(Reference: http://www.federalbudget.com/)

Steps to recovery:

1) End all offensive military actions overseas. Finish winding down Iraq and abandon Afghanistan wholesale. These actions have cost several trillion dollars over the last 10 years. We can't get that money back, but we can stop spending more.

2) Defense spending is in the top 3 highest budget expenditures. Cut it by 1 third across the board. Maintain important overseas installations such as Japan and Taiwan. Given China's rise, its wise long-term to keep a presence in the region. Scale back deployments in Europe unless Russia still is still a threat to western Europe.

3) The most amount of money the U.S. spends is Health and Human Services. The U.S. health system is a fucking mess. Somehow we spend the most on healthcare and get some of the worst societal benefits out of any industrialized country. I don't have an answer here, but it likely involves completely tearing down the existing system to its nuts and bolts and building it back up. I'd love to hear ideas on this point from others that know more about it.

4) Social Security is the other one. My mom relies on it, so does a lot of my family. We're from meager backgrounds and traditionally have come from poorer parts of the nation. That being said, cut it.

When I look at my paycheck and see that upwards of 40% of my income is being sucked out by the government and used more for things I oppose than things I support (e.g. war spending versus scientific investment) it pisses me right off.

Yes, I have heard the naive argument "But taxes are there to run the things you use like roads and government services that you use every day". This is true only in part. Yup, we need an army. Yup, we need local police. Yup, we need roads. Yup, we need a justice system. But it doesn't take trillions of dollars a year to run those things.

The government shouldn't interfere with business like propping up failing business models. It should work to make sure that business plays fair, i.e. anti-monopoly or collusion, etc.

I'm more liberal than conservative, and definitely not one of these people that wants business to have free-reign over everything. But there are bottom lines that we have crossed and need to back off.

You're more liberal than conservative. I'm more conservative than liberal. Bless your heart, I agree with all of your points. At the end of the Cold War, other conservatives were making the same noises that you're making now. For their pains, their careers were destroyed by the people who run the current mainstream conservative movement. Let's take a look at those points of yours.

Points 1 & 2. Cut defense spending and all of the cool people will call you an isolationist. Sure, argue rationally all you want; the name will stick. Also, remember that the United States is bound by treaty to defend more than two dozen nations. That includes keeping bases in some of those nations. Those treaties will have to be renegotiated. Those nations will have to increase their own defense spending. Many of those nations have budget problems of their own. Have fun.

Point 3. Touch social spending and the cool people will call you a heartless bastard who cackles at the sight of starving widows in between gulps of baby orphan blood. Sure, argue rationally all you want; the charge will stick. Of course, this doesn't solve the money problem. Iceberg? What iceberg?

Point 4. Social Security is the third rail of American politics: If you touch it, you will die. Sure, argue rationally all you want. It will help as much as it ever has.

Long story short, the bureaucracy rules us. The administration of administrators who administer the other administers who supervise the people in charge of those who actually get real work done cannot make any concessions to reality. It would be like Gorbachev loosening the grip of Communism; one exit through the Iron Curtain and it's all over.

The Cool People will double down. They will continue to double down until it is physically impossible for them to continue doing so.

A computer program automatically torturing applicants with endless puzzle tests is not a way to find talented qualified people with experience delivering working results that delight the user. It's a good way to find people that have a lot of free time to play games because they are unemployed.

In the years following my first job out of school (decades ago) I can't recall any work that I have gotten by going to these sites, or dealing with monkey tests. Work comes because of my reputation and experience which speaks for itself. At conferences people give me their card and tell me to call them if I am looking to 'move up', which generally means "pay more than the last guy". Any time one contract or job ends, I look through these cards. Most of the time I get several phone calls from people I have met of the sort: "Hey Bugsy, I heard rumors of ABC Corp having layoffs. You looking to get out? We have a position..."

It's bad enough when the interviewer wastes more than 10 minutes of time with puzzles. Having it be automated so it can waste hours and hours without any human feedback is extremely offensive. Whoever designed this system knows nothing about acquiring talent.

The note in the article that in the future the site is going to be augmented with "real world tests" that force the user to design entire sites or otherwise labor for free borders on criminal since they are forcing you to do real work and you're not getting paid for it, in violation of state and federal labor laws.

If you haven't already seen examples of someone's work before you contact them, maybe you shouldn't be hiring them. Or maybe you need recruiters who know what they are doing.

Again, I have no doubt that desperate people who are unemployed because of their incompetence or lack of skill will not have any problem devoting the hours needed to google answers, or to hire third parties to help them complete these tests. I am sure complementary businesses will now open up that sell test answers to desperate applicants for a fee.

A surprisingly well-written tech article for a source like CNN: clear to non-technical people, and yet not chock full of gross inaccuracies. Mainstream journalists have gotten me used to much lower quality.

I might get flamed/downvoted for this, but where's the content of this article? Apart from some vague tropes ("Erlang is bad at string processing!" "We need scalability, and that means async Python", "Pick the right Python libraries!"), there's really nothing interesting about the implementation details, especially considering such a attention-grabbing headline (to put it nicely).

What specifically was bad about the Erlang code? Isn't this just saying that if nobody in your company really understands a language, don't use it?

This is more about the technical competency of a specific company than general technical issues. Or, to put it bluntly, it's more "Mixpanel sucks at Erlang" than "Erlang sucks". Don't get me wrong, I'd be really, really interested in a good analysis why in this case Erlang was the wrong choice, but this article didn't even get close to anything technically interesting (Even with the ubiquitous requests/s graph).

We have not won the war on boredom. At best we have won the war on idleness, which is only a lite version of it. If anything, these kill-time gadgets exacerbate the deep boredom problem, what Pessoa calls tedium:

Tedium is not the disease of being bored because there’s nothing to do, but the more serious disease of feeling that there’s nothing worth doing. This means that the more there is to do, the more tedium one will feel.

I can totally relate to this quote and attest to the ineffectiveness or even negative effect most tech toys have in alleviating my chronic diminished motivation and under-functioning reward system.

You forgot the War on Drugs. Get rid of it, free all the people in prison for non-violent drug-related offenses, and tax the newly legalized drugs.

This should free up a lot of money that's being wasted on ruining people's lives right now, and make more money from taxing legal drugs.

As a bonus, it'll get rid of a lot of organized crime. Witness what happened with the repeal of Prohibition.