iteria

I check every month and it hasn't happened to me in years. But then, I leverage PayPal or other such things when possible.

You're supposed to read these books multiple times. You read the first time to get a general understanding. And then you reference things within the book as they pop up as ideas you want to remember more about. No one remembers the details of anything they read the first time. It's about constant exposure. Some things however, are important for shaping your general thought processes, but not important enough to remember specifically

Once I got any vision, it was just gradual improvement. The issue is that I missed the critical period for vision so my brain was just spectacularly bad at understanding the world and very slow about learning how to get better. Every year my brain figures out how to process the world a little more. I've always had 20/20 vision technically. There's nothing wrong with my eyes except that my optical nerves are scarred.

But more people know what bacteria are at a baseline level and what they do with diseases than before when all we had were demons/bad humors/etc.

There are functionally illiterate people too in modern day and the average reading level is still elementary school level, but that's vastly better than before when the average person couldn't read at all.

Same and I'm American.

Although as an American, I always struggle with blanket statements because we have wildly different standards for literally everything depending on where you are. I live in a major city that isn't LA or NYC or something like that. all of my medical records are digitized too. All my doctors can look at everything an urgent care, hospital, regular doctor did. But also my sister who lives in nowhere, USA has to deal with paper everything and long delays. The US is both 1st and 3rd world depending on what area you're talking about.

I just want to second the person who said to reach out to your 0 to 3 program. It's extremely important because your child's blindness might be fixable. I was born blind. But it was because of nerve damage. I don't really understand what all the doctors did, but they managed to restore some sight in one eye by the time I was in 3rd grade or so. Enough to read if the book was close and the text large. By the time I was in late high school, I was able to get vision that was functionally enough that I didn't need any kind of accommodation. By late 20s, I had 20/20 vision (I mean in one eye, but that's all you need!)

It can be a long road, but the body is very use it or lose it, so starting early is so important. I still have some visual processing issues, but I need no support and I can even drive during the day. Technically at night too, but it's too iffy for me, so I avoid it at all costs. Not saying this is your boy, but I am saying that consulting with a professional is a good idea in case there's something that can be done even if it takes years to see the results.

To be honest, probably. The vast majority of users don't need the advanced features of excel. I've seen people be awed by pivot tables. I'm sure some people need those extra features, but I'm guessing vloopup is about as fancy as it gets.

Because not everything is distributed on YouTube. I support writers and artists on patreon. That's the bulk of what I support. Even if we say Google, youtube creators already complain about youtube and how it squeezes them so is it really better? Youtube even has a patreon like thing, but creators prefer to diversify the platforms they are on. Especially if, as is common, what they are selling on patreon are things that aren't allowed on youtube.

Honestly, I think we need more shame. People feel so righteous doing these things to employees because their establishments bend over backwards to accommodate customers. We need more store bans and public shaming. People shouldn't think this is okay and should experience consequences for it.

There should be no conditions on your love for your child, but support? Yes actually. You can actually hurt your child in the long run by supporting them too much. My brother was an absolute fuck up who couldn't get his shit together until my parents were like no more. And then magically he knew how to hold a job and support himself. I have countless stories like this. Sometimes not giving your kid the space to fail is hurting them. Fact is that parents don't live forever and when my aunt died my cousins fell into horrible poverty not knowing how to dp anything on their own. They burned through all the money she left them. That's what fate you leave a child you always have to support.

And by afford, you mean they didn't have the service? Because when people who struggle to pay rent (which would be everyone who qualified) have to choose what to cut, they'll cut internet to the house. And the adults will be fine because they have phones. The kids will be the ones who have to suck it up.

We could fund both of them easily with no strain by removing the contribution cap at 250K of income and not raiding the fund for extra change every time the government is pressed for money. The US is not in a demographic situation where Medicare and Social Security are untenable, but removing these programs would impact young people by making them responsible for their elders. It's easier to bear the burden when everyone pays in than everyone having to consider how they're going to afford to support their parents, etc and how they'll afford their definitely sky high private insurance. These two programs are the lesser of evils for the problem of elders.

People say that but I say why does the government get to decide that and not parents? I have a kid and parent controls are a thing. You know what I don't see even at my kid's young age? Parents using parental controls. I have locked out preteens from these kinds of things. You know what my siblings did? Grant them access because it was annoying to listen to them whine about not having access. I have told grown adults about what a videogame entailed. They go, "Oh no, not for my child!" And then they buy the game marked as mature and why it's mature and they present their license at the store then call me shocked that this video was not at all appropriate for children.

Giving parents the tools isn't working. They already have the tools and aren't using them. This is letting the government decide what's right for your child and even adults across the board because people hate this one part of digital life and are too lazy to teach their kids to interact with it responsibly with the guardrails and restrictions they can totally apply.

Every time this idea of "Oh, kids shouldn't have access to social media" comes up, I get upset because kids only get access through their parents. There are precious few children who have absolute control over their digital life. Their parents have just declined to see what's possible because of the modern version of "I'm not a computer person." Or they can't take their kid's displeasure.

Apparently, people think that at 18, you'll magically have the skills to be responsible on the internet instead of what will really happen we send a bunch of adults into the deep end to make mistakes without guidance or the lienancy of youth. Something like this law takes responsible parents ability to slowly ramp up their kid's ability to be competent digital citizen and cripples the utility as a whole, especially for those who hold minoriry opinions like, "man, I really dislike my country because of reasons the larger community is ignoring. Wish the government would treat me like a person." See LGBT community, but there are more.

The real reason for unlimited PTO to to skirt a very burdensome labor law in California. In California, you must be paid your final paycheck on the day you end employment. For tech workers, that could be a lot of cash a company suddenly has to come up with since PTO would have to be paid out on top of normal salary. I know it's such a problem that smaller companies with accrued PTO reject high paid CA candidates even if they have rights to work there.

As for 4 day work weeks. That's always a special topic for me because while it's great for certain kinds of workers, it's just materially bad for a lot of others. And then there's the elephant in the room that shows that literally every school district that moved to 4 day weeks has worse outcomes for children. Their grades are lower and health outcomes are worse because schools act as a safe harbor for underprivileged children.

I do know plenty of companies that play with schedules, but I've seen people tend towards 5 8 hour days. The only thing I've seen have success is flex hours, vacation minimums (which is really just accrued under a different name), and forced time off usually in December or in the summer if have a natural workaholic staff.

I've been at several companies with unlimited PTO. I've it it go the following ways: 1) no questions asked until a secret limit (usually 3-4 weeks) and then you're likely to be denied based on your manager's judgment 2) As long as you get your work done and give enough notice, no one cares. This is my personal favorite variant. 3) you're approved as long as enough people are not taking off during that period.

The problem I've found is that you don't really know which you're gonna get. What's the limit is a secret few companies openly speak about to leverage the fact that generally speaking people take less PTO with unlimited PTO. Some of the companies I've been at combat this by having vacation minimums or official office closed days or having leadership leas by example, but it's honestly a hard problem to solve because a surprising amount of people will not take vacation without the pressure of use it or lose it because they are natural workaholics.

I have also found that people are generally more stricter about how good your performance has to be the more vacation you take. I've found that despite taking like 6 weeks (which is crazy for an American), most companies have been cool with it because I perform well, but people who take 3-4 weeks get way more pressure for average performance. Is suspect this bias is also why some people don't take off.

I'm the opposite. I went to the literal closest college for what I wanted that happen to be a top 10. Even over a decade later people care. They mention it to me. I have a suspiciously easier time getting callbacks in economic downturns.

I won't make my kid kill themselves to get into a top 10, but only people who haven't gotten the glow of a top university think it doesn't matter.

I have a friend who is an accountant. For entry level jobs, those jobs were meant to be done by someone with a high school diploma and the bar for interviewing is literally "hey can you do basic excel" as you get closer to staff level the interviews become far more complex and nearing what you see in tech because they are testing if you _could_ pass the CPA if you had to. This kind of grilling can be skipped by simply having a CPA.

There's really some truth to the licensing thing. In some ways, I'd really like our field to adopt certifications so we can skip the BS of interviews. I got the leetcode certification, let's talk design or something relevant please.

You could form relationships with recruiters. You don't need to be close with recruiters, just reliable. I've found that connections with other professionals is better for getting into niche positions, but good recruiters have placed me into excellent positions as well. It's just a slog to weed out crappy shotgun recruiters from quality ones.

Ultimately, though, I ponder about your professional connection problem. You don't need to be super close friends to have people refer you for things. Just pleasant. I see what you say, but part of your career as you advance is managing people's feelings. If people don't walk away feeling good from interactions with you, then I don't think you're doing your job well. That doesn't mean you have to smiley and be fake, but people can't feel like you don't care at all about what they are emotionally invested in whether that be the project or their career or whatever. It's worth considering that you might be lacking a skill for higher levels of work and even if you got those positions you'd hate them because of how much emotional labor is involved.

You're not paying for access though. You're paying for curation. Access to any given site is free (ignoring the cost of internet access itself) assuming you know the URL. What is not free is someone taking your query and finding sites that might be what you want. You pay in currency or attention. Take your pick.

We all need to think about paying for the internet because literally none of it is free. Not even the hobby blog on a random desktop in someone's basement. It still costs them that bit more in electricity. If no one will pay then we all deserve to drown in ads because that's what we say we wanted with our non-dollars.

I always recommend consulting at a quality firm. I recommend consulting because you almost never get put on a project that matches your skillset exact or at all! I'm a fullstack dotnet developer and I got put on a Kotlin mobile app assignment because "well you know react". Pick something that isn't staff augmentation and that has relatively short assignments of < 1 year and enjoy your skill expansion.

Webdev can be impactful. It's really a matter of thr domain. Some of my most impactful work work was webdev in health IT. Some of the stuff I did across jobs in order of when I remember:

- Validate covid positive/negative status for reentry into various nations - Dynamic reports that allowed hospitals to understand how in or out of compliance with regulations they were. - Take the data underlying those reports and submitting them to thr government in order to continue funding for the hospital - Integrating various health insurance APIs into a system to vastly speed up approvals for surgeries (we're talking from days down to minutes) - Honestly, every battle I've waged and won around accessibility

That's just off the cuff. I really enjoyed my time in health IT. The technology and regulatory challenges made for interesting problems, and it was nice to understand immediately the good I was doing. It's easy to understand the good in an assignment like, "Identify all the tired doctors/nurses/staff based on this data and flag them for forced time off"

Is that where that came from? I used an inflation calculator and honestly, it would be extremely reasonable to say someone can't have more than 8K in savings and get this benefit. I hate that the US government never sets anything to inflation so we always have to play these games for everything with benefits.

Which is an utter failure. The government has set the limit so low that people who take the assistance much rely on the grace of others or become homeless. The limit should be set to the federal poverty level. Having assets that amount to literal poverty wages is not wealth building or cheating the system and would make life possible. Setting it to take would be appalling as well, but at least defendable. I have no idea how anyone even came up with the 2K number. I assume the federal poverty rate on a monthly level, but people should be allowed to have savings.

This is correct. I give $3/month on patreon for 2 chapters a week to this one author. $36/year isn't a lot, but it takes these authors' years to finish these books at this rate, and any author would kill for the amount of amount I sunk into 1 book. Multiply it out, and it becomes a livable wage if you can get enough people to support your patreon. I have a friend I personally know who did this. He's not even a good writer. He just found an underserved niche and made a livable wage $1from somebody at a time. His writing improved and I'd say it's passable, but no one would pay $10 at all once for any book he wrote. Apparently over a year is fine though.

> How about we encourage people to use the skills and passions they have, rather than box them into conforming to the vision of the few ?

Because life doesn't work like that. If you want to be a doctor you need to undergo a grueling training regimen. I'm deeply passionate about software, but that doesn't change that 80% of my time is spent doing boring, tedious work because that's what work is. Even if you're an artist. I know literally artists. There is no way to have fun all the time doing something productive.

That's why I teach my (admittedly, high functioning) ASD daughter about tolerating non-preferred activities to get what she wants. Yes, she finds having her face painted disgusting, revolting, skin crawling. She willingly endures it every time because she delights in the result. It's her choice every time to sit in a chair and have it done. That's the kind of thing I want her to take from childhood into adulthood because every adult has to do things they hate for the sake of society running and even the care of themselves.

Same way I don't like exercise because it's just actively awful because of my condition, but to not do it is to make myself deteriorate over the long term because of my condition. I want my daughter to be able to make those kinds of decisions. What sucks, but is good for her in the long run. We finally got bathing on the list. No one is going to argue with me that a person who never bathes is a functioning person.

I will continue to "train" my kid. Her life is better for it. Ever since she got therapy she has been happier, more stable, less disturbed by the world, and more able to connect with people both like her and not like her. If any parent could get an outcome like mine from "training" they'd pick it every time. No one is gonna tell me when my kid used to slap herself and cower under chairs is better than my kid who is probably too obsessed with trains and rainbows and spins while she walks when happy. I think I like her spinning better than her cowering.

I see your POV, but at the same time, shouldn't Canada ask itself why it doesn't have a Netflix equivalent? American media reaches far, but it's made in the US. It's not really the US's fault that other nations aren't investing in making media that appeals to their culture such that another culture can take over.

I took the bus for nearly a decade and I drive a car now. My life was greatly improved by having a car and while a car is more expensive technically, in indirect costs, it feels like a break even to me. At least as someone who buys cheap cars, tends to live within 30mins drive of my job and keeps them for a good long time. Even in a good public transit area in the US there is a significant time sink to using public transit for literally every aspect of your life. Getting to work is efficient and not significantly more time intensive than driving, but doing everything else like visiting a friend, going to a hair salon, get groceries can be a huge difference depending on what city you're in. I lived in a city where I was faster to take the bus to work than drive, but getting groceries was a harrowing 45mins journey. Places where getting to work took twice as long, but I could walk to the grocery store. In the US there's just no way to make public transit really work across all dimensions. Especially as we add in specificity. Like needing to bring home a large amount of items or visit humans instead of businesses. EU was much better about this just because of how mixed housing and businesses were.

It's a choice a parent can make until someone calls the cops because your kid is unattended. I've had people give me you're an awful parent side eyes for not keeping my eyes on my kid 100% of the time in a fenced in park. Letting my kid walk to school like I did as a kid is just forever outside of my reach if I want to not have CPS called on me. At least if I geotag my kid with someone obvious people will be chill about her playing in front of the house.

Probably hurricane strike zone. It's not weird to travel that far to get out of the way of a hurricane. Usually because that's when lodging becomes available. I did it every few years as a kid.

What about apartment dwellers? They can't just plug in their cars at night. They'll need to go to a charge station. Now we're comparing a 5 min fill up to a 1 hour charge.

I agree for me as a home owner the charge station question is no big deal, but when I was doing apartment living it's a completely different consideration.