I find the idea that the idea that people from another country tricked into conscription would get this benefit. If they got to this point by trickery, what's to stop more trickery?

If a TODO passes code review, more than one person fucked up.

1. Those apps are simple
2. Those apps target a wide audience, hence have more budget as a result
3. Those apps are made by large, well oiled (you'd hope at least) companies. You don't want my honest opinion on most small software development boxes. This industry grew faster than mentors became available for the newbies, so many devs including seniors still don't know what they are doing.

In a lot of countries (Canada, Germany, etc.) they can afford to go to school longer because society realizes that it is in it's best interest to make it affordable (free in some cases).

If you believe the US's way is the only way to have a democracy and freedom, you need to learn about other democraties.

People who appear intelligent to the average person, are either slightly more intelligent than their audience, or charismatic.

Really smart people can be hard to follow unless they put efforts in communication skills or are charismatic (but that might be the same thing?)

Learning to deal with "unmaintanable" codebases is a pretty good skill. It taught me good documentation and refactoring manners. It's only a problem for you if management does not accept that their velocity has gone down as a result of tech debt pilling up.

Code should scream it's intent (business-wise) so as to be self-documenting as much as possible As much as possible is not 100%, so add comments when needed. Comments should be assumed to be relevant when written, at best. Git comment should be linked to your work ticket so that we can figure out why the hell you would do that, when looking at the code file itself. I swear some people seem to think we only read them in PRs (we don't). Overall concepts used everyday, if they need to be reexplained, should probably be written down (at least today's version). Tests are documentation. Often the only up to date one?

Where I'm from, they know. The news have done a good job of reporting on it, and they see the cost of houses, and whatnot be worse than before. It's kind of new from the last 5 or so years, before that they didn't get it. But now it's pretty obvious so long as they watch the news or pay attention to their kids and grandkid's lives.

Professionals should care about their client's privacy though. That shouldn't be a debate.

No, but think about how we structure society.

We give people shit education, and they wind up not being able to read at a 6th grade level.

Then you basically have to navigate an entire world where you are required to pick how to sign away some of your rights/enter deals written beyond their comprehension.

This is a system that breeds suckers as sets them up as suckers, to screw them later.

Generally, you can replace some comments with variable names or comment names. Which means you must already be in the habbit of extracting methods, setting new variables to use appropriate names, and limit context to reduce the name (Smaller classes and methods means shorter names can be just as expressive, because the context is clearer). It lowers the number of wtfs per minute you get reading code before you even need whole sentences to explain why things are done in a certain way, because the names can be a powerful hint.

But realistically, you end up needing comments for some things anyways.

I'm glad they are finally doing something about climate anxiety.

Except that instead of an authoritarian government using it to totally control the learned populace, they are showing you ads.

We've still got a way to go before 1984. If it did happen, you wouldn't be able to discuss it.