cyberdrunk

> had the good sense to hold their RSUs

Hindsight is 20/20...

Deresiewicz's story is inconsistent.

First, he writes that early artists (Da Vinci, Bach etc.) basically saw themselves as artisans who worked jobs for their patrons, who essentially sheltered them from the cold realities of the market.

Later, he laments that now artists are crushed by the market and can't have any stability that Bach et. al. enjoyed. He's missing a ton of contemporary working artists, who still have their patrons - visual artists working in game dev, musicians composing music for movies, commercials, video games etc. These people have steady income, just like Bach did. Of course, they're not really working on what they'd like to be working on, but neither really did Da Vinci (he was known to procrastinate a ton when asked to produce another boring portrait of somebody's daugther - a portrait which comically now could fetch tens of millions of dollars).

My guess is that there's massive luck factor in determining the outcome. i.e. you can pursue multiple ideas and you can't know beforehand which one will pay off. Best bet is to work on stuff you enjoy and don't expect success.

Apple patches security vulns even in older versions of iOS (to support people whose device is too old to upgrade to the latest version) - I don't know for how long though.

> Data Engineering sounds interesting but also appears to require heavy statistics.

That's Data Science. Data Engineering is just writing code (pipelines in Spark usually) which moves data from system A to B and perhaps applies some machine learning code, supplied by data scientists, to it. But, most of the work is just moving data around. I work with dozens of Data Engineers and none of them know even basic stats (and if they know, they don't get to use it anyway).

> it's one (maybe the most important) of the world's cultural nexuses

How does that translate into everyday living for people who don't have a job in culture creation (media, fashion etc.)?

> A good amount of people buy a certain car and maintain it, intending to run the vehicle into the ground completely.

In such case, yearly depreciation is the cost of replacing the car with a new one, divided by the number of years until you replace it. In my calculations, I estimate I'll be driving my cars 20 years each, and base deprecation costs on that.

> Yeah, that was my first reaction to that bit. Most of my friends would feel uncomfortable about me paying for a hotel room for them, and that would make me feel uncomfortable.

Also, it means that they can basically never propose to come visit you (as they'd put you in an uncomfortable situation of having to approve/deny the hotel expense) and would only come by when you initiate the idea of a visit.

These two situations are not equivalent.

A book author has basically 100% market monopoly on his/her books. He can set a high price and people who want to read the works will still pay.

Whereas ride sharing companies interchangeable and are in full competition with each other, which, in a healthy market, should bring the price down to the point where they're all only making a marginal profit. The cost of alternative mode of transportation does not come into equation (well unless it's overall cheaper and better - then it will kill the entire market segment).

Regarding chance of being hired into those roles without previous experience, I'd say they are minimal, unless you join a scrappy, low-wage startup (or other low-pay environment - perhaps government, academia?). Everybody else can afford to hire people with experience, and will likely choose them over you.

Instead, the way to laterally move into those positions is to work somewhere as a developer and express interest in moving into the desired position. There, you (hopefully) already have a product and org knowledge that is an asset over hires from outside company. Also, before the transition, you can just pick up some work that belongs to the target field, so people will over time see you as the "X" guy and the move will be very natural.

BTW Data Engineer is basically IC Programmer.

> People in the Soviet Union, in general, took a high degree of pride in their work.

Have you lived in the Soviet Union? I haven't, but have in Communist Poland which had similar work culture. In general, people were slacking off and stealing from the job to the largest extent possible (stealing because the jobs didn't pay a living wage or, if they did, you couldn't buy things you need from stores anyway, so you stole them from the job if possible). The organization of work was often a complete travesty which makes government jobs a paragon of efficiency and common sense. [1] On top of that, higher promotions required being vocal about supporting the communist party, which led to incompetent mediocrities being promoted.

Overall, while I'm sure there were stil some people who took pride in their work (esp. the less smart and informed ones, who couldn't see the sad bigger picture), I can't tell if it was more common than in capitalism.

[1] For example, it wasn't uncommon for people who bought a new car to take it to a mechanic to disassemble and reassemble it completely. Only then you could be sure that the car is put together properly - the workers in the factory who worked on the car just didn't care. Another story - in an apartment in a new building my parents bought in 1979, a 1m x 3m section of the wall was missing. The building company just didn't bother to build it (the same defect was present in all flats), and have put a thin wall of plaster and cardboard in place instead. Of course, that wall provided almost zero thermal insulation in severe winters that Poland had at the time, so everyone who bought these flats ended up DIY-ing the missing wall themselves (usually with stolen bricks, as you couldn't buy them either).

For me at least a "lifestyle doctor" is a term without negative connotations.

> 1000-1500 hours

This comes down to 3-4 hours of focused effort, every single day of the year, on top of their work and family responsibilities. Have you actually tried living like this even for 6 months? I doubt it's mentally feasible for most of people.

Honestly this sounds like taken from The Onion.

The whole idea of waterfall as I know it is to have large-ish iterations (typically a couple months), which comprise of analysis, dev and testing stages. Is this different from what you have in mind?

... which, given that most people are speeding, makes their estimates completely unrealistic if you want to actually obey the law.

There is a ton of inefficiencies in big businesses and governments and IBM and other service companies are preying on that. It's a viable business model, if a little scummy.

It's because you want the people who already live here and are your neighbours, your co-taxpayers, your co-voters to thrive. The alternative (lots of miserable and frustrated Americans) can lead to a shitty living environment even for those who are doing fine. Also, as the history has shown, such situation in extreme can lead to end of democracy.

Yes, thanks for the correction.

Worrying about and preparing for ever more elusive contingencies can be poison in itself. Kafka's short story "The bunker" pictures this state of mind very well.

> Now it’s just join the printer to the WiFi and it’s there, ready to both print and scan wirelessly.

Or, alternatively, spend a frustrating afternoon trying to set it up, give up and buy very long USB cable...

In my area, it's easy to tell - the winter smog (from burning coal and god knows what else) stinks.

Someone must have been bored out of their minds.

The Soviet system was clearly inferior (say it was running at 10-30% efficiency of a market system), but wasn't completely dysfunctional.

Combine this with large population population of the Soviet block, the fact that that population was effectively used as slaves at many times and also had very little consumption goods available (most output went into building out further industrializationn to catch up to the West as well as into military and propaganda projects, such as space race) and you can see how it still managed to cough up some respectable output, at the cost of misery of the people working behind it. However, as industrial processes became more complex and reliant on specialized high-level skills (such as in semiconductors or software), it was clear that the system has reached its limits and just cannot do these things well at scale. The rampant incompetence and nepotism were just not incompatible with things like modern chip factory.

> The corruption in Russia today is a legacy of that Soviet-era black market.

Not just of black market, the centrally-ran economy was corrupted to the core. Most decisions (who gets the job, who gets the apartment etc.) were routinely made based on bribes or favors.

Before automobile, people were using horses and buggies to travel to neighboring farms and the nearest town. They weren't that isolated.

Research mindfulness. In short, it's about being more in the present and less in the past and in future. Excessive thinking about potential problems in the future can turn into anxiety, so mindfulness should help.

> "into to Kubernetes"

That could be a movie about absurdity and meaninglessness of life...

> It dropped the overall US homelessness rate by 17% against the backdrop of the great recession [2]

It's practically tautological that if you give homeless people homes, then the number of homeless people decreases ( unless there was a time limit on the house and the measurement was done long-term).

> I want to understand how best to tweak and measure performance.

For the long term, make it a repeatable process, i.e. establish a bunch of test cases against which you run your tweaked code.