- It was always my understanding that software careers are shorter than other technical careers, and the higher wages compensate for this. More than compensate, if you invest early.
If by FIRE you mean retire in your 50s, I don't think that's an aspiration. That should be an expectation. You might be able to work a full career in this industry, but I wouldn't plan on it.
- The economy functioned without large numbers of office workers in the past, and there are regions of the country where this is still the case. To an extent they will sell their services to each other. To another extent they will be selling to the owners of AI (imagine an electrician building out a data center). The economic surplus will still be there - it will be larger in fact - and there will still be a need for their services. The players involved will change however.
- I'm not sure the comparison is apples to apples, but this article claims the current AI investment boom pales compared to the railroad investment boom in the 19th century.
https://wccftech.com/ai-capex-might-equal-2-percent-of-us-gd...
> Next, Kedrosky bestows a 2x multiplier to this imputed AI CapEx level, which equates to a $624 billion positive impact on the US GDP. Based on an estimated US GDP figure of $30 trillion, AI CapEx is expected to amount to 2.08 percent of the US GDP!
Do note that peak spending on rail roads eventually amounted to ~20 percent of the US GDP in the 19th century. This means that the ongoing AI CapEx boom has lots of legroom to run before it reaches parity with the rail road boom of that bygone era.
- I received both the worst and the best pieces of career advice when I was an undergraduate.
The worst advice was that writing software, after the dotcom bust, was dead as a career. This taught me a lot about the value of "conventional wisdom" vs looking at the underlying supply and demand dynamics of a career. Sort of adjacent to the theme of the essay, I think the best careers are those that you can tolerate and those that have favorable supply-demand curves.
The best advice was from a pre-med advisor, who asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life surrounded by people who were old, sick, dying, and - not in so many words - decrepit. At that moment I realized I was not a healer, I found most bodies to be gross, and I had no business considering a medical career.
- The headline is provocative, as some amount of corporate-owned farmland is owned by corporations that are in turn owned by farmers and their families.
I would also push back on the notion that owner-operators are in a better position. It's more accurate to say that farmers who have assets of any kind are better off than those who don't have assets. As an example, generations back in my family we owned a lot of farmland. There were some bad investments made in the farming operation and we almost lost it all. This was in the early 1980s for those who are familiar.
If my grandfather had sold all of his land and equipment in the late 1970s and invested it in the recently-started Vanguard group, rather than re-investing in the farming operation, then my family would be wealthy. Now expecting a farmer to know about index investing and to bet on it when it was just starting is unreasonable. But it's a good lesson in diversification.
When people lionize farming owner-operators, they discount the risk that owner is taking by having so many assets concentrated in one operation. Now farmers do know about investing and diversification, and some do make the rational decision to cash out. Many also don't, for various reasons.
But it's not totally fair to expect farmers to behave differently than other asset owners because farming is seen romantically or in terms of national security.
This is a different argument than one which would decry the position of tenant farmers. Obviously being a tenant farmer owning nothing but equipment is harder than being a farmer who has $5 million invested somewhere else and rents the land he farms.
- Psychosis is a symptom of schizophrenia, which is a thought disorder according to psychiatry.
Psychosis can also be caused by a lack of sleep (like not sleeping for days) and in this case sleep can end the psychosis.
Which is to say that schizophrenia and psychosis have an intersecting relationship.
- There was a theory that autism and schizophrenia were opposite ends of a spectrum, but it's fallen into disfavor. The theory went that autism produces mechanical, rigid thought patterns while schizophrenia takes free association too far.
I think it is possible to be diagnosed with both schizophrenia and autism which is why the theory is not considered anymore.
- I think "Habsburg" is a good enough descriptor. It encompasses the Catholic, northern-influenced culture (if not actually in the north like Trieste) as well as the baroque, counter Reformation-derived artistic styles.
- They helped me out for my 8th grade science fair! I wanted to build a shake table to simulate the effects of earthquakes on buildings. (tl;dr: the taller the building, the more flexible it is. At least according to my experiment, which did get me a place at the state finals.) They helped me size the motor and even had an AC one I could plug directly into the wall. This was the Geneva location.
- [flagged]
- I had to scroll through most of the paper to find this.
> All participants were right-handed native English speakers with no exposure to a second natural language before the age of 6 years
Which removes a confounder that Python mimics English syntax.
Still if this is a typical study recruiting thirty-some undergrads as subjects it's probably not generalizable, or even replicable given the same experimental setup.
- I don't think it's just about doing vs talking.
There are people who are great at something not because they do novel work, but because they redo known work that's really hard.
Not everyone has the luxury of knowing where the frontier lies and working at it. Many, many people reinvent the wheel simply because they don't know that what they're trying has already been done. And they can redo the work in a great way.
Of course they'll never get credit for this.
- It's what most users want.
Most users want to scroll through internet TV passively. However there is a big enough minority of users who want authenticity, novelty, and creativity in their online experiences. This group is big enough to sustain, say, a social network.
We've just never solved the Eternal September problem.
- If there isn't a Voight-Kampff test for this there needs to be.
- Wall Street pays cash. Trading firms pay cash. Cash is the best form of compensation because it's the most fungible*. If you really believe your employer's stock will double in value, you can take your cash bonus and buy shares of it. Of course if you're that confident in your market prediction power you're in the wrong line of work. Wall Street pays cash because it gives employees the power to invest it however they wish (read: no one knows the future so they invest in a diversified basket of assets).
The only downside of all cash compensation is it attracts mercenaries. Personally I find believers and missionaries more pleasant to work with.
* All else being equal, such as the payout schedule.
- > I've had equity in most of my jobs and the job sucks then I'll leave before my stock vests which I've done twice.
Sometimes you can't tell how it will be from the outside. You only know whether you'll like the job, or whether it has prospects, after trying it.
Bouncing isn't a bad move. In fact it's smart from a diversification perspective. Once you realize a company has no future, just get out and try again. As an employee, choosing whom to work for is one of the few ways you can diversify against risk.
- Is there a genre of science fiction that deliberately tries to downplay the amount of change that will occur between now and the future? Would it just be unpopular so no one tries?
Call it staticpunk or something to jazz it up.
- I don't think the author of the piece is saying there has been a cultural change among students, emanating from within. Rather the thesis is that smartphones are the culprit. "Things changed" can encompass the proliferation of smartphones.
- The higher the level of education, the less attention paid to pedagogy. I had better teachers in high school than in college.
- > Probably led me to be a bit too conservative with such things
Those who graduate into recessions have crimped lifetime earnings compared to those who graduate into expansions. I wonder to what extent it's lost income, and to what extent it's a more risk-averse attitude.
- Investing in a market index today is even easier. Instead of doing historical research on thousands of stocks, you just compare the expense ratios of a handful of index funds and pick the lowest one.
- I'm not sure if there is any literature to this effect, but an institutional arrangement that has known flaws is one in which peers nominate future peers for membership. Academia is an example of this arrangement.
When evaluating whether an institution is accountable, a good default question to ask is, "Is power plural?" In the terminology of the American political order, this is called checks and balances. It's not perfect, but a system of overlapping institutions, whose members are chosen by a plurality of methods and from a plurality of backgrounds, and which have oversight over each other in a loop, are more accountable than unitary institutions.
I'm sure some have attempted to answer this analytically, basically making a "directed power graph" to measure how plural power is, and then correlating that with measures of accountability such as corruption perceptions. This is a huge topic and the second paragraph is my opinion, but that's because I think that's what such an analysis would show.
- Novelty is a byproduct of immaturity. To take another field that matured recently, mechanical and in particular aerospace. You can see a lot of crazy airplane designs from the 1920s through the 1940s. There was a lot of novelty back then and it was an exciting field to work in. Now airplane designs look very standard, and for good reason. The field matured and figured out the best and most economical designs. Novelty is a temporary state, and most novel designs are figuring out how not to do things.
- I'm still waiting for the clothes-folding robot.
- > Irish and Armenian genocides were given special focus, probably mostly due to the demographics of the area I grew up in.
There's just so much history to cover, and to be charitable to those who exclude events deemed important it can be that other events are deemed more important (especially by the local population) and there's only so much class time.
History instruction seems to be of two minds, either grand narratives (great men in the past, metrics-driven narratives like agricultural productivity now), or the case study approach where you sample some episodes from a variety of times and places and study each in depth. In both cases the approach must involve leaving some stories on the editing floor.
- It is mind-boggling to me that one of the most important numbers in life - the 2% inflation rate target - is not taught to everyone.
It's the financial equivalent of not teaching what temperature water freezes at.
- I have thought about this too.
* Remote workers aren't actually a worldwide labor force because of time zones, so the competition on the labor side is less than in theory.
* Remote work diminished the difference in liquidity between labor and capital markets. Capital is by nature more liquid than labor, and being more liquid gives you an advantage. As you say, the competitive pressures exist in both markets, and maybe this is a wash in terms of power.
* Remote workers can pay off mortgages faster, leading to more early retirements.
I still think the primary reason is a desire to manage according to the old style, which is a different argument than the GP.
- Why are bats so often a vector? Is it because they are airborne mammals? Meaning they can cover a lot of ground and come in contact with a lot of other vectors, and also have biology more similar to humans than, say, birds?
I am aware that birds are also a common vector, but bats seem to be the greater risk.
- Field hockey, water polo. If you include club sports there's more like fencing and squash. And yes I think rowing too.
I'm sad to report that renting a family bedroom or two joined bedrooms on Amtrak to take a journey on say the California Zephyr didn't pencil out. It is costlier than flying (about $2000 vs $1600 at the low end for both options, resp.) Even if you account for the cost of staying two extra nights at the destination it about breaks even.
With children I don't want to risk the days of travel becoming an ordeal as opposed to hours of flight time. The "digital detox" might quickly go sideways and require hours of screentime pacifiers. Maybe when they are older.
Happily the QM2 actually made financial sense and there would be more room to move about and explore the ship.
I think rail travel makes the most sense in the Acela context the article opened with - routes between cities that take less than a day. For cross-continent travel the time savings of air travel make rail travel a harder case to argue.