> With the system online, there were still many improvements to be made. Like taxes, applying for retirement was still an incredibly confusing process. Working closely with talented designers and the Retirement Services team at OPM, we set out to reinvent the user experience from end-to-end.
Complaining that the writer took all the credit seems a bit petty.
It was downplayed at every other opportunity including the conclusion, emphasizing instead the lone team of two heros. A few shout outs here and there, but the theme was clear.
The creation in the article appears to be genuinely useful and impressive as well. It certainly benefitted a great deal from other people's work, but so did apple and linux and whatever else.
You're literally being downvoted for stereotyping an entire generation. The word stereotype implies it, but it's not remotely close to true.
Like, the easiest, most obvious example in the world is trump: he hyperbolically brags constantly about things he didn't do or actively tried to stop and it would be real hard to argue that he's genZ.
When you single out a specific group for your observation, it has strong implications about the other groups you didn't mention.
Yeah and that would be a lot more relevant if we were talking about, dunno, programming circuits or constructing proofs.
Instead we're writing english language sentences to be read by humans. Where connotations and implications and other such "unspoken" things absolutely matter.
Are you trolling? The implication is clearly that GenZ is unusually hyperbolic. That their predilection for hyperbole is somehow unusual or notable, otherwise WHY MENTION IT.
Speaking personally, the Summer of Love and 1990s counterculture is much more unusual and hyperbolic. I'd be curious to hear where you're seeing Gen Z surpass those generations.
Unusual yes, but I wouldn't call them hyperbolic (in the context of its meaning in this thread).
Also, wrt. to the Summer of Love, I would think its values are in the complete opposite side of what's being discussed here.
Excerpt from its Wikipedia page [1]:
"Many opposed the Vietnam War, were suspicious of government, and rejected consumerist values. In the United States, counterculture groups rejected suburbia and the American way and instead opted for a communal lifestyle. Some hippies were active in political organization, whereas others were passive and more concerned with art (music, painting, poetry in particular) or spiritual and meditative practices."
That doesn't sound compatible with "young people these days are so desperate to show off their skills, to the point of faking it, to get jobs in the government or the industry".
But I am now curious to hear about how you think both cohorts are related.
how exactly is different…? I give you Trump, you give me Biden. I give you Scott, you give me Pelosi. I give you Bush, you give me Clinton… it is not different but regardless of whether it is or isn’t no one is defending it. it is just a disservice to everyone to think somehow magically things are all this different now than before, same crap different toilet paper
Ok, give me biden. Where are his lists of corruption scandals[1]? His public statements about taking bribes?
I'm not quite sure how to explain this very obvious point: biden and his government was not corrupt in any meaningful sense and trump and his government is extremely corrupt and pretending that they're the same is both factually wrong and has the effect of protecting trump and his corruption.
The point isn't that anyone is above reproach, the point is that all you're doing is normalizing the increased awfulness of the republican corruption. And normalizing it means that it is more likely to continue happening and less likely to be punished.
If you're supposedly unhappy about clinton "corruption" why aren't you really mad about trump?
This whole "oh everything is the same nothing can improve" attitude is literally a favored tactic of the most corrupt governments. They want you to think that way because it means they'll never be held accountable. Any time people start talking about improving things they're met with an endless deluge of "oh it's all the same nothing can change" which is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
[1] The best the fairly obvious house republican "investigation" into joe biden could manage was some vague statements about his son getting paid for having the last name biden, which may or may not be illegal, but certainly seems unethical, but more importantly, ISN'T THE SITTING PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Like, it is so incredibly obvious that words fail me that the president being corrupt matters A LOT MORE than his son being corrupt. Like, a lot a lot a lot more.
> biden and his government was not corrupt in any meaningful sense
amazing to read this, very amazing. the echochambers people live in these days are mind-boggling. biden has been a politician for 5+ decades and you do not get to be that unless you are evil and corrupted and bought ecery fiber of your being… must be all kinds of nice living in a fantasy world you live in. trump surely will top any evil and corruption (at least in america, no contest) but saying biden is not corrupt is beyond any comprehension :) wow, just woow
Biden is a 5+ decades politician, he is corrupted and has had every fiber of being sold to the highest bidder over and over again. it is you that care about “which team you are on” - not me. I have been a democrat my entire life and will continue to be so especially now that alternative barely exists but I also posses intelligence to know that democrats (especially fucking establishment ones like biden) are corrupt to the core
Boy I am real tired of this frankly, well, I was going juvenile, but I'm pretty sure most kids are smarter than this, so I'll just call it what it is: an idiotic, damaging and ultimately false understanding of reality.
The world is not some kind of simple morality play and your continued lack of understanding about what has actually happened in the real world is offensive.
It's not because you're ignorant, that's just mildly annoying, it's because you're so proud of your ignorance. The complete unwillingness to grow and learn and challenge your current understanding, that is what is offensive.
There's a great phrase I heard a while back, "thought terminating cliche". You just toss out these blanket statements, "all politicians are evil and corrupt" as if everyone else is supposed to just blindly believe in your assertions and stop thinking for themselves and searching for truths.
Biden did some bad things, possibly even some illegal things (mostly on the premise that every single american has done at least one illegal thing) but he's still vastly superior to trump in any metric you care to choose.
The reason this matters is because we (for now) still get a choice. Are any of the choices perfect? No, obviously not. But we can still choose the better option. We don't have to settle for the worst one.
> [1] The best the fairly obvious house republican "investigation" into joe biden could manage was some vague statements about his son getting paid for having the last name biden, which may or may not be illegal, but certainly seems unethical, but more importantly, ISN'T THE SITTING PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Like, it is so incredibly obvious that words fail me that the president being corrupt matters A LOT MORE than his son being corrupt. Like, a lot a lot a lot more.
It's different because it's all about that now. The Clintons had their scandals, the "pay to play" lists etc. We all know they are in bed with the moneymen. But it didn't define their administration, and they were pretty hush-hush about it.
Trump on the other hand is completely open about this. He even brags about making money from deals, something that was previously considered a huge conflict of interest. He appoints people based on loyalty alone, not knowledge or experience. He bullies countries into compliance with mafia tactics ("appease me or else..." tariffs or even war like venezuela and greenland). It's a huge moral shift where that is no longer unthinkable. The US used to have values. It was a country that was at least trying to be the good guy.
Also, the constitution used to be holy. Now Trump is flaunting the 1st amendment on a daily basis (limiting LGBTIQ+ speech, establishing America as a "christian country" which is explicitly forbidden). I think all these developments are very concerning. I don't live in America but considering it is still a big world power it does worry me.
I love the spirit of your comments but IMO it is misguided
The US used to have values. It was a country that was at least trying to be the good guy.
This really is all wrong. One might think this based on pitches from different times but all Empires are evil by their definition and America has always been that, always
> This really is all wrong. One might think this based on pitches from different times but all Empires are evil by their definition and America has always been that, always
Again, the problem with this train of logic is you inevitable condemn everyone and everything as evil, at which point the word completely loses its meaning. Evil is only useful as a term if there are actually things that are not evil.
America has certainly done immoral, unethical and frankly evil things. It's also done moral, beautiful and even heroic things. It's a big complicated entity made up of literally millions of people and trying to summarize it as "good or evil" is pointless.
The reason this nuance matters is that we want, need to encourage doing good and the first step to doing that is to actually be able to distinguish between good and evil.
> We estimate that over the past two decades, USAID-funded programmes have helped prevent more than 91 million deaths globally, including 30 million deaths among children.
How about that? Or are you going to come up with some excuse that somewhere, somehow, an american also benefitted from saving all these lives and therefor it doesn't count?
I mean you are making this too easy
that I can copy&paste above the fold..:
The core reason for creating USAID in 1961, under President John F. Kennedy, was to consolidate and revamp U.S. foreign aid into a single, more strategic agency to counter Soviet influence during the Cold War, promote democracy and free-market principles, and fulfill America's moral and economic role as a global leader. It aimed to separate economic aid from military assistance and make it more effective in fostering development, spreading U.S. values, and creating stable partners, distinct from the bureaucracy of the State Department.
didn’t copy and paste from wikipedia (though I can if needed) - wasn’t expecting to read USAID as american spreading goodness out of our pure hearts but here we are, have read crazier things than that for sure
1 in 5 children are hungry in America right this moment, we don’t do a single fucking thing because we are “good” - can’t believe there are people (you are probably in majority) that still believe this nonsense. wild wild stuff
just do a simple thing - ballpark how many lives of innocent people has America taken, lets just say since WWII. then lets see after you ballpark this whether you still think we are (or ever were) “good guys”
The major difference is the disappearance of shame.
However, the greatest enablement was the overblown cynicism large swaths of the american elites had towards the national proclaimed values. When you think everything is cynical even when it is not then the next step is to have governments that are completely cynical.
the echochamber is going nuts… look at this thread and see how many of you are saying “degree of corruption” and then think whether or not you are getting this fed like clowns from whatever fucking (“social”) media your brain is being poisoned and then start to question your life’s choices
> I will never feel like a "normal" person, they will make sure I never will.
I'm going to tangent a bit here but so far in my life, after observing lots of people discussing things related to this, every single person feels this way.
Every person thinks they're atypical. That they're experiencing things other people don't. That they're different in some way to "everyone else".
Exactly what this means is up to the reader, but it sure implies some interesting ideas here.
There's certainly slow books still being written but most fantasy books in specific assume a certain amount of knowledge about a tolkien-esque world. You can do entirely new worlds, and some people do, but most stories are about people and the choices they make.
This is a good point, the fact that you can just download some video games and run them on your linux desktop with a working desktop environment and so on, even while getting a ton of papercuts, was basically unimaginable 15 years ago.
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