As a 3rd anecdote, I used vim for 10 years as my primary editor and “shell”. Then 10 years ago I learned tmux and fell in love with its window multiplexing. Now I use vim strictly as an editor/splitter. But I use tmux to split my code from my repl window. And maintain multiple windows where I’m working on different projects.
Historically you are correct that only around 4,000 employees of the US federal government are 'political hires' that the President can change/hire/fire. However in October 2020, Trump ordered Schedule F [0] that effectively increases the number of career bureaucrats that could be made by political appointment rather than by a competitive process. The Order was promptly rescinded by the Biden administration in Jan 2021. [1]
The Trump administration said that they believed Schedule F would increase the number of career positions to roughly 50,000 existing jobs. However many think tanks and union members believe that Schedule F could be interpreted much more broadly and could include well over 100,000 positions.
If the Trump administration revives the Schedule F order, it could mean very significant changes for many career bureaucrats.
Fear mongering was certainly not my intention. The simplest explanation for why this didn’t happen during President Trump’s first term was because the order was effective Oct 21st, 2020. Which was less than 2 weeks before President Biden won the popular & electoral vote.
I share your hope that the incoming Trump administration will uphold the usual norms of hiring & firing careers federal employees!
Agreed. However containers make maintenance much more difficult. A year after a container was deployed, it needs an update. And then you discover there are a set of deprecated libraries that need updating. It can get messy. Not sure any solution is perfect.
Any company that accesses/uses Personally Identifiable Information (PII) must register a “PII Czar” with the proper authorities. That person (or persons, depending on the size/scope of the PII data) can be held criminally liable in the event of a data breach.
If a jury finds that the PII Czar enacted the correct policies/procedures & took the right precautions, a jury could find them innocent. But if there was willful or negligent handling at the company, the PII Czar goes to jail.
In the US, one of the big lies told at the corporate level is that no one ever sees jail time because the regulators are too underfunded in comparison with large companies. What’s necessary is clear personal ownership of PII and criminal liability in the event of a data breach.
"An official one - in a word, the chief of the establishment."
"I am the chief myself."
"In other words, you expect to do time yourself? Why didn't you say so in the first place? Why did you take up two hours of my valuable time?"
The old man in the Passover trousers became exceedingly angry, foamed at the mouth, fumed, emitted explosive noises, but the pauses between his sentences did not diminish.
"I am Funt!" he said emphatically. "I am ninety years old! All my life I've done time for others! Such is my profession - to suffer for others!"
"Oh, so you're professional figure-head!"
"Yes," said the old man, tossing his head boastfully. "I am Substitute-chairman Funt! I've always done time. At the time of Alexander the Second, the Liberator, at the time of Alexander the Third, the Peacemaker, at the time of Nicholas the Second, the Bloody." And the old man slowly bent back his fingers, counting the tsars. "At the time of Kerensky I also did time. At the time of Military Communism, I did no time, to tell the truth, because clean business disappeared and there was no work for me. But how I did time in the days of the NEP! How I did time in the days of the NEP! Those were the best days of my life..."
I hate the double standard where a low level employee can be fired and blacklisted for a black swan mistake, but systemic mistakes get the top levels golden parachutes. So no luxury prisons for execs, either.
Data Fiduciary Duty - you have to use the data you have in the best interest of your client (which isn't allowed to be the advertisers that want the data, nope!), and if that means deleting what isn't necessary, so much the better.
Also, forced arbitration isn't allowed and class action lawsuits result in more than a reward of $3.97 paid five years later with a free year of credit monitoring thrown in.
I'm not sure it was like that. Back then they had scams. Postal scams, work-at-home scams, beauty product scams, etc.
One possible different might be the internet. Allowing scammers access to so many people makes it easier to fish. There was probably an increase in scamming after the mainstream use of the telephone.
Can’t stress this enough. Thank you for mentioning it!! In my career I’ve encountered many engineers unfamiliar with this concept when designing a distributed system.
Yeah it’s very common since it becomes an issue as soon as you get sockets involved in an app. A lot of frontend engineers unknowingly end up in distributed system land like this. Coordinating clients can be just as much a distributed systems challenge as coordinating servers—often it’s harder.
