By the fade-out of your comment, it seems your accurate assessment of this individual's bloviation is insufficiently self-important for the HN crowd. This is why I never post here. Worse comments than Slashdot.
All kidding aside, it takes ten years to stop being awful. If you look at code you wrote a year ago and think it looks bad, that's a good sign. On the other hand, if you look at code you wrote a year ago and it seems about as reasonable as code you write today, maybe you're right. If you love tech, there's always devops, and if you're in the same boat there, you can try project management, or become an expert in some niche field. Or maybe tech's not for you. That's ok!
Coyotes come out after dark. It takes about 20 minutes for them to figure out people aren't around. Mangy jerks.
Once I was walking through some brush in a city park in Calgary, AB and a siren went by. The whole area around me lit up with howling. Little unnerving, although coyotes are pretty cowardly out West (in the East they've interbred with wolves and will once in a blue moon take a hiker down).
Here in southern Ontario the coyotes are still pretty cowardly. I live rural (but close to town) and I might see them from 100 feet away before they skitishly run off. Except for one time there was one that brazenly marched down our driveway in broad daylight. Not sure how long that one lived for, never saw it again...
The ones in town are a bit less shy.
What's strange is last night our chickens were attacked by an eastern red fox. Usually they're super skittish and shy around humans, but as I (along with 3 other people) was rescuing my rooster from under a car, this one kept circling around, thinking he was going to get his prey back from us. Not scared at all.
(FWIW roosters are amazing animals... this one seems to have charged the fox to get it to drop one of the hens, and then fought with it and decoyed it away from the hens a good 200 feet down to the road, then it hid under a car of some people who passed by and witnessed this all happening and stopped. All birds survived, just missing some feathers. Rooster gets lots of treats today.)
In depressing times like these, I like to remember that something like 30% of users have adblockers installed. It might seem like people will mindlessly go along with this sort of manipulation, but there is still a place for independent thought on the web. Not on facebook, Reddit, Instagram, or really any other big-name site, but you can find it if you look.
So... Are these reviews paid for? I've known a few people who got stuck with a surface, usually because their work forced it on them, and they invariably hated it. The thing is barely a computer. They've sacrificed physical usability for the sake of some form factor pissing contest with Apple. Why are all the "best laptop of 20xx" reviews led by the surface and Dell's equally awful XPS? I don't want an eight ounce conversation piece. I want a brick I can drop down the stairs with a bunch of RAM in it. I can't be the only one.
I was in a similar situation. The "political animal" in my case managed to turn management against me, and my reward for making the business work was getting cut loose. Get solid evidence and rat the team lead out. It's you or them, and that isn't your fault; there's no dishonor in it. Worst case is that you lose your job, and very likely, you're going to anyway if you continue to do nothing.
I think the question is, how much control do you want over your government? Do you want them doing this stuff? I come from a country with a stronger democracy than the US and governments will fall over stuff like human rights violations, if they don't properly punish the perpetrators.
I was astounded when I mapped out a transit ride from a suburb of Amsterdam to the city center - and discovered it was 15 minutes long. I'm not a fan of compact European living (washing machine in the kitchen?!), but that's a hard advantage to ignore.
