Have you considered starting a book club? I love to read and I found a few people that like to read in the same genre and we have a lot of fun.
76 karma · joined June 14, 2019
That being said, the opportunities are limited, and I'm not surprised that you found more success elsewhere.
If you are single or don't have any kids I think it is a lot more reasonable -- it's quite difficult to find housing for larger families. Even so, if you are capable of getting a good job working remote for a company it is possible to make it work.
I will say that Canada is in a bit of a flux right now. We are having an affordability crisis, and the cost of everything is going up.
It's not impossible to make a good life in Canada, but I think it's becoming increasing difficult and definitely not something that should be taken for granted.
I did a little bit of work on pitch prediction and we were able to get a pretty good result predicting which zone the ball would go into. I think we were around 36% accurate with a specific pitcher. I built a realtime predictor on live games which was pretty fun. Wish I had know about this.
As for that, it depends on your what your social circle looks like. I learned how to cook a couple great meals and how to make a couple fancy cocktails. I invited a few friends over that told my other friends. I slowly integrated different people from different areas of my life and now I'm that guy that throws fun cocktail parties.
It's not the same sort of social status as driving a fancy care, but it has increase my social status amongst people I actually care about.
Although, I'm sure there were people in my class that identified with Harrison and thought that everyone else was holding them back.
> I work on a product which just clones other similar products with a slightly better price point, so it’s hard to really care about the goal, but it would be nice to shift that mentality slightly.
Building something that has already been built at a better price point can be an interesting challenge. Obviously there's only so much control you have over the project, but learning how to deliver solid software on a budget is a super valuable skill. If you want to shift your mentality I would suggest that you approach it as it's own learning process.
We've had working sessions where the moment there was an issue, the developers at BigCo said that they need to talk to someone on some team and they wrap up the meeting for the day -- even if we had just got started. It's gotten to the point where we will have project managers in the working session -- essentially babysitting -- to stop the devs from just giving up.
The amount of stonewalling I've seen is insane. We were trying to address an issue with our integration and I was told that a particular configuration on the client side was impossible, or maybe that we needed a new license, or perhaps we needed to contract to another vendor and it's going to cost half a million dollars, or whatever other excuses they could come up with.
So I asked them what product BigCo used, I looked up the documentation, I sent an email with 12 steps on how to make the configuration change, I got on a video call with my contact at BigCo (and his boss to make sure he showed up) and I literally walked him through the setting up the configuration.
I just don't understand how you get to the point where that's business as usual.
On meritocracy:
"I think a defining feature of the group culturally is this belief in meritocracy, in the sense merit is what makes the economy work. The sum total of our GDP is the sum total of the individuals in it."
Nothing too controversial...
"Everyone earns what their merit is worth."
I feel like this only works in a very technical sense and doesn't translate to what people would mean using natural language. Merit is a morally loaded term which I think makes the whole debate over Meritocracy confusing. A better way to put this would be:
1. Individuals have different amounts of leverage, which is correlated to earnings. 2. Competency is non-trivial and significant source of leverage. 3. A person with competency has more leverage than a person without competency all things being equal.
"That is coupled with a market myth that says that whatever people do that earns money is essentially good for society."
Perhaps there are people that believe this, but they must be a small group of people. Everyone everywhere complains about the knock-on effects of different industries.
It's not clear to me where they are drawing these conclusions from.
He does mention that there are systemic issues with the status quo, so I'm sure if you asked him if he was happy with how things are running I'm sure he'd have quite a list of things that he thinks could make the world better for everyone -- even if you might disagree with some of his solutions.
In the interview he says that democracy is the political version of capitalism/a market economy and I think that's key to interpreting him charitably. In his worldview many of the good things about democracy are the good things about capitalism, but they also share many of the same flaws. In systems that emphasises individual agency and are incentive based, his view is that contempt locks us into a vicious cycle that de-incentivizes leaders from actually providing a realistic way forward. I tend to agree, and I can hardly fault someone for trying to argue for the best version of their vision for society.
Many Canadians are strongly against any sort of investment in fossil fuels of any kind.
I would interpret some one saying "my guys" in this context as a sign of respect. It can be roughly understood to mean "my go-to guy." It has the connotation of a well established, high-trust, working relationship.
For example, if I needed to get my car serviced and someone was trying to pitch me different mechanics I would say, "I got a guy" to indicate that I already feel looked after.
"Never get yourself bloody. Always cut towards a buddy."