The one that went to college did so on the money the coal company paid her father to strip mine his land. Swimming in the pit they left after they moved on was a family tradition.

None of them worked for the same firm for 30 years because they’d get laid off, or go on strike or the plant would shut down or the crop would fail and they’d have to go get a factory job.

This glory days nonsense was exclusively reserved for the upper class. It’s pure privilege to believe jobs were in some way better historically than they are now.

For someone holding VTI its closer to 3% and a 2050 fund its more like 1.5%. Indexing is how most people are investing in their retirement accounts because controversies like these just don’t matter much. Hedging this off is going to cost more than its worth.

FWIW I came up with a provisional employment scheme that I thought would work at a job where I was responsible for hiring pipelines. It involved making an annual bonus (in an industry that was bonus driven) garaunteed and accelerating it so it was 50% sign on bonus and 50% delivered at 6 months. The company balked. Because provisional screening is a very good mechanism. Its must more expensive than hire and fire, at least on paper.

We could have codified some more complicated approval process for apps on laptops. That could involve tickets and strenuous review and making everyone spend tremendous resources trying to keep an endpoint secured that way.

But we didn’t believe that was the right way to do it. Instead we assumed no matter what we did laptops were going to get owned up. So we focused on blast radius, detection, forensics and time to remediation. We’d need all those things even if we believed in a pre approval process.

But we didn’t document most of those things in audit scoped controls, because that would have ossified them. If we wanted to improve our detection regime we didn’t want audit ceremony to get in the way.

I’m comfortable with those decisions and would make them again. We worked very hard to make sure our endpoint security was as good as we could make it.

A specialist accountant certainly would not have improved the process.

So no, I don’t think the solution we came up with was not putting effort into the problem, it was thinking very hard about it and not letting a checkbox audit cause us to make bad decisions.

Iran hasn’t been dollar denominated for decades at this point, they wish they could be! It would make their oil more valuable.

To satisfy the audit they looked at an app that was installed on a laptop that was not part of our base image from the previous 6 months and a screenshot of the message where the user “asked” to install it.

You can literally get a soc auditor to write up whatever you want as a control and if they don’t explain that and encourage it you should find a new auditor.

Companies doing well and growing pass on crazy revenue opportunities because the ones they are focused on are even higher roi. They don’t get bogged down in incremental costs.

If they are cost cutting on dev tooling some bright boss is going to realize the real savings is in cutting down on devs. If you are an American dev team your health insurance costs smoke any amount of token spend.

Apolitical journalism started with the telegram wire services as a _marketing_ approach, not a moral one. It allowed them to sell to more local papers which were all politically aligned. You can see that in some of the surviving names. But local reporting stayed political in those individual papers the whole time. We have like a whole chapter in basic us history classes on the political implications of the Spanish American war journalism empires.

Apolitical tv was similarly a market condition. The airwaves were limited, so the content was controlled. That was apolitical in that it tried to appease both parties, but you wouldn’t see any topical coverage on political issues they both opposed.

So when people talk about politics entering journalism they are telling on themselves. They prefer a very narrow set of journalism that wasn’t ever some universal norm, and was itself political.

But pick a technology used to write code and you’ll see many of the same things. Broad unit test adoption happened more then 20 years ago and people still can’t decide what it’s good for or even if it is useful.

That’s because it depends on the circumstances of the problem and the person solving it.

So no, we can’t decide exactly what it’s good for and if we could there would be exceptions. But that’s not an indictment of any tool.

Data governance and enterprise sales is a moat. The harnesses aren’t.