Individual responsibility can just become a blame culture. I remember sitting near a team that worked like this - meetings with everyone trying to prove that some screw-up was actually due to someone else.
In such scenarios nobody wants to stick their neck out at all, everyone hates everyone else.
At a higher level the usual problem is with incentives being different from one team to another. If you want something done you have to start with the incentives rather than expect people to work against them and there does have to be leadership to break deadlocks.
Culture matters and going against yours is difficult. I think everyone tends to be unable to put themselves in the shoes of someone from another country - it is terribly tempting to use one's own "lense" to see everything.
In America there's pressure to "be a success" and it's not easy to get away from. If you're successful it's a virtue and if you're a "loser" it's because you're lazy or something bad. Bums sleeping on the street don't deserve a place to live even in the richest country in the world because losers need to be punished and winners should not be taxed unfairly.
Where I'm from in Zimbabwe, foreigners including my parents always misunderstood the importance of age - the need to show respect to older people no matter what you think of their utterances. Every 2 seconds I could see other immigrants like myself rubbing Shona people up the wrong way by not understanding where the power lay and what people were proud of.
When I was in Turkey with my wife I realised it was another place where older people held a huge amount of power and the whole country operated differently from Britain - where one only has to be able to get a mortgage to be independent and tell one's parents to go to hell. In Turkey you have to kowtow to your parents and uncles and aunts because you're probably living in a flat that one of them owns until you're quite late in life.
It's not that "success" doesn't matter everywhere but that there are multiple priorities and it's not a pure indication of status. Quite often it's about family or not being of "the other" tribe.
As for thinking you're defined by your job, that is just part of the "pigeon-holing" process by which people try to understand you quickly and sometimes attempt to neutralise a perceived competitor socially. I don't think there's much you can do other than not buy into it yourself and not practise it yourself.
It probably has. It's super difficult to be truly unique in a world where billions have learned to read and write. It doesn't matter however. The people who see your work haven't seen/read everything out there. You can be unique for them.
The governments don't really cause the issues. The big issues are just things that face the country no matter who is in control - how to pay for everything, how to deal with population aging etc.
It's not a simple country - it's a machine with millions of complicated parts and therefore it's difficult to come up with simple things to do that will make everyone happy.
The public don't all have a 10000 foot view, which I don't think any 1 person could comprehensively understand anyhow, and are susceptible to being sold "simple solutions" by politicians - in fact they won't elect anyone who doesn't pretend at least to offer simple solutions.
It's fine to stumble initially, like discovering fire, but design gets us lighters and ovens. Good design allows for some flexibility without leaving everything to chance like pure stumbling does.
Documents are meaningless. In rotten countries they simply get rewritten or ignored. Nothing beats an electorate who value honesty over being told what they want to hear and who punish corruption.
They're there because someone a long time ago was wealthy and probably had ties to one or more monarchs.
This is not a basis for holding power in any country that calls itself democratic. This idea that they are somehow above everyday concerns and that's a good thing is some sort of weird retcon, and if we're going to use unmitigated cynicism to impugn the validity of action of other office holders who are elected, or who have got to the lords through prominence in public life, then allow me the same here: they're just there to pursue the interests of the landed gentry and hold back progress on issues like fox-hunting. And they have done exactly this in the past. The fact they're not trying to win an election means they are entirely free to pursue selfish aims.
There's no virtue in maintaining the privileges of these alleged 'nobles' to interfere in the running of the state.
What they’re going to get is 92 fewer (to use the modern parlance) nepo-babies having access to the levers of power. It’s something to celebrate.
Lots of countries call themselves democratic that absolutely aren't e.g. The DPRK for a ridiculous example. We actually aren't even democratic in the truest sense that we don't all vote on everything but instead elect representatives to vote for us (we hope). It's all a compromise with trade offs.
Here one will just get different "nepo babies" who are more directly involved in the struggle for power because they will be connected those in power - people who have been useful and will be wanted in future.
Some people say that the desire for power is the thing that should disqualify a person from having it. i.e. we perhaps need some anti-politicians. This would mean people who don't want to be in power having some forced upon them like in Jury duty.
It seems that this chap didn't go and implement a new library, he reimplemented an existing one and became sole-controller of it. i.e. he seems to have taken its reputation, brand whatever you call it away from the contributors and entirely to himself. Their work of establishing it as a well known solution is no longer recognised.
So of course we feel that something wrong has happened even if it's not easy to put one's finger on it.
If you decide to improve it in any way to fit your needs you can merely tell your own AI to re-implement it with your changes. Then it's proprietary to you.
In such scenarios nobody wants to stick their neck out at all, everyone hates everyone else.
At a higher level the usual problem is with incentives being different from one team to another. If you want something done you have to start with the incentives rather than expect people to work against them and there does have to be leadership to break deadlocks.
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