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I think if you read this article you'll see (at least part of) the answer. Not only does a given action have to cause a definable result, the medium upon which the result is deposited has to provide enough detail to read the result back off it, and the people reading the result have to be able to be consistent and accurate in their analysis of that result.

With bite marks, the skin has to hold the bite mark (which it doesn't) and experts have to be able to map it back to real human teeth (which they can't). With blood spatter, there are analogous problems.

Tegus | Engineers, Data Analysts, Managers, Designers, Product | REMOTE | Full-time (US), Contractor (US, PL)

https://www.tegus.com/careers/tech

We’re a team of engineers, designers, product managers, data scientists and more coming together to redefine financial research. We believe that small teams of smart, talented people can have enormous, outsized impact on the company and the industry.

We come from a huge variety of backgrounds; in particular, most Tegus employees have no prior experience in finance. We value hard work, ingenuity and outside perspectives in all parts of the product development process.

Tegus helps companies make better decisions. Using interviews with experts, financial filings, and other data, Tegus creates a compelling insights for decision makers. Our products and services help our customers discover answers to the most challenging questions they face.

Tegus is growing quickly: we've gone from just 15 people in 2018 to more than 400 today. Despite growing so quickly, we've always run our business in a sustainable way. We've generated significant free cash flow every year we've been in business and do not need outside investment to continue operating.

We're based in Chicago but our team is distributed and all of our tech team roles are fully remote friendly.

Large, slow ships are easily found and caught. If that's a problem, then you build smaller, faster ships, which are less energy efficient.

Losses of ships are only a financial matter because losses are very rare, so insurance is cheap. If losses become common, insurance costs skyrocket and the cost of doing business goes way up, reducing the amount of trade. That's what the article is saying will happen.

I'm having trouble understanding what you're saying in the second sentence of #1. But primarily, none of the examples you cite were on the military to stop, they were the responsibility of civilian agencies.

I'm a fan of Patreon, but in my experience, it's not a well known platform outside of tech. I've mentioned it a number of times to a variety of different musicians, music producers, etc., and until maybe the past year none of them had ever heard of it, though recently one had.

I think it does have the potential to be like Kickstarter and really broaden the appeal of this type of contribution, but from what I can see, it hasn't actually managed to do that part yet -- both based on articles like this one and my own anecdotal experience.

Tegus | Engineers, Data Analysts, Managers, Designers, Product | REMOTE | Full-time (US), Contractor (US, PL)

https://www.tegus.com/careers/tech

We’re a team of engineers, designers, product managers, data scientists and more coming together to redefine financial research. We believe that small teams of smart, talented people can have enormous, outsized impact on the company and the industry.

We come from a huge variety of backgrounds; in particular, most Tegus employees have no prior experience in finance. We value hard work, ingenuity and outside perspectives in all parts of the product development process.

Tegus helps companies make better decisions. Using interviews with experts, financial filings, and other data, Tegus creates a compelling insights for decision makers. Our products and services help our customers discover answers to the most challenging questions they face.

Tegus is growing quickly: we've gone from just 15 people in 2018 to more than 400 today. Despite growing so quickly, we've always run our business in a sustainable way. We've generated significant free cash flow every year we've been in business and do not need outside investment to continue operating.

We're based in Chicago but our team is distributed and all of our tech team roles are fully remote friendly.

What he won a Nobel for (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2008/kru...), and what he writes and speaks about in the non-academic realm, are very different. And I don't think the implied "successful people can't be outlandish" holds up, anyway :)

No, it was refreshing, but it wasn't really quite long enough to break the mental patterns that I'd built up for so long around computer / internet / use. I did come back excited to read HN etc., I was no longer tired of tech news.

I don't have really any advice for others in this stage yet, since I'm still right in the middle. I hope I move into my next job, whatever that turns out to be, I have more perspective on the post-quitting period.

Not sure what specifically you mean about surprises. I guess not?

I bought health insurance on the state marketplace where my permanent residence is.

Just feel like it's time for a change, and I'm willing to accept the likely paycut that moving into a less hot segment of the industry will likely mean.

No, I just want a big change within tech without totally invalidating the specific technical parts of my skillset. I would like to also be somewhere I believe positively in the impact of the company on the world overall, rather than just neutrally.

I don't really have too many regrets about it, there would have been both advantages and significant disadvantages to leaving sooner.

Certainly being a bit less emotionally invested would have reduced the burnout, and lots of people stay motivated and do great work without that level of commitment.

I posted on a thread about burnout back in May about quitting my job[1] after nine years, this seems like an invitation to post an update.

I used the time off to travel around in a van, hiking, eating, camping, and visiting friends. I'm now back in the city and catching up all of the life stuff that I put on hold for the pandemic and / or travel -- minor remodeling, maintenance, friends I didn't really get to see during the pandemic, etc.

I've been making big-picture decisions about future work as I go but the next phase is to put in serious hours into the search (since I'm planning to move out side of my current network / FinTech). Looking to start something new sometime this winter.

If anyone has questions about taking a longer time off work (will be 6+ months for me) or about taking more time almost totally away from computers / tech (2+ months), feel free to thread Q's.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27124604

Except the distances here are twice that, and the farther you get apart the more the curvature matters.

The 170km number given in another comment (and by the calculators) is meant to take into account "normal" light-bending; the distance here is 250km. While I'm not an expert, that seems like a lot of extra distance / angle to make up.

Same result, just true "line of sight" vs. including light bending. The calculator I used gives both values.

Using https://www.everythingrf.com/rf-calculators/line-of-sight-ca... because it's the first result that came up.

298m height where he's viewing from = 61.6km line of sight

610m height of Knockbrack = 88.2km LOS

Total of 149.8km theoretical visible distance.

And in the article he mentions a real distance of 154 miles -- not kilometers. So doesn't sound like there is any chance it was actually Ireland?

Thread in question: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/87674/independent-evidenc...

While I agree he's wrong about open source's economic effect, there are plenty of areas where open standards have succeeded in creating interoperability without open source, the obvious example being in computer hardware -- think about USB, WiFi, etc.

I think this being a good answer hinges on the resulting user experience. If one person spends several minutes going through the process of putting in their payment and other info only to be told you don't have a ticket, they're going to be pissed. So you need a good answer on how to avoid that experience, however you implement the locking.

Saying this as someone who has been on both sides of that interview question, and also evaluated performance in it as a hiring manager.

Senators and Presidents are more likely to be re-elected by a certain segment of the population if they oppose COVID restrictions of various kinds, yes. And news networks always profit in ratings from a crisis. Both political and ratings success translate pretty directly into financial success.

For the other examples, I have no idea if any of those professions disproportionately oppose scientifically accepted COVID rules. However, if you just relate them to the "profit from ... death" line and not COVID, I think they're all factually correct, those professions do profit from the process of death or its aftermath.

> So, the American society collectively willingly let people die to make more money?

Yes, quite explicitly? Many people publicly made the argument that it was worth more people dying to keep the economy open, though they generally paired that with denying any significant death toll.

I agree the specific association to COVID seems to only serve to anchor the article to current events; it stands on its own without that line. But I don't really think these are unsubstantiated claims in any major way.

> you being by default direct can give some people the opposite impression

Definitely rings true.

> Make it into a cooperative discussion so they don't feel like they're the only one criticizing the subject

If these are people I have time to have regular 1:1s with, then what you're saying does make sense. But there are a lot of people I work with where the benefits from saying the difficult thing would be large that I don't work closely enough with to be able to spend that kind of time. I guess what I'm really asking is how to translate that into a culture; either raise the average trust level or lower the required trust level for difficult conversations.

I've unfortunately not found this to be true. I regularly say the difficult things, sometimes ultimately productively, sometimes not; sometimes I'm successful at structuring the feedback so people don't feel "attacked", sometimes I'm not.

However, through all of that, I honestly feel I've only received the same kind of communication in return from people I've build trust with in other ways, generally through friendship of some sort.

Very interested in suggestions as to how to better translate a willingness to say the difficult things into getting other people to do it too, even to those without a preexisting personal basis of trust.

> I save over 50% of my income but I don't make anything close to $300,000 so yea, taking a whole year off would be a big chunk of my savings.

There is something wrong with this piece of information. If you really save 50%, then taking a whole year off will only wipe out one year of savings, no matter what you make. So if it's a large part of your savings and you're really saving 50%, then the problem is you've only been saving for a couple of years. Having a higher income just makes it easier to have a higher savings rate, it doesn't change the math on how many years you have to save to afford the time off, given equal savings rates. You might want to re-read my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27126783

> I guess I need to try and find a job where I'm making $300,000 lol. Do you have some niche specialty or is that literally just a standard rate?

It's a standard rate for someone who was a senior engineer then got promoted two more times, I guess. I don't have a niche specialty. And I expect to (and have planned for) making less at my next job, and potentially for the rest of my career.

20 years, not 10.

((((((((50*1.07+50)*1.07 + 50)*1.07 + 50)*1.07 + 50)*1.07 + 50)*1.07 + 50)*1.07 + 50)*1.07 + 50)*1.07 + 50)*1.07*0.04 = 30,000 per year income, after saving 50,000 per year and making 7% for 10 years at a 4% withdrawal rate, which is very aggressive for a retirement longer than the standard 30 years.

((((((((((((((((((50*1.06+50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06 + 50)*1.06*0.026 = 50,000 per year income, after saving 50,000 per year and making 6% for 20 years at a 2.6% withdrawal rate, which should be relatively safe even for a very long retirement.

Personally, I think there is a lot of truth to the autonomy, mastery, and purpose framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_Ab...

Another way to say it would be that I think it's about the job not aligning with people's intrinsic motivators. Doesn't necessarily require the job to be at all stressful.

When people don't have enough of those things, they get burnout. Some people get them from other parts of their lives, so they're unphased by lacking them at work as long as they make "enough" money. Some people just need less than others, for a variety of reasons.

One of the reasons I don't usually answer financial questions like this online is because, in a sense, it really all comes down to this answer. If you make a lot of money, and you're careful, and don't get unlucky, the rest just falls into place. But hopefully my other response is helpful for people still learning how to think about saving.

> I guess I'm still confused. "Pays well" as in, pays well above average? I'm taking average to mean ~$130,000 in California / Bay Area. > So you made well above that for 9 years AND lived somewhere with a lower cost of living?

As I said in my original post, I've been very fortunate, and my situation doesn't apply to everyone even in tech. But yes, though I started out lower than that at the beginning, it just grew rapidly over time. This is the pay grade I've been at for the last several years: https://www.levels.fyi/company/PayPal/salaries/Software-Engi... (3rd party source, not implying anything about its accuracy)

> Then I could understand saving so much that you don't worry about retirement. But if you're making "good" but average salary in the bay area, and even saving a lot, you're still eating into savings to take months and years off.

I'm going to ignore compound interest and taxes for simplicity here. If I save 50% of my salary, and take one year off, I lose two years of savings -- one year of spending and one year of making up for what I spent. If I save 10% of my salary, and take one year off, I lose ten years of savings -- one year of spending and nine years making up for what I spent.

> Maybe an easier way to ask this is... What would you consider to be enough saved in the bank, at say, 35 years old, to take a whole year off?

This part of the answer is actually terrible advice because it's so over-simplified, this is just meant to make a point. The shorthand rule is at a 50% savings rate you can retire after a 20 year career. So you don't really need to have anything saved at 35 beyond what you'll spend to take time off, because when you come back you'll still have more than 20 years left to work.

Keeping my savings rate high is fundamentally what allows me to do this, more because I'll make up for the "lost time" quickly than because of what I've already saved.

One of the most important parts of my plan, and part of what I was referring to when I said "almost nothing that looks like work" is to keep a hard cap on computer time. This break is about other parts of my life.

Being in the right mental place to do that is part of why now is the right time.

Professors are paid (though sometimes only ~50%) during their sabbaticals. Otherwise you're exactly right.

For the past nine years I've worked at a place that pays well, and saved a very large percentage of my income. I did this specifically so I have the flexibility to take time off, and potentially choose jobs that don't pay nearly as well in the future, without it affecting my ability to retire. I don't want to imply I deprived myself to do this; we work in an industry where many of us can do all of that and still live beyond comfortably.

While I realize this isn't an option for many people due to lack of opportunities, kids, lifestyle creep, etc., I have both planned for it and been very fortunate. So no, I'm not worried about it.

The latter part of the article, about "The Burnout Society", maps much more to how I and others I know use the term. There was a period at my job where I was burned out -- but that ended when I decided that I was never going to achieve what I had hoped for the organization. I had become an "achievement-subject", and just deciding not to be one largely removed the feeling of burnout.

My last day at my current job is Friday, after nearly nine years. I'm not leaving because of burnout, but because I no longer need the job (right now -- it's not like I never need to work again) and it's no longer rewarding in non-financial ways day to day.

While my time will be very lightly scheduled and contain almost nothing that looks like work, I do have goals for my time off and a rough timeline for when I'd like to return to work. Those goals would be very difficult to achieve (for me, not necessarily for others) while also working full time. I am the perfect example of someone quitting as an act of self care.