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> The real problem there, if there is one core problem, is that "Conservative does detailed analysis of Iowa state Department of Human Services budget and makes the following 542 findings" and "Liberal does detailed analysis of Vermont state Department of Corrections and makes the following 384 findings" isn't going to attract attention ( much less improve advertising revenue ) like raging about lazy poor people or bleeding-heart liberals or raging about greedy business owners or racist conservatives.

That's certainly true, and quite unfortunate. That's one thing I appreciated about Ross Perot - rather than run a shit ton of 15-second commercials, he did 30-minute presentations on TV with charts and graphs attempting to educate people on the issues he thought most important.

> I can fire back
  You can of course fire back. You could even before listening to what I'm saying. Is that helpful? Does that advance us toward some mutually-agreeable solutions?

> conservatives generally think all government social welfare spending is a giant fraud supporting lazy people

I'm fairly sure you know that quite false, so yeah, firing back with lies would be not only "not helpful", but quite counter-productive. I'm glad you decided not to go down the road, at least not too far.

> liberals dig into solid numbers about poverty, illnesses, crime rates, workplace injuries, and so forth.

Come on now. I pointed to one example everyone knows - Lennon's "Imagine", every liberal knows it and sings along. Is there a famous song called "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" that conservatives know and love? Maybe that famous hit "Be cautious of unintended consequences"? They aren't called the liberal arts for nothing. ;) Pick just about any famous liberal speech and you can just about guarantee it'll heavily feature one of these three words: hope, dream, imagine. Match the caricature to the idealogy:

Hippy with a tambourine singing about love.
Accountant-type in a suit with glasses.

Which one is the liberal stereotype and which is the conservative caricature? There's a REASON it's that way and not the opposite. Nobody looks at an accountant and guesses they are probably liberal.

Look at the verbs in the campaign slogans for this election:

Donald Trump "Make America Great Again!" - MAKE

Bernie Sanders "A Future To Believe In" - BELIEVE

Hillary Clinton "I'm With HER" "Hillary For America" - No action at all ("her" is emphasized though)

The conservative action is "make", the liberal actions are "believe" and well, nothing. Though "I'm with HER" suggests dividing people into demographic groups. Is the action "divide"?

I have a stack of PC Magazines back for ages at the top of my closet. On one of them, there is a caricature of Bill Gates as an octopus, fighting off attacks from fighter jets (the lead of which was Netscape) because Microsoft had the audacity to ship Internet Explorer as the default browser in their operating system. Let me repeat that: The fact that an operating system used it's influence to set the DEFAULT WEB BROWSER was front page news. And people were upset.

And now....Microsoft has the stones to involuntarily change the operating system (and the license agreement) that it's users run on. What is the response? Sure there's outrage, but what are the real consequences to Microsoft? Maybe a class-action lawsuit at best for a few people? An apology for 'not being clear enough' about the upgrade process?

If you really want to be serious about how much control people have over your systems, you need to be a little bit more vocal, and a little bit more upset than this. The fact that the 'Internet Outrage' only caused the ad agency to double-down should probably clue you in to the level of action you really need to take here.

If you're not willing to defend against a company that is literally threatening your job security (I have clients with Windows 10 PCs), what threat are you to a fast food chain?

Union membership is at an all-time low because they let themselves become infested by organized crime who rotted them to their core. Unions have a severe public perception problem but any time someone mentions it to them they just stick their fingers in their ears and pretend as hard as they can that that isn't any organized crime still involved at all.

Let's not be disingenuous by suggesting that union membership decline was caused solely by external forces and has nothing at all to do with some of the horrible management choices they have made since the seventies. Why do you think every caricaturization of a union leader in the media is as a Marlon Brando-esque character?

No. "What is they wearing" is not English, unless you're an "Asian" caricature in English popular culture, in which case more correct is "What is they wearing, Blud?"

This is 99% about control. There are multiple players here. Local governments, the US major political players, credit card companies, banks, they all get to win. Control means you know much more about transactions, you get more say about what transactions you favor or not, you get a larger percentage on transactions, you get to use negative interests in the bank because people can no longer extract their money from the bank. There's a lot. It's about power and the threat of power. For one thing it means the US can threaten to stop all financial traffic for any target they pick, on the spot. There is a big difference between using little cash and taking away the possibility to use cash.

This article http://norberthaering.de/en/ho... describes what happened in India. India is mostly cash based, or was until some people decided that was no longer the case. The result was a caricature of unchecked power.

I can't tell if you are intending to caricature IT managers.

Culture is just plain stupid. All you need on that front is to be able to work well with others.

What is culture to you anyway? Wearing flashy pants and eating french food or what?

Actually, I would like to comment that not all country is horrible. The really old stuff, and related genres like bluegrass, had musical value I think: these were authentic artists, not corporate-created caricatures. But you're looking at stuff from the 40s-70s or so. Johnny Cash, for instance, I think is a good example of an authentic country music artist. It's not my preferred style of music by any stretch, but I can recognize the value. But all the stuff that's sold as country these days is utter trash, and a lot of it seems to basically be "redneck rock".

therefore your claim is just your projection on what you want to caricature as happening so that you feel better. IOW you're being a moronic twat making shit up.

I though about this for three minutes, when I discovered all the shit dripping off the fan the morning after.

A simple photograph (or gallery) of person (or people) expected to mount the stage would be the best sanity check. Our visual systems are way better equipped to get a slice of primary this-can't-be-right cognition for a celebrity in the hot light feeling watched by a hundred million people.

Yes, you could still end up with the same visual on two different cards, say an actor or actress nominated in two different categories (e.g. lead/supporting). That would require a rare double mix up.

For director/voice actor they could add the image of one of those spindly little chairs or a microphone. They could also tuck a photo of last year's winner (already holding their damn trophies) at the bottom—or even better, a manic caricature of same.

These would be about right as a cue for LAST YEAR'S winner of same category (drawn in a slightly more minimalist style, with Oscar added):

Caricatures drawn for The New York Review by four artists

Wallace
Kubrick
Shostakovich

(Baring a recount, you have a whole year to book this art before the next gala shindig.)

You would need to use stock images for THIS YEAR'S winner, or you'd risk letting the cat out of the bag. Probably stock images from the actual production (which I'm sure all nominees have available if you ask nicely).

Obviously, the inner staff of whatever agency takes this over in future years prepares a winner card for every nominee in every category, and the newly-scared-shitless MC of final card selection would manually winnow the field—stamping each selected card "official"—and then immediately burning all cards not selected.

Bonus: you also get a one-of-a-kind souvenir for the lucky winner to pass along to favoured family or friend (ideally signed by hand by the caricature artist). There are probably other PR/monetization strategies available in conjunction with this, not that anyone in Hollywood would notice another shake of the purse.

Mmm you deliciously smug, condescending, insulting elitist asshole... Thank you for 4 years of Trump, and probably another 4 after that.

With caricatures like you who needs hyperbole?

My (mod funny) comment was a bit of a caricature of Agile, of course. Still, I'm surprised you said what you did, rather than chuckling. I thought you'd been doing professional development for a number of years. Perhaps I'm remembering wrong.

Agile emphasizes *automating* testing. Automated testing is a good thing. It sometimes catches regressions and fatal errors that completely break the build entirely. That saves your alpha and beta testers from dealing with some of the easy, dumb mistakes.

Scrum by the book says sprints should be 1 week preferably, up to 2 weeks, and you should have a release (or a minimum a releasable product at the end of each sprint (each week). If you're going to plan it and build it in a week, that doesn't leave more than a few hours for QA. Traditionally high quality software spends a few weeks in alpha testing and a few weeks in beta testing before it moves to limited release. If you follow Scrum as originally written, release comes at the sprint - alpha testing is done after release, by customers in production. That's advantageous in that customers get the cutting edge new features right away, and it also means they are getting alpha-grade software. Much like the difference between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Many people like Fedora, which is cutting edge, on their desktops. Virtually nobody wants that on their production servers, they want the reliability of Red Hat or CentOS Enterprise, which has been tested for at least 18 months. Fedora is basically the beta test for RHEL, and that beta test takes 18 months, not 18 hours.

I would also think you'd know that an essential, fundamental concept behind Agile is that we don't know what the future holds, requirements change -- so long-term planning is basically pointless. That makes perfect sense - to everybody who hasn't yet been taught how to determine what the *real* requirements actually are. Certainly sitting in a meeting the users' boss's boss doesn't tell you what the users' actual needs are, but there are methods to determine the real needs, and plan for them even years in advance. Agile rejects that notion, though for those who have been shown how to do it, it's a proven fact that you *can* learn the requirements, and the likely future requirements. You just have to be taught how to do so.

It's sad too, when I asked Dmitry what it was like in Russia. He just said, quite darkly, "They don't have video games my friend." (He knew I was a gamer, so he was teasing me, but also drawing a real contrast.)

This caricature is out of date that I tend to doubt the whole story. It's hard to imagine that anyone thought that someone could fall for this. "My friend"? This is the caricature part because no one talks like that outside of a hollywood movie.

Another guy talked about living in Germany before the wall came down.

To put it in perspective, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved 25 years ago. It only existed for 73 years. So your references are getting more and more dated.

It's quite inspiring to see a new Chinese citizen say "Today I learned I have the right to own a gun! That no one can take it from me, and that nobody can stop me from saying president XYZ is a @!#?@!"

You are sooooo full of shit. No one but no one talks like that. The fact that you came up with some Chinese, Korean, Russian and Indian names does not add to your credibility as much as you think. You may done your homework, but you have failed the shibboleth.

Yes, there was definitely a Thatcherite anti-bureaucrat edge to Yes Minister/Prime Minister. At the same time Hacker is generally shown as a well-intentioned bungler, so it's not as if the politicians get off lightly. Ultimately the actual straight man in the show is Bernard Woolley, so if anyone gets it easy it's the Principle Private Secretary, whereas the civil service, in the form of Sir Humphrey are shown as shameless schemers and Parliament and Cabinet, in the form of Hacker, are shown as hopelessly outmatched. I'd say as much as it is Thatcherite, it also invokes long-standing caricatures of the Westminster system that date back to the Victorian Era. But there is still insightful commentary on how things work behind closed doors, and Sir Humphrey, even if out of pure self-interest, does on occasion rescue Hacker from catastrophe (like where he convinces Hacker's daughter not to take part in a nude protest). If anything about it is overtly Thatcherite, it's in showing Government has been a bungling, error-prone mess always on the edge of catastrophe.

Mind you, looking at politics in the US and Britain right now, I think maybe the writers had a point. It's hard to see how Trump and Brexit represent government as a sophisticated organ of precise decision making.

I'm old enough to remember a time where tech conferences were actually useful, when actual techies were present that actually knew about the tech.
Of course, there were already salespeople there, as well. But both categories knew their stuff:

One could actually learn something, get good information from insiders, pose and get immediate answers to relevant questions, access that was hard to get otherwise, in those days.

But it has been decades since that state of things. I have stopped going to tech conferences when they started getting populated by junior sales folks and booth babes only. All you seem to get now is some bored young person handing you a flyer before losing eye contact and returning to whatever is more interesting on that smartphone screen. I'm making it a caricature, but that's what it feels like to someone like me..

I can get that flyer as a PDF without leaving the office.. and a lot more information, online.. So why bother going to a conference?

Cheers,
Anonymous Old Grumpy

Properly being whatever you personally wanted to happen. You are a caricature of your own self.

I am pretty sure you're a caricature and trying to convince people that people like you are more prevalent in an effort to draw sympathy.

Well, environmentalism is the new religion and I think you'll find that most people who are not "progressives" are not necessarily adherents to any particular traditional religion. Nice caricature though.

I think many people who supported Hillary for some reason had a blind spot to all her faults.

As an outside observer, I can confidently proclaim that this statement would be true of the vast majority of vocal political commentators here no matter which name was inserted into the sentence. It is frankly bizarre that such a large group of relatively learned individuals lack the capacity to introspect their own opinions and instead merely vomit forth whatever emotional response they hold as the one truth.

No person placed under intense and biased scrutiny is going to walk away looking like anything other than the most extreme piece of trash ever to walk the Earth, whether it's a politician or your ex-partner. The caricature of a human that evolves in your mind as a response to an emotional analysis is an enormous straw-man and you should be able to recognise and deconstruct that.

I don't have an intimate knowledge of U.S. politics, but I've yet to see anyone attempt to provide an analysis that wasn't trying to push an emotional opinion on the audience. No matter how elegant and subtle you think you're being, it's woefully transparent and repugnant to witness.

Daniel Dennet's rules for composing a successful critical commentary are as follows; if you wish to criticise someone you need to analyse the parts of their opinions that you agree with first, to ensure you fully understand the whole:

1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.
2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

No politician is universally bad or has universally bad ideas, and making it out like they are is just going to trigger our internal filters. I find myself skimming over or skipping large posts online most of the time these days; not because I lack attention span, but because the author isn't providing a thoughtful analysis.

There are certainly reasons to dislike, and not favor, Hillary Clinton - but I find that far more often the caricature that people think of her as is nothing remotely like the reality, in part because she's had 24 years of being turned into a target, primarily by the right, but also by the far left.

Take the perception that she's a warmonger, for instance. I mean, sure, she's not a pacifist or a dove by any stretch of the imagination, but there's a large amount of difference between someone that's willing to entertain military solutions to international crises, and someone who actively goes looking to pick a fight. People blame her for supporting the Iraq War, which is fair - but she wasn't one of the ones pushing it, nor can anyone believably argue that she'd have chosen to invade Iraq had she been President instead of Bush-43.
More importantly though, she is first and foremost a -rational- actor in terms of international policy. She is calm, calculated, and deliberate. She's not likely to fly off the handle, overreact, or wind up in over her head in a dispute with her prestige on the line. Consider 2008 - do you think Trump would have conceded gracefully the way she did to Obama, never-mind agreeing to work for him in a role that wasn't even the number 2 spot? I think it far more likely he would have flown off the handle, and threatened to retaliate however he could.

I realize that some people seem to think that Trump will be different now than he has been in the past, but I have yet to see anything in his track record to give me any indication he can be someone other than who he continues to show us that he is - thin-skinned, proud, incapable of taking a slight or backing down from a confrontation. Explain to me again why this is more reassuring than someone who is an old hand at foreign policy and a known commodity?

Every time I see you post, I can't help but imagine some plastic caricature of a generic white frat boy with absolutely nothing between his legs but shiny beige skin. Because your posts have no more insight than I would expect from an actual Ken Doll.