately left me with this conclusion: People get the world they create, and they are complicit in its creation. How many people who hate the PATRIOT ACT and NDAA voted for Obama? How many should have known? How many people who wanted prudent financial management voted for Bush? How many should have known they would get deficit spending? How many were tricked into voting for one of these guys with the idea that the alternative was so much worse...when in retrospect they aren't that bad (Bush, for instance, never cracked down on abortion like we were told to fear in 2000, and he was in office 8 years.)

What if everybody actually demanded their government was honest, prudent, and abided by the constitution?

So, yes, use everything you can to understand geopolitics, because we're in a time of great upheaval- or close to it. The future for the USA is dimmer than the past, unfortunately, no matter which major party wins the next several elections.

Stealing someone's boat is not karma for writing an article pointing out how much of a hypocrite you are. The first is a crime, the second is protected speech.

Plus you wouldn't be so mad if you didn't realize he was right.

He's afraid to sign a form that has an error on it, because he's a moral person.

Meanwhile, she's giddy to steal his very expensive boat, because she knows no matter how much she fucks it up, it's not going to come back on her. Plus nice new boat to screw around with.

If this situation doesn't show how profoundly corrupt government is, then I don't know what will.

And all the evil like this-- it is visited not just on rich people like him, but on poor people, who have their assets stolen by government agents just as giddy as she is.

Yet most articles about it don't even have the guts to call it what it is: Theft.

It's pathetic what "americans" have become. If he's pulled out a gun and shot her dead, right then and there, he would have been in his rights, she was in the act of grand theft, and it would have been self defense.

But of course mentioning that truth is shocking-- shocking!-- to the enslaved sheep that americans have become. (Hell the idea that he should be allowed to have a gun even, seems to be alarming to the impotent cowards that inhabit this country.)

Is there any evidence (eg: a direct quote) [1] that Steve Jobs actually "hated Java"?

I'm tired of this kind of sloppy nonsensical, and actually, dishonest attribution of opinions to Steve Jobs. It was bad enough when he was alive.

Jobs clearly talked about how first class support for Java in the Mac was important back when OS X came about. He clearly wanted "write once, run anywhere" to work. I once met one of the people whose job it was at Apple was to make Java look mac like in the UI. Obviously they put a lot of effort into supporting Java.

While Java may not have achieved what they hoped, it's absurd to just assume that "Steve Jobs hated Java" because its convenient for the reporter, and let's be honest, gives the reporter an excuse to put Job's name in the title.

[1] The quote in the title talks about the weight of it, and how it is a drag, but doesn't express any hatred. Dishonest characterizations like this (calling it "hatred") is not just sloppy writing, it shows a lack of integrity. It's why we have uninformed people thinking google is "open" while Apple is "closed" - a lot of reporters saying that who know nothing about the actual situation (which isn't that much different between them.)

The answer is very simple: Brody is lying about what Tesla told him, just like he's told many other lies in his article and in the rebuttal.

Putting it into a "he said / she said" is a smokescreen.

The car might be a lemon but the idea that Tesla told him to run the heater to charge the battery is beyond credulity.

This is not exactly the first time the NYT has told lies for ideological reasons. The paper does it regularly, and really, the idea that it (or any paper in america) is an "unbiased" media is quaint.

The difference is, Elon Musk is willing to stand up to them and call them on it, so they are obfuscating.

You're looking at the cost of production, and then the price and assuming that all of the space between the two is profit, and seem to be implying that somehow it is a ripoff.

What you're not considering is the value to the customer.

The incremental cost of a copy of Microsoft Office (with electronic delivery they cut out virtually all of their manufacturing cost) is close to zero. Probably 12p as well.

Yet Microsoft sells that Office Suite for $99 or much much more.

If the value of one copy of that office suite to a company is $10,000 in improved efficiency (eg: salaries saved by not having to pay overtime or hire as many people-- remember when spreadsheets were physical sheets of paper and companies had staffs of dozens of women whose sole job was to type up correspondence on typewriters?) then they are "profiting" even more than Microsoft is because the spread is wider.

Further, manufacturing costs are only one part of the costs of a product. Yes there's marketing, and advertising which you may hate, but there's also the offices that house the workers that run the company, the royalties paid to people who generate formulations, the taxes paid to the government, the manifold fees, costs, and expenses involved in running a business. All of these raise the actual "cost" from above the 12p manufacturing (and delivery costs I assume you included.)

For me, the value of buying a brand that has reliable quality control is often pretty high.

If a high quality bottle of ketchup elevates the satisfaction of an inexpensive meal (say fish & chips) to the point where it is on par with a much more expensive meal, like those workers using office, I may be getting more "profit" out of the transaction than the company.

This is how I use ketchup. It means I eat out less, and spend less on food and have a higher quality of life.

North Korea is at the end state of socialism. Hayek wrote a famous book called "The road to serfdom", and this prison camp, and the way the rest of NK citizens live is the serfdom he's talking about.

Once you accept that you're owned by "society", and that everyone is "responsible for the greater good" this is inevitably what you end up with.

You ask if they lack critical thinking or a critical mass. Both of these are true, they've been indoctrinated to believe in this system, except maybe the ones like the writer of this story who were born in a camp and got less indoctrination.

The sad thing is, you can see this very same thing play out repeatedly in history. The way the germans let the nazis take over, even after it was clear they were up to no good. The way there was no revolution to overthrow the soviet state in the USSR.

You see these same mechanisms happening here in america today-- people claiming that "health care is a right" which is essentially saying they have the right to enslave everyone else for their own benefit.

And there's the error- they think "the rich" or "everyone else" is going to be forced to pay for their wellbeing, never realizing that they are calling for their own enslavement.

Pair the idea that you have a "right" to make others pay for healthcare (and other things) with the claim by these same people that you don't have a right to self defense (eg: own guns.) The latter is even in the constituttion.

You'd think this would cause a dissonance in their head, but the party ideology is so strong they never connect the two.

And when americans are being herded into camps, long disarmed, and forced to work "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs".... they will wish they still had guns.

Schools teach people to be compliant little sheep and have done so for over a century, there's a distinct connection between government control over schools and lack of critical thinking in the populace.

Unless things turn around soon, the US will end up in some sort of terrible state. Not likely like North Korea or Nazi germany or the USSR, but we already are suffering from the economic destruction of these kinds of policies (and like NK citizens told to blame the US for their poverty, we're told to blame wall street, germans were told to blame jews, russians were told to blame "hoarders", etc. etc. etc.)

Someone from a portuguese speaking country thinks that your email address is theirs and that their password is not working and is trying to reset it. That seems to be what's happening here.