My dad worked in a steel mill his entire life, and as a long term cancer survivor, would have been left for dead due to Koch's policies had they prevailed in his state of residence. He outlived him. Bye! (Nice to see that even if you have near infinite wealth, the grim reaper will still catch up with you).
The bigger issue for us Olds is that we have serious financial and family responsibilities that make us highly undesirable employees in today's modern "I've got mine! Fuck you!" society.
Imagine that you have a close family member with Stage 4 cancer. Who wants to have you on their team? Nobody, that's who. And you better be living in a jurisdiction with solid legal protections, or they will fire you in a hot second.
That is a far greater concern than salary stagnation.
Ah, the magic of financial engineering. Mr. Neumann will cash out of his fictional decacorn in dribs and drabs and never have to work again. Everyone else will be left with a bit pile of shit (aka a commercial real estate venture that bet on ever upward growth and got ripped to shreds in the secular downturn).
Pilot here. I predict that airlines are going to soft ground the Max while this gets sorted out. They might not take them out of service completely, but would not surprise me a bit if they rely on other equipment where possible until this gets sorted out. Better to take a hit on increased fuel costs that risk the loss of an aircraft and all on board.
I take the approach of telling people to call or text me if something is urgent (my number is in the company directory), because I likely won't notice an email quickly, and will ignore Slack/IM completely so soon as I walk out the door. The only time my phone buzzes is when something is actually on fire.
I remember previous jobs where late night emails demanding edits to someone's slide deck were routine (and anything is not urgent, it is editing some product manager's slide deck). That shit can wait until Monday, and if you are throwing it on me because you procrastinated, that's your problem.
Building the cockpit is fun, but you only have room for two. The next logical step is to buy interior panels and windows from a mothballed 737 (you can find them on eBay). I have been building out both the cockpit and front cabin (and passengers have a view out their windows). For my project I am putting more effort into the cabin, since it is for entertaining friends as much as it is a flight sim.
I was assigned as an inventor for a bullshit patent application our legal team did not even understand. I did everything I could to undermine it. The whole system is fucked and is all about who has more money for lawyers (who know fuck all about the matters at hand)
Maybe this is all not such a bad thing. The worst case scenario is a mass extinction that kills off large animals, clearing the way for whatever is next, not unlike the Cambrian explosion. We elected Donald J Trump. We (large animals at the top of the food chain) kind of deserve what's coming to us.
Somebody needs to write a Peter Thiel / Not Peter Thiel script, and cross reference the photos with his Friendster profile pic where he was shirtless on a boat advertising for twinks (pro tip for people who think he was outed by Gawker, he was one of the most obvious closet cases in San Francisco).
A substantial percentage of the US population installed that "cow clicker" app at some point, and who knows what data they harvested. Even if they did not access your full profile, they could probably learn a lot about you based on when and how often you were clicking on cows.
Just a friendly reminder, Gawker did not out Thiel. He had a public profile on Friendster that clearly described him as interested in men. Gawker's editor at the time remarked that people like him thought the web was this super ultra secret bat cave, and that if you posted something there it wasn't really public.
This should give everyone serious pause. If this false alarm had been sent by NORAD (it has happened before, read Command and Control), it's very likely that several million people in both Koreas, Japan and possibly the US would be char-grilled nuclear krispies right now. There needs to be a serious re-evaluation of our alert systems and launch on warning posture.
The internet really is an incredible cesspool. It would be interesting to see how the public reacted if YouTube and Facebook turned off their content moderation for a week. It would make the goatse meme look like a Sunday school picnic.
If you want a forecast of how ridesharing companies will settle out, tear the route map out of an inflight magazine. There is no global airline, but many regional airlines that provide international connectivity to other regional airlines.
It makes sense that each major region will have 2 or 3 dominant operators including local taxis. In the long term, a local operator will have advantages due to better local knowledge, government relations, etc.
Roaming agreements will take the equivalent of Star Alliance, and primarily of value for international travelers. Most users will interact with their preferred local operator. Note this has been tried already, but failed due to parties not trusting each other, but will probably be tried again once territories are more nailed down.
The author's basic problem is he does not understand the United States is comprised of over 3,000 counties. The differences among them are vast, and most of the country is sparsely populated. To understand America, you'd have to spend time in places outside the big cities, like Appalachia, much like Great Britain is not just London.
I don't want to offend anyone, but could a high rate of suicides on farms have anything to do with the heavy use of pesticides in these places (which operate essentially as nerve agents, so it would not be surprising if they caused higher than normal rates of depression, hoarding, etc). Not trolling, just curious.
A corrupt government that ran its economy into the ground backing a cryptocurrency. What could possibly go wrong?
OTOH, if someone with centuries of banking experience were to launch a well managed cryptocurrency, that could be pretty useful (Switzerland I am looking at you).
I would like to see a digital currency whose money supply is linked to the number of users in the system. As more users enter the system, generate proportionally more coins and vice versa. Something like this might work as a stable store of value.
This ^^^^. I have lived in San Francisco for 25 years now. While I could reduce my cost of living dramatically by moving, I have spent my entire post-college life here. Nearly all of my friends and professional network are here, so I have approximately zero interest in moving, even if it would be cheaper, it would not be worth it.
I bought some Bitcoin over five years ago, totally forgot about it, and then remembered I had bought some. I sold it and bought an SLR camera to photograph the total eclipse this summer. It felt like the time I won a few hundred bucks at the slots in Nevada.
My mom was a public school teacher. My parents sent me to a Jesuit school after K-5. Best decision they could have made, and says a _lot_ about public education. She always talks about how they teach for tests and nothing else.
I more or less cut off contact with several people I used to consider intelligent and open to facts, but they were so blinded by their politics it became pointless to argue with them. I doubt anything will change their minds at this point, which is sad. It's one thing to debate the most appropriate response to this, it is another to deny the underlying physics exist.
The thing about being 40+ is you really start to see through bullshit. I remember working for one company that was selling a product customers simply did not want. I tried explaining this to the founders, and suggested alternatives, but got branded "not a team player" for not drinking the Kool-Aid. So it is important to work for companies that are actually doing something useful, otherwise you are going to have a hard time concealing your skepticism.
If you take solar arrays as an example, someone needs to do the build out. That someone is likely to be a local or regional company that hires local workers. Planning and construction accounts for a significant fraction of project costs as materials costs have plummeted, so this is money that ends up being recirculated in the local economy. Of course there will be large companies in the mix, but there won't be a network effect that results in one company owning the whole industry like Facebook, which is a good thing.
The world does not need more Mark Zuckerbergs, it needs millions of small and mid-size businesses working on the build out of low carbon energy sources. Converting the world electricity supply to run off renewable sources will require tens of trillions of dollars of investment over a period of decades. It's not a small opportunity, but unlike the app economy, it's not a winner take all market. This is mostly a good thing, although we won't see many overnight billionaires from it.