The majority of the world's Ruby programmers are in Japan, where it's used for a whole lot more than building Rails apps. So Ruby isn't going anywhere, although it may become a curiosity in the West over time.
Bangkok has built a lot of transit in the past decade, 6 lines on top of an already-substantial existing network. Still plenty of projects under construction as well. This alone puts it way ahead of Jakarta in terms of quality of life IMO.
Bangkok has seasonal haze incidents that can get bad enough to close schools etc. Those are a scourge across all of SEA and are generally caused by slash-and-burn agriculture practices. It's much different from having bad AQI year-round.
I'd hardly say Bangkok is a clean air capital, but it's next to the ocean with no significant mountains nearby so usually pollution gets blown out to sea.
"Boomer" is an insult that directly references a protected characteristic, as such it's not only insensitive to use in the workplace, it's illegal. You'd be well within your rights to report this to HR, though I wouldn't recommend that in most cases. At the very least it's worth bringing this up to your manager if it happens repeatedly, phrase it as wanting to protect the company.
Maybe note in writing somewhere that this happened in case you get laid off and need some negotiating leverage to get a better severance. Email to yourself can work well, then it's discoverable.
It isn't illegal, in the sense that no one will be arrested for saying it.
As I recall, it's a bit more subtle. If the workplace continues to allow discrimination based on a protected characteristic then it will be considered a hostile workplace, which is illegal.
Age is only a protected characteristic for people 40 years old or older, which is every member of Gen X.
This presumes that le-mark's account took place in a workplace. On Twitter, about 6 years ago, a millennial wrote “Ok Boomer” to William Shatner, who replied “Sweetheart, that’s a compliment for me”, as Shatner, born in 1931, would have been in the Silent Generation.
I think the weird is still out there, but increasingly confined to meatspace. Burning Man? Very weird, especially the regional burns. Boutique music festivals have tons of weird. Go camping in the backcountry and you'll meet people who are at least eccentric.
Online there's plenty of weirdness still out there on obscure forums, Twitch streams, and Discords. Tumblr is still going, and Bluesky would have a lot more weirdness if it wasn't constantly consumed by woke purity spirals. (This is unfortunately a problem with IRL left-coded social spaces as well, left-libertarian seems to be the sweet spot.)
Unfortunately corporate America has taken over the vast majority of internet social spaces and that has made the weird much more difficult to find. This makes sense, back in the 90s there wasn't much weird on AOL (the FB of its day) - you had to go to Usenet, IRC, or BBSes. Later on Livejournal and Myspace.
What's the "dodge" here? All these companies already have a large presence in other countries. They can adjust employee counts in each of these locations as they see fit.
Let's say you make companies pay a tax per non-US employee. So they transfer the non-US employees to a contractor, and pay the contractor. This is often the default arrangement anyway. What do you do now?
You would need China-level capital controls to make this work and that is not compatible with the dollar remaining as a reserve currency. Nor will Congress or the Supreme Court go for it.
Yup. This is not difficult and it’s a fairly bounded problem. Only a few hundred companies are capable of the level of outsourcing that is considered significant. And those companies are highly sensitive to regulatory demands
"This is not difficult and it’s a fairly bounded problem"
Epic handwave. And you're wrong btw. If anything small business outsources even more than large companies. Tons of small business owners have zero US employees but have a personal assistant/CX agent in the Philippines, IT contractor in Latam, design contractors in Eastern Europe, etc.
The Econ 101 view would say yes, note most countries haven't imposed 1:1 retaliatory tariffs.
But economic considerations are not the only ones. Opposition to the American Revolution is a fundamental theme in Canadian history. People shouldn't be surprised when Canada acts accordingly.
These are the same rural areas rapidly turning against the administration due to its trade policy destroying global demand for their products, its foreign policy funding their international competitors, and its environmental policies lowering their land value by discouraging wind power development.
Certain rural areas like northern Idaho may be dominated by people moving there for ideological reasons, but this is not the norm.
What made you think people rapidly turned against the Trump administration? His approval ratings declined slowly since January. They are higher than they were most of 2017.[1]
Approval ratings don’t mean much for a lame duck president.
Look at the 2026 Senate polls in places like Iowa. Given Trump’s margin of victory in 2024 the Republicans should be crushing it, but they are struggling.
> Approval ratings don’t mean much for a lame duck president.
A term limited president can care less about approval ratings. This does not mean their approval ratings cannot be compared to their approval ratings.
> Look at the 2026 Senate polls in places like Iowa. Given Trump’s margin of victory in 2024 the Republicans should be crushing it, but they are struggling.
I do not accept Senate polls measure Trump support better than Trump approval polls. And 2026 Senate projections show Republicans losing 1 or 2 seats. Iowa is not 1 of them. Iowa polls did show the unpopular incumbent senator and a hypothetical Democratic opponent had similar support. But the unpopular incumbent senator announced she would retire. And hypothetical opponents poll better than real opponents many times.
