I have to wonder context when I read a statement like this.
Big Tech? Startup? Selling a service? Selling software tools? Something else?
Because (business) success usually involves a big recipe of good ideas, good execution, good networking/marketing/sales.
Proprietary code was once rare and valuable. But code is cheap to create, and plentiful. It might as well be flour, sugar, butter. Can anyone that ever worked at a bakery trivially create a successful rival bakery because of a few recipes and an EZBake Oven? Can a vibe-coded Adobe Creative Suite take down Adobe overnight? I'll believe it when I see it.
That's not to say that if you're an engineer, but you have a passion and confidence in your ideas and salesmanship that you shouldn't give it a try, if you're in a position to do so, or otherwise don't have better options. But thinking that software engineering is more of a factor in rapid business success than it used to be seems like an odd assumption.
You're reading too much into that statement, by far. They could very well dictate what their children must pursue, but it's much more likely they want to do the things parents do, which is offer up guidance and recommendations, and yes, even sometimes encourage one path over another.
Actually, one of the biggest criticisms of him is that he overperformed with bad teams.
The NFL has a draft system where the worst team in the league gets the best pick in the next year's draft.
Tomlin dragging teams that should have won 2 or 3 games into the playoffs each year just to lose immediately meant that the Steelers never got any good draft picks and thus never improved the team year of year.
I don’t think this criticism matches reality though. The Packers did not bottom out to get Aaron Rodgers; the Patriots did not bottom out to get Tom Brady. The Browns did bottom out to get Baker Mayfield; how’d that go?
In fact there are way more examples of bad teams crashing into high picks, and then continuing to crash, than dramatic turn-arounds into Super Bowl victories shortly thereafter.
Good teams and coaches go for the Super Bowl every year because it is impossible to predict when you’ll get there and win. That includes when you have (or don’t have) a great quarterback. You just have to try your hardest every year and hope.
And excellence is a habit, not a dial you can quickly turn from one side to the other over the summer. Most players have short careers and so a team needs them to get better every year in order to hope to peak as a team.
It seems to me like a lot of sports criticism is based in regretful retrospection. “Oh, if only they’d done this or that, they would have won.” But it’s impossible to know what would have happened. Injuries alone are unpredictable and hugely impactful from year to year.
It’s a natural thought, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good way to actually manage a team.
> The Browns did bottom out to get Baker Mayfield; how’d that go?
Browns fan in. Baker had them legit good the COVID year - beat the Steelers in the playoffs, then lost to the Chiefs in large part to a hugely controversial call. Then Baker hurt his non-throwing shoulder trying to tackle someone on and interception that happened because the sprinter masquerading as a wide receiver (Anthony Schwartz) stopped his route. Then Jimmy Haslam, already famous for being a criminal and drafting Johnny Eightball when told to do so by a houseless person in downtown Cleveland told him to, made one of the worst trades in NFL history. Andrew Berry has had really good drafts the last two years which underscores your point.
Funny that Aaron Rodgers thought he would go #1 to his hometown 49ers who instead took Alex Smith. And that SF is killing it this year with Mr. Irrelevant Brock Purdy (further demonstrating your point).
I was also in Boston when Tom Brady happened; earlier that year I nearly physically ran into Drew Bledsoe. Just to keep things nerdy on HN, later that year I brought down the uni's network but it was not Harvard. Maybe I shouldn't have paid attention to sports so much
QBs are important in the NFL, but so are the other 21 starters, not to mention the reserve players. Consistently going 8-8 or better every year means that a team doesn't have access to high quality talent at a price discount. This is a problem for ultimately winning a championship in any sport with a salary cap.
Tomlin is a poster child of how hard it is to drop early impressions of someone. He came in as a hot shot, but after last season he was going on 8 years since a single playoff victory.
He did the best with what he had, as all coaches in the NFL are bound to do. He dealt with a Big Ben playing well into his decline, then a bunch of 2nd and 3rd string QBs, and then the prima donna/flake Aaron Rodgers, which was likely the deciding point for his retirement. He could have had his pick of coaching jobs if he wanted, and the steelers record over his tenure was something most teams would dream of.
He stayed at the Steelers too long. He should have gone somewhere with a better QB, the Steelers should have bottomed out enough to be able to draft a good QB.
Andy Reid is retiring when he gets his 303rd regular season win. At nearly the same time, Tomlin is going to find he once again has the zest for coaching.
I think the issue with this hypothesis is that it omits variables.
Basically... is the United States, scratch that, WILL the United States be on a trajectory, post-Trump, where there is reason to believe future leadership will consistently be trustworthy to foreign nations? And how would anyone know that, or at least have reasonable confidence in that belief?
What brought us here to elect someone like this, and is that "what" going away or being fixed? Is there some hope for undoing polarized politics in this country, so that "this election is the most important of our generation" doesn't occur every four years, and both sides believe that "the other side" will ruin the country once and for all?
Time is not enough to fix the core issues. Time can move us past this particular era, these particular instances of unpredictable leadership, but time alone will not move this country past whatever levers of control convinced this electorate that this kind of leadership was the right choice for this country -- and the rest of the planet.
Trump will go away. Eventually he will die. But he laid out a blueprint for ruling by executive decree. (Yeah, previous presidents did too, but he took it far further than anyone before him.) Sooner or later someone smarter than him will come along and do it better and even more successfully.
American democracy is eventually doomed, unless there are structural changes that make this kind of thing impossible to ever happen again. I predict a Democratic president and Congress in 2028. If they don't fix this, in the first two years, then limited government will not endure in the US. (Why two years? Because they probably won't have enough of a majority in Congress after the 2030 midterms. That's just how these things usually go.)
None of this is historically true at all. We learn history so we can have informed opinions about trends like this. Nixon was called the "imperial president" because he had more power than any US president since. After that, executive power was reduced significantly until Obama (who expanded it more than any president in US history). Yes, we can talk about why that was and there are reasons Obama did that, but he still did it. Trump just increased at bit over that.
PS They are called "Executive Orders". Decrees are things monarchs give so I expect you aren't an American which explains your lack of understanding of US politics.
> But he laid out a blueprint for ruling by executive decree.
Other presidents also extended the power of the executive branch and over-used executive orders. Of course, not to the extreme degree Trump did.
Trump's legacy will be his effective use of social media saturation and his "mask off" approach to rallying his base. Previous (R) administrations felt they had to maintain at least a little civility and be coy about the kind of people they were rallying, and cryptic about the kind of emotions that activated these people. You had to use innuendo and dogwhistles. Trump proved that you can directly preach to people's anger, belligerence, and cruelty, win elections based on those messages, and even maintain your popularity by delivering on your promises with oppressive, cruel policies. This lesson is going to be burned into politics long after he's gone: You don't have to even try to be a statesman to lead government.
To whom it may concern, I believe the year was 1987 or 1988. (I was around 9ish, I think.) My brothers and I stumbled upon a Commodore 64 amidst trash beside a country road. In the box, even the manual was in good shape.
This was promptly carried home and plugged into the TV via coax, if I remember correctly. Sample programs from the manual were entered, and before long, custom programs were written.
The power brick was large and hot. My dad would not let me leave the computer on overnight. Nor did I have a disk drive.
I got good at typing out programs from memory. By the time I reached college, code (at college course level, as well as fast touch-typing) was generally easy, and I felt like my fellow students were learning what felt "natural" to me. (Unfortunately, this also instilled a bad habit of preferring the easy route, and never being a diligent, hard-working programmer. Not to mention... dropping out.)
This machine was definitely instrumental in my chosen career path! I did not own a proper PC until sometime early in college when I bought an IBM from my second roommate, and upgraded the CPU to a Pentium 200Mhz...
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