bartedinburgh

What do you mean by real chicken? What are McNuggets made of in the US?

I saw Americans amazed at Europe’s “real cheese”, and Coca-Cola with “real sugar”. I have never heard the explanation for “real chicken” yet.

This is funny and scary at the same time.

Small fish in a big pond? I've heard a completely opposite advice stating that "in a big pond" there's much competition, and dominating a small niche yields better results. What is the rationale behind being a small fish in a big pond?

I use https://kanbanflow.com to manage my week.

Instead of classic Todo - Doing - Done, my board is divided into Todo - Monday - Tuesday - ... - Sunday - Done. The board contains both work-related and private tasks. If a new task comes up randomly during the day, I just add it to the board and immediately resume whatever I was doing. Since I've scheduled the new task for later, it's not occupying my mind anymore.

The app has a built-in pomodoro timer. I don't necessarily use it in a strict sense (100% deep work) but I don't do any non-work-related tasks when the timer is on, so it helps me fight procrastination and schedule my breaks.

I've blocked most sites that I identified as time-wasters. My phone is in my drawer on "silent" and I usually don't pick up the phone at all during my working hours.

I've noticed that one of the most important things for me is gaining momentum. If I work 2-3 pomodoros first thing in the morning, it's usually going to be a productive day overall, but if I start with procrastinating, the whole day often ends up not very productive. So I pay much attention to how I start the day.

On a not strictly work-related note, going to bed and waking up at the same time significantly improved my overall life satisfaction. During my last holidays, I took measurements how much sleep I naturally need (~7.5h) when there's no pressure to wake up early. Then I started taking care to always be in bed at a set time (11 p.m.) and get the right amount of sleep.

Being an expat myself, I cannot help but notice that it's often more expensive than being a local, especially in the beginning. Less choice in housing, no family support, being unable to claim certain benefits either because not qualifying or simply being unfamiliar with local laws are some of the reasons causing this. If you need a visa/work permit you can also incur siginificant expenses (both time and money) because of that.

I have an above-average income in the UK, and often hear about "people who live on half of what I do" conviniently omitting their reliance on social housing, family help, and state benefits, all of which I lack. While it's possible for a foreigner to acquire those things, it takes a significant amount of time.

Yeah, most of Europe is barely on par with Canada if not worse.

Check out static website generators like Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com). If that doesn't meet your needs, you can still use the same tools as for a bigger webapp e.g. Node + React + Bootstrap/Materialize.

A CSS framework like Bootstrap (https://getbootstrap.com) will provide you with some easy to use components.

I used to work for one and was not proud of it because I felt our products did not provide any value.

My boss had this theory how betting small amounts of money is just another form of entertainment people enjoy, just like going to the cinema or playing a video game, and thus we were in the entertainment business. I didn't really buy it and I wondered if he truly believed it himself.

Not everyone has a chance to work on world-changing, truly innovative stuff, but there's a lot of productive, useful work to be done, and I just think that online betting is not one of them.

If you have $5 million reasonably invested, you could pay yourself approximately $200k per year until you die (the average long-term expected return from the stock market is > 4% above inflation) and likely leave some cash to your kids.

Except those who die in poverty after a miserable retirement because they haven't prioritized financial wellbeing in their lives.

That's what happens when you entirely rely on one platform as your source of income, be it Freelancer, YouTube, Amazon, or anything else. You become de facto employed by the platform and can be let go in a similar way you can be fired from a regular job.

If OP had a normal salaried job and was let go for whatever reason, would it matter if he used to be a good employee before, or had a car accident, or was short on cash? No, I wouldn't matter; his employer would not keep paying him on the basis of "being fair" or "helping in a difficult life situation".

While I understand OP's frustration, his story is really nothing out of ordinary. I know many people who were, fairly or not, let go and subsequently got into financial trouble. Life's tough.

You are right. In my original post I implicitly meant office jobs (software in particular). I kept that assumption implicit because I understood that the article was concerned with jobs that had the potential to be done remotely and thus save you the commute time. Mopping floors does not have the remote potential in the first place, while some (most?) office jobs do.

I think it's connected with the rise of bullshit jobs.

If your job is well defined, e.g. make an app or a website design, you can do it anywhere in the world. The app/design is your deliverable that anyone can see and judge.

If your job is a poorly defined "management" or "product ownership", with no real deliverable, how can your work be judged? Your job turns into convincing other people that your job is useful. Work long hours, seem busy, attend meetings, leave the office late. An epitome of the corporate environment.

I suppose the idea is to work in SV for a couple years while you're still young and healthy, rack up as much cash as you can while living quite frugally, then move to a cheaper place, buy a house for cash (or at least have a solid downpayment), and have no problem finding a job since you have X years of relevant experience at top-tier companies.

The result of fleeing middle class is that you have a city with a strange mix of very wealthy individuals (who can afford the high COL) and very poor people (who cannot afford to move out).

I've left the center of my live in pursuit of a better job, and even though I earn above average wage, taxes & rent consume a huge chunk of it, because many people here live in subsidized housing.

Is that more fair?

Now I can either be poor in my home town (no good jobs) or poor in a big city, where my wage is largely consumed by high taxes and rent. Why do other people deserve a subsidized house but I don't? I want more disposable income too.