The fundamental acid test of any political economic system is how it can organize for and conduct. Combat for a very long time now has required close organization and synchronization of elements and units and this continues to require structures of authority in hierarchies that are even strikingly alien and ill at ease with today's democracies. The author cites examples of guerrilla war and tribal conflict but societies that relied on these as means to maintain their sovereignty have perished or have been diminished so that they are utterly at the mercy of nations that do not.
Moreover, decentralized political economies cannot either deliver the goods when it comes to economies of scale that modern capital makes possible. Democracies strain to deliver large capital intensive projects like the Hoover Dam or the construction of aircraft carriers but these are simply currently beyond the pale of even more decentralized political economies.
Of course, technology can change how warfare is conducted and reduce the relative advantages of economies of scale. If one prefers anarchist political economy, one should be interested in anything that levels the playing field between decentralized and centralized coordination strategies. When push comes to shove though, will you be so enthralled by anarchist ideals that you would scorn or deny technology that tends to centralization if it makes humanity wealthier or wiser than alternatives?
I mean, hell, how many facebook groups are out there that feed on persecuting outgroups? You dont need a central state to do this stuff. A state can provide the NKVD/Stasi but its peoples neighbours who use it to screw one another. Deliver them Facebook and they'll do most of a social credit system for you
The tech interviews I've had so far have consisted of some kind of leetcode or hackerrank or codility test and then basically the same thing but supervised.
On one of the older ones I stalled out on references. It was a fed gig and they wouldn't take freelance clients for references so I had to use managers from like a year or more ago and one of them just wouldn't respond to recruiter emails. They made me do a lot of tests though and they kept saying I was advancing because I beat the tests and got all the corner cases. I dropped some pastries at the old office (as much for my old colleagues as for my old manager) and emailed my old manager about the reference but she seems evasive about it. She's also extraordinarily busy and I don't really want to pressure her into giving a reference if she feels I was a bad employee (although she could say as much in the reference). She could come through in the end. I guess we'll see.
I'm in a few interviews right now. In the one I recently got spat out of, I had some leetcode problems which I think I got correct (I don't know if I got all the corner cases but I sure tested for everything I could think of). One of the recruiters said I fell down on the video interview. I'm sure their feedback will clear it up and I'll post it here to close the issue.
I don't think I'm that good at data structures and algorithms. I've definitely hit the limit of my natural talent. I'm bad at recursion (I almost always prefer while loops). I haven't been getting a lot of questions about binary trees and I think that's why I've been doing relatively well. Binary trees are okay too but I never see them in the wild and I can get confused about them. I need to grind a lot more leetcode but if I do that what I will have attained is not really a native excellence or deeper insight into the nature of data structures and algorithms but rather a kind of mental hashmap or muscle memory of approaches to mimic that I've seen in leetcode problems in the past (which is not unhelpful in and of itself).
Anyway the other day I did some landscaping around a transmission line tower for the power authority and wrote a little webscraper for an upwork client. The former paid me $2100 and the latter paid me $320 and the latter was a lot more work. Seems like there's easier ways to make a living than programming.
Moreover, decentralized political economies cannot either deliver the goods when it comes to economies of scale that modern capital makes possible. Democracies strain to deliver large capital intensive projects like the Hoover Dam or the construction of aircraft carriers but these are simply currently beyond the pale of even more decentralized political economies.
Of course, technology can change how warfare is conducted and reduce the relative advantages of economies of scale. If one prefers anarchist political economy, one should be interested in anything that levels the playing field between decentralized and centralized coordination strategies. When push comes to shove though, will you be so enthralled by anarchist ideals that you would scorn or deny technology that tends to centralization if it makes humanity wealthier or wiser than alternatives?