When you have insanely overly funded law enforcement geared for massive threats that don't exist, then they are most certainly going to use all that manpower and equipment go after easy targets that cannot defend themselves, to justify their salaries somehow.

They know it's a hassle to go after people who are wealthy and can afford their own lawyers so they avoid it unless there is something political to be gained.

This theme repeats itself at every level, local, state and federal.

This is why when I see things like a national database for facial recognition it's pretty easy to accurately predict for every one "terrorist" caught each decade, thousands of people will experience life-traumatizing hassle that they didn't deserve.

Just look at the TSA and their VIPR "squad" - if they are not defunded soon, they will become the nightmare of the USA, never catching one "terrorist" but themselves terrorizing millions of citizens for no purpose but to "keep us in our place".

I think we will really get a demonstration of this at the upcoming RNC and DNC conventions (ironically funded by taxpayers).

I think it's partly an artifact: due to a naming conflict, the git package in Debian used to be named "git-core" and was renamed "git" around then.

I love corporate, boring, "soul-crushing" work. Why? Because I can sit down, whip out a basic CRUD form with a small approval cycle in a day. It saves a company 100K over the year, I am loved by the customers, and because it is so simple, it normally requires no maintenance. Maybe we update the fields once a year or so.

At the end of the week, I've already saved the company more than my salary. After a year, I am a critical asset to the company.

After 3 years, I've optimized everything, the ROI slows down, and I move on.

This pattern is not a tragedy. It doesn't crush your soul. It makes you a prized commodity in the business world, with a chance to make a change in your life every few years.

I have usually alternated between 3 years doing this, then 2 years doing startup work. It has given me a much broader base of experience and skill than anyone who stick to one one side of the coin. It also has given me years of experience in large industries (banking, energy, etc.) which I then use to find very real problems to which a startup can be applied.

I have led a very satisfying career, doing this for almost 20 years now.

Okay, I guess as someone with hard-won expertise I'm duty-bound to take slight exception to this line:

Put a backpack on and you can walk into any building at any university in the United States any time you want.

First, the nitpicking: Technically you can't get into Harvard's excellent libraries without actually (a) being a Harvard student, or (b) working for Harvard. (And if you're a programmer, I'm not sure which of those options is going to prove more expensive.) But, of course, the rest of Harvard is open to the backpack-wearer, and MIT even opens their libraries (I'm proud to routinely impersonate a graduate of MIT) so this isn't much of an objection.

On a slightly more serious note: They also won't let you into the labs with just a backpack. If you'd happily accept a sub-market wage to be taught laboratory research techniques, in a piecemeal and haphazard fashion, by sleep-deprived world experts equipped with state-of-the-artish equipment, engineering graduate school is the game for you. And I did kind of enjoy working in the lab, just not enough to keep that as a career. It's not that great a career; you have to love it to stick with it forever.

Now, having said that, I cannot re-emphasize this line enough:

After you’ve escaped the mind-warping miasma of academia, you might rightfully question whether Published In A Journal is really personally or societally significant as opposed to close approximations like Wrote A Blog Post And Showed It To Smart People.

All my journal publications mean nothing compared to the stuff I've scrawled in the margins here at HN.