>what did I really gain?
This is what I was trying to say: gain being the good effects dream vacation had on your mental health. Cost, of course is time, but you'd pay that anyways.
I don't know why nobody has brought this up yet... while you embark on the journey of finding a good therapist that you can work with, if you are not opposed to the idea, adopt a small pet, dog maybe. A pet has great potential to enrich your life in many ways while still giving you plenty of "me/alone" time. Hopefully that will help you ride out some rough patches without feeling too lonely. If you do go down that path, do your research before hand on what it entails to have a pet.
> That's only possible because the science itself is difficult.
So was (and still is) landing a man on the moon, but we still managed to do it.
Difficult doesn't have to mean "impossible" and accepting wrong/bad results just because getting the right results is hard, is plain stupid, at best.
The vested interests of multi-billion $$ corps who often directly and indirectly fund the said "researches" make it hard to take lot of research at their face values.
There is good reason to question your doctor and nutritionist, out of genuine concern for your own health and well-being. And if a doctor is not open to questions or addressing our concerns sufficiently, we should be on the lookout for a better doctor.
> Thought experiment: if you could take your dream vacation at no expense but would have no memories or photos/videos of the trip would you do it?
Of course I would, there is no downside to it. Even if I have no memory of it after the fact, the goodness that would result from such a vacation would remain with me (and hopefully affect me in a positive way).
Plus, I get to do it all over again; because, if I had no memory, it never happened! Win-win ;-)
That is assuming the (much debunked) trickle down economics. A 20c increase in taco price is not going mean an increase in the worker's pay (if any at all). Minimum wages haven't increased (much) in the States for over a decade, in spite of record profits for a lot of these minimum wage employers. Sure, the price increase is going to help with wealth accumulation for some, but certainly not all, and the ones left out will feel the sting. Someone on a pension will see a sudden increase in prices, property taxes etc. something she didn't have enough buffer to accommodate. Of course, there are other forces that will do the same too, but it would be foolhardy to ignore the effects of digital nomads on local economy. Better to get ahead of it in terms of public policy before it becomes too big of an issue. Same way governments around the world are struggling to curb inflation, nomads can cause (unexpected) inflation on local economies.
Good luck getting that (potentially every changing) list from the hands of your HR and legal departments! Remember, that (at least in US) lot of protections and laws change quite frequently and not knowing where an employee is would put the company at huge risk. Companies, for most part, establish their bases where they find local laws are favorable to them (in addition to ability to find enough able warm bodies to fill the positions), they don't want to open themselves up to lawsuits, legal hassle, what-nots from state/city the laws of which they are not fully appraised of all the time! What happens when that @listOfPlaces change, say every year?
They would still be using a lot of city/state/country local infrastructures (utilities, roads, parks, emergency medical/police/fire services, local libraries, to name a few), won't they? Costs for these might not be funded by Sales Taxes alone or at all. Not paying one's dues to the City/State/Country of residence in accordance with local laws is not only illegal, but also immoral; it breaks revenue calculations city/state/country makes based on multitude of things (at least in most sane places), and if a nomad is not doing not paying equal share, then the locals are footing the bill for them!
Mere income tax on landlord's rental income is not something that will come close at covering all the income gaps city/state would face if one were authorized local worker.
As someone else pointed out, these nomads are earning in foreign currency that literally translate to 10x-100x in local currencies, they will simply drive the prices up and soon drive them up enough out of reach of the locals simply because nomads can afford inflated prices.
I use bookmarks extensively and the bookmarks experience on Edge and Chrome is so horrible that they have been relegated to 3rd class citizen in my workflow, I ONLY use those browsers when I MUST. All the bookmarking for me happens in Firefox, it shines in this regards (can it be better, of course, but it is leaps better than Chrome/Edge!). I think the problem is the Instagram-mentality, where everything is ephemeral and very short-lived, preserving long-term is always an afterthought, if at all.
With every firefox update I can't help but fear that they'll gut the bookmarks feature-set to bare-bones :-|
And air circulation, or lack thereof!
Yes, the one in my building has crappy air circulation (no pun intended!) and the facilities people know this, but they "won't" fix it (too expensive for FANG company to fix a toilet).
The solution: they put those fruit-smelly things in every corner of the toilet. Not only does this NOT solve the problem, The only thing, IMHO, this does is make you hate fruits :-(
Book-binding... I have been wanting to do this so I could bind my own books, mostly for fun and "wow" factor, if nothing else. But it either got pushed out due to something (seemingly) more important/immediate or I didn't go that extra mile!
Watched several videos on the inter-tubes, but nothing clicked... Didn't ever explore the option of bookbinding-workshop!! Care to share some details about this workshop (location, what to look for, pitfalls, etc.)!!
I have been a sucker for nice mechanical pencils for well over 2 decades and gone through tons of books or just bunch of papers stapled together, nothing fancy.
Been meaning to get into fountain pens, any good recommendations please?
> Edit: With that said, I'm not convinced this is the kind of the king that would actually hurt MS's reputation outside of geek circles.
I kind of disagree with this, if enough geeks denounce it, this spreads like a wild fire. Geeks have the (un)fortunate role of recommending everything from a router to PC to TV to their friends and family and if disgruntled enough, they might steer them away from things they dislike, it is just human nature (and justifiably so too).
If one non-techie thing I have learned at Microsoft very early on, is it the fact that never underestimate the _minority_ geek population who can have a disproportionately large impact on general populous with their opinions!
Current MSFT employee... I can say that PMs often wield a lot of power over decision making than most people in the org, esp the customer-facing decisions. And while it may not have been the PM in the lowest-rung of the chain, the parent comment perfectly applies to program managers in general, often in the middle management or higher up, both of which are often disconnected with real world, in spite of their claims to otherwise.
PMs at Microsoft have enormous veto power, they cite data (or lack thereof! ;-)), direct customer interaction, conducted user studies, etc. which the dev team is usually lacking in. Of course this is only an anecdotal observation over the last 2 decades or so.
Increase in $$$s in revenues is one of the best ways to get promoted, recognized and rewarded at Msft (and not only at MSFT, I suspect that's the case at most publicly traded companies, who only care to drive up the the bottom-line, no matter the means to achieve it, as long as it is (mostly) legal).
Good intent or not, the management execution of it was completely botched. They could have even come out on top by projecting that they care about older devices' usability, if they had announced the feature; it was a no brainier and PR/marketing person worth their salt would tell that.
Which makes me question the bit: "good intent on their part" :-|
> If she had an Android anything, I'd be spending at least an hour per week on tech support
First: I hope your wife doesn't read this ;-)
Second: I can believe this to be true if-and-only-if you tried to run it on a language setting you can't read!
Third: One gets comfortable with whatever phone+ecosystem they familiar with or use the most and that is not a basis to claim one is superior to the other. For that person, yes it might be superior(experience), but it cannot be extrapolated to the general population.
In my little circle, if anything, I hear complaints and "how to get this done on my phone" requests way more from iPhone owning family members and friends than the ones with Android phones. But this doesn't just make Android a superior OS over iOS, because it is just 1 data point.
While Apple does provide updates for older devices, the devices are barely usable. Foremost, you most certainly will need a battery-swap on anything older than 3 yrs (not a cheap proposition) and their devices seem to get progressively slower (in my albeit limited) experience.
Apple and Android ecosystems and user-bases are wildly different so a true apples-to-apples comparison (pun-intended!) is not trivially possible.
I'm one of those who's in the RSYNC school and take snapshot-style backups of my data.
I wonder, how a folder under syncthing that has RSYNC snapshot-style backup data work, which is, how does SYNCTHING deal with hardlinks (I suppose it ignores them and treats them as individual/new files?).
I know that's not what syncthing is for, but I'm just curious.