This statement sounds like the type of language one uses when trying to get a patent.

Old value: Returning value to shareholders.

How to do it? Treat your employees like family and don't be evil.

New value: Returning value to shareholders.

How to do it? Treat your employees like human resources and get away with what you can get away with.

Is this hypocritical? Most people would say yes, but in your framing it's not because we've backed up to the least specific articulation of an underlying principle. It's a species of the motte and bailey fallacy.

Agents may be changing the game for how software gets produced, but all it's really done is switch software developers from being managed to being managers. And software developers trying to square their historic value/principle that management tasks are useless, easy, and ceremonial (to borrow GP's word) tasks that should take a back seat to ~flow state coding~ with their new view that management is an integral, difficult, and requisite part of writing code reeks of hypocrisy.

I’ve noticed this push to try to clothe hypocrisy in made up virtues like intellectual curiosity and mental plasticity a lot lately. All I can think is that it’s some kind of ego satisfaction play people make when their place in the world is threatened.

This statement should make you uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable because it is a pure expression of the power of the state. But it's still due process.

Just because you disagree with the outcome doesn't mean that due process wasn't given.

The second silver lining is that, even if CBP does its job, there is another step where the Trump administration will certainly drag its feet again: "If it is determined upon liquidation or reliquidation that excess moneys have been deposited, such that a refund with interest is due to the importer, CBP certifies the refund and interest amounts to the Department of the Treasury, which then employs its own processes to disburse the certified amounts to the importers of record."

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cit.193...

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2025/25A312

By the way, the solution to your “I want to buy a house in SF” problem isn’t to move to SF and pay an insane amount of rent for 5-10 years, it’s to keep living like you did and doing your normal job that you were doing before you won 260k/yr for 2 years while you save.

I won’t even bother digging into how warped your view of what it means to be upper class is, I’ll just say stay on that hamster wheel and keep chasing that dream dude.

And anyways, shareholders are paid a premium on today’s stock price (which theoretically reflects the current value of future profits, or at least the market’s view on it) in order to compensate for the exact loss you mention.

Let’s modify your post to highlight the absurdity:

Let's say someone sees a parking warden they find physically attractive. They follow them for a bit in their car and when they write up their last ticket, the stalker gets in their car and follows the officer back to the station and then to their home. The next day they pull up to the warden’s house and follow them to see where the warden is working that day - they drive over there. They strike up a creepy conversation and the parking warden eventually leaves, disturbed. The next day, the parking warden is working a night shift - they've been told to patrol a dark neighborhood where there are plenty of alleyways that nobody can see into...

See where I'm going with this?

Anything which allows someone to follow a person in a vehicle who they've just come across on the street is inherently a danger to the surveilled person.