cseleborg

Is it a bit much, though?

Unlike me, my children will never experience their home planet without microplastics everywhere, from the highest peak down to the deepest trench in the ocean. They will have to pay a hefty price for what we and those before us have done to the environment. I think that's a bit much.

Where's the cost-benefit for them of wrapped cucumbers?

Like I said, there are applications where plastic is justified, medical devices for example. Cucumbers, bread, smartphones, cutlery, plants, cereal, rice, potatoes, toys: I think there are plastic-free solutions that we should now absolutely and urgently go for.

That was news to me, although I guess I'm not surprised. It's frustratingly difficult to buy groceries at the supermarket without plastic.

I haven't bought a cucumber wrapped in plastic in years (I actively avoid them) and have thrown away maybe two cucumbers in the same time.

At this point, I think any plastic is a problem, and it needs very serious consideration whether plastic should be used. I'm fine with wrapping sterilized medical equipment in plastic. Crispbread, not so much.

This seems unsustainable. Cranberry fields forever?

Seriously, we need legally imposed limits on the use of single-use plastic wrapping, a correction of the economics and a change in habits.

Our family consumes two kinds of crispbread. One manufacturer (Wasa) uses paper for its wrapping. The other (FinnCrisp) use a plastic wrapping inside a carton box. That's just absurd.

Other products may not have a single-use alternative, like meat. Consigned containers is a solution here, already widely in use for beverages in many countries.

As long as manufacturers can get away with wrapping stuff in plastic, they will. We need to pressure them into finding alternatives.

As someone else pointed out here, we are paying a high price already for the damage we're doing to the environment (waste collection infrastructure, rising insurance prices, tax-funded repairs after natural disasters). If we folded those costs into the prices of the products most responsible for them, and added some legislation on top, we could change quite a few habits in relatively little time. It just needs someone with guts to make those decisions, which is something in rather short supply, at least here in Germany...

End of rant.

Oh, dear, I hope that was ironic?

There are so many interactions at work outside of politics, which I would define as the advancement of your personal agenda before that of the organization and of anybody else.

I have such rich interactions with my colleagues. Sometimes we work together on a project. Sometimes it's purely social, like the first few minutes of a meeting with someone I haven't talked to in a long time. Sometimes they need my support or I need theirs. And sometimes (rarely) it's about having an uncomfortable conversation because something didn't go well. But none of these is about politics. I love where I work, in big parts because of the lack of politics.

(Edit: Typo)

Oh, what satisfaction there was in removing the gunk off the mouse's spinning rods!

I wonder if it's worth worrying about that. There's plenty of freelancers who have no ambition of growing beyond a small team that helps them with the side stuff. Those are the freelancers who don't want to become entrepreneurs. I think they're an interesting enough market to target, and maybe it's OK if those who have dreams of growth don't feel addressed here?

Come to think of it, it may actually be flattering to solos if you recognize them for what they are and don't treat them as not-yet-bigs, if that makes sense.

Interesting but not entirely convincing link between being introverted or extroverted and self confidence. That probably deserves a little more nuance. Confidence in which ability? I'd like to read more on that.

So once everybody has automated this, the next level will be the handwritten note with a personal detail, which will increase (repeat) sales.

Back in the day, I used to write a handwritten note with every single box I sent out. Since I had often had a conversation with the customer prior to that, I could often include some personal detail, showing that the message was not generic but truly written for that person. (I did have a generic message that I would use in a minority of cases.)

It does take a little bit of dedication and love of the customer to do this over and over again, so I'm not convinced shady, unscrupulous marketers would do it.

Caveat: My business eventually failed, so...

I struggle with this, too. I'm just very verbose. I try to keep this piece of advice about working to shorten a text in mind: it's done, not when there is nothing more to add, but when nothing more can be removed. (Saint-Exupery, I believe). It helps me a little bit.

That's a very clean way of dividing up the data, I'd be curious about those figures too.

I was going to question the relevance of comparing tech-caused accidents with human-caused accidents since, despite the growing evidence that tech is the better driver under normal circumstances, we have this cognitive bias around lower perceived safety when someone/something else is driving. People just want to feel in control, even though they're more likely to crash, and my guess is that this will slow down adoption of self-driving technology more than necessary. But then I realized that evidence like this would probably be the best argument no matter what, so in the end, it makes even more sense to compare those numbers!

Oh, dear. Managing deep trees of TODOs is... not a good way of managing TODOs.

I find long TODO lists/trees stressful and cumbersome. I used to maintain quite a few of those, but eventually found it discouraging. There's no end in sight!

What I appreciate about GTD and its context lists that look and feel like TODO lists is that they are short. While I may have items sitting on mine for several weeks at a time, overall, they feel entirely manageable, like about a week's worth of work. GTD provides me with other tools to get stuff out of my head and reliably resurface them when needed.

(Edit: style)

Lots of good advice already, specifically taking breaks/a break, cutting back hours and therapy. Burnout is serious stuff.

Reading your post, I get the sense that you're stuck in the tension between not feeling competent enough yet wanting to "earn a good amount of money".

Maybe you're not the 200-500k/year superstar programmer, but you're definitely competent enough, holding your startup's stack together like you are doing, to earn a comfortable living programming. What are your salary expectations? How much would be a "good amount"?

If you think about what you really need to be happy, how much salary would be enough?

Maybe the difference between "a good amount" and "enough" can help reduce that tension once you realize that you don't need to have a rock-star salary to be happy?

Well, I did write that I nowadays store digital photos of my important notes.

However...

Like psyc, I still have notebooks around from my teenage years. What I no longer have are the recordings from my piano compositions from that same period.

I did lose one notebook once. It had my email address in it, and the finder contacted me. Somehow, the handover failed. I was angry, but in all honesty, it hasn't affected my life a bit.

I used to use OneNote with the Microsoft Pen (or is it Stylus? I forget...) to take notes in this fashion. Eventually, though, there are only a few cases, like large diagrams that you need to evolve over time, where a digital solution beats a paper notebook. The need to start and unlock the computer/tablet if it's not already on, to dismiss or ignore notifications, to launch the app, to select the right color or tool and the occasional glitch when writing (pen sometimes not writing, or suddenly jumping to a completely different place, even deleting old lines when drawing new ones, I feel like I've seen it all) add up to more friction than a paper notebook.

My notebook, which I use like a Bullet Journal, has no batteries that need recharging, no screen that can crack, no notifications, the pen has an ink capacity of over 2 years of daily writing, with a new recharge costing ~6€, no software updates.

There's no search, and occasionally I do flip through the pages longer than I'd like, but it's rare.

Nowadays I mostly write in my paper notebook, and if there's something in there worth keeping, I upload a photograph of it in Notion.

The trucker's hitch is one ofy favorites. I use it (with some Paracord) to tie stuff done to my bike. A piece of cord is just so much more durable and more compact than those elastic bands with hooks. I prefer taking the extra 30 seconds rather than risking a rubber cord snapping somewhere near my face.

I learned the taut-line hitch a while ago and find it great for exactly this purpose, and it looks a bit easier than the one you suggest. Do you have a particular reason to recommend this one?

Not just America. Europe, and other civilisations in the past, always benefited from immigration.

Not in agriculture, so I don't really know what I'm talking about, but...

Isn't that pretty much everything that's wrong with our agriculture today? Isn't large-scale monoculture, which this system obviously aims to support, a part of the environmental problems we're facing?

The original article points to the unsustainable course of the current trend, so while the caterpillar system and the ability to roll on less land solves the immediate problem described, it fails once you look at the bigger picture, I think.

Those are some pretty interesting websites of yours! I checked them out to see if they shared some sort of common Kirby look-and-feel, but you seem to put enough emphasis on design to offset any such thing. The projects look very interesting too.

That TODO item is just the receipt for a few bytes of technical debt you took with the universe. A few bytes is nothing compared to Management's roadmap, so it gets ignored. But have no doubt: the universe always returns to claim its technical debt...

Well, there's Schröder, of course, definitely a bit embarrassing now. But there were also those for whom this actually was a legitimate foreign policy strategy. I do believe DE's current president and former foreign policy minister, F.-W. Steinmeier, genuinely thought increasing business with Russia was the way to keep Europe's annoying neighbour civil.

> except our own behaviour

Oh, well, no risk of that predator disappearing anytime soon, then...

I think we're recognising that this strategy was a mistake and simply didn't work with Russia. If we trade with them, they'll become more like us, was the thinking, and the strategy behind the German government's policy towards Russia for 15 years.

One might argue that our strive for convenience, especially around transportation and throwaway plastics, is about to ruin the whole planet.

> try cleaning the heads with IPA

I've had mixed results with cleaning heads with IPA. My head often seems very sluggish the next morning, and other people with whom I spend such evenings have reported similar results with their heads.

Is it, though? I'd imagine throwing more partners into the mix only increases the pressure to generate big returns in the short run.

Do you have any examples?

That's what I did, and that's not how it works. The Bürgschaftsbank guarantees the loan in case the founder fails to repay. I'm going through that right now.

I like some of what the article proposes, but some parts leave me skeptical. The author sketches out an industry of funds to buy and scale small businesses to Middelstand level. I think one of the reasons for Germany's strong Mittelstand is that many of these are privately owned, sometimes even family-owned, and can take a long-term view on business and innovation. I lack the imagination to see how the proposed kinds of funds could be content with dividends year after year rather than the exits I suspect they'd prefer.

I wish there were more dividends-only VCs...

> they give you a loan

Yes, they do, if you can provide a security for the loan. More often than not, the founder is the guarantor, which sucks for them if the business fails. This is moderately founder friendly, to say the least.