notenoughhorses

I am a millennial and my parents did no events, since they both worked and had long commutes. I wonder when the middle class entertainment slowed down—I want to guess it’s when you have more two income households, that don’t earn enough to hire home help.

In my city, an older guy organized an “urban hiking group” where he would plan walking routes through the city, usually stopping at a restaurant for brunch. It was very popular, but probably a lot of work. He was semi-retired, so he had the time to do it. He did research to have talking points on the history of some spots we passed, like a tour guide.

It was a great low key meet up. You didn’t have to make friends with the organizer. If you were walking with someone you didn’t really like in the group, it was easy to drift to talk to someone else.

Many accountants are worried about the risk of filing for their clients and won’t do it at all. Determination of ownership is not as straightforward as one might assume in many cases.

Looks good on my iPhone 11

Or alternatively, to add to the list, working parents cannot afford to live near grandparents. They bought in the 1980s.

I’m an accountant, not developer, but in my case I found freelancing much preferable to working on a team.

I don’t think I’m “bad” at working on a team, in that my team members would be happy to have me on the team, but I personally found it stressful to navigate multiple bosses depending on the project, having to rely on junior teammates that I would not have picked to hire, etc. I am much happier working with clients where I get to decide how the work gets done. Even though I still interface and meet with lots of people, it’s different and much more comfortable!

I’ve been using blot.im It’s not free, but it’s cheap and the workflow really works for me.

You keep the files in markdown in a Dropbox folder, and the blot service uses the files to update your blog. This makes it easy to use my preferred editors on my phone, iPad, and windows or Linux desktop pretty seamlessly.

Yes

I’m not a “kid” person, basically never held a baby before we had our first this August.

As the child bearing person in this equation, I also did the most research on pregnancy, birth, subsequent baby stuff. (My partner did do some reading too, but not the same extent of feeling like he needed to figure it all out.)

One thing that’s interesting is that in many ways, even the pair of us who knew nothing about babies have pretty good instincts for what they need. We got some help from a post partum doula to show us baby care, since we figured you can’t learn all that from reading.

We did read some books. I tried to stay away from articles because they are incentivized to act like there’s conflict or “new” stuff to talk about to keep engaging readers. The most useful resource has been a private Reddit forum of other people who had babies the same month, so we can compare what’s worked for lots of people, what popular info seems totally wrong to lots of us, etc.

Kids aren’t easy, but they are not hard the same way our knowledge-worker jobs are to learn.

Before Instagram, we had magazines to help teens compare themselves to an unrealistic ideal. I had an English teacher in high school who had an entire wall plastered with problematic themes in magazine ads, so it would highlight the subtle messages we are receiving when we look at these ads. I used to love buying fashion magazines and looking at the ads before I took that woman’s class, and after that I totally stopped buying them.

Now, I do think Instagram is way more insidious because you’d now be thinking you are comparing to other normal teens rather than at least knowing these are special magazine people. But my point is that the teacher who explicitly taught us about these patterns and influences did so much more to “protect” us from these negative effects than trying to ban/blame the magazines would have done.

I like it, but it doesn’t feel liberating. It feels like you need to be very careful, because if you express yourself in a way that could be taken the wrong way, it will be! But I like getting the insight into how many different people think. Edit: typo

I have a - in my name, and while I’m used to websites not accepting this, it’s always interesting which ones give a neutral error like “only letters and numbers allowed” vs an insulting error of “please enter a valid name” when I try to see if their firm will accept my correct name.

Become a contractor doing this stuff for clients. I do bookkeeping currently, which is super easy for me, but in trying to train clients who want to do it themselves, and in general just working with all kinds of business owners, I see so much about what “normal” people struggle with.

When I first started doing it, I thought what I did was so easy, there’s already lots of software to help, soooo thought clients could just do it themselves if you showed them how. But I’ve learned so much of it is so hard for people with no background in it, and also so hard for people who don’t Google stuff.

I thought your point was clear. As someone who is more of a “learner” than a teacher currently, I appreciate the thought of letting me, the learner, explain my current mental model and then a teacher helping troubleshoot that. Listening to this also helps pinpoint where I’m stuck, specifically. Often, a TA or professor will launch into their favorite explanation without first understanding my question.

Interesting question.

I’ve taken free coursera programming courses, and now I’m taking university CS courses. On one hand, the material we are expected to learn is definitely more rigorous. But the actual teaching quality is not better. The difference in costs reflects the value of the degree and the institution verifying your performance through tests, etc. But it’s hard to measure because better universities also get to select the better students who are likely to put a lot of work in to learn the material regardless of the quality of the teaching. So you still end up with better educated students I think, than the students who are accessing free teaching (I mean this on averages—so if a thousand students access a free class, a lower % of them will stick with it and learn the material).

There are definitely some motivated students who can take free teaching and run with it, but I think there are a lot of factors at play that keep paid education competitive anyway.

Maybe. Every time Intuit integrates another app into their main QBO product, it makes things worse. To some extent, when they are separate apps that connect to QBO, I get more control over what data transfers. When it’s integrated, they tend to make automatic adjustments with no ability to edit them. Obviously this is a choice they are making to do things a bad way, but my point is just to share a counter example of integration being a net negative.

I decided to start a CS undergrad degree 15 years after finishing my first undergrad degree.

The university had a math placement test. I didn’t remember almost at math, but spent about 3 weeks going through the placement test review materials for 30 min to an hour a day. Got almost perfect score on the placement test.

I did retake calculus 1 and 2 by my own choice since I wanted to know it quite well, and much of that seemed completely unfamiliar.

So it’s much much easier to learn a topic the second time around even if it’s forgotten. To get up to speed on it, you could use the placement test materials—collegeboard has some standard tests and materials to review for those tests, or your local university might have review materials for an in-house test.

I will say, I completed calc 2 a year ago now, and I already feel it slipping away again due to disuse. Now I’m onto new math topics I never took the first time around, like linear algebra and higher levels of calculus.

I appreciated reading about how both of them reacted to the realities of early retirement. I like to think I could be like the author, and be happy without much, but it did make me think if I might be more like his SO, especially when I see my friends upgrading their lives in our 40s.

My take away from the post is that they fundamentally felt 2 different ways about it. The author did not feel the stuff his SO felt. But she was on board with retiring on “lean fire” so I doubt she predicted this about herself either.

I read this post a few weeks ago, so maybe I’m remembering wrong, but I thought the author was perfectly open to SO returning to work, but she wasn’t sure in the middle of all this if she really wanted to do that? I don’t think it’s the author’s responsibility, and I don’t think he thought it was his responsibility, to decide for his spouse if she worked or not, that was up to her to decide.

I pay over $6,000 a semester to attend a reasonably-priced state university. While the professors may be overworked and underpaid, from a student perspective, for the money I give the institution, the institution can invest a little in systems that do all this automatically.

International students pay significantly more, and there are often 100 students or more in a class.

So it’s also not a great solution to put the burden of overworked professors onto the students by invading privacy and making them use poorly built suffrage to do so.

The trouble is at the institution level.

This semester all my exams are open note, no proctoring. I think it is harder for professors to write a good exam this way (they need to make the questions things that test understanding instead of just recall.) I’m certainly doing way better with this method, but I think I am still learning the subject just as well as I would in the “old” method of stressful proctoring and memorization.

It seems like with software, you could easily write math questions with different inputs, as you suggest (in fact, our homework software already did that for math last semester), but it seems that those tools are not built into the testing software so much. It definitely seems like a solvable issue though!

Well remaining fortune depends on how much of it is spent, after all.

I have a Wacom which I believe is similar usage to Huion mentioned by OP.

I have made videos by simply opening up gimp, setting up appropriate screen and background, and then using Camtasia to screen record my writing.

Biggest issue for me is that I like to use multiple monitors. Between two monitors and laptop screen, there are three monitors. The tablet acts like a mouse that extends across all three screens, so the aspect ratio gets messed up (the middle third of the tracker affects the middle screen, so tiny movements side to side there are quite large on the monitor).

There is probably a better fix, but I end up disconnecting my laptop and going to separate workspace when I want to record. Not a big deal, but annoying That I can’t just plug and go if I want to use drawing tablet randomly in a project.

This sounds lovely. As a student, I currently associate code with trying to get a problem solved in time constraints... And when I work on personal projects I'm always frustrated by lack of progress in the time I have to spend on it. I'm going to try and see if I can think of it more like your framing--work on something without worrying about time, just tending to it bit by bit.

I tried to learn to self code for a few years, but kept hitting wall of what to learn next.

After realizing I really wanted a chance to change careers, I decided to just do a second bachelor’s, basically to have a curriculum.

So far, I’ve learned more math than programming. The actual coding we do is greatly benefited by the self learning I did before, but my understanding of what’s going on in code is much higher. The other place I got stuck seems very natural for other people to move past with ease, but it was how to really solve problems with code. For me, I think the much deeper understanding from a school setting will set me up to better understand how to solve problems with code. (At least, I seem to be pretty good solving problems with accounting, my first degree, so I don’t think I lack inherent problem solving ability. This whole second bachelors is a bet that I am just missing deep enough understanding of the subject area to apply it to problem solving yet.)

I’m doing a CS degree now, mostly lower level classes now. I find that teaching well does make a difference. Interestingly, when my professors use slides provided to them by the textbook company, I generally find it much harder to be engaged by watching their lecture. Compare to professors who make custom material and truly have some skill in presenting it.

Professors who choose to use the full suite of textbook, plus textbook provided slides, plus electronic auto graded homework might save themselves some time, but definitely are less effective educators, in my limited experiences.

I love school and work from home, but school from home doesn’t work as well for a couple reasons: - the professors are completely unprepared to do it effectively. I’m surprised they are struggling as much as they are. Many don’t seem to be drawing on any departmental prior experience, or even taking simple training on stuff like how to run a Webex meeting. Some professors clearly know how to do it better and it makes a HUGE difference. So that’s a big issue with the current situation. Some profs are doing a stellar job this semester, others are doing a completely awful job. - for me, face time with fellow students is really helpful for learning, more so than face time with coworkers being helpful to work. However, in lectures you don’t get that much time to interact with other students anyway, so to me it’s not worth the time of getting to campus

The freshman class at the university I’m currently attending is the largest one they have ever had. Now, we are a more “affordable “ state university, but it’s still $6k tuition for a semester, plus many people seem to have gotten duped into paying for campus housing even though it seemed like high chance classes would end up online one way or another.

Looks like that office can't possible be as cold as modern offices. I would freeze in dresses like that in a modern workplace.

Even worse, 2 managers, one direct report

I thought grain free wasn’t so cool anymore since that stuff came out about canine heart disease? Maybe I’m misremembering