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Children are not in daycare for their parents' entire lives. Once children reach kindergarten, many public school systems provide after-school care for working parents that is significantly cheaper than private daycare. Some provide before-school care as well, but usually schools time their starts to community work schedules.

If you make just enough to pay for childcare now and decide to, instead, leave your job to spend time with your children, you are giving up some number of years of professional job growth. When you return to the market, you will likely not have grown your skills and will most likely enter around the same pay level as when you left. If you stay in the market, you will have spent that money on childcare, but you will now most likely have grown your salary through wage increases and job transitions.

In addition, while you may be giving up some time with your children during their early years, they also gain substantial growth with their peers and outside influences which may help them as they grow older.

My wife and I made this choice with our children, and that was what the heck we were doing. Childcare was expensive, but we knew it had a time limit, and when our children finally entered public school, we were substantially better off than if one of us had left our jobs. We feel the experience for our children was great as well, considering they still speak fondly of their pre-K experiences.

At a previous job, we had a product that was attractive with criminals. We were seeing some elevated chargeback rates and refund rates, so I dug in and determined that at least 25% of our new account purchases were fraudulent (unreported stolen credit cards). I put in some rudimentary fraud analysis, and injected a hoop that suspected fraud users had to go through before their account would be billed, simply to prevent the credit card networks from blacklisting our merchant account. The fraud rates dropped considerably with a small false-positive rate, but the new-user metrics slowed with it.

A week after I left my role, the company disabled it. They were sure that the system was a significant cause of some major userbase declines. Within three months, one of their credit card processors threatened to lock them out for elevated fraud rates, and they spent the next six months getting it resolved. Growth never returned.

No one was trying to be dishonest, but no one wanted to look bad, either. The entirety of the metrics showed something was off, but the growth narrative was so important, it was easy to ignore the questionable parts.

This was not a VC-backed business, so the pressure to perform was entirely internal. Nothing was faked, but the success wasn't (entirely) real, either.

The scary thing about this reply is I cannot tell whether it was written by a human or by Bing trying to gaslight me into believing that factual correctness is not important. It reads just like Bing trying to explain why the year is 2022 or Bing did not say that it said the Eagles won the Super Bowl.

"Please don't anthropomorphize the AI. It doesn't like that."

According to the article, as the owner of the duplex, you would not be subject to the vacancy tax ("It applies to buildings with three or more units, not to single-family homes or duplexes").

As for your other points, yes, the government is trying to incentivize that inventory back on to the market (by disincentivizing keeping it off). Yes, they are doing it in response to a situation they took part in creating. Is this more or less likely than tenant termination freedom to result in more housing being available? That sounds like every market de-regulation argument ever.

At ABIA, the terminal is between the parallel runways.

If you believe that the payload was a sophisticated signals investigation platform, sending a radar-homing missile towards it potentially gives your adversary access to information about your missile's capabilities.

If I take that amazon.co.uk URL and replace it with amazon.com, I get zero scam-looking SSD drives. The only results that are 10TB are 7200rpm portable drives, and the largest SSD drive is an $800 8TB drive.

I wonder what makes Amazon show all those junk on its UK site, but not on its US site.

I "retired" at the end of 2021, in my mid-40s after a 25-year career in technology, all with a single company (until they got bought out mid-2021). Both my wife and I used long careers with a small company to reach executive positions in those companies. She is still working and plans to continue working until our children are out of high school. While working, we max out our 401ks, HSAs, 529s, and after that, commit a fixed amount of money each month to self-managed investment accounts primarily invested in dividend-growth stocks with DRIP enabled. This combined with a generous profit-sharing 401k plan from my former company and living comfortably below our means allowed us to build up both a comfortable post-60 retirement fund and a transition fund for before those retirement funds will be accessible without penalty. We have lived in our current house for 13 years, and it has increased in value as well.

Our plan was always to work until the children leave high school, at which point we will not be tied to the school district and can move wherever we want. Our mortgage will be paid off around the same time. When the children are out of the house, we will decide whether to sell the house or rent it, but regardless, our plan is to move somewhere else, probably outside of the US in a place that has a lower cost-of-living than our current location. Predicting where that will be now is a little short-sighted, but if it were to happen today, it would most likely be Portugal or Costa Rica (two low-cost, warm, expat-friendly locations). Based on our projections, we won't be rich, but we also will not have to worry about money.

I put "retired" in quotes because I may go back to work. I am in no rush, and I do a little consulting here and there, but I left work to spend more time with my kids and 9 months out of the year, I have a lot of time during the day when I am not doing that. Also, it makes my wife jealous and I want her to still love me.

For those thinking about retirement, the two biggest things that worked for us was paying ourselves first (max out tax-advantaged investment accounts, invest them in run-of-the-mill dividend-paying equities, and leave them alone) and making a profit every month (living below our means, although some months may not be profitable, every year is). Those profits do not include the money you put into investments. We chose stability where possible (almost no job hopping in favor of constant growth within our current jobs, a house in a good school district and then working on it rather than hopping to a new one), and making decisions in light of the overall goal -- retiring when the kids are out of the house.

But, let's be clear, we are very fortunate. We have had a lot of things go our way. We have a lot of advantages that not everyone has. What we find acceptable, not everyone does. What works for us may not work for everyone else.

As someone with a software development background, I always found legal language very interesting. It is like a very verbose, programming language. All sorts of words and phrases have very specific meanings that, when arranged in a certain order, produce specific, reproducible outcomes. Sections of contracts and laws reference other sections by name and reference, and the whole document (or set of documents) gets interpreted in a semi-rigid way.

Just like computer programs, mistakes happen with legal languages, and when they do, they are typically have unintended consequences.

(edited for a couple of missing words in the last sentence)

I was a co-CTO for a small technology company. Having separate distinct roles is what made it work for us. Downstream, the roles are treated with equal authority and responsibility. Upstream (to the CEO in our case, to the board in Netflix's case), the roles have distinct areas of accountability and weight.

And similar to Netflix, our company had co-CTOs because we were mixing two different technology strategies for our software portfolio. The only awkward part was when leadership lost any confidence in one of the pair.

> I'm not sure what the solution is, but the fine line between positive framing and intentionally misleading investors is crossed way too much, and in the long run, it hurts both the founder and investor community.

The solution for out-and-out fraud ought to be prison time. This does not sound like a case of "exaggerating metrics"; JPM alleges that the founder knowingly created false metrics and used them to misrepresent the company's value.

To be fair, SV is littered with stories of this tactic being successfully used, too. Two that come to mind immediately are Ashley Madison's lady bots and Reddit's use of fake users in its early days to make the community look larger than it was.

> > So, I personally don’t really get the pushback.

> Right, you don't. So don't rag on those who do. This new UI is terrible for my workflow.

In my experience, when people say, "I don't get" something, what they usually mean is, "I don't want to get" that something. The author does not want to understand why people are pushing back; they just want people to stop pushing back.

Note that I include myself in "people." I have done this myself and recognized it upon reflection (not with the JetBrains UI, but in other situations).

> "I used to work for a large company trying to fill the void [huge gap in the market for good aviation scheduling software], and our software was damn good too. SW was one of the airlines interested, we would demo it exactly like the scenario today, but it was "too expensive" and they stayed on their homebuilt stuff."

This is a common situation in any industry. A company has a solution it self-developed in its infancy to support itself, and as it grows, it comes to rely very heavily on this software. At a certain point, everyone involved with the software -- from the developers to the users to the customers -- knows that it is not on par with third-party software developed by a team dedicated to all of its potential use-cases and pitfalls, but it is very difficult for the business to replace it because the ongoing cost is a relatively low maintenance cost, and the replacement cost is a one-time, relatively high purchase fee (with, usually, a similar if not higher ongoing maintenance cost). So the immediate reaction is to stay with the low ongoing cost, even though everyone "knows" that the long-term benefits of the third-party solution far outweigh the financial savings of keeping the in-house solution, whether those benefits might be avoiding a national week-long service outage or something simpler, like the ability for staff to get more done in other areas of the company that need attention when getting larger.

I have been there. It can be very difficult to make the financial case when the future benefits are somewhat speculative or intangible. Accountants tend to devalue those benefits, relative to the hard numbers they already have. It does not help that system replacement projects often go over budget and introduce other problems that cost more money. Replacing home-grown systems is hard because they are not just software replacements; they typically also require reworking business processes.

That's a good idea, but not really feasible for a family. After the rental car fell through, we resigned ourselves to not getting to our destination and decided to make the most of the situation we have (explore a new city we have never experienced beyond an airport or a highway) and solidified our return flight.

The agent this morning told me that they are using the next three days to move staff and planes where they need to be, and the result will be a lot of cancellations when the routes don't serve that. That's why nothing is getting rebooked until Saturday.

SWA has been telling affected passengers to keep their receipts for reimbursement later, so hopefully once things clear up, they will go beyond the letter of their policy to help make things right with their customers. No guarantees, but also not many options otherwise for those of us affected.

Their brand is going to need it, so whatever that cost is will probably be worth it for them.

> Here’s the baffling bit. I make a reservation this morning at Enterprise in a KC suburb and get back a confirmation number, cool. Five minutes later I get a call back that they don’t have any cars available. I ask him why, because I got the confirmation number. He says the website isn’t accurate at the moment. WTF? So when a car is rented and driven off the lot the database doesn’t update? Or worse, the local dealer data is not synced to corporate in real time?

Same thing happened to me. My wife even called the night before and talked to someone (not at the airport, though) and confirmed. The guy at the pickup had to tell 6 people at 6am that they were only honoring reservations made at least three days prior, and all of them had confirmed numbers.

Likewise, no cars are available within a two hour drive. It looks like the first few days of problems sucked up any available inventory in the system.

> Car rental inventory is absurd, and renting a box truck is even worse. I've learned over the years that a "reservation" is a best case scenario. - nothing's real until money changes hands.

As Seinfeld said, they're good at taking the reservation, but not good at holding it.

Both can be true. Some people will swear them off. Some won't. Some SWA will win back with steep discounting.

For me (I am affected), this is actually another in a series of recent events that are making me reconsider my preference for SWA. They are no longer a "cheap" airline, routinely more expensive than the other major carriers. Their planes are not nice anymore. I've flown on a few other airlines over the past few years and found their planes to be nicer with more features (like chargers and phone/tablet holders). And now this. The cancellations are one thing, but they totally botched the communication of it, and their practice of delaying flights throughout the day only to cancel half of them after several hours left people stranded.

Will I stop using them? We'll see how they respond, but they may not be my first choice anymore.

I am affected by this. We got halfway into our flight only to find our next leg was cancelled. SWA will not (cannot?) rebook anyone until the 31st. Our return flight was going to be Sunday, so we rebooked from our halfway stop back home on Sunday.

Here are some crazy things I have encountered.

Rental cars in our city are sold out. Same for cities within two hours drive. The websites will accept reservations, but when you show up, they tell you they have no cars. Because it's the holidays, busses and trains are booked and any flights on other airlines are crazy expensive ($1500 one way). When you are stuck in a city, you are probably truly stuck there.

Your only hope of dealing with SWA is waiting in line at check-in or a gate. The phones don't work. Online chat doesn't work. The lines are long and slow.

Luggage is hit or miss. If your bag was pulled off a plane, you might find it in baggage claim, but most bags are on a plane or on the tarmac. SWA told us it may be 30 days until we get our luggage. They won't pull bags for people, and the agents that we spoke with acknowledged and felt for people who may have had medicine in them.

The workers are as befuddled as the passengers. They have been very nice and as helpful as they can be, but their phones haven't been working and their computer systems have been slow.

On Twitter, someone posted a video of the announcement at Houston Hobby about no flights until the 31st and people keeping their receipts for hotels, etc. They said the same thing at our airport.

People in the airport are so mad. It's unfortunate because it's not constructive. But tempers are flaring, and frustrated passengers who finally get to talk to an agent end up slowing things down because they spend a lot of time trying to hear something they're not going to hear.

Ultimately, this is an operations failure. Companies talk a lot about accountability, but the typical way you hold people accountable is by replacing them with more capable people. It will be very interesting to see if any executives leave SWA over this. If not, I would say that no one was held accountable.

To close, my family and I are fine. This is but a minor speed bump in life. No one is dying, and we will see how SWA takes care of the extra expenditures. Some people aren't so lucky. They have meds in bags, or finances that don't allow them to spend multiple nights in a hotel and get Uber trips for a few days. Hopefully, SWA takes care of them, too.

Similar to you, I left my job about a year ago after working non-stop for 25 years (worked through college, software development, architect, director, eventually C-level, all at the same small company). My break was to focus on spending time with my children. It has been very rewarding. Initially, I thought I would take 6 months off and then get back into an IC role, but after a year, I am in no rush. I have played the interview game with a few companies in the last few months, but so far have not found an inspiring place yet. There still seem to be plenty of opportunities with small companies out there.

When I left a year ago, I thought that it was likely that the industry would start to slow down within those 6 months. I have been watching everything happen with mild curiosity. I am fortunate that my wife has a healthy career, so looking for any work has been low-stress.

> However, the technology does have quite a few advantages, provided that you’re investing in a legitimate project with a good & planned-out vision: > > 1. It’s a great and risk-free way of earning interest on your crypto holdings

This section is where I basically stopped reading. Anything that earns interest is not risk-free. Full stop. The whole point of earning interest is to reward the lender (and to be clear, "staking" is lending to the system) for the assumption of the risk that they may not get their money back. There are low-risk opportunities (usually accompanied by low interest). And in the case of staking a token, the staking comes with the implicit risk that the value of the token may decline substantially.

I see a lot of talk of "risk-free" opportunities in the DeFi movement, and that's why I stay away. It sounds too good to be true, and it is.

There are other issues in that article -- in particular, most DeFi APY calculations are variable and constantly changing -- but that one was the full-stop for me.

Also, this study focused on Italian schools, and the authors readily admit that while Europe more generally also sees the same grading bias, the reasons for that in other countries may be different.

> She adds that although other European countries also grade girls more generously than boys, the reasons for this could differ from place to place and won't necessarily mirror those in Italy.

I worked for a Usenet provider for a number of years designing and writing the software that powered their Usenet feeding infrastructure. The Usenet feed is basically a giant stream of articles, and we used queuing theory to scale out the systems that read it in, process it, and distribute it to readers.

My experience with the formula's is a little different from yours. People thought what I showed them couldn't be true. "If the feed is X articles/second and system's P95 is Y, the backlog will continue to grow," would often be met with, "That can't be true ..."

I think the most interesting part of this article is that Ryanair was able to immediately offer affected fliers $100 tickets to their destination. Being a primarily US flier, I am amazed that their systems and flight vacancies allowed them to react so quickly to the opportunity.

In Firefox 105.0.1 on MacOS, the button also always fails when I click it.

EDIT: In my case, it appears to be some extra "<div style=\"position: static !important;\"></div>" text added before the closing </body> tag. I suspect this is introduced by a plugin, probably LastPass.

Is it cheating if you make decisions to purposefully not gain an advantage (ignoring gambling-induced outcomes, like throwing a match)?

"He was cheating! An outside influence was telling him which move to make and he purposefully didn't do it!"

No, the US has no official language, but English is the de facto national language. Some laws require official documents (election forms, immigration forms, etc.) in multiple languages. You often see signs including other languages in specific locations depending on the local population (Spanish in the Southwest and Puerto Rico, French near French Canada, Native American near reservations). In addition, some state laws require the use of languages important to their local populations (e.g. Spanish on legal and warning signs in areas with a lot of Spanish-speaking citizens)

This particular law is a state law passed in Texas. It requires that schools post any privately donated signs with this message. The law is written in English, so the case is not a slam dunk. A court could find that the law specifies the phrase in English and only applies to signs with the English phrase.

This Texas law is an example of the recent trend in the state's politics to leverage private actors to enact policies that may be constitutionally questionable. They also did it with their recent abortion laws, that enable private individual and organizations to sue abortion seekers and providers for facilitating abortions, even if the people bringing suit have no relationship to the abortion activities. The constitutionality of such laws have not been determined in court yet, so they may yet run into issues.

Moving away from on-prem data centers does not reduce security costs. At best, it's a lateral move, and depending on the cloud setup, may actually be more expensive.

Ultimately, this is an opex vs. capex decision. Data centers are expensive, and require a lot of up front capital to go into the ground. FedEx is worldwide and moving more technology to the edge, so buying land, designing and constructing buildings, and then operating them for 10 years or more in a large number of locales requires a huge investment. They can take that money now and solve their problems immediately.

They are also not saying what they mean by "closing its data centers". FedEx announced a 10-year partnership with Switch last year to build and operate edge facilities. FedEx may be moving out of data centers it operates on its own into facilities built and run by others, and using "cloud-native" designs deployed on hardware in those facilities.