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Number of Coders In Congress To Triple (From One To Three)
jfruh writes Last weekend, Tim Berners-Lee said that the UK needs more members of parliament who can code. Well, the most recent U.S. congressional election has obliged him on this side of the Atlantic: the number of coders in Congress has tripled, with the downside being that their numbers have gone from one to three.
Given the average age of those serving in Congress, perhaps it's important to define the term "coder" here.
Sure it's always beneficial to have a few "geeks" as lawmakers, but I kinda doubt that someone who took a FORTRAN class a few decades ago is going to be providing much value towards policy governing next-gen internet technologies.
They'll be too busy fighting over the space they get in the Capitol basement.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Someone needs to tell Tim Berners-Lee that not all programmers agree on things such as patents, copyright, and the colour of the sky.
Or the spelling of "color"
Was just gonna say this. I know a guy who can do all kinds of coding and believes that both evolution and climate change are not real. Another who thinks the moon landing was a hoax. Apart from these tinfoil-hatters, I also know some coders who are massive douchebags and even idiots.
Ability to code is no guarantee of good intelligence or character.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Every coder I've ever met has a black-and-white worldview
Hm... So I take it you're a coder as well?
Addendum: Now that I think of it, if I had to choose between a politician who was a coder and one who wasn't a coder with no other information, I'd vote for the non-coder. Too high a percentage of the coders I know (or know of) are conspiracy nuts and/or egomaniac manchildren.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There was a time, a golden age most of you have never even imagined, when, to work in IT, you had to be very smart, well educated, and very dedicated to coding and computers. Sadly, that decades gone Xanadu has been replaced by legions of people just looking for a paycheck, who have never seen any other platform than Windows, and whose main qualification is that they have a certification or two. Makes me sad to look back on it...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
A world full of people like that means that a person of a skillset and interest that you are attributing to yourself should be able to find a very comfortable place.
I look at it this way. I'm not a fan of car salesmen. However, if I love cars, design a good one, and want to make a business out of it, I need car salesmen to sell the cars. Not all of them will love cars. Some of them will simply love making money or sales. They still help my dream to come true.
In theory, for every bunch of boot camp MCSEs out there, there needs to be at least one person who knows what they are doing. Although it feels like you may now be surrounded by careerists who don't love computing, those careerists ultimately make it possible for people who love computers to have a bigger niche to fit into.
The percentage of people who love computing against the careerists may be the same, or even lower than it was before, but the absolute number of enthusiasts has probably never been higher.
Really, I don't need my legislators to know how to program, because I don't know that programming skills are what's needed to produce good legislation and policy.
Basic literacy in science, and the honesty to make evidence-based decisions would be much higher on my list of essential skills for congressvermin.
<PEDANTIC> main() returns int </PEDANTIC>
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.