glasss

Good ideas are usually still good across time and tools

That's not being frugal, that's a hoarder mentality.

A voice based BBS could probably trace some kind of cultural or technical lineage to TikTok today, interesting to think about.

It's funny to think that not that long ago businesses would pay a premium for that feature set from their voice service provider. Maybe not the SSH part lol, but I worked with plenty of small and medium businesses in my career that paid for a voicemail to email service.

Great piece, I definitely enjoyed reading through it.

I don't have a question about ASML or the machine in particular, but I am curious about your thoughts on something: I've recently noticed a fair bit of media (blogs, YouTube videos, TikTok clips) about the same thing: this machine and the EUV process. Do you think interest in this topic is just a coincidence or did something happen to cause these different content creators and authors to do a piece on it at around the same time? What caused you to do a piece on this now?

I think on average it's a safer assumption that the union made up of your peers are more aligned with your interests than the owners of the company are.

All of my friends that are teachers do admit their union has flaws, but also are very grateful to have strong contracts, benefits, and people willing to fight for them when the school system tries to screw them over.

Great to see! I think unions should be the default for most situations.

That's actually a great point, and probably touches on the broader trend of chasing profits now at the cost of long term health. For what it's worth, the two Disney adult couples I know are both having kids and besides bluey everything they consume is Disney related.

I agree, I think it does simply make sense to cater to the customers with the money. If I were starting a business selling products or services to consumers directly, I wouldn't target a customer base that could only afford to buy it once or twice. It wouldn't matter why they have more money, being child free or being a software engineer from San Francisco, I would just figure out their demographic and target them.

I guess that is their hobby, consuming the products or experiences and sharing that with others.

The reality actually is you do not need to spend a lot of money to participate in any hobby. Some hobbies are expensive, and may have gotten more expensive in recent years, but at least in my experience and social circles it's very easy to participate in hobbies without spending a lot of money.

Yes but in my fantasy world I'm the king because my morals and opinions are best for society. And of course I'll always be reasonable and never have a bad day or let my personal interests take priority over the good of my subjects.

Obviously this is just wishful thinking about governance that people have been saying for milennia. Socrates said philosophers should of course be kings / the ruling class.

There's no simple solution to creating a harmonious society, which of course leads people today and from thousands of years ago to say "Gee, wouldn't it just be nice if everyone listened to me about how to act and what to do when people get out line?". It's a fantasy, and a reminder that anyone wanting a benevolent dictator or to give up their responsibility of being a good citizen shouldn't be taken seriously.

But I do pinky promise I would be a good king if everyone wanted to give me a try.

I have the same dilemma. Privacy and anonymity has always been a top priority for me, but we can't excuse malicious actors, we shouldn't even accommodate people with good intentions but misguided means if the outcomes are so clearly detrimental to society.

I don't think there is a good answer without limiting freedoms in either direction, and I don't envy the people in government that are earnestly trying to do good for their constituents but are struggling with a solution.

The people committing TARP fraud may have been the same people that caused regular working people to lose their homes, businesses, and retirement funds, but unless that venn diagram is pretty clearly overlapped I think you're misunderstanding what the general public was / is upset about.

I know there were some really large settlements in 2012 and onward, but for everyone I know who lost their business or their home or their investments, I don't know anyone who received any of this settlement money.

Do you have data to back this up?

I like supporting my local community - so I guess I don't have much loyalty to a company in Arkansas but I do have loyalty to a company down the street or a town over.

I thought it was a good video, but similarly I had an issue with how he discussed the loss of the skilled trades and professions in the US. He did a good job highlighting that these jobs are rare, don't pay well and are important, but he made it seem like we all just accidentally stopped investing in local manufacturing, or that we just let those skills erode. Leaders at these manufacturing companies moved things over seas, laid off the skilled workers, busted up unions, and overall sold off this skill set in order to sell cheaper products and make more money for themselves.

> Wells Fargo did a bad thing. But the badness of the thing is uncertain, amorphous, hard to quantify: People were harmed, but not in ways that the legal system can easily reduce to money.

> But the financial system can: The bad thing that Wells Fargo did caused its stock to drop, which is a good rough measure of how bad it was. The shareholders perform the socially useful service of measuring the badness [...]

I think this is a really interesting point - assuming the actors in the market who are buying and selling stocks share the same general morals of the rest of the population, they can penalize companies that do bad things. But that would mean market forces would need to act on moral grounds and not on profit motives.

For most commercial companies you'll see pharmacy benefits split similarly: 1% - 2% of people on the health plan will account for ~50% of the pharmacy drug spend. That's regardless of overall health of the rest of the members. It's great there's been a lot of innovations for newer drugs that help more people with rare diseases, but specialty drugs just cost a lot. It takes a long time for generics or biosimilars can make it to market.

That is a great point, the things I value most from my time in FIRST are the friendships, connections, and soft skills I built. The engineering is fun, but I definitely use my teamwork, leadership, research, and presentation experience more on a regular basis.

Additionally to the OP, if you want this to be something that you and your kid do together, you can volunteer as a mentor for the team if your schedules align. You can have a very large impact beyond just your kid by doing so.

Yes, there some specific routes set in the gym intended for the ACG group where legs / feet aren't necessary. They'll also set similar routes nearby each other, and another volunteer from the group will climb alongside and help the other climber as needed. But a lot of routes are accidentally set in a way that works for wheelchair users as well. Especially if they are allowed to cheat a little bit and grab a nearby hold from another route when needed.

Related to the article, people with impaired vision may have a volunteer use that person's cane to point out where the next hold is, or they just need to be led to the wall to start and they can handle it from there.

For people with a bit more mobility issues they also have an ascender seat / chair (not sure what the proper name is). You sit down, get strapped in, and pull a handle down from overhead repeatedly to "climb". It's not climbing a wall with holds, but you get the same workout and still end up 60 ft in the air.

FIRST (https://www.firstinspires.org/) is a more structured program intended to be organized through schools or similar communities (homeschooling groups, 4H, etc.). I have more experience with the bigger robots intended for high schoolers, but they have programs all the way down to kindergarten.

Doing something similar at home is very possible, and if you are nearby an existing team or program they are usually more than happy to have a conversation with parents about how to get their kids started even if it doesn't mean joining the team.

Related, the Adaptive Climbing Group does great work: https://www.adaptiveclimbinggroup.org/

Every Wednesday at my local gym I have the pleasure of seeing people who normally use a cane or wheelchair to get into the building climb better than me.

Unfortunately I don't think the market of third party support vendors for open source software is robust enough to have enough competitors that can provide the same quality (or at least promise of quality) as traditional vendor support from MSFT or another big company.

You can say the market might emerge if the large corporations or government agencies started shifting that way and generated demand for it, but those entities aren't known to take risks.

This is what I was gonna say - they're building, they just may not be building the next venture capitalist funded business. Who says we need more of those anyway?

That could very well explain it, I hadn't thought of that so thank you.

I can generally agree with lowering barriers of entry, even if there would be some social stigma of having a doctor who didn't go to school. My reservation would be around ethics classes, but I guess I just don't know if any of the exams for lawyers or doctors have a set of questions surrounding ethics.

Some economists insist that everyone and every organization should only be prioritizing efficiency of gathering capital.

I think it's interesting that the post mentions a higher average ROI for "students who graduate on time". The reasons why that might be seem like something that quantitative data can't easily explain.

I think there is definitely merit to your statements. I believe the future of the average software developer job involves a very high level language, API integration, basic full stack work with a lot of AI assistance. And those roles will mostly be at small to medium businesses who can't afford the salaries or benefits that the industry has standard in the US.

Almost every small business I know has an accountant or book keeper position which is just someone who had no formal education and the role is just managing QuickBooks. I don't think the need for formally educated accountants who can handle large corporate books decreased significantly, but I don't have any numbers to back that up. Just making the comparison to say I don't think the hard / cool stuff that a lot of software developers love doing is going away. But these are just my thoughts.