mgolawala

These types of things used to infuriate me. To stop them from ruining my mood on vacations I just account for them as "various other charges". It is sort of like tipping now.

For example, When you book a cruise, the price they give you doesn't bring up the fact that the cruise line also expects you to pay the wages for the wait staff and room stewards. If you bring a family of four (the charge is per person) on a 10+ night cruise (the charge is per night), that charge adds up quickly. Something like $15 charge * 4 people * 14 nights = $840 in charges. That can be a significant percentage of the cost of your entire cruise.

Yes, those in the know, realize that they can change the amount that you get charged by going to guest services - but now if you do adjust those fees... the Cruise line has effectively shifted the guilt of shafting these unfortunate and hard working souls on to you. Hope you sleep well at night. Ugh..

Now when I see these types of charges I just shake my head, sigh and move on. I just account for some percentage of unexpected charges such as these when I visit tourist hotspots - Resort fees, Cleaning Fees, Bag check fee, City fees, the list goes on and on and on. It's not right... but the way I see it I can either fret over all these fees, or just accept that they will be there if I travel to tourist hot spots. I don't really know of a solution.

While I agree with you and felt the same way as you, I found that it wasn't as big an issue once I bought a case for the phone. Once you put a case on the phone the camera bump completely disappears.

I dont know what percentage of iPhone users go case-less with their phones, but I haven't seen one being used without a case.. and I have been actively looking for them.

I say this as a person who used to go case-less with my iPhones until my iPhones started having camera bumps. Then I started to get a case to rid myself off the camera bump. Last year I got the leather case, and while I winced at the ridiculous price I paid for it, I have been extremely happy with the choice. The blend of steel, glass and leather feels and looks great.

I am seriously hoping for a 4K panel so that you get a 2x resolution of 1920x1080 .. If they did that, they would instantly have my money.

I have wanted to get into an EV and it is the long distance travel issue (for that 1% of the time) that has been keeping me (and I imagine a lot of people) from making the switch. Tesla is the only model to have come close to solving that issue.

One thing I have been waiting to see is a push to have gas stations adopt EV charging on a large scale. Gas stations, particularly ones along interstate routes, often double as rest stops and usually have large parking areas with small marts, and a couple of fast food options. If companies partnered with a major gas pump operator like chevron, shell or mobile to offer even a small number of charging stations with each gas station (even just 2 to 4 at each site in the 50-100kw range.. though the wiring would most likely need to be upgraded to support this) things would shift rapidly I think. I know charge times remain an issue, but if you are taking a rest stop anyway.. the 30-40 minutes of charge is not as big of an issue.

A government subsidy could also be introduced to help offset some of the cost of upgrading these gas stations. An increased tax on Gasoline could go towards paying for such a subsidy. Also I think we need to take another look at nuclear power to help charge those EVs, but that is another conversation.

The best feeling for me is when I come across old code and then re-write it to make it [simpler | faster | clearer | better] .. It is tangible proof to me that I have improved in my craft.

Perhaps humans wont end up being inferior instead we will just end up being part of the system that creates the next level of life.

When I was a kid, and learned about the billions of cells and bacteria making up my body, and how they communicated with molecules and worked together in immensely complex ways. Specializing and signaling and coming into existence and dying, and so on... I wondered if they were aware that they were part of a huge complex organism, or if they were just "doing their thing" oblivious to my existence.

Ofcourse, cells aren't conscious so they aren't aware of anything, but wouldn't it be interesting, if we humans end up acting like these cells and bacteria, completely unaware of the next level of life we were creating. We could just be "doing our thing" building our networks, and computers and machines, and going through our lives and such.. meanwhile it is all to sustain a level of life that we, like our own cells, do not realize we are a part of.

Actually one of the things my wife and I often discuss is how with our current society even what we consider our "nuclear family" is at most just a part time family.

For most of humanity a family group stayed together for the majority of each day. Children played with siblings, cousins and were usually within earshot of one of their parents or relatives. Certainly they would have found their way back when hungry. As they got older, they worked right beside their parents on the various chores and tasks.

In modern western society, the spouses are separated for the majority of their waking hours. (Even if one spouse chose to stay at home, the issue would still remain as the other spouse would have to go to work). The children spend either a significant or a major portion of their time in day care or school, also separated from their siblings. Then throw in the after school activities, projects and homework needed to create a modern "well rounded" child. (Don't even get me started on how un-affordable it is to have kids)

They do get to have a rushed breakfast together and hopefully a good dinner as well, but that is about it. A significant portion of the weekend is spent doing chores. Add in the American working culture of taking very few vacation days.

The decline of the family is because our culture has created an environment where we are working .. working constantly.. (either chasing a higher standard of living or running as fast as we can just to maintain our current standard of living (housing, education, healthcare), working so you can afford to have kids) and we work in an environment where we are disconnected from our family and friends. Often, if you are lucky, you make friends at work.. but almost always these aren't like the friends you made at high school, they aren't as meaningful and strong. Then People change jobs and you "stay in touch"... If you are lucky, you find the person you love at work, but work places romances are tricky as well.. sometimes (usually?) frowned upon.

We just have much less TIME to build those sorts of deep bonds. Visit a village or a small town in the developing world and observe how much more TIME people seem to have. How much more time they spend with each other.

There are plenty of things in existence that took more than 15 tries to get right. It is silly to dismiss something because it has failed the last 15 times.

If wealth taxes are beneficial and a good goal to work towards for a society, then it might be worth it to try for a 16th or even a 17th time until someone figures it out. Human flight took plenty of tries too, but it was something we deemed beneficial, so we figured it out.. eventually.

Anyway, Property taxes are a kind of wealth tax, as are capital gains taxes and inheritance taxes. All three of those are wide spread and well established.

Perhaps we don’t anymore? Not for most of us anyway. In a sense we too are domesticated and brought up in captivity.

Even if we knew how to survive. Between private property, most wildlife being eradicated, the rest being protected, loss of natural ecosystems to farmland (private property) and ranch land (private property), commercial fishing reducing the abundance of fish available, other areas being protected from fishing, rivers being dammed up or polluted, water tables dropping due to the pumping of ground water, and our sheer numbers. Perhaps Living like hunter gatherers is no longer a choice available to us. It is either live as we do now, or perish. I know that is how it would be for me.

It's a sobering thought.

In the same boat over here. I have ~$3K budgeted and ready for a new laptop but I am holding on to my 2013 MBP because of the current generation's keyboard.

I have my fingers crossed that they will redesign the MBP and fix the keyboard before my 2013 dies. Hope springs eternal.

Having two nuclear powers shooting each other's planes out of the sky should make the whole world nervous.

In a perverse way, it is probably a good thing that they are both nuclear powers. The stakes are too high for them NOT to call a truce and end this madness before it gets out of hand. It seems like most remain hopeful that both sides will stand down after a couple of rounds of chest beating.

Knowing humanity, it is only a matter of time though, before two nuclear powers begin an all out war with each other. India and Pakistan are definitely on the top of the list of candidates where such a war could start.

Not to mention that in Norway the VAT is included in the price, whereas in the U.S. the Sales Tax needs to be added on top. For a fairer comparison, you would actually need to add the appropriate sales tax for your state. That wont make up all of the the 25% difference but could easily add 7 to 9% to the cost of the U.S. price.

That line of thinking can also be quite demotivating. For instance, it could also be used to argue that since none of what I do matters anyway, I might as well spend it doing something else such as watching TV, playing video games, hiking in the forests, reading a good book, etc.

I use this exact method to get myself to workout when I am not feeling like it. I tell myself I will slack off and not really go hard today. ie. It's better to do a workout at 75% effort than skip it altogether. Inevitably, once I start I find myself working out as I normally would.

To cover that scenario you could grant copyright to the creator/artist for "life or 20 years whichever is greater".

>> There are plenty of scarce assets defined by no utility except for their scarcity; we call those assets money.

Money doesn't hold value because of its scarcity. Money holds value because of the faith and credit of the entity that backs it.

If a person issued a single unit of currency tomorrow and promptly died, it wouldn't suddenly hold any value simply because it is scarce and guaranteed to remain so.

To put it another way, money's value lies in the fact that it is "legal tender". That status is backed by a powerful organization and people have to trust that organization. When the trust is gone, the value is gone, regardless of how scarce or plentiful the units of money.

That is not a problem of population density, that problem is inadequate peak capacity in transportation infrastructure. For example if you stack subway lines one under the other simalar to those described by Elon Musk, or increase the capacity of the existing public transport system through through faster & more frequent trains, you can resolve such issues. You just need to commit to spending on the infrastructure to support the population density.

Interestingly, it is policies like prop 13 in California that restrict the revenue needed to invest in the infrastructure to support higher population densities.

I agree completely.

Who will take his place? Who will be the Stephen Hawking of my children's generation?

As a society we should work hard to find, celebrate and give a platform to the Stephen Hawking-s and the Carl Sagan-s of tomorrow. The impact of such "celebrity scientists" (I do not use that term pejoratively) is far greater than the measure of the work they have done. It is how they inspire an entire generation to seek out knowledge, understanding and fill us all with a sense of humility, awe and wonder.

I agree, but there are good reasons why it is often good to combine both types.

Considering this is only a side project, you have a high likelihood of abandoning it out of boredom, lack of traction or simply burn out. However, if your side project is "interesting" to you because you are experimenting with various tech, you come back to it because it is fun and it will keep you motivated.

It is totally cool to build something to learn and throwaway, but why not build something to learn that might also generate some income in the future?

The value of the shares goes up because, even if the business and profitability stays exactly the same, with fewer out standing shares, the earnings per share goes up.

I totally agree, I was just yanking your chain. :)

I made a similar decision to yours last year and am currently on a 5K 27" + 4K 27" setup myself.

Nice! Sounds like all that compromised there, was the wallet. ;)

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Mid 30s, Senior, Independent consultant, Generalist. Take on projects I find fun. Took 1 point off simply because income isn't steady and predictable.

While no one can predict the future, I tend to agree with your hypothesis.

The advantage of a 401K over the Roth is that since both can be raided, at least with the 401K your money is being taxed only on the way out. With the Roth you are being taxed on the way in for sure, and you run the risk of it being taxed on the way out as well.

Judging from the past my guess would be that we wont see something as obvious as a penalty or a fee. Instead what you may see is a more aggressive required minimum distribution schedule. Perhaps you could see the date of penalty free withdrawal pushed back from 59.5 to 65 or 67 years of age. Means testing of social security benefits has been mentioned before. If that gets put in place, and you fail the means test for social security, they will have effectively taxed you more your entire working life.

Congratulations on the new release. I have been waiting a long while for this. :)

Love the improved GUI.

The problem has a lot to do with acceptable risk. Not of the passengers.. I mean of the politicians. As a politician, if anyone argued for lowered screening at airports, we all know what would happen when eventually a hijacking or airplane bombing occurred. That politicians career would essentially be over. It would not have mattered if the hijackers or bombers could have gotten through anyway.

Robotics and AI have improved significantly and will continue to improve into the future. How much have humans improved over the last 30 years? People simply cannot compete, and this is a trend that cannot be reversed, or shouldn't be reversed.

Just as mass industrialization necessitated huge social change in response. The emergence of a middle class, the growth of cities, organized labor and work hours, etc.

As automation and AI continue to replace jobs and more and more people find it difficult to compete at any price. I predict you will see similar societal changes in response. I don't know what those will be, and they probably will not come easy. We could see a utopian future similar to Star Trek, or a dystopian one instead.

We live in interesting times. :)

Another thing to keep in mind when considering what makes us happy is cultures. I have had the good fortune of being born into one culture, raised in a country with a second slightly different culture, and spending my adult life in a third, very different culture.

It is quite plain to me that people are driven quite differently. There is always the background noise of attaining social approval and status through accumulation of wealth and shiny things.. but each of these cultures scores other things in a slightly different way.

To give one example, in many (perhaps most?) asian cultures, having 3 generations of a family living under one roof, is seen as a sign of (familial) success and unity. I have noticed that in general in the US, the longer you go into adulthood without moving out of your parents home it is considered a sign of failure.

I don't know which one is better, but it is interesting how society influences what makes you happy.

Very insightful, and very well said. I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think you have probably hit the nail on the head.

I should add though, that I think it works the other way too. You could also have the problem that the 35+ year engineers look down upon the 20 somethings and communicate it, perhaps unknowingly, in subtle, or not so subtle, ways.

It almost feels like an animal hierarchy problem where you have an older male being added to the herd and the young pack leader is worried about this older male challenging him, while the older male thinks he can and should challenge the younger one.

Makes me wonder then, do women face age discrimination?

You hit the nail on the head. Yes it is a price hike.. At the amount of money software developers make annually, $240 annually is peanuts. Especially since it will be pretax for the company (or the self employed individual). Jet brains offers free community editions and hasn't indicated that it will stop doing so. Use that if you cannot afford the $240. Or just get the one product you are interested in for half the price. Think of the productivity improvement you get and decide if it justifies the price.

I think this is a tremendous deal for polyglot or multi platform developers and a mild price hike for specialist programmers. If you think the new price isn't worth the software, don't get it. I think it is.. in fact I think the kitchen sink license is worth a lot more than the $240 they are charging frankly.