"But the essay causes concern. I worry that lots of small ISVs will read his article and believe that they need to hire great hackers."
Why does this rise to the level of concern? If these small ISVs take what the author considers misguided advice, they will be less competitive and his dreary SourceSafe-based business will do even better.
The author Elliott is miserable, negative, hateful, boastful and self-righteous. Don't forget (now there's a patronizing phrase, as if anyone forgets the obvious) that the article is entitled, "MY, MY, MY (not someone else's: MY) Interview with (that god damned) murderer Hans Reiser." The article is about Elliott's feelings, primarily. Who cares? Elliott has the psychological insight of a paramecium.
To be fair, Elliott's hatred of Reiser is a little further up the phylogenetic tree, at least on the invertebrate branch. Other than that, the article doesn't say much about the crime or the trial, about Reiser's marriage to a venal Russian bride, or much of anything else. What we do learn is that Elliott is an opportunist who hung around Reiser's trial, managed to get an interview, and gets miffed because Reiser didn't give him what he wanted. The whole purpose was to give readers enough of a bad taste to purchase his book. Elliott is so unsympathetic, he unintentionally forces the reader's identification with Reiser when he turns his back to Elliott and asks the guard to be returned to his cell.
The author misses the point that PG's essays are not intended to be understood literally, but as literature, to be appreciated on an aesthetic level only.
The idea of a static mindset is itself limiting. One needs to have a mindsheaf, which could be a time-varying sheaf of mindsets. This would be a contravariant functor F from the real line, with its usual topology, to the category of sets. The value F(U) for an open set U of the real line would be one of the mindsets of the mindsheaf. Of course, other topological spaces are possible, and the functor could have values in other categories. I mention only one possibility to illustrate the primitive inadequacy of the notion of a static mindset.
The Kripke metaphor is very appropriate in this context; it can be argued that he did most of his 'important' work at such an early age that he has yet to do anything to substantially eclipse it. Although, if I'm completely candid, I still don't understand most of his stuff.
It's expensive to raise a family in the United States. The economics and the culture are against it. Add to that the cost of raising a family with someone who turns out to be the wrong person: your expected income after marriage must be reduced by the probability of divorce times the cost of divorce. Children necessarily complicate matters.
The problem would be alleviated somewhat if more and more people owned their own businesses, instead of the situation we currently have, of numerous workers employed by a wealthy class. At some point, these workers should simply refuse to work for anyone substantially more wealthy than they are. The value to an employer of having a large pool of interchangeable labor is calculable. Who created that value? Not the employer: the people. And it is the people who should and who must demand that value they created for themselves.
The article claims that "...a number of intellectuals—including Aitzaz Ahsan, Noam Chomsky, Michael Ignatieff, and Amr Khaled—mounted voting drives by promoting the list on their Web sites."
This is false about Noam Chomsky: there were no "voting drives" on chomsky.info or zcommunications.org, where Chomsky has a blog. Chomsky has never paid any attention to the Foreign Policy vote. I wonder what possible motive Foreign Policy has for making this false claim.
I think this is Ayn Rand hate gone awry. You don't know anything about me. And all I really said here is people should be responsible for themselves; that's not some crazy fringe idea, and it's not limited to Objectivists.
And I said it specifically about economics and smoking. Smoking is a choice. I think if people want to damage their health by smoking they should be allowed to, but they should have to pay for it. Do you really think that's crazy and would destroy society?
And your view is exactly why the USA is 37th on The World Health Organization's ranking of the world's health systems, below countries like Colombia (GDP $337.286 billion), Chile (GDP $163.792 billion) and Costa Rica (GDP $56.777 billion). The USA's GDP is $13.794 trillion. At least you beat the communists (Cubans) by three places...
Why does this rise to the level of concern? If these small ISVs take what the author considers misguided advice, they will be less competitive and his dreary SourceSafe-based business will do even better.