Things you're allowed to do (2020)
milan.cvitkovic.net
milan.cvitkovic.net
Terminology is confusing, but usually made to measure is when a garment (jacket, coat, shirt, trousers) is made to your specifications on demand. Services vary, but usually the size will be adjusted to your measurements, and you can choose fabrics and construction details.
Many local tailors will do this, and the price isn't much higher than an off the rack piece. If you are buying from a high street brand off the rack you are most certainly getting ripped. Many brands use poor fabrics, choice is limited, and fit isn't great. A made to measure piece will be cheaper, can use better fabrics, will definitely fit better, and gives you plenty of choice and customization. It's almost like a cheat code for nice clothes!!
For example a commissioned a wool jacket in a Loro Piana fabric from a local tailor. I was able to add details such as contrast colour stitching in button holes, custom lining and my monogram on the interior. The cost was about 20% (that is, 80% off) from a comparable jacket from Loro Piana, and using the exact same fabric, which a much better fit to boot.
Likewise you can pay tailors to alter garments. Alterations isn't magic but sometimes you can buy second hand or vintage and get a piece that suits you much better.
A caveat here is that in this case you get what you pay for and construction might not always be great. I had tailors that did great jobs, others that did lousy jobs, and others that do not so great jobs, but the price is so cheap that I put with them.
The first jacket I checked on the Loro Piana website cost $25k... wow.
and then later
> I got mine for 500 pounds.
Yeah, that may hold for "fashion" clothing, but the way you write sounds like that's a generalized statement.
I don't own a single piece of clothing worth $200, and I don't want one either. (I'll make an exception for an all-weather hiking jacket in the future, but even there I'd prefer buying used.)
On the other hand, a local dry cleaners used to patch my pants for $6. That was useful.
You are allowed to do this, but people will think it’s strange. If you don’t want to spend $7.99 on a greeting card (understandable) it’s better to make your own card and write a really thoughtful message. Draw something, if you can, even badly. Those are the cards that people keep.
my grandma used to send postcards without a photo, where all space except the address field was used up with her message.
[Notes from olden times....]
I'm kind of a sweaty guy so I got miradry in my arm pits. They lasered out something like 80% of my sweat glands under my arms and it makes a big difference. I don't sit somewhere feeling absolutely disgusting worried that I stink. You can do it for your hands too if you have sweaty palms. Cost me like $2000.
I'm going to start some hair treatments here soon because it's getting thinner than I like up top
But my body still needs to cool itself so I now sweat profusely on my chest, back, forehead, and palms.
Do you find that your perspiration just found a different outlet?
Otoh, there are definitely people around that stink but are not visibly sweaty. I think it must be more a microbiome issue than anything volume related.
For the record, you are not the judge of your own odor.
And even if someone else says you have no body odor, that still doesn't mean you don't -- some people have less sensitive noses, some think "smell I'm accustomed to" = "no smell", and some will just try to be polite.
(Personally, I haven't put on deodorant since COVID started, but I'm pretty remote..)
If you're starting a project or doing something complicated for the first time (ie, buying a house), pay someone to walk you through the basics and answer a list of questions. It's often cheaper than you think. The hardest part is finding experts who are willing to do one off work for a few hundred or thousand dollars.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/17/sacked...
Quit your W2, form LLC, go back to employer. “Hey boss, I started a new company, me and my team will do just what I did before but now we can scale up and down as needed.”
My business does this. We’ve got ten people and a fantastic amount of work. I was worried that the downturn would hurt us but we have more inbound work now than we did a month ago and we’re adding two new people next week.
In my limited experience, I find that there are tons of people willing to "help" me with tasks I don't care about, whereas it's very hard to find people who can actually provide high value assistance. For example, setting up my company, I called an accounting firm. The guy they put me in touch with had no real input re the specific tax and situational questions I had, and wanted to sell me bookkeeping software (while telling me to call revenue Canada - our IRS - and ask them about my questions.). That seems to be the norm. Same is true with financial advice, legal advice, travel agents, all sorts of things.
Understandably, people have built businesses that "productized" something, and are focused on selling that, because of the low marginal cost. It makes it very hard to actually get expert advice
I'm not the first person to say it, nor is this the biggest example, but definitely evidence in favor of "Real Estate Agents are a oligopolistic cartel"
A real estate agent won't have the insurance, probably has not mechanism to even take your money through their brokerage (who would want a cut of everything and limit the kinds of services the agent could offer). Plus what they told you is correct, there is a limited upside in making even a very high hourly wage offering you advice, and huge downside if there advice doesn't pan out and you sue, or they have some reputational issues from second guessing colleagues. The whole market just isn't set up that way.
And I'd guess a big reason is that at the residential transaction level, there is basically no demand for it. If you're buying a site for an industrial project or housing development or something, I'm sure you can find a consultant that specializes in that.
Tldr, there are good reasons why a real estate agent wouldn't advise you like that, even if overall it's a scummy job.
They typically write back thoughtful responses.
Not giving any examples so they don't get 1000x low effort cryptocurrency pitches.
And I'll continue to not give any examples since I'm apparently already responding to an unprompted low-key pitch about a 1 in a 10,000 cryptocurrency opportunity.
Edit: oops, I misunderstood your low-key pitch. It's even more fascinating-- these technologists could be missing out on anywhere from 0 to 9,999 new crypto opportunities that innovate well beyond the single one you think everyone already knows about. Still, I think I'll pass.
Like seriously nfts? Are we still not talking about the fact that they’re worse than beanie babies?
Just think about how Stripe facilitates the purchase of things many people don’t need.
One piece of advice that I think is actually quite bad, or at least I've had extremely bad experiences with, is asking people for something. I've often cold-emailed artists, programmers and other hobbyists asking them to make their work libre/free (artists CC-BY/CC-BY-SA/CC0, programmers GPL, hobbyists some type of OSH or CERN license) and I don't think I've ever gotten a positive response. The only exception is when I haven't read the documentation in depth and the project is already libre/free.
Most times, asking artists or others to put their work under a libre/free license, even if it's decades old, is met with outright hostility. I usually try to couch the "ask" in passive language and signal understanding if they don't want to but, from my limited experience, this only seems to make people angrier.
I'm sure there are better ways that I could ask and I'm sure I'm framing it in some way that triggers anger but I also don't think there's an actual good way to ask that from someone to try and get them to put their work under a libre/free license.
Talking to people in person is another matter and that I've had good success with, but asking online, through email or otherwise, often ends in them ridiculing me and calling me names.
I also find it confusing how people can use clips from movies, songs etc. not in the public domain or use public domain works outright but not see how contributing to the commons benefits society.
I appreciate your comment but my feeling is that a closer understanding is that the overton window is such that fair use, public domain and old work enriching the commons are so taken for granted that people have forgotten how important they are.
Sorry to reply again, but this is quite surprising to me! I would feel very differently about an individual asking me for a copy of my work for personal use because they couldn't afford it / couldn't find a copy / wanted to learn from it, etc. vs. someone asking me to make my work freely available to all.
Regardless of how you feel about the principals behind why someone should do that, I hope you see there are very real differences in what you are asking them to do.
It seems like an enormous leap to me. Imagine I’ve been approached by someone asking for a free license to my software. They’re probably unlikely to pay me anything (whether unwilling or unable doesn’t matter), so my decision has a likely loss to me of $0 and I can decide if I like the proposed project enough to say “sure, why not?!”
Contrast that with giving my software away to everyone, including people would would pay the money that I use to buy food and shelter.
In case you’re interested in constructive feedback, what you’re doing here sounds more like advocating for someone to provide some social good, but couching it in passive language.
With you not knowing these people, the ask itself is extremely presumptuous and the approach you describe of using passive language likely lands on them as a passive aggressive maneuver. Many people find that that approach to be manipulative and offensive.
If you’d just like personal use for free, you should ask for that directly and maybe share why that would be helpful for you, so that they can approach it as an act of sympathy or charity.
If you are invested in the principles of free/libre works, then you should advocate for that directly explain why the principle is so important to you that you’d engage with a stranger about it.
In both cases, you’re still likely to get a lot of closed doors and hostile responses, but you would at least be doing these people the kindness of being direct about what you want and why you want it.
I suspected as much in terms of the passive language being perceived as passive aggressive. I didn't want to come off as aggressive as most of the time I really like the person or their work and I certainly don't want to strong arm them into doing something they don't want to do.
I think your advice is good to try and personalize the story and be direct about it. I don't have any illusions that this will be successful but at least it won't fail in the same way.
That being said, I can imagine an organization that promotes libre/free work making a blanket email that does just that (I've even read a few myself). The reason is clear because it's the organizations mission and, in that context, direct language would be preferred.
Food for though. I do wonder if there is any strategy that would work.
You’d up the odds a lot if you offered to pay them to relicense the work.
It would say a lot that you’re willing to invest in these principles you care about, and would make it easier for them to quantify the change to what they likely see as an asset portfolio.
What’s currently a charitable plea becomes a philanthropic negotiation.
My next experiment is to frame it in terms of a purely business transaction with the condition that the work released under a libre/free license, making sure not to use any of the passive language I've used before, etc. The issue is always understanding what a fair price is and, for my own personal standards, make sure the artist understands what kind of terms they're agreeing to (the equivalent of "informed consent").
You start by getting them to license the work to you. Unless the person you're asking is a software developer, of course, their first reaction probably isn't going to be quite as "free" as the licenses we're used to around here, but plenty of artists are perfectly willing to grant informal licenses, especially if scoped to some project you have in mind.
(This should go without saying, but this is an SV startup-centered community, so maybe it needs to be specified, but you should not abuse the informality of such terms if you want to convince people any further.)
Then you probe to license their work to other people who aren't you but might be like you in wanting to prepare derivatives of the work, except that they might not have had the temerity to ask. You should realize that this is a much taller ask, especially outside software circles, because people have intuitions about the integrity of their work that public licenses are expressly designed to waive.
At some point in the process you might consider offering to pay for the equivalent of retroactively commissioning the piece to relicense it! This frames what you want as a slightly-twisted variation on a relationship artists in particular are relatively well-equipped to deal with, and usually comes with an understanding of what the buyer can do with the output— "How much would you charge to commission a work to be used for any purpose with unlimited distribution?"
To add to this, artists have lots of experience with people asking for free stuff and couching it in "social good" language. In their experience, these people are invariably assholes, and they don't want to deal with you long enough to find out that you are one too.
I saw from some other responses where you are coming from re: the principals of giving to the commons, and I do sympathize with that in general.
On the flip side, I hope you understand that there are many artists and programmers who are asked to work for free / "for exposure" on a daily basis. Exposure and the common good, unfortunately, does not pay the rent.
For many folks asking for their work to be given away freely is akin to saying "I feel your work is worthless". Or worse "I feel your work is worth something, but I / the world should be able to benefit from your work without you being compensated for providing me that benefit."
Even for folks sympathetic to free/libre principals, being able to give away one's work freely to the world is to be in a position of privilege, where they can work purely for principal of the common good because their own material needs are already being met. For many folks, that simply isn't the case.
It's worth reading deeper.
If you aren't rich, you're allowed to do some of the stuff that rich people do, without doing all of it.
In my opinion, that's the entire reason for preferring a capitalist society where money determines what you get. It means there is some limited freedom from "social station" or class.
Sometimes I’m down a rabbit hole and I realize that the level of mathematics is becoming outside of my (undergrad-level) comfort zone and I often think it would be helpful to sit down with a mathematician for an hour and have a chat with someone expert in X (where X could be combinatorics, probability, statistics, linear algebra, etc...)
Find a local university, look up their math (or whatever) department, and a simple email to one or more professors explaining what you want to do and that you're willing to pay will more than likely give you some leads if nothing else. Hell, you might even find that the professor's time is within your budget depending on the institution and their level of seniority.
He offered to do it himself and when he told me his rate it was so low I was almost embarrassed.
Those people probably aren't good candidates for a friendly chat anyway. Believe it or not, there are plenty who don't want anything from you.
Normal people interact with us all the time.
You might try just being friendly with people some time. It's only weird if you go about it in a weird way.
Run for office
Start a SuperPAC
Rent powerful tools
Install three-phase power to your homelab
Rent an office
Create a mysterious alter ego
Write a book. (Fiction, even.)
Hire a voice actor / composer / musician / painter / ... (related to several ideas on OP’s list)
File a patent
Build a musical instrument… radio transmitter… boat… car… plane… helicopter… rocket…
Many counties and cities also have boards that normal citizens can join. It's usually not too hard to get on it if you can make a good case like "I live in the community, this is important to me, I have experience in this area." Good thing to do if you don't want to get as involved as running for office. You also might meet some important people in local government
Your employer will claim this as his own.
The employer may be right to, if you develop it on the company dime or it’s related to your work, right? If you do it on your own time with your own resources, and your employer doesn’t agree to leave you alone, then take some of the other advice in the post and hire a lawyer. Speaking from experience, having a legal agreement signed by my employer that my own developments belong to me and aren’t competing was worth every penny just for peace of mind.
Three phase? What kind of homelab?
That said, everyone can get 240 (and almost everyone does, for the washer/dryer), and I'm pretty sure that with 240 and a device (VFD?) anyone can kinda create their own 3-phase on a smaller scale.
You’re actually very much not allowed to do this in many professional situations. Unfortunately the line between when it’s okay and not okay is illegible to many people.
I love this one. Back in Chicago, I realized the rate I was getting parking tickets at was about the same as the rate at which I would otherwise pay for street parking. I also learned that if you pay the meter, LAZ Parking takes a huge cut, whereas parking fines go directly to the city so I started incurring parking tickets instead.
Also I learned that Chicago doesn't do anything until your third ticket, so if you're going to leave the city, you can park for free for your last couple of weeks. I guess that one is a little more unethical.
The streetlamps are on in Chicago tonight
And lovers are gazing at stars
The stores are all closing
And Daley is dosing
And the fatman's counting the cars
And there's more cars than places to put 'em, he said
But I've got room for them all
...
Be particularly attentive to rough ground (cobblestone), curbs, puddles, lamp-posts or other obstacles.
If your parking passes that test, it generally also accommodates the blind, bicyclists, children, etc.
It's not hard to find spaces that pass the test -- which is also why it upsets me so when people neglect to.
I think if everyone did this, the rate each person was taxed at would fall below the current rough meter equivalent amount and the city (and LAZ Parking) would gather less revenue.
Up to you if you consider that positive or negative.
As a side note, I've always thought that the categorical imperative is as good of a rule to follow as any. But sometimes the 'if literally everyone behaved this way' thought experiment can get pretty silly, not to mention impossible to actually determine what would happen in such a case.
why?
I read somewhere that half of the space in some downtown areas is dedicated to infrastructure for cars. Seems like a lot.
but someone complained about paid public parking specifically
I don’t think it’s the case that you can’t find a land use undesirable just because it generates income.
That really seems like it depends on what the damage a particular action causes.
Property destruction, for example, probably shouldn't scale. If I, accidentally, destroy your shoes, I need to buy you a new pair of shoes (and maybe a bit extra for your inconvenience). The goal is to make the victim whole again.
For things with the potential for loss of life, the goal is primarily deterrence, I think that's where things make more sense to start scaling.
Basically "you can deviate nicely from your nerd stereotype but not too much"
Fuck that. Go to raves and take drugs for a while for some real change
Be careful with this one. If the student is here on a visa, they are not allowed to have outside employment. Many do have "under the table" income of course, because graduate stipends are poverty-level at most schools, but it could get them in trouble.
I've been wondering about this. A quick Google reveals that barter is indeed taxable. This specific example might be silly, but would it be taxed according to the market rate for toilet cleaning services?
Warning about this, I've been doing this for the last five years, and it's made re-entering the job market difficult. I've spent the time working on Open Source software and doing what I love, but it seems to raise a lot of red flags to potential employers. So document all of your crazy adventures so that you have something to point to. Or start your own thing along the way.
Not that employers wouldn't want to hire you, but that you've tasted too much freedom and your brain will never put up with the bullshit that is modern corporate employment ever again.
Instead, people should be allowed to list experiences that are relevant to the position. And then it is also fine to say, that one has worked for X years on something. But anything that is not related to the job should not be necessary to share.
Having been on the receiving end of a lot of CVs I can’t say that I expect any particular structure.
A CV is just like “technical specifications”. As long as it honesty tries to convey wether you are worth my time to evaluate for a particular role you can structure it anyway you like.
Things you are allowed to do +1
Thanks. Even though you are the first person who tells me this. Plenty of career workshops say the opposite.
Hiring managers and recruiters are just people, looking for other people to give jobs to. However you convince them to do it is what works.
You can’t possibly interview everyone who applied, so you have to filter. Sometimes it’s easy (eg you’re hiring a senior but the candidate has only 2 yrs experience) but that’s rare. You have to develop more filters, or you’ll drown.
If I see a resume with a recent gap, it presents a question: What’s up? Why was this person not employed? There are many reasons, many not good. So I’ll pass, there are many other resumes without this problem.
Doing your own thing doesn’t mean there needs to be a gap. Write what you did! Call it a Startup or Startup Explorations. Talk about the idea, the tech, the UX, the marketing, all of it. This will show that you’re a self starter, a problem solver. Leaving the years empty doesn’t show any of that.
Let me leave you with this pragmatic thought: We can argue here if chronological resumes are good or bad, and what we should have instead. In the real world, that doesn’t matter because everybody else is submitting a resume, and you want yours to stand out for the better, not for worse.
I work to live, not live to work.
In our case we have a fast moving project and so need people with specific skill sets. So having the right skill set has much greater weight than a CV gap.
TBF I would want to know what happened if you are just coming back into the market after a year or more, but if you have one gap is a year or so back and you've been working since, I don't see how that is a problem. I'd be more worried about someone who had no gap but never held a job down for more than 6 months.
Its true that if you are hiring a bunch of common roles you need to filter the CVs somehow.
I’m honest about what I did during any lengthy leave of work.
I’ve experienced no company loyalty so I give none. It’s a contract, an agreement, nothing more. I always will emphasize my talents and skills and explain how that fits into the role I’m seeking. 90% of the time this works but occasionally there’s someone who thinks it’s career suicide to leave a job before 10 years.
They are mostly boomers.
I went back into the salaried workforce eventually, and the background check company just wanted some proof that my company existed, which I covered by showing them the business license or something (can't remember exactly what I did). Practically zero hassle. (I just told the truth in the interview that I wasn't proving to be a business genius, and I was worried I'd eventually fall behind on technical topics)
It was fine, I went back to work over a year ago and made more money than I ever have before.
Not in a "regular" retail store, but in any case where a single person has the authority to adjust the price: any kind of street market, for instance.
True story: I was in England and with some friends who live there, and we were going to an "artist open studios" day. I mentioned that back in the States, I routinely offered less money to the artist than they were asking. Not a whole lot less, just 10-20%. The "asking price" for a piece of one-off art is completely arbitrary anyway and the artist is almost always happy to bargain.
My British friend looked horrified. I don't know if everyone there would consider it rude, or just her.
There is so much marketing around "hand crafted" products that people forget it's all either fake/weasel words or done in very low wage places.
Even in "regular" retail stores. I have successfully bargained in big box stores, it doesn't always work of course, but even these stores are usually managed by humans and salesmen, especially those with experience are often allowed some margin.
- Live in multiple places with multiple people
- Arrange your own timeshare system with friends
- E.g. a group of nine friends can rent three three-bedroom apartments in three citiesTip: WD-40 is for cleaning rust. It's not a very good lubricant. For squeaky hinges, or many kinds of metal-to-metal contact, you want 3-In-One oil, which is a real lubricant that's in most hardware stores.
Just because you're allowed to do something, and by 'allowed' I assume it means, not breaking the laws written down by your local, state, and national legislative bodies, doesn't mean you should do that thing. (And, conversely, there also may be things you aren't technically allowed to do that might sometimes be a good idea to do, although any such actions should be contemplated judiciously).
IIRC this was Rowling's basis for saying "Harry Potter fanfic is fine as long as it's not erotic" -- too many kids searching online for everything Harry Potter.
Also the attack on the strawman is very elementary as well.
Also, if I may, you may be associating this article too heavily with the field of self-help. I personally am not a fan of self-growth tips (most are bad), but I thought this article was not bad. For instance, you don’t really think to hire a personal researcher. And also, it’s just a list, not prose selling an idea. Also most “products” on this list are abstract.
https://www.businessinsider.com/fifty-shades-of-grey-started...