You're assuming that targeting people's finances is the best way to leverage the data collected. In Facebook's case, they are using it to literally assert influence over masses of people. When other groups get access to that same data, then they too can use that data to assert influence because that's literally what the platform has been developed into (not implying this was Facebook's intent all along).

I think these groups targeting your pocket book may have the most immediate effect on your person -- however -- I don't think it's the scariest or most malicious outcome.

That's a good point, actually.

Maybe he didn't leave his mark as a programmer/engineer the way HE wanted to, but you definitely have to admire his ability to identify good opportunities. He laments choosing and then using LISP for so long and in a way seems to blame the language for adversely affecting his perspective on programming, but it really seems like it served him well when it was useful. I think the same intuition that helped him choose LISP for solving problems (because it was a nice set of tools at the time) probably ended up helping him choose good professional opportunities, too. If he's frustrated about the way his perspective changed then I have to agree with the other commenters that he would need to work on changing that perspective and not remain complacent.

I like this idea a lot. I personally don't like writing makefiles and so having nice build tools like cmake generate them for me is about as close to writing them as I want to get. Letting make stay as a low level building block for high level build tools seems like the right way to go.