198 karma · joined April 5, 2012
Occasionally I also do art projects with decent sales through a NY gallery.
I have always seen art as exploratory, a frontier where you push what is thinkable and communicable. An example would be the literary pioneers that preceded space exploration. In other words playtime to widen your perception before you narrow down on a problem and solve it.
BTW Jordan Peterson's latest podcast goes deep on this issue. His podcast is here: http://jordanbpeterson.com/2016/12/podcast/
Hiring people in Austria is another issue. Part of the high standard of living is all the employee protections. E.g. by US standards there is an ungodly amount of holidays. If you are a core team of founders or hire people remotely this can be mitigated.
Actually counter intuitive why Austrians tend to be more risk adverse. It's really a mental block rather than a systemic issue.
Just go fly a glider, UL or, VLA. Buckling up feels like putting on a wing backpack, I promise. They become an extension to your body after about 50h of flying. Most importantly these flying machines are available right now. Also they work really well. Mindbogglingly well. There are ULs that can fly 1000km on 15 gal. With about 100h of experience you can fly a glider 500km and more.
I hear you say but it's expensive. Glider flying can be quite affordable, like 2000 bucks/year affordable. It's more flying anyways especially when you live in a mountainous area. Many clubs also let you reduce the fees when you help maintain the gear.
I hear you say it takes a lot of training. Well, you are pretending to be a bird. Chances are you will welcome the training until you feel very comfortable in the air. I never thought the required training is tedious. It's really part of the fun.
In short, If you want to to fly it's more doable than you may think and tiny flying addons (aka jetpacks) are generally overrated.
I have worked at Universities and IT in the US, Switzerland, and Austria. Austria has almost free kindergardens, schools, and higher education. In CH (basel area) I paid 70USD/day/child kindergarden fee. In the US it's quite normal to start saving for your kids education when they are born.
US health care is a mess. Even after paying tons of money you have to set money aside for all the times you get screwed over by insurgence companies refusing to pay certain parts of a procedure. If you are honest with yourself you have to subtract this all from your pay check and/or add this when you live in an area that has fail-proof health insurance for under 400 USD/month/family.
CH's living expenses are generally very high and most people starting a job there underestimate this. If you think a 40 USD pizza at a normal looking place is insane, you are one of them.
Just throwing some pointers out that salaries must be compared in context ...
The thing to keep in mind when using it is that not all parts are equally usable. For a stable workflow you have to stick with what works. When you start using less polished corners FreeCAD tends to crash. It takes a bit of testing to figure this out.
Keep up the good work.
There is not really much tech required. You can simply cut apart the gypsum model tooth by tooth and align it perfectly with wax and add space for you gum. Finally create a mold and use medical grade silicone to make the tooth straightener.
Silicone also allows for more movement and gives you control of upper and lower teeth in relation to each other.
While this is not rocket science there are considerations about jaw alignment that would be difficult for the amature to get right the first time around in any but simple misalignments.
At times this is frustrating because you want the easy fix and when antibiotics work they work really well.
It's also quite illuminating how many symptoms do not seem to benefit from taking antibiotics even when they are the knee-jerk treatment.
I sometimes joke that modern medicine is 50% prescribing cortisone and antibiotics.