Choose Boring Technology
&gt; To be clear, fuck this guy.<p>Arghhh...why do people feel compelled to virtue signal in such stupid and unnecessary ways?  This is an article about technology. Want to discuss politics?  Fine.  Write an article about politics.  Don&#x27;t shoot yourself in the foot with politics.  It&#x27;s a bad idea.<p>I know people who have absolutely ruined their careers mixing politics with work.  One guy had to move to another state because nobody would hire him.<p>I feel younger folks are particularly naïve about this stuff.  I don&#x27;t care who you think you support today, left, right, middle, Martians.  I guarantee you that life will eventually make you regret some of your choices and even change your mind.<p>Do not take a red-hot poker in the form of words and brand yourself on the internet with something you might just live to regret and will not be able to erase.  You never know who&#x27;s reading your stuff.  And don&#x27;t say, &quot;I don&#x27;t care&quot;.  I know people who have lived to regret thinking that way.  If you want to write about tech, write about tech and leave all else out of it.<p>I have lived in countries where changes in the prevailing regime came with serious consequences for those firmly and publicly aligned with the prior regime.  People in places like the US (particularly younger folks who just don&#x27;t know the history and nature of the world) don&#x27;t understand the idea that something that might seem to like favorable virtue signaling in one epoch can turn into a death sentence when the tides change.<p>Don&#x27;t get on lists or clans unless you fully understand the potential consequences.  You want to be a software developer?  Fine.  Don&#x27;t be a Democrat or Republican software developer.  Believe me, it will cost you and you will likely never know it is happening to you.<p>All you have to do is reflect on what you are thinking this very moment as you read this --particularly if you down-voted the comment.  Some of you are thinking something like &quot;this guy is an idiot, I would never want to work with him&quot;.  Well, there you go: QED.<p>Regarding Donald Rumsfeld.  &quot;Fuck this guy&quot;, among other things, says, &quot;this person is ignorant&quot;.  Not an insult, just a statement of fact.  I seriously doubt they are able to recite the guy&#x27;s biography.  They likely &quot;know&quot; through a myopic third party unidimensional quasi-opinion of unknow origins.  In other words, they know nothing.<p>No, this isn&#x27;t to say I love Rumsfeld.  I like very few people in politics (let&#x27;s call it zero right now).<p>For example, among other things, did you know Rumsfeld was responsible for moving the world to high definition television?  In fact, it would not be a stretch to call him &quot;The father of HD television&quot;.<p>Seriously.  I was floored when I learned this myself about twenty years ago.  He did this outside of government, when he was in private industry.  There&#x27;s a wonderful little book titled &quot;Defining Vision&quot; that is a super interesting read about how the US, and the world, moved to HD TV.  It&#x27;s a great book about the tech, business and political sausage making that got HDTV going.  Imagine my surprise when I was reading a book about technology and Rumsfeld surfaces as the key player that made it all happen.<p>I have learned we should strive not to manufacture ignorant caricatures of people and paint them in a negative single wavelength  light after reducing them from a complex three-dimensional being to a single point in space.<p>This is no different from saying people crossing the border are criminals, that all Democrats are communists and all Republicans are idiots.  These are incredibly ignorant views of reality we should all avoid.  Do not brand yourself with such views, it&#x27;s a bad idea.