Hemingway, Hounded by the Feds
nytimes.com
I sometimes wonder what will happen to all these programmers when they're 60, 70? Will we all wind up manager?
nytimes.com
I met a guy on his 60th birthday who was considering starting another start-up.
I'm fifty. I did some back-to-back 100 hour weeks last year, and definitely felt it a lot more than I did when I was 30. But I work smarter and I know more tricks. My .emacs file is full of hardfought wisdom (mostly knowing what to throw out, frankly).
I think I have some good years left :-)
You sure do pal. Thank you for the inspiration.
This is about seeing the end of the road and realizing the greatest things you've done you can never do again. Here's a man who is considered by some the greatest american writer (words of my freshman year english prof), who felt like he would "never achieve what he was capable of"(paraphrase).
See:
http://www.jayebee.com/creations/incompleteness/incompletene...
Before that it was "What happens when a programmer retires?" or something like that. The first 5 or 6 comments made more sense then.
(btw, i didn't catch the before link)
As I read his works, I often wondered if he just lived in more interesting times or did he himself make life so interesting?
Why isn't anybody commenting about the surprise ending to this article? Spolier: People thought Hemmingway was crazy for thinking the FBI was after him, but after he died it turned out they really were building a case on him.
Disturbing, and unsurprising, that Hemingway was harassed.
"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists." -Hemingway
Hemingway was a known harsh critic of the state. Sure you have freedom of speech and expression, but they have the freedom to keep an eye on you.
I am sure there were many other incidents occurring in his life that contributed just as much to his early departure.
I can only imagine what it was like back in that era, specializing in a SPECIFIC field with no tangents and suddenly being unable to perform your specialty due to any reason. If anything, this probably lead more to his demise than the FBI.
Sure, J. Edgar Hoover was a special case. Or was he?
Even though it was unfinished, Moveable Feast is one of my favorite books of all time. Definitely worth reading if you haven't yet.
Really though, I love Hemingway and the end of his career when he realized could not retire, could never retire, that struck a nerve with me. What will I do in my 50s and 60? Will I still be able to practice my craft? At what level?
Home this clears up some confusion.
Anecdotally, I had a close family member go through what sounds like very much what Hemingway was going through, although it was the builders out to get them, not the feds. They would seem them trailing them everywhere, every tradesman, every building site, every van was a tail set up for them and them alone.
The “Why would two auditors be working in the middle of the night? Of course it’s my account.” echos the things that they would say. It was extremely distressing for them and us.
It recently happened again, this time the paranoia prominently featured the egyptians. They had recently given a talk on the history of the egyptians. That's all it took.
Luckily for us we lived in an age where they have a pill which made it all go away in less than 2 weeks.
>> The “Why would two auditors be working in the middle of the night? Of course it’s my account.” echos the things that they would say.
The difference between Hemingway and your friends is that Hemingway turned out to be right. The chance that someone paranoid would /randomly/ guess the truth about the world is /very, very/ low. That means his brain was probably working well.
Now, as for the question of how you should feel when you are tailed by the FBI for several years -- I think "paranoia" (read: taking steps to maintain personal privacy) isn't an absurd response
This isn't reddit, read the article first before posting.
This isn't 4chan, read comments before replying :p
“Auditors. The F.B.I.’s got them going over my account.”
You're telling me the FBI were in that bank? And even if by some billion to one shot they were in that bank, you're telling me they were auditing his account?
Whatever.
Do you think Hemingway had an account at that bank, or do you think he was wrong about that?
Do you think Hemingway was correct about an audit, or do you think he was wrong about that?
Do you think Hemingway had any information other than just (where I have a bank account), and (am being audited) that he used to infer that the F.B.I. had the bankers up late? (Including tips from other banks he used, tips from friends in that bank in particular, phone calls asking him to update information pre-audit, etc)
>> You're telling me the FBI were in that bank?
From the article we have plenty of evidence that Hemingway was quite perceptive about stuff like this. Also, my understanding is that Hemingway wasn't the sort to say random stuff.
>> And even if by some billion to one shot they were in that bank, you're telling me they were auditing his account?
Since we can be pretty sure it was in fact Hemingway's bank, and since we can be pretty sure that being investigated by the F.B.I. involves and audit, and since the investigation was only two years in length... the idea that it's a billion to one shot is _absurd_. Several nights over the two year time span this quote came from would have involved auditing. You're either not thinking properly, or your trolling.
The way to think is to _start with the data_, and then figure out the _most likely hypothesis_... NOT figure out which of your friends a quote reminds you of, and the likelihood that your friend would be lying.
Okay, hope that was enlightening for you. I'm off!
(this will be my last reply, as I'm 40% sure you're trolling at this point)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-oped-0701-hemi...
Last paragraph was really weird, though. An unsourced, odd vision of afterlife described as "perhaps" Hemingway's? Was he even superstitious?
(I have a single copy that I'll send (for free) via media-mail to whomever wants it, provided it's in the U.S. Just shoot me an email at my user name @gmail.com.)
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2004/06/the-transformatio...
Retirement is for the frail and the exceedingly [wealthy+lazy]. There is the probability that you will never be the latter, and if you're young now there's a good chance that you won't be the former either - at least not on the timescale you're thinking of.
So planning well for the future requires considerably more thought than just looking at what everyone did during the previous generation or two.
Some things don't progress. Sometimes technology gets to a local maximum and the next breakthrough is perpetually about 50 years away (i.e. energy production). We won't be the first generation to die of cancer despite spending our youths convinced that they would have cured cancer by then.
For one, most of us know the dangers of extrapolating past the end of data points, so we shouldn't base longevity changes on an extrapolated graph.
Secondly, there are signs that longevity has peaked. There was an article a couple of weeks ago that got bandied about in the Australian press (which I can't find now, darn it) that life expectancy is now a little shorter than it was a decade ago. From memory, it was USA data, so perhaps a US reader will remember it.
It is too bad J.Edgar Hoover didn't write...
Hemingway (along with his "literary style of wearing false hair on the chest") damaged himself in his maniacal rush to prove himself the pinnacle of manliness. And Hoover, who was probably queer, commenced an unsurpassed reign of sexual blackmail of everyone including the wives of presidents.
Though I shouldn't speak such ill of the dead, I suppose.
Part of working for yourself is figuring out things like budgets and savings for retirement.