"the" alternative... that's one of the biggest issues with the system (locked into two parties).
506 karma · joined September 26, 2014
Why is it assumed that there is no public record of the paper changing hands? They tweet the request publicly, so it stands to reason that someone is paying attention and archiving. I suppose the key word here is "public", but I'm not sure why that matters if the goal is covering up illegal activity.
How were you doing it before the internet? Go back to that.
I don't think this is the case. The client was volatile (random screaming and swearing at people in the office and me in my first and only meeting with him, plus a vague personal threat made against me if I were to "fuck him on the contract").
I knew what I was walking into and boosted my price accordingly. The only reason he went for it is due to having (or at least thinking he had) no other options. I worked fast and was extremely careful with my time. Everything went well, he paid me and I never heard from that company again.
> walking your rate up each year for existing clients
How do you get repeat business? It seems that my clients are happy with me after each project (no complaints and I typically get recommendations) however I haven't had any repeat business. I suspect this is due to working with very small startups with low budgets.
1. brought my suicidal depression back down to regular occasional depression
2. brought stress levels down to manageable
3. learned / learning 3 new programming languages, 2 platforms and 2 game engines and developed skills in pixel art.
achieved this by making money a secondary priority and living a life of near seclusion in my apartment (do have a daughter here 2 weeks per month and live with my gf so i'm not completely secluded).
edit: i've only worked 6 months this year and spent the rest improving my game dev skills. I usually take on 3 month contracts and then break for 1 to 3 months before my next.
I'm also not sure what sort of data the people in this thread are working with. I can't make $125k per year in the midwest as a fulltime developer (unless I'm freelancing - and even then keeping steady contracts has been near impossible). In fact I'm not seeing those numbers anywhere outside of the west coast - I applied for a fulltime job in CO recently and they balked at $90k... said they couldn't go over $60k.
Edit: recently quoted a local client at $75 per hour... he looked visibly perturbed and never got back to me.
A few contracts back I quoted $80 per hour and was told max budget was $60/hour (which I had to accept out of desperation).
I hear a lot of talk on the internet (especially HN) about people making massive amounts of money as contractors, but I have yet to see this in action. On the other hand $10k per month isn't that bad.
I get all of my contracts through recommendations from past clients and colleagues and can charge from $60 to $90 per hour (the most I charged was $250 per hour for a job I didn't want to do and didn't expect the client to accept).
Before I torched it though I tried a little experiment. I left my tech skills in place, but also added things like "Blacksmithing" and "Former POTUS" as my skill set. I also said "Do not contact me" and "I hate recruiters" and something along the lines of "if you contact me, you clearly didn't read my profile" - the spam seemed to increase for a while before I finally deleted the profile completely.
> Crazy: 1) mentally deranged, especially as manifested in a wild or aggressive way. Extremely annoyed or angry. Foolish. 2)extremely enthusiastic 3) (of an angle) appearing absurdly out of place or in an unlikely position
I have to agree that he does not fit the definition of crazy at least by the text of his article.
I think it has to become a political issue enforced with regulations.
>for politics or mass dissemination of paper based digital files for the public to quickly consume
> Imagine, if students could start posting free textbook pdf files just by handing out a piece of paper which you could scan, or maybe with a phone one day, and instantly receive the file.
With both of those, how is this more efficient or easier to pass around than a cheap micro sd card, or just emailing a pdf?
I almost killed myself about two years ago. Have had depression since I was a kid. I saw a doctor, got on meds, went to a therapist and started feeling slightly better for about a year on and off. ive been stuck in the same location for a long time... Was hoping to change that last year but all I could do was fail job interviews (in part because I was trying to wean off my meds).
There is no success part to my story yet but you are not alone. Do see a doctor and don't feel like a failure if you find out you are depressed.
> The study also finds that there are 46 percent fewer trees on Earth than there were before humans started the lengthy, but recently accelerating, process of deforestation. “We can now say that there’s less trees than at any point in human civilization,”
> loss of 15.3 billion trees each year... 5 billion of those may grow back each year, so the net loss is more like 10 billion annually.
> does not in any way change our understanding of the current rates of deforestation... “It does not say there’s more forest. It just says there’s more trees in the forest,” says Lovejoy.
> deforestation is making global warming worse... if we were living on an Earth with close to 6 trillion trees, rather than 3 trillion, climate change would be less severe.
My daughter is already in a much better place than i was at her age. I was homeschooled until college (yes, my family are a bunch of hicks) and I didn't have insurance until I was 22. I was also raised in an incredibly restrictive religion which I have since abandoned for science and reality.
I'm not saying I don't want a better education and better insurance for my daughter than she currently has, but she's on a better path than I was on by a long shot (she gets As in science for starters... hell, she has a science class!).
Meanwhile, the more money I made, the more I / my ex-wife spent. By the time I quit that job (and jobs in general) I had almost nothing to show for myself outside of knowledge and experience (which is very valuable in its own right of course). I had very little in savings - and yes this was due to my own money management problems and not with being an employee (my daughter's old school was almost $20k per year, rent was the same), but that's irrelevant when life is staring you in the face.
Also, I had been bouncing between jobs and job titles for nearly a decade - this was prior to anyone really using the term "fullstack" to describe what I was doing (I can't even count the number of conversations I had where I was told to choose either frontend or backend work), and I was constantly struggling with management who wanted to pigeonhole me and push me towards a specific career path... that of me becoming a manager. More of my time was wasted on office politics, water cooler talk and socializing at bars with my coworkers than I care to admit as well.
I came to realize that I hated the lifestyle associated with being a fulltime tech employee. I hated the free meals in the kitchen, random mid-afternoon beer breaks, and all the other "perks" that I now view as carrots on a stick.
As a contractor I can easily make $12k+ per month if I find the right client (I've done this multiple times). In the last 9 months I made $90k (reduced my prices in order to get clients easier)... but that's only if I'm working 8 hours a day with steady contracts which almost never happens (like I mentioned, I don't bother looking for steady contracts)... and these types of contracts are typically for very demanding clients so they're very stressful.
I value variety more than stability, and frankly I don't want to die with the realization that I only helped upper management and owners pursue their dreams while mine died a quiet death.
I too want my daughter to have the best opportunity and life possible, but I'm not sure how working for $110k per year for 10 hours a day in an office with people I hate is going to give her better opportunities than what I'm doing now. She's still getting an education, she has all the tech she could possibly want (minus a cellphone), and she's a smart kid. I would prefer to get her out of the public education system, but it actually seems to be working better for her than her private school did.
side note: i only went to college for 2 years and it was to get a graphic design degree. i taught myself how to program when i was 8 years old on qbasic - video games was always the motivating factor, I fell into webdev by mistake and then got good at it.
Edit: She's at my house more than her mother's because her mother works full time.
I'm guessing that the implication is that a kid makes things too difficult in terms of money or perhaps time.
On money: I just don't buy a lot of stuff.
On time: I'm awake by 4am and asleep by 9 or 10pm every night. I don't watch much TV / play many games (Netflix and bf4 / gta5 binges do happen though). I try to read myself to sleep each night. The vast majority of my free time is spent working on my games (of which I have yet to finish one, though I've only been going hard at the game development as of late... the last couple of years were spent more on learning and less on producing).
He's not at all disabled for what he does, which is think, and he does that better than (I'm guessing here) any of us.
first time you've been right.
> this is the way we learn by testing things out.
that's not at all what you're doing. you're pushing an anti-science, pro-creationist agenda.