"Why Google Stadia Will Be a Major Problem For Many American Players"
That's kind of backwards. Blame a provider of a service instead of kicking the backsides of the network providers for their shitty state? Seriously, it will be Stadia that will be a major problem for the US players, not your crap internet connection provided by a crap company for idiotic prices and frequently with laughable speed and latency? Do you think Stadia would be the major problem for people having $40/6mbit connections? I remember the days when the US was leading in bandwith and prices. It was so long ago, just thinking about it makes me feel old.
So, given the state of US cellular networks and coverage and their old, sick, narcolepic turtle pace in expanding, maybe they'd be quite happy to see the rest of the world get delayed in 5G deployments - maybe then US networks wouldn't look that bad and and the other hand they could blame their slow pace and lacking coverage on the Chinese, oh my:)
The only way to avoid leaking backdoor information is to not have one. Period. If there is one, it will unavoidably either leak out, or be found out, that's certain. I understand they'd wish their jobs would be easier, but wishes aren't horses.
The complete lack of data and privacy protection in the U.S. is astounding. People seemingly not caring about it is even more astounding. Yes, some people can say they care, but unless these voices can amount to a force to drive relevant laws to be established, it's all just smoke.
As with many things, those who didn't yet have any success through/using LinkedIn, will tell it's not relevant, not useful, waste of time, and those who had success in landing interviews, finding jobs, will say it's relevant.
It's no different than any other site which can - in theory - connect you to jobs. If we'd start an is-jobsite-X-relevant for each of them, man, can't really figure a larger waste of time and space.
From the article: "In its defense, Huawei can point to the fact that no security researchers have found back doors in its products. âoeThereâ(TM)s all this concern, but thereâ(TM)s never been a smoking gun,â says Paul Triolo of the Eurasia Group. While thatâ(TM)s true, it wonâ(TM)t change the view of the US, which is stepping up its efforts to persuade its allies to keep Huawei out of all their networks."
I don't want to defend Huawei, I couldn't care less, however, this whole thing actually seems to be a baseless discrimination. Until someone can actually prove any of this, we all should call it as it is: total bullsh*t.
Some say that, well, they don't tell us, but they probably have a good reason to do this. I don't believe that, why should I, how can they demand trust without earning it first? To put it plainly, "show me the money" (Jerry Maguire), the we can talk.
11 from 21 showed up? Boohoo, I'd need some really long time ro feel sorry for these guys.
It's still better percentage than the percentage of _any_ kind of response I got from job applications (SoCal): 2 out of 18, one of which led to an interview process, the other was a no off the bat.The rest, nothing. Good thing I'm not in a rush.
While I agree that not notifying an interviewer about a cancellation is rude, I can also understand by the time some people land an interview, or a job, they can get frustrated.
However, there's absolutely no excuse for not going to an interview when they already payed for the travel.
" most businesses don't really need programmers to be deep thinkers"
This whole writing is a large pile of stinking bullshite. You don't need people with knowledge? There are plenty of those. You only need shallow coders for a short un-important job who'll move along after the job? Even more of those. Good luck building a company for the long term using such people.
Plenty of "programmers" and "coders" are out there with some level of lanuage knowledge, but what people like the writer above don't always realize is that they usually need people who solve problems, and the ones not being deep thinkers are seldom capable of that. The iidiotic examples about NP completeness shows how the writer is a bigger idiot that those people (s)he praises.
And the bashing of maths, arrogance, etc? It seems the writer is a disgruntled lunatic, toxic and unproductive. Someone I'd really never want to work with, ever.
"it will be automatically provisioned and patched for you by Microsoft. Maybe you'll be OK with that."
No, I won't. Lots of people won't. Thankfully I'm not required to use Windows for my development work for a long while now, so I only use Windows in VBox (mainly for Office, and for the very occasional Windows development tasks) and have switched to Linux for many years now. I have one Windows laptop at home though, but mostly because of laziness and since it can run putty quite OK:)
But back to the point, for average users who can afford the monthly/yearly fees this probably will be OK - until some automatic update bricks their "rented" OS, which will inevitably happen. Why wouldn't it, it was just yesterday that I had to help someone (a typical average user) with a bootlooping Win10 - which by the way has become completely borked after restoring a previous "working" state and I had to reinstall the whole thing. As a developer you can't afford such issues, and we would need more control, not less. While this "rented" Windows might still have a version with more control, centralizing updates and charging monthly fees will most definitely not make me want to use Windows as a main dev platform, that's for sure.
The only way I'd like to see regarding Windows is for them to make its updating process much more reliable and with the possibility of much more control (not necessarily set as default, but being available and usable), and to make it - at least the versions that would follow the current Home and Pro - completely free, with MS trying to figure out other ways to make profit (which they kind of already do, just take a look at their Azure numbers).
So, in the future CPU makers don't need to invent new names. We'll just identify CPUs with the name of the newest vulnerabilities they have:) it'll be much easier:)
I'm aware what sh*tstorm this may bring, but I have to say, this is your/our fault. The US has basically no data and user privacy protection laws whatsoever, companies allowed to essentially do as they see fit with the data they gather. Why some get suddenly surprised that the companies actually do what they are allowed to do? Yes, you can get enraged, but unless you actually do something, it's really your fault this has been allowed to get this far. It's been already time - and time, and time - that people learn.
I can't seem to understand how the US can be so behind the curve on some really important issues. One of them regarding financial/banking issues is the matter of the freaking chip&pin cards (or more the lack of proper use of them). Never ever have I seen any US store require chip&pin authentication, they always just read the chip and make you sign, which is crazy a**stupid. I thought they saw finally the light when chip cards were getting introduced - very, very, really late vs. everyone else -, but introducing such a half a**ed solution is idiotic, and nothing seems to change.
I've been asked this question before, and I'll tell you what I told then: don't try to explain what you do in technical terms, it's no use. Try to describe the applicability and usefulness aspects of what you do, and its effects. In essence, don't try to describe the invisible, instead describe it's effects on its surroundings. Obviously, it's the easiest when you do something connected to something they know about. If what you do has no applicability, it's not useful to anyone or for anything, or it has no effects on anything, then well, make something up, then find a new job.
Most good creative people will not continuously hit their keyboards, read only task-related contents, or only talk about task-related issues. There are some, sure, but most of them are not work drones. Analyzing their work behavior with such mentioned surveillance sounds simply too much, and smells like an enourmous source of frustration. There's no way frustration can produce good results. I wouldn't ever tolerate it. There's one simple issue you have to keep in mind: working for someone is a two way street - one gives talent and time, and should expect support, respect and a tolerable - physically and psychologically - work enviroment in return. Otherwise what's the point? I wouldn't enjoy such a work environment, I'd rather be a shepherd in the Himalayas.
No, not just this. If I ever loved it, this wouldn't matter. Since I never loved it, this still doesn't matter. If I have to use python, regardless of love or hate, this still doesn't matter. Overall, this just doesn't matter, at all.
"Python has a solid claim to being the fastest-growing major programming language... June 2017 was the first month that Python was the most visited [programming language] tag on Stack Overflow within high-income nations. This included being the most visited tag"
So, nothing to see here, really. It's all fashion. DL and ConvNet frameworks are in the mainstream now, and yay, how many of those favour python? Right. So, why are so many people looking for solutions? Well, because they need informaton on python issues and are looking for howtos and answers. Why? Well, because usually they don't use it that much so now they need answers, and fast. All these statistics show nothing more than current trends, which, by itself might be interesting, but don't say much more than that. Also, some might also bring into the picture that the relation between higher python use in higher income countries just might have some distant relation with deep learning having a higher financial threshold to enter than pretty mugh everything else.
"can learn how to code in a few months and join the high-paying digital economy"
And some still wonder why overall code quality and programming skill level dives like a drunken mallad.
Coding doesn't mean anything. When I started highschool I could code in 4 languages. They kept teaching us algorithms and math for 12 hours a week (4 hrs theory&algorithms, 4 hrs math, 4 hrs coding labs) for 4 years, followed by my university years, followed by many years of practive and still I'd need to learn more than I have time to spend.
No wonder companies test the sh*t out of everyone wanting a sw.eng. job (not me, oh no), it's the easiest approach for trying to filter out the crappiest.
This is not a new phenomenon, it's been going on in the desktop PC world since the beginnings, and it's been going on in the mobile world since day one. I absolutely hate the trend but there's not much one person can do about it. As I see it, especially in the mobile world, there are lots of coders who use and link large libraries even for small tasks, usually don't even try to implement it themselves, and usually don't even search for other solutions or smaller libs providing the same functionality, they just stick with the first they find, and never care for the size of the apps. This applies for average junk apps as well as for large company apps like linkedin or spotify or here maps, and I could just go on. Gone are the days when efficient and small coding was the norm. And most of young coders don't even, or can't even think about writing small and efficient code. Just a couple of months ago I was given a code to use for some task, handling images, at a speed of ~14s/image, which was unacceptable for the specific task. After a complete rewrite in about two weeks I got it to run at ~1s/image, which was still slow, but at least was good enough for a proof-of-concept. And everyone was looking at me like I was some alien.
Lots of coders prefer fast prototyping and quickly throwing together some app and spending very little time on making it small or as efficient as possible - upgrade your device/hw/PC is their mantra. Well, f*k that.
My point of view regarding long hours has always been that I'm not against it, when absolutely necessary, but I think it's something that should be avoided at all costs. I've worked my share of 14-16 hour days, 6 and 7 day workweeks, but it's not something I'm proud of, or something I like to brag about. Always keep in mind, that you work to live, and not live to work - well, some people might be against me regarding that, but I don't much care about them:P
On my first US interview, of course it came up. They asked it in a way like, would I have something against the occasional longer days or something like that. When I told them that 80 hour weeks are not that unusual for me, but that I absolutely hate those, they first smiled then looked a bit confused:) Thing is, I don't like to get things unfinished, and I put in the work when it's required. But I sooo really like it when I don't have to:)
I think that when some people burn out it's not so much because of long hours, but mainly because they lose control. No work, no project, no professional commitment can be more important than one's life, family or health. Not every job is for everyone, but sometimes conditions or the economy doesn't let you move around enough, and some are not strong or brave enough to keep trying even when it'd be possible. But thing is, life is really short to be stuck in a crap job.
I just don't understand these guys. I'm a guy, I've been working in IT/CS-related positions all my adult life, mostly around and with guys, no surprise there. However, every professional experience I had with female co-workers and external project partners has been very positive, successful, and exceptionally smooth. As in all aspects of life, probably not all people are exceptionally talented and I might have been very lucky to work with such women. However, I have to say, everyone willing to gamble with their professional relationships for, how to put it, non-professional reasons, is simply an idiot and not worth having contact with.
I only can deem such research results as irrelevant, and a waste of resources and time. If you only take into consideration one aspect of these people's lives, then you can't draw any definitive conclusion. They most certainly had very different diets, very different lifestyles, very different life conditions, work conditions, stress, illnesses short or long term serious or not so much, travel habits, sport and workout habits, and a million other factors that could cause any kinds of differences in the long term MRI scans.
"Have you travelled to any country (otherthan your country of residence) in the last 15 years? Ifyes, provide details for each trip, including locations visited, date visited, source of funds, and length of stay."
Now, I do realize there are lots of people on this planet that do not travel much, some never even leave their country. My question is, realistically speaking, who in the US govt. thinks many of such people will apply for a US visa? Since even when talking about regular people, 15 years is a long time during which very very many travels can be done. And then there are some people, who the US probably wants - or should want - like scientists, researchers, engineers, etc. some or most of which might travel dozens (or even more) times PER YEAR. Now, just for a moment think about gathering information for 100+ travels for a visa application... Geez, I mean: GEEZ!:)
"Have you ever held a passport other than the passport listed in your visa application? If yes, provide the following information"
Well, I don't know how many passports people usually have during their life. Up to now, I have had a total of 3, from 2 separate countries (they do expire you know). Personally, I don't know the details of one from those three (I don't have it anymore, not even a copy) and it would be practically impossible to find out that data. Thankfully I don't need a US visa - well, not yet... this administration can seemingly have some fun with regulations:)
Another favorite:) 15 years worth of employment history?:) Really:) Nice. I'd like to see a 30-40 years old senior tech worker fill out such an application:)
"Google would be able to absorb the cost as easy as a dry kitchen sponge could absorb a single drop of water."
Well, maybe Google is paying different wages to women, maybe they don't, but one thing is still very much constant in this universe: leave it to a government to spend your money as it were theirs and on top of that talk about it as it was nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why Google Stadia Will Be a Major Problem For Many American Players" That's kind of backwards. Blame a provider of a service instead of kicking the backsides of the network providers for their shitty state? Seriously, it will be Stadia that will be a major problem for the US players, not your crap internet connection provided by a crap company for idiotic prices and frequently with laughable speed and latency? Do you think Stadia would be the major problem for people having $40/6mbit connections? I remember the days when the US was leading in bandwith and prices. It was so long ago, just thinking about it makes me feel old.
So, given the state of US cellular networks and coverage and their old, sick, narcolepic turtle pace in expanding, maybe they'd be quite happy to see the rest of the world get delayed in 5G deployments - maybe then US networks wouldn't look that bad and and the other hand they could blame their slow pace and lacking coverage on the Chinese, oh my:)
The only way to avoid leaking backdoor information is to not have one. Period. If there is one, it will unavoidably either leak out, or be found out, that's certain. I understand they'd wish their jobs would be easier, but wishes aren't horses.
The complete lack of data and privacy protection in the U.S. is astounding. People seemingly not caring about it is even more astounding. Yes, some people can say they care, but unless these voices can amount to a force to drive relevant laws to be established, it's all just smoke.
As with many things, those who didn't yet have any success through/using LinkedIn, will tell it's not relevant, not useful, waste of time, and those who had success in landing interviews, finding jobs, will say it's relevant.
It's no different than any other site which can - in theory - connect you to jobs. If we'd start an is-jobsite-X-relevant for each of them, man, can't really figure a larger waste of time and space.
From the article: "In its defense, Huawei can point to the fact that no security researchers have found back doors in its products. âoeThereâ(TM)s all this concern, but thereâ(TM)s never been a smoking gun,â says Paul Triolo of the Eurasia Group. While thatâ(TM)s true, it wonâ(TM)t change the view of the US, which is stepping up its efforts to persuade its allies to keep Huawei out of all their networks."
I don't want to defend Huawei, I couldn't care less, however, this whole thing actually seems to be a baseless discrimination. Until someone can actually prove any of this, we all should call it as it is: total bullsh*t.
Some say that, well, they don't tell us, but they probably have a good reason to do this. I don't believe that, why should I, how can they demand trust without earning it first? To put it plainly, "show me the money" (Jerry Maguire), the we can talk.
" millions of phone buyers that could get an American phone"
Well, good luck with that. American phone, right.
11 from 21 showed up? Boohoo, I'd need some really long time ro feel sorry for these guys.
It's still better percentage than the percentage of _any_ kind of response I got from job applications (SoCal): 2 out of 18, one of which led to an interview process, the other was a no off the bat.The rest, nothing. Good thing I'm not in a rush.
While I agree that not notifying an interviewer about a cancellation is rude, I can also understand by the time some people land an interview, or a job, they can get frustrated.
However, there's absolutely no excuse for not going to an interview when they already payed for the travel.
" most businesses don't really need programmers to be deep thinkers"
This whole writing is a large pile of stinking bullshite. You don't need people with knowledge? There are plenty of those. You only need shallow coders for a short un-important job who'll move along after the job? Even more of those. Good luck building a company for the long term using such people.
Plenty of "programmers" and "coders" are out there with some level of lanuage knowledge, but what people like the writer above don't always realize is that they usually need people who solve problems, and the ones not being deep thinkers are seldom capable of that. The iidiotic examples about NP completeness shows how the writer is a bigger idiot that those people (s)he praises.
And the bashing of maths, arrogance, etc? It seems the writer is a disgruntled lunatic, toxic and unproductive. Someone I'd really never want to work with, ever.
"it will be automatically provisioned and patched for you by Microsoft. Maybe you'll be OK with that."
:)
No, I won't. Lots of people won't. Thankfully I'm not required to use Windows for my development work for a long while now, so I only use Windows in VBox (mainly for Office, and for the very occasional Windows development tasks) and have switched to Linux for many years now. I have one Windows laptop at home though, but mostly because of laziness and since it can run putty quite OK
But back to the point, for average users who can afford the monthly/yearly fees this probably will be OK - until some automatic update bricks their "rented" OS, which will inevitably happen. Why wouldn't it, it was just yesterday that I had to help someone (a typical average user) with a bootlooping Win10 - which by the way has become completely borked after restoring a previous "working" state and I had to reinstall the whole thing. As a developer you can't afford such issues, and we would need more control, not less. While this "rented" Windows might still have a version with more control, centralizing updates and charging monthly fees will most definitely not make me want to use Windows as a main dev platform, that's for sure.
The only way I'd like to see regarding Windows is for them to make its updating process much more reliable and with the possibility of much more control (not necessarily set as default, but being available and usable), and to make it - at least the versions that would follow the current Home and Pro - completely free, with MS trying to figure out other ways to make profit (which they kind of already do, just take a look at their Azure numbers).
So, in the future CPU makers don't need to invent new names. We'll just identify CPUs with the name of the newest vulnerabilities they have :) it'll be much easier :)
I'm aware what sh*tstorm this may bring, but I have to say, this is your/our fault. The US has basically no data and user privacy protection laws whatsoever, companies allowed to essentially do as they see fit with the data they gather. Why some get suddenly surprised that the companies actually do what they are allowed to do? Yes, you can get enraged, but unless you actually do something, it's really your fault this has been allowed to get this far. It's been already time - and time, and time - that people learn.
I can't seem to understand how the US can be so behind the curve on some really important issues. One of them regarding financial/banking issues is the matter of the freaking chip&pin cards (or more the lack of proper use of them). Never ever have I seen any US store require chip&pin authentication, they always just read the chip and make you sign, which is crazy a**stupid. I thought they saw finally the light when chip cards were getting introduced - very, very, really late vs. everyone else -, but introducing such a half a**ed solution is idiotic, and nothing seems to change.
I've been asked this question before, and I'll tell you what I told then: don't try to explain what you do in technical terms, it's no use. Try to describe the applicability and usefulness aspects of what you do, and its effects. In essence, don't try to describe the invisible, instead describe it's effects on its surroundings. Obviously, it's the easiest when you do something connected to something they know about. If what you do has no applicability, it's not useful to anyone or for anything, or it has no effects on anything, then well, make something up, then find a new job.
Most good creative people will not continuously hit their keyboards, read only task-related contents, or only talk about task-related issues. There are some, sure, but most of them are not work drones. Analyzing their work behavior with such mentioned surveillance sounds simply too much, and smells like an enourmous source of frustration. There's no way frustration can produce good results. I wouldn't ever tolerate it. There's one simple issue you have to keep in mind: working for someone is a two way street - one gives talent and time, and should expect support, respect and a tolerable - physically and psychologically - work enviroment in return. Otherwise what's the point? I wouldn't enjoy such a work environment, I'd rather be a shepherd in the Himalayas.
"Does this make you want to avoid Python?"
No, not just this. If I ever loved it, this wouldn't matter. Since I never loved it, this still doesn't matter. If I have to use python, regardless of love or hate, this still doesn't matter. Overall, this just doesn't matter, at all.
"Python has a solid claim to being the fastest-growing major programming language... June 2017 was the first month that Python was the most visited [programming language] tag on Stack Overflow within high-income nations. This included being the most visited tag"
So, nothing to see here, really. It's all fashion. DL and ConvNet frameworks are in the mainstream now, and yay, how many of those favour python? Right. So, why are so many people looking for solutions? Well, because they need informaton on python issues and are looking for howtos and answers. Why? Well, because usually they don't use it that much so now they need answers, and fast. All these statistics show nothing more than current trends, which, by itself might be interesting, but don't say much more than that. Also, some might also bring into the picture that the relation between higher python use in higher income countries just might have some distant relation with deep learning having a higher financial threshold to enter than pretty mugh everything else.
"can learn how to code in a few months and join the high-paying digital economy"
And some still wonder why overall code quality and programming skill level dives like a drunken mallad.
Coding doesn't mean anything. When I started highschool I could code in 4 languages. They kept teaching us algorithms and math for 12 hours a week (4 hrs theory&algorithms, 4 hrs math, 4 hrs coding labs) for 4 years, followed by my university years, followed by many years of practive and still I'd need to learn more than I have time to spend.
No wonder companies test the sh*t out of everyone wanting a sw.eng. job (not me, oh no), it's the easiest approach for trying to filter out the crappiest.
"thus the organization would take fewer steps to promote deployment and competition"
I think it's high time this Ajit Pai guy left the scene. This is just dumb.
This is not a new phenomenon, it's been going on in the desktop PC world since the beginnings, and it's been going on in the mobile world since day one. I absolutely hate the trend but there's not much one person can do about it. As I see it, especially in the mobile world, there are lots of coders who use and link large libraries even for small tasks, usually don't even try to implement it themselves, and usually don't even search for other solutions or smaller libs providing the same functionality, they just stick with the first they find, and never care for the size of the apps. This applies for average junk apps as well as for large company apps like linkedin or spotify or here maps, and I could just go on. Gone are the days when efficient and small coding was the norm. And most of young coders don't even, or can't even think about writing small and efficient code. Just a couple of months ago I was given a code to use for some task, handling images, at a speed of ~14s/image, which was unacceptable for the specific task. After a complete rewrite in about two weeks I got it to run at ~1s/image, which was still slow, but at least was good enough for a proof-of-concept. And everyone was looking at me like I was some alien.
Lots of coders prefer fast prototyping and quickly throwing together some app and spending very little time on making it small or as efficient as possible - upgrade your device/hw/PC is their mantra. Well, f*k that.
My point of view regarding long hours has always been that I'm not against it, when absolutely necessary, but I think it's something that should be avoided at all costs. I've worked my share of 14-16 hour days, 6 and 7 day workweeks, but it's not something I'm proud of, or something I like to brag about. Always keep in mind, that you work to live, and not live to work - well, some people might be against me regarding that, but I don't much care about them :P
:) Thing is, I don't like to get things unfinished, and I put in the work when it's required. But I sooo really like it when I don't have to :)
On my first US interview, of course it came up. They asked it in a way like, would I have something against the occasional longer days or something like that. When I told them that 80 hour weeks are not that unusual for me, but that I absolutely hate those, they first smiled then looked a bit confused
I think that when some people burn out it's not so much because of long hours, but mainly because they lose control. No work, no project, no professional commitment can be more important than one's life, family or health. Not every job is for everyone, but sometimes conditions or the economy doesn't let you move around enough, and some are not strong or brave enough to keep trying even when it'd be possible. But thing is, life is really short to be stuck in a crap job.
I just don't understand these guys. I'm a guy, I've been working in IT/CS-related positions all my adult life, mostly around and with guys, no surprise there. However, every professional experience I had with female co-workers and external project partners has been very positive, successful, and exceptionally smooth. As in all aspects of life, probably not all people are exceptionally talented and I might have been very lucky to work with such women. However, I have to say, everyone willing to gamble with their professional relationships for, how to put it, non-professional reasons, is simply an idiot and not worth having contact with.
I only can deem such research results as irrelevant, and a waste of resources and time. If you only take into consideration one aspect of these people's lives, then you can't draw any definitive conclusion. They most certainly had very different diets, very different lifestyles, very different life conditions, work conditions, stress, illnesses short or long term serious or not so much, travel habits, sport and workout habits, and a million other factors that could cause any kinds of differences in the long term MRI scans.
"Have you travelled to any country (otherthan your country of residence) in the last 15 years? Ifyes, provide details for each trip, including locations visited, date visited, source of funds, and length of stay."
:)
:)
:) 15 years worth of employment history? :) Really :) Nice. I'd like to see a 30-40 years old senior tech worker fill out such an application :)
Now, I do realize there are lots of people on this planet that do not travel much, some never even leave their country. My question is, realistically speaking, who in the US govt. thinks many of such people will apply for a US visa? Since even when talking about regular people, 15 years is a long time during which very very many travels can be done. And then there are some people, who the US probably wants - or should want - like scientists, researchers, engineers, etc. some or most of which might travel dozens (or even more) times PER YEAR. Now, just for a moment think about gathering information for 100+ travels for a visa application... Geez, I mean: GEEZ!
"Have you ever held a passport other than the passport listed in your visa application? If yes, provide the following information"
Well, I don't know how many passports people usually have during their life. Up to now, I have had a total of 3, from 2 separate countries (they do expire you know). Personally, I don't know the details of one from those three (I don't have it anymore, not even a copy) and it would be practically impossible to find out that data. Thankfully I don't need a US visa - well, not yet... this administration can seemingly have some fun with regulations
Another favorite
"Google would be able to absorb the cost as easy as a dry kitchen sponge could absorb a single drop of water."
Well, maybe Google is paying different wages to women, maybe they don't, but one thing is still very much constant in this universe: leave it to a government to spend your money as it were theirs and on top of that talk about it as it was nothing.