No. Large numbers of Americans aren't. Corruption and abuse of power is why we we have millions of people protesting. It may not be covered on the mainstream news but I was on the ground in Chicago where I easily saw a quarter of a million protestors. New York, Los Angeles and other big cities had similar numbers.
I have three techniques that never seem to fail for me in increasing order of complexity.
1. Write a blog post about it. I'm an old school blogger and my best learning tool is to immediately start writing about it. I'll do this even before I've used the thing in question. Another writer here talks about producing versus consuming and that's the magic -- this shifts you immediately into being a producer. Most things you try and learn aren't that hard when you start actively engaging with the topic by writing about them.
2. Write test coverage. If it is a software technology then I'll start to use it by writing out the tests needed to use it. I find tests always make software technologies much more understandable because, inherently, they force you to think very atomically.
3. If I really, really want to understand something in depth then I'll create a side project about it or that requires it. Just for example I'm currently doing this as a way to force myself to build better web apps. I've chosen HotWrite and Turbo as enabling technologies and now I've got the core of a neat little app that avoids full screen redraws, uses CSS I actually understand and so on.
In case any founders out there are wondering if a Hacker News post drives actual revenues, I needed to make a timeline today, remembered this, signed up, hit the limit and bought an account.
PS - This is the best timeline tool I've ever used. I used it to chart out my career history and it was damn useful.
The problem with feed discovery is very, very real. Lots and lots of feeds exist that don't have link tags. I wrote Scott's Feed Finder to probe for them. Yes I'm biased but its a very solid feed discovery tool:
I find the lack of string interpolation to be the one thing that kills me about javascript. The lack of it feels wrong and I can't get behind languages that don't have easy interpolation.
You can mentor people. You can adopt. You can foster a child. You can engage with your community. You could be a boy scout leader. There are lots and lots of ways to engage with kids that aren't "biologically yours". Technically my oldest son is a child I adopted and I never actually think that he's adopted. He is simply my son.
Agreed. The car manufacturers will lose control of the "car user interface" if they take on Apple's new CarPlay. My prediction tho is that some manufacturer will be desperate and take it and on then its a slow moving wave that crests over the industry as consumers ask for it.
I'd strongly advocate for what I call "The Boy Scout Campsite Approach to Code Improvement". Boy Scouts have a motto "Leave the Campsite Better than You Found It". What I'd do is:
* Pair program to teach people you work with that there is another way; they may simply not know any better.
* Make any code you touch better; new / old it doesn't make any difference. Do it right.
* Important: NEVER, EVER COMPROMISE ON THIS!!! Seriously you skip one time and it can all be downhill after that (sayeth the voice of regretted experience).
I built a marketing automation system for Udemy content creators. Alas Udemy decided to block all crawling of their site which broke my ease of use proposition so I abandoned it. I'm still pissed at Udemy.