85 karma · joined September 11, 2020
I also think you’d be surprised how little time to pay off would actually be needed. Give people a calm space and community (including their friends and family), and we will all flourish.
I really don’t think we have anything to worry about not having any people left. There’s still plenty of innate drive to reproduce, both biologically and intellectually (as in, educating far more people than the number of kids you could ever have).
There are three things we need to deal with the temporary population imbalance:
Older people who remain healthy continuing to work to care for their peers—-not necessarily hard physical labor, but being out in their communities helping, which is rewarding and will help them stay healthy, too.
Easy immigration for regular people so they can move to where they’re needed.
General efficiency so we’re not wasting resources. This requires both technological and lifestyle changes, even for the rich. The more efficient we can get, the less we have to reduce our overall population.
They were mad that work was interrupted, and if they ever wore any masks at all, they weren’t high quality respirators that are actually awesome to wear in the winter or allergy/smoke season—they were either uncomfortable (humidity built up inside the mask, hard to get people to hear you clearly, fiddly rubber bands hurt your ears or mess up your hair) or ineffective (low filtration, worn without a good seal).
So they want to argue that it was all unjustified and we should just ignore the next pandemic so we can stick to how it’s always been done, because that’s more comfortable.
For comparison, I live in a place that is typically considered as tier 3 or 4 out of 4 in the US by employers (4 being the cheapest). Costs of living are honestly more like tier 2 cities, but it’s a small city in a poor state. 7 years ago, the going rate for an unlicensed handyman was $32/hour, often paid under the table in cash (I don’t have more recent numbers because I find DIY better and easier than hiring someone reliable).
See and be seen in the dark, while keeping your hands free. Great for taking out the garbage or checking the mail at night, especially because we don’t have much lighting outside (unless it’s a full moon) due to light pollution regulations.
They were harder to get earlier in the pandemic, so I bought a less popular brand in addition to the popular brand one I already had from a repair project.
Reasonably comfortable, and I haven’t had a single respiratory illness since I started wearing them when going out. Also good for allergies, smoke, keeping my face from freezing in the winter, and looking like I’m in a SciFi movie.
In the US, basically all of my spending outside of the basics is on things you could classify as avoiding ever being poor/homeless. No vacations or eating out or streaming subscriptions or “toys” or whatnot. Maybe these kids feel that same pressure but took it too far, into fraudulent territory.
Well, sometimes. But what people want is not always good for them or for society at large. Targeted advertising has a side effect of hiding what exactly is being advertised to society. There's obviously the extreme cases of "vices," but what about things like junk food? People love it. Targeted advertising can induce cravings that make people buy and eat things they know are not good for them. Or for another example, what about pesticides and gas guzzling trucks? I don't want all my neighbors' vanity being exploited in order to pollute my neighborhood. We can openly talk about what we all see on TV, in newspapers, or on billboards, but if I'm not seeing the same ads as my neighbors online, those conversations aren't going to happen.
Heat increases the rate of offgassing, so a medium amount of heat in well power managed devices can draw out the time for which there is noticeable offgassing for years. I have found if you can burn-in a computer or TV with heavy load (and consequently heat) for say a month or two, that usually takes care of it. But some mobile devices (especially fanless ones) are “too good” at thermal management, making this difficult. And even for devices with fans, you want to run them in a clean environment so you don’t prematurely fill the fans up with dust or worse.
I’ve had problems with offgassing odors that never seem to go away on multiple monitors, MacBooks and an iPad in recent years. This leads to headaches that makes it impossible to use the machines for more than a few minutes, even with good room ventilation.
It would be great to buy a laptop that is known to be low offgassing. I was wondering if a Framework laptop would have less glue and could be more effective offgassed in a shed by disassembling the components and ventilating.
The role that most companies these days call “Senior Software Engineer” is actually an intermediate-level role (e.g., 5 years of experience). Staff is arguably where the actual senior-level roles start. This corresponds with the transition from being told what to do to being told to figure out what needs to be done and make it happen.
For Staff+ engineers, communication and high level architecture are just the tip of the iceberg. You have to understand the problem domain and the solution domain, be able to come up with good technical solutions (which is generally a collaborative process), and sell others on these ideas. Then you have to follow through with implementing them yourself and leading others working with you on them. If you don’t have the technical depth to understand the details, you’re not going to succeed at that. If you haven’t already internalized a lot of the details through your past work, you’re not going to have enough time to both learn the technical details and do all the communication, implementation and other parts of your job.