> The country went insane when inflation crossed 5%
This is actually one of the few reasons I'm hopeful for the next election (assuming we still get one) - last time, regardless of the root cause, the country blamed those in power right then.
> How does one even go about accusing someone of insider trading? The illegality sounds pretty unenforceable.
Much of it is data analysis. My favorite examples of this are actual hacks - once foothold is established instead of encrypting & ransoming, the attacker just listens to the CEO/CFO. One hacked a law firm that handled some sizable mergers.
Personal tangent: Once had an opportunity to insider trade on a particular huge aerospace company. Playing a squad-based PvE game, matchmade into a team with 3 real-life friends at said company who chatted on in-game voice comms about their day, talking about court cases and senate hearings, and later panicked when they realized I could hear it all. They were nice guys, and I assured them that I wouldn't misuse what I overheard - I don't work in a relevant industry, and my investments do just fine without an illegal edge (plus I know Matt Levine's Laws of Insider Trading #1: Don't).
Not combat-armor, but a lot of motorcycle protective gear is exactly this. D3O is soft/flexible normally, but goes rigid on impact. I have plates of it in my own riding gear. I believe there's also some progressive versions that harden more or less based on the impact force.
Also, the additional task of tracking down all the monthly charges when my personal credit card number was compromised yet again and I need to update my payment details
> LAION “only maintains a database containing links to image files that are publicly available on the Internet,” arguing that it does not keep the image data so there it can’t delete the file.
As I see it, this is another step in a field whose history is a story of force-multipliers. 60 years ago, they used punch-cards. Every decade or so sees a sizable jump in how much an individual programmer can accomplish in a given time frame, and it has only increased the demand for such specialists.
For most of that time, we made middle-class money like most other engineering disciplines. We're due for a reversion to the mean.
Lately I keep thinking about Star Trek - everyone can issue commands to the computer, but they still had vast armies of engineers.
Bingo. I, and others I've known, don't fit in California, so we bootstrapped somewhere with a low cost-of-living and fiber-to-the-home with a proper privacy agreement. Many don't have the goal of growth, but subsistence for the nerds - freed from the tyranny of MBAs, spend company and personal time on side projects unrelated to the Business.
Some have drawn the attention of the SV crowd - they sold, to YC grads or bigger corpos, and immediately bootstrapped again. The money is a Means only; We just want to solve puzzles and learn things.
Or union labor. I needed some electrical work on a new house, but there's no electricians available for months. Hanging out with a contractor friend, I mentioned that the state law says "the homeowner OR a licensed electrician", and he reacted like doing it myself meant wiring the house with dead orphans or something. I've done electrical work, I just make more money in software so I'm not licensed, but that is somehow even worse because I'm depriving the union electricians of work. So now its a secret I take to my grave apparently.
I used to joke that we couldn't call ourselves Software Engineers without professional liability/E&O insurance, until I got a contract that required I hold exactly that and I learned it just costs $100/mo or so.
Lived & owned homes for 20 years in an area where ASHP are standard installs as the climate range meant 100% of normal (outside of freak polar vortex) heating and cooling was covered by the heat pump. Inexpensive part failure is common annually - usually capacitors and fan motors. Usually expensive part or system failures occur around 10-15 years.
This is the same niche I fell into - building applications to standardize the work happening parallel to SAP because it didn't cover the edge cases, and people created their own workflows using mostly spreadsheets passed around. Which, comically, our client eventually bought another enterprise piece of software to cover our niche. We figured the gig was up...that was 5 years ago. Turns out the new enterprise software covers only a tiny fraction of the edge cases, so ours just keeps chugging along, paying the bills.
You can also buy dechlorinator for use with aquariums - super important to not accidentally kill the bacteria maintaining your nitrogen cycle. A bottle goes a very long way (ratio is drops per gallon of tap water).
Founders can offer to buy the rights back later. I did this exactly - sold exclusive rights to software and team was hired onto acquiring company, years later acquiring company decides to shut down software arm and terminate existing service agreements. I offered to buy the rights plus our team back (for about 1% of the initial sale - they were going to just shutter it all), and immediately engaged the clients in new contracts. That purchase agreement was a doozy, spent more on lawyers than buying the rights back.
Consider caring for some other solitary bees. Personally, I like leafcutter and mason bees, which mostly just means providing homes (hollow tubes), construction materials (leaves & mud respectively), and flowering plants. In late winter, you harvest the cocoons to remove parasite-ridden or diseased (fungal, usually). They are aggressive pollinators and if you grow fruit & vegetables you will see increased yield that makes up for the lack of wax & honey.
Regarding Forensics - if you were going to work in computer forensics, I did that for a bit after grad school. I didn't last 6 months: aside from a couple corporate espionage cases, everything else was child porn/abuse. Important job, but soul crushing digging through personal machines seeking that for 40 hours a week.
Many companies don't just undervalue their current staff, they underestimate the market value and demand for that staff. My wife was in this situation, pushed for market analysis of her staff (mostly PMs) to take to management in an argument to give out raises. That analysis was some employees were underpaid by almost half the market rate. Management disagreed with the analysis. Within 2 years, the entire department was depopulated, having taken alternate job offers for considerably more money. The CFO couldn't grasp that people wouldn't just stay out of loyalty at 60% of what they could make elsewhere.
This is commonly called the 'Paradoxical Reaction' and is pretty well documented, not just for stimulants. Antihistamines, for example, may cause drowsiness in neurotypicals but increased agitation & activity in ADHD. Per my ADHD sister, she's supposed to inform her anesthesiologist of this prior to any surgeries because there's similar complications with some anesthesia.
This was exactly my fear when designing my new house - I wanted to build a hybrid (heat pump and gas furnace) air-conditioning and water-heating system for a home in a climate with very cold winter and increasingly hot summer. Despite providing charts on efficiency & cost savings, and a detailed plan for installation, I eventually gave up. If I couldn't make builders, plumbers & HVAC techs understand, I'd never be able to get it serviced; If the techs couldn't understand it, I'd never get a future buyer to understand it either.
As someone navigating this right now - it's a mess. Business is in a no-income-tax state, I moved to 4% state, and it was deemed easiest to be personally responsible for paying quarterly estimates so the business isn't on the hook for paying business taxes to a state it doesn't do any business in. Some states, however, decided now was a good time to declare a single remote worker in their state means that company has a nexus there, and thus owes all corporate taxes to that state.
Carnivorous plants are only edible in the most technical sense. They grow in low nutrient environments and slowly digest prey - meaning you'd be eating something that is mostly small leaves coated in rotting insect goo.
I would maintain some hope for municipal fiber. Our local power company deployed one carefully, and was very successful despite repeated suits by the cable-internet provider. Eventually the ISP fought back at the state government level which limited the fiber's expansion, but lots of rural areas launched their own using similar models. Apparently the cable monopolies didn't feel it was worth competing for rural areas, meaning a number of farmhouses, hours away from cities, have better service for cheaper.
Clearly not considered: new acquaintances may be filtering out the author. I was in SF less than a week and found locals were friendlier if they didn't know I worked in tech, doubly so with the Bay area natives.
If you don't want to be pigeon-holed as the stereotypical Tech worker ('the ones ruining SF'), then show you have other interests and qualities. Author has done a fine job of defining the edges of that particular mould. The fix is the same as the other comments - break the mould, get outside the comfort zone.