This describes my experience very accurately. Eventually one can build one's life around the personal flexibility working at home offers, and that can add (even more) real resistance to change, even if change is what might be best.

Indeed. If you were to truly run the government like you'd run a business, wouldn't you "fire" all the older people who are no longer performing at an acceptable level i.e. retired?

From a .gov perspective performance and production is measured not by working, but by voting, and voting rates are excellent for older people.

That's one more way a government isn't a business. Also, didn't Trump campaign on generally minimizing government? Did (does) he also run his businesses in such as way so as to "minimize" them?

Obviously there are approaches that make sense to be common to running both business and government (that probably apply to most everything else as well because they'd seem like "common sense") but, at a high level, to say "run government like a business" is one of those things that only sounds reasonable (possibly) until you think about it.

Disagree. In this stretched analogy, performance might be measured by voting, but production is measured by tax paying (i.e. contribution to the revenue stream).

I just logged in for the first time in forever to say thanks for a really interesting and thought-provoking read.

"Sequel", or "skewl" when I'm in a hurry. Who has time to say "ess que ell"?

A friend of mine, who is not a fan of database work, pronounces it "squeal".

That's why I say "postgres", not "postgre sql".

What about Postgres Cue Ell?

He also did a little write-up around this stuff:

http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/201698.html

Shopify's founder wrote an interesting article on his experience apprenticing in Germany: http://tobi.lutke.com/blogs/news/11280301-the-apprentice-pro...

Thanks, that was a surprisingly good read. In a similar vein, there's also the `Duales Studium', which gives vocational experience and a bachelor's degree.

It should be mentioned that "Duales Studium" requires very good grades as the spots are highly sought after.

or, use http://excess.org/urwid/ , which contains awesomeness.

Including the ability to support the colors available in modern terminals (ie, Linux, OS X). I needed to do a subtle zebra striping for an analysis tool and ncurses couldn't do the job. urwid, however, can.