Letter to 20 Years Ago
imperialviolet.org
imperialviolet.org
I used to buy the homes of people who were delinquent on their taxes. To my surprise I learned that people also develop a fragile truce with a whole ecosystem of insects and animal droppings. Are most people like that? I choose to believe no. Because I think what's elitist is choosing to believe most people are too unhealthy to take care of themselves. Folks who think that way are going to be biased towards building orwellian tech dystopias. Just because unclean people exist, doesn't mean the rest of us don't deserve freedom.
Also there's just as much unscrupulous software in the mobile world as there is in the desktop world. It's just that, rather than being called malware, it's called an app with overly broad permissions. Like you download a Family Guy game and it uploads all your emails and photos to some business intelligence database. But that's apparently considered OK for some reason, since the user consented to it having that capability, likely believing that permission agreements would be as innocuous to consumers as EULAs.
* AAPL & AMZN, long hold
* Leicester City, 2015-16 English Premier League
* It is your L3 nerve root. Get a second MRI
* Move to New Zealand in 2019
Travel broadens the mind. There’s a profound truth in this cliché that is better experienced than explained. If you have an opportunity to live in a land not of your birth, take it.
Simply being resident overseas doesn’t terminate US citizenship; you can’t lose it accidentally (although you can lose your passport; pro tip: don’t). Taxation, especially inadvertent liability for double taxation on income, is a can of worms though, and it might limit where you live & work to nations that have an income tax treaty with the US. That is still much of the planet, but there are demons in the details so rather than attempt to interpret the smorgasbord of IRS regulations and treaties for you I’d recommend obtaining advice from an international tax professional, it’ll be worth it.
However you’ll find all of these issues pale into comparison with the logistics of finding somewhere to live, opening a bank account, maintaining resident alien status with employment rights, registering (and remaining in regulatory compliance) with local governmental entities, finding work/society and so on in another country and culture and maybe even different language and alphabet.
I’ve done this 𝖿̶𝗈̶𝗎̶𝗋̶ five times now. What we leave behind is the least of the problem. Fortunately, I don’t ever see it as a problem. It’s always been an incredible adventure.
Leaving this as a memo to my future self.
If you bought and held (which requires keeping the keys secret against a lot of attacks and not losing them), and also managed to pick the peak to sell at, and managed to sell without being scammed, exit-scammed by the exchange, or having your account locked, then yes you could have made a lot of money. Because there's a lot of risk along the way.
Piece of paper in a safety deposit box (maybe even at 2-3 different banks) would do this just fine, but you'd have to know it was going to be worthwhile enough to have bothered.
> managed to pick the peak to sell at
Just sell bits of it here and there to spread the risk around.
i think it's also the design of the page. it has no footer.
I also think you don't need to keep referring to phones as PDA. You can just say that cell phones merged with what we used to call PDAs, or became more PDA-like. Somebody in a coma since 2000 would get that.
> At PDC on July 13, 2000, Microsoft announced that Whistler would be released during the second half of 2001, and also unveiled the first preview build, 2250. The build notably introduced an early version of Windows XP's visual styles system.
> Whistler was officially unveiled during a media event on February 5, 2001, under the name Windows XP, where XP stands for "eXPerience".
So while the product wasn't released until 2001, the codename and preview builds for developers were already released.
What did happen in May 2000 was that President Clinton turned off selective availability signal which made civilian gps signal much more accurate. See https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/
What I do remember, other than the obvious part that ubiquitous connectivity wasn't there yet, is that those products sucked compared to today. And that fits in with the 2000 action that allowed more accurate GPS to be used by the public.
Though even in 2007 or so I remember my phone gps sucking. It took a long time to get a fix and didn't have hinting from cell tower triangulation or sending nearby wifi APs to a server somewhere.
What is this referencing? I don't know how to do that! edit: I think this is referring to opening the /proc/pid directory - I don't think this technique is well known yet. https://lwn.net/Articles/773459/
No kidding.
Two words: Buy AAPL.
you'd have to wait 8 years though
In 1515: Your idea that people learn to read isn't wrong, but it's elitist.
The majority of peoples computer experience has been reduced to tapping colorful pictures for dopamine hits that force them to watch more adds.
An interface quite literally better suited to monkeys than to people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPiDHXtM0VA
That we have not taught people the fundamentals of computer interaction is a failure of education. One that took centuries to solve for books and wasn't perfected until the 18th century. And only when people had stopped killing each other after finally reading the Bible and realizing that the information gatekeepers were lying to them for their own benefit.
- People are evil and getting more evil. Don't trust anyone. The governments of the world are corrupt and will become more corrupt. Forget about principles and ethics.
- Invest in the hype. Those who control the money supply are twisted fucks. Don't save money, don't look for value investments, don't look for logic or reason. Do the opposite of everything you were taught. Be reckless. Follow the trends. Don't think; just do what everyone else is doing as soon as it starts to look trendy. Don't look at the underlying tech or fundamentals; the worse the fundamentals, the less efficient, the better the investment!
- Corporations are going to get bigger because the government will help them to establish and expand their monopolies and this will make it impossible to start a small business since it will compete with the interests of corporations. The playing field is not even so don't play that fucking game; they get free money from the government, you don't; they play a different game. The majority of people with power will support corporate monopolies no matter how harmful they are, so nobody will even speak up, you'll be fucked.
- Don't start working on open source. Even if your open source project becomes popular, corporations will use your open source work to make the world a worse place and everyone will make money from your work except you. What kind of fucking world do you think this is?
- Playing by the rules and doing the right thing is for idiots! So far you've been a fucking idiot!
- Be an asshole! Everyone else around you will be an even worse piece of shit so you won't even feel bad about it! It will feel normal. Your successful asshole friends will even think you're a nice guy and they will praise you for your comparatively superior ethics (trust me, the worst stuff that you're capable of doing is not that bad).
- If you think that this sounds 'not worth it', you don't want to know what happens if you continue down the righteous path that you're currently on. Trust me, as your future self who always tried to do the right thing, choose the asshole path.