throw149102

I think there's still things that ring out to me as true even though I didn't have that experience (Grew up in Iowa). So I'll agree that it's not always the hyper-competitive aspect of it, but it's the need to have a personal brand and to push that out on social media. And the desire to escape from our current economic conditions by credentialing is still there, even though it's not nearly as intense, and not all people here feel it equally.

> No Music

I presume you're not a fan of lofi? K-pop? Dubstep? Video game soundtracks, in general?

There's also an element here of how people express their tastes: Now a days, everyone has infinite access on Spotify/Youtube/Apple music. So I would say that music has become very decentralized. Anyone can put something on Soundcloud or Bandcamp, and anyone can listen to it. So the label of "pop" is maybe not as descriptive as it could be.

> No Cool behavior

I want to say something sardonic and rude like "So what, like smoking and getting pregnant as teenagers and raping people?" But I literally have no idea what you mean by cool behavior, and that's what my mind goes to when you say "cool". What do you really mean when you say "cool behavior"?

> no new anything

What do you think of twitch.tv? Or Esports? I presume your thoughts are not positive?

Let me start with the end.

> This idea that "only the wealthy" (how is this even defined??)

I don't know how OP defines "wealthy", but I define wealthy to start around 3 to 10 million dollars. This is due to the Trinity Study[1], which showed that withdrawing 4% of your portfolio every year gives you a 96% chance to not run out of money during a 30 year period. Therefore, a portfolio of 3 million dollars gives you a salary of 120,000 for no work. If you're willing to live anywhere other than the center of a large tech hub, 120,000 dollars is an incredible amount of money. I live in a city in Iowa, and you could live pretty comfortably with half of that, meaning your safe withdrawal rate is probably 2% instead.

I give an upper range of 10 million as a little leeway in case of extreme circumstances, or the SWR changing dramatically.

Of course, this definition of wealth is not the sort of wealth that Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates has. I think there's a distinction between personal wealth, i.e. to live your life without any worries about money, and the political wealth that billionaires have to control entire countries. I just think that my definition is the useful one for this point. My definition also does not include income, which I think is an important part of what it means to be wealthy. My impression is that income could only include more people, rather than exclude people, because people with 3-10 million dollars have an amount of income by default, via their investments.

> It turns out jobs happen to exist in cities throughout the country. Almost all of them in fact.

There is so much more risk in moving for a job than just not being able to find a job. Firstly, the relocation expenses. First and last months rent, security deposits, truck/trailer rentals, gas, food, travel expenses, moving crews, insurance for the moving crew, temporary housing while moving, utility hookups, storage costs, spousal employment assistance, and loss-on-sale allowances for your previous home. I can't find any non-paywalled studies for estimates for the cost of all this, but from the research I've done on the internet, the minimum cost to move is around $1,250 to $5,000, on local vs cross-country moves. That is only for the cost of moving itself, and not on the lost revenue from not working.

> Families are also able to move as a unit if so desired.

Not always. What about families who are not in a single home? For example, a family could have a grandma that lives in a nearby retirement home. Not only may that grandma not know how to use a widely available resource, but what about for all the things that can't be done online?

Another issue is that a good proportion of Americans are relying on their families skills and finances. As according to [2], 12% of Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency bill. That means that when your car breaks down, you can't afford to go see a mechanic. If you're part of that 12%, you first take it to your aunt/uncle/grandma/grandpa/family friend, so they can look at it for no cost. If you live somewhere else you can't do that.

A final issue is the non-financial issues related to moving a family. There are multitudes of studies showing decreased well-being in children who move during childhood. Here's [3] for an example of one.

>It should also be noted that this already happens today and not so much so be the wealthy for whom moving actually is much less important. Take a look at net migration stats throughout the country: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2017/demo/geographic-mobi....

I agree that, for the wealthy, moving is much less important. You have infinitely more resources to do it with, and furthermore, you have infinitely more resources to make your current situation livable. I'm not sure how this connects to your overall point though. I also downloaded the net migration stats, but I have no idea what they're supposed to mean in context.

> This idea that "only the wealthy" (how is this even defined??) have the autonomy to do anything is so played out in today's political discussions. It's a trope used without thought to the idea being proposed. No consideration given except that something might cost money and is therefore only doable by some abstract group of wealthy people.

Maybe it is a tired trope in political discussions, and that people are saying things without actually quoting the research. That's happening on all sides of any political discussion. But actually doing so is almost never worth the effort. To take a quote from Alberto Brandolini, "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it". In a prisoner's dilemma sense, it seems better to reply to bullshit with more bullshit. At least then you can match the volume.

[1] http://www.retailinvestor.org/pdf/Bengen1.pdf [2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2018-repor... [3] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2010/06/moving-well-...

My understanding of the principle is that you often need a much larger rework of your life to quit an addiction than just changing the habit itself. So much of an addiction is the habits and preconditions that you take before using a drug. For example, first a person might have a lunch break at 12:30, then they'll go and talk to coworker X who also has a lunch break, then they'll take a walk, then they'll start lighting up. All of these little habits have nothing to do with smoking individually, but your brain is already primed to assume 'lunch break -> chat -> walk -> smoke'.

Being willing to alter your deepest held beliefs predisposes you to altering other things about your life, from big things like moving across town to small things like taking a lunch break at a different time.

There's also a social element that I think is hard to reproduce in a secular context. Convincing a bunch of adults to coordinate their schedules is much easier if they believe that they will go to heaven if they do so. Furthermore, you already have a public building as a location to hold meetings. Hell, even the architecture of a lot of churches is awe-inspiring. They're physically designed to be these places where you come to terms with your faults (sins) and begin to deal with them. Of course, that also means that their design is religious, with religious iconography in the stained windows and on the walls.

Not OP, but I want to say there's a lot more that goes into the development process than just source control, versioning, and code search. There's linters, and dozens of different kinds of tests, and ways of automatically running those tests, and layers of procedure before code changes go public. This seems much harder to do for stored procedures. Especially considering that stored procedure languages are fragmented between different databases; you don't just pay the cost of having to change the stored procedures when changing databases, you are also paying for the fact that it is harder to build automated tools to analyze the stored procedures, because the API for each database is going to be different.

That being said, there are lots of factors that influence how maintainable a specific stored procedure is. Team size, business needs, company culture, etc. Stored procedures get a bad rep from the places where they are train wrecks. YMMV.

To me, calling it "Trash-talk" seems to have a smug tone. It seems to imply the designers were insulting Amazon rather than having some sort of constructive criticism.

"In general, criticizing one's employer in public is usually inversely proportional to the longevity of one's employment with said employer." reads a lot more balanced to me.

>For example, when playing board or card games, I always try and discover some dominant, completely broken strategy that is definitely not in the "spirit" of the game. (...) isn't this how games are supposed to be played?

IMHO, there are 2 necessary criterion on whether or not a game should be played in a certain manner:

1. Is it fun? 2. Will people continue to play with me if play this way?

The first is obvious, don't do things that aren't fun. The second has to do with exhausting the people who might want to play with you - after all, if no one plays with you it's unlikely you'll be able to keep playing the game.

I don't imagine these criterion are complete, however. A dog might want to "play" by chasing a cat, and the cat might continue to "play" if it fears for its life. This is not a thing I allow. There needs to be some criterion for consent, or for the game being "good" for all parties involved.

In the case of card games, I've been very turned off of them before because of broken strategies. I'm not in principle against discovering new strategies that happen to be much stronger than intended ones, but if the game that comes out of that discovery is no longer fun, then I have no incentive to learn how to play the game.

This seems somewhat of a silly critique. By the same logic, we know that the vast majority of problems can not be solved by any program, yet we write programs to solve problems everyday. Or we know that the vast majority of mathematical statements cannot be proven or disproven, yet we can do math proofs just fine.

I think we don't suffer from this because we end up asking questions that are relatively simple. Technically, there are many more uncomputable numbers than computable ones, but we are much more interested in the infinitely smaller set of the computable numbers than the uncomputables. (Furthermore, we are much more interested in rationals than we have any right to be, considering that there are many more real numbers than rationals).

There should be a similar premise for type systems. Perhaps any type system will disallow valid statements, but we can try to make it so that those valid statements are above a certain length, say 100,000. Then, there are still infinitely many valid statements that are illegal, and they may be much more elegant than their counterparts, but they're so long that it is irrelevant for practical purposes.

Now, actually building a type system like that is a whole 'nother beast. I imagine you would give up some notion of completeness for a level of "predisposition", that is, the type system predisposes programmers to making legal statements in the same way that normal number systems(reals, rationals) predisposes mathematicians to making provable statements. A slight nudge towards writing programs in a certain style can go a long way in terms of avoiding "illegal but valid" statements.

Even if you do live in "Tornado Alley" tornadoes can have a surprisingly limited effect - small tornadoes have the habit of carving small paths in the city, capable of leaving one side of a road pristine and the other destroyed.

In either case, building a home out of stone would do very little to stop, say, a refrigerator picked up by the tornado moving at 200 mph. Nor will it stop the house from pressurizing and blowing the roof off, stone or no stone. I mean, it could, if the walls were a foot thick each and there were no windows.

As a result, most Americans in the Tornado Alley (who can afford it) have a basement that has stone walls, and just accept the small probability that they lose almost all of their home.