OT Liberals, describe current events if Hillary were President

Don't give a flying fuck what other nations think of us - I think that being an American is something to be proud of because this country was about being a classless society and a fair and just one - and if your administration is actively working to divide the people a lot more than what they would naturally be, shames the free press if it does not agree with it or actively working against minority groups with archaic rules - it's a national disgrace.

I think that if we believe we are good and smart and hard working - to not be prepared and willfully ignore scientific evidence that this is a huge problem - is a national disgrace.

You want to call it a projection, be at it - I call it a national disgrace because this administration has worked diligently to turn this country into the haves and have not and to divide and disadvantage the weak.

 

LMAO. he will unequivocally be the absolute worst president in the history of this country. There will be textbooks written about how horrible he was and people are still debating that his response is fine.

Feeling worried about our kids' future.

 

But just this administration? Cause the divide of the ultra wealthy elites and everyone else furthered under at least the last two administrations. When most people say national disgrace they're referring to how others view the US looking in. Id phrase what you’re saying as you’re ashamed to be associated as an American with the US administration, thats why I called it projection, but semantics aside.

 

I hate that you are proud about this. Tells me everything that is wrong with this country. Apathy is not something to be prideful about.

 

I will never vote for Democrats or Republicans unless a whole lot changes about this. It is not apathy. I believe that the two parties' political agendas and crony capitalism are a big issue and I won't support it. I will use my votes for third parties, because my vote is really my only voice for change, whether you like it or anyone else on this forum I do not care. I care about voting for what I believe in, not what you tell me too.

Apathy is staying at home.

 

I disagree with that. He believes that they do more wrong that right - and he is entitled to this opinion. It is not apathy. I think he is wrong - but at least he thought about it and came to a conclusion he believes in.

 

I may absolutely be wrong. Who here hasn't been? lol.

 

I disagreed with a lot of stuff that happened in the previous administrations - but neither of them felt like it was actively working to divide the country and fanning feelings of hate and distrust - so I disagree with that assertion. I felt that both of the previous administration did work to try and unite people on many subjects - even if their policies divided them on some.

 

I sort of agree. I agree that on a social level they didn't fan the flames of dissent nearly as much as the current one. Financially though, I'm not sure, I'd really have to think about it, it seems to me there were a lot of fiscal policies that worsened the wealth disparity, I'd probably have to go do some more research on this. I actually agree in a lot of ways that I am so ashamed of Trump most of the time, usually whenever he talks... He is so disrespectful amongst other things...

 

You should also be asking to describe the current events if Sanders were president.

 

Well, I think Obama's hands were really tied - he inherited a financial mess that took almost 2 years to start growing the economy - and the way to do that was the bailout which was, imho, justified. The problem with the bailout was that it was not better regulated to ensure that it would help the weak and limit profiteering by the rich - but it did what it was supposed to do. He also did raise the high-level tax bracket that the Bush administration cut and he did work on Obamacare which while being a very limited solution - is much better than anything we have had in a long time when it comes to providing health benefits for the weak.

Bush's tax cuts were a disaster that really accelerated the borrowing nonsense and got us the recession at the end of his term. He was dealt with 9/11 and tried to restart the economy - but he did try it and the early bailouts after the crash were his administration's work. So - I would say that the Obama administration was actually better than Bush at trying to lessen the divide - but the Trump administration repeated the Bush tax cut mistake when the economy was humming - he inherited a strong economy from Obama - there was no need for that at all.

 

I don't know. I am not an Obama hater, honestly personality-wise I kind of liked Obama and Bush. Economically they had fairly different circumstances during their presidency. I wasn't a fan of any of the bailouts personally. I think you can make a good argument that the bail-outs worked though (on both accounts) I think those loans were all paid back in full, so I may not like that they happened and don't think they should have still, but I can see that POV.

 

I have never been wrong. My giant brain protects me.

 

I know you are a software guy - and I believe Joel Spolsky's "Joel on Software" book made a very compelling argument against "burning things to the ground to start over" - which I believe is what the "no bailout" argument is.

Sure, his arguments were about big software projects - but I think they apply to big projects in any discipline - big projects become big because they were successful and as such there is a lot of 'institutional knowledge' in them - that "burning things to the ground and starting over" argument abandons a lot of that institutional knowledge and often ends up with a loss (See Lotus 1-2-3 version 3 which was written from scratch, late to the market and buggy, which lead to it's demise, Netscape's rewrite that took much longer than expected and lost the market to Inernet Explorer, Windows 8 rewrite of the UX paradigm which failed miserably and helped iOS, Android and MacOS gain a lot of the OS marketshare Windows had).

So, the argument that the book makes and that I believes applies to big government / social constructs is that when you have big projects that are failing - the correct approach is to see what is wrong with them, fix it while propping what worked well - and taking the long-term approach to fixing it over time. The bailout was that, it recognized that we had big financial problems because of borrowing over bad unsafe data, but the big institutions that got that bailout did provide very important tenements of modern line - of employment, providing health care and continued cash-flow which is the most important portion of a successful business (or economy). So, that was why it was done and why it was successful in propping the economy and avoiding a much bigger economic collapse.

If you remember the first 2 years of the Obama administration - the Republicans were crying about the huge deficit and debt that was happening because of it - but the deficit actually got smaller as the Obama administration got along - so by the end of it - the deficit was almost as small as it was in 2007 before he came in - which shows that the big bailout worked and the main causes of the economic collapse was being fixed slowly as planned. Trump immediately cut the top-level tax, added cutting corporate taxes on top of it and the deficit grew immediately even before the $2T Covid stimulus (which is justified).

 

I want to apologize for my reaction to you on this. I edited my post. I don't believe I am apathetic about this, you might and you are allowed to have that opinion. My comment was mostly said in jest to @andalusian because he and I have had numerous discussions about it and we disagree (which is fine). I did not need to react that way towards you. So I am sorry and will try to do better next time.

 

Totally off-topic but one of the strongest urges I have at times on my own projects is hitting the restart button when I find a few things I don't like. There is also something almost magical to me about having a fresh project started it's like from here I can do anything and it feels great.

 

Same, but there is a difference between successful projects that serve a lot of people and small, fun projects.

Our most successful project has started almost 10 years ago, it was already built on software we developed at least 5 years prior to that - and it has been slowly moved and updated and converted since. It started as a PC project running local database and executing most of the logic using an interpreter that I wrote almost 20 years ago. It now lives in the cloud running Node, with UX on smartphones or web - and since we started our cloud move about 7 years ago - we are now replacing the old NoSQL database we used since with a newer one that can handle the much larger volume we are seeing and big users increase. I do not think there is one piece of code in that project that is from the original project - but I can go over the code and see where decisions that we made very long ago are still kept, even if we rewrote it and replaced it and prodded it over time. Hack, the database, despite the fact that we now use a 3rd generation NoSQL, OODBMS system has large portions that clearly were a relational db implementation within this new paradigm - still based on what worked well and improved from the original project.

 

So my boss a few months ago decided to change our entire project (again), and it's been weird all of us left have C/C#/C++ backgrounds and now we're running entirely JS, Node, etc. I don't believe I have ever in my life spent so much time googling. Now that everything is mostly done on a browser too, I'm learning a lot about how different the browsers really are. I don't know why it is but I kind of feel like tearing down the whole project to switch to really web heavy stuff has killed my brain (not that, that takes much I suppose). Something about JS feels, hacky to me, I always feel like my code should be better, but I can't always pinpoint how, even though it's "easy to write" and less verbose than C/C++.

Anyways, I think there is a good point in there about burning it all down may be a pretty nuclear option and has a lot of bad consequences as well.

 

FWIW - I have been doing JS for a long time - and even the interpreter that I wrote a very long time ago had 'event handlers' you could write in JS using Microsoft's Javascript engine that you could embed in other projects - so it is not a shock to me - but when we moved completely off compiled code to run just about everything in Node - it was a hard move, although, in my experience, a smart one.

You can shoot yourself in the foot with any tool, and JS has some parts that feel like a hack - but there are some really brilliant parts there as well, and especially with ES6 and Typescript - a lot of the things that compilers helped you and protected you with - you can do with JS now as well.

Not sure what you are going to use for UX - but the modern frameworks are really good, We are now rewriting the UX we have for our smartphone apps, moved from jQuery etc.. to VueJS which is wonderful (wrote our web interface with it as well) - frankly, this is the most fun I have had writing modern UX - we used to use things like Delphi for our PC apps - and it was great, so moving to jQuery or native smartphone implementation was a big downgrade. With VueJS - we have caught and surpassed what was available in the PC side for mobile/web based apps - which is pretty amazing.

 

I will check out vueJS I don't really know much about it. In fact this is part of what I honestly have found somewhat confusing. My boss said hey were doing web stuff now and we were all like ok... None of knew anything about web stacks, I did have some training in JS from an MIT professor a few years back and that's was about it (we were using the electr0n framework), most of my experience for implementing user interfaces and user experiences were in Unreal Engine and Unity3d. When we started (this was about 3 months ago now), the couple of us left on this project were digging through google we found AngularJS, ReactJS, and just so many different things that we had no idea what the heck we were doing, we're still kind of making it up as we go...

I've thought a few times I should recommend we hire a web developer, not that I don't mind the experience but it's slowed us down quite a bit.

Typescript does help quite a bit coming from the backgrounds most of us have.