A fine read indeed. This quote in particular resonated:
"Many who have ''plied their book diligently," and know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry,
stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter
parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain underbred and pathetically stupid to the last."
Successful people are very often full of shit - since perception is hugely important in any human endeavor, the people who have attained success must have mastered bullshitting (incl. faking confidence) along the way. Then, like any other life skill, they pass it onto their children. I see this mechanism in my father and in myself.
true.. it irks me to no end to watch self-confident idiots spout endless bullshit that amount to zero value to the company (which usually means actually getting an objective accomplished). It's not actually 'what' they're saying that seems intriguing to people, but more about 'how' they're saying it, typically bordering on arrogance. To many lower-level employees, perhaps suffering from their own imposter syndrome, generally assume that there must be something to it, even if what they hear is objectively wrong or lacking any material substance. These people seem to have learned that they can act and speak in a particular way, they can attain positions of authority, without having to actually do anything. They're immediately put into command positions with staff to execute their useless (and usually selfish) agenda. This is usually confirmed by those in positions higher than them, who have attained those positions in largely the same way. Management consulting is probably the most egregious case I've seen first-hand. You know, where a bunch of 22-year olds from 'good schools' in nice suits come into your company and dictate 'strategy' at $3-4K US per day. Most of these people didn't have a clue, and readily admitted it. Yet there they were..wasting tons of money. I couldn't understand it until I realized that their very presence there was simply a function of the broad confirmation bias that existed at the highest levels of the company.
This is my experience with more sr members at multiple "faang" as well, there is a lot of cheating especially at more senior "engineering" levels, a lot of these people realistically wouldn't cut it as tech support.
I don't understand how these people sleep at night.
I always knew I was full of shit, and often received gentle and not so gentle reminders about it. But I didn't realize how much more full of shit was my father until a few years ago. It's a hard life.
Well you have to be full of the exact right kind of BS, with lightly understated confidence, and mostly certainty about what your social-peers proper place in society is.
> This is what happened with the United States hundreds of years ago.
United States started with a bloody revolution in order to secede from Britain.
To get some territory for your country, you'd either need a revolution in an existing country or perhaps create an artificial island somewhere in international waters (or a base in space). I don't see any other options.
"An attempt to create a sovereign state on an offshore platform in international waters near the Italian city of Rimini. It was completed, but shortly afterward seized by the Italian government and destroyed with explosives." :/
The state currently performs suspicionless surveillance on the entire traffic graph of the USPS. Every piece of mail is weighed and imaged and sender anf recipient are placed into a database, so it is impossible to send a letter without creating a permanent record of source and destination.
You can, of course, leave off the return address, and this works fine for letter mail.
Packages, however, require ID to be dropped off. You cannot use the USPS to send packages anonymously.
The analogous version for a state-run ISP would be a blanket filter/ban on Tor/VPN usage.
I don’t think the USPS is a good example of a state-run organization for that reason. The state has already demonstrated their desire to eradicate personal privacy and anonymity.
> Staying for years around an area that gets "only a month" of excessive PM2.5 particles and smoke is unwise and you will soon become someone with an existing respiratory condition.
I live in a city which has a serious smog problem in the winter and colder autumn and spring months. Yet most people don't have respiratory conditions.
> I can do as a CS engineer to help solve the big problems of our time, such as climate change
So far, technology has only created environmental problems. I don't think environmental problems created by technology can be solved with technology without creating another problems.
I think that this topic is quite complex, and generalities are to be done with care.
Yes new technologies such as 5G and autonomous cars (electric or not), when doing a comprehensive analysis of those systems, will bring more problems than solutions. But technology has so many other shapes, even in the field of CS. Would working on software to simulate and visualise atmospheric phenomenons be working toward more problems ? Working on optimizing the use of an electric grid ?
Even 5G and autonomous cars are not problematic by themselves, its how we plan to make, deploy and use those technologies that will lead to even more troubles.
To sum up my view, I think that tech is not the problem, but tech providers and users are.
In general, all environmental problems that people create stem from using technology - i.e. without technology (starting with the most basic ones, e.g. mastering fire), we are harmless enough to not be able to do any damage. So far, the more technologies we've developed, the more damage we've done to the environment. I can't see this trend reversing.
Well, this trend will reverse, no way out of this. We either find solutions (voluntary degrowth for instance), or physics laws will stop us, and from that point the societies us two live in collapse.
But who knows what will happen ? So far, we developed new tech not thinking about those physical limits. That state of mind is definitely changing, especially among students. With that said I also tend to be pessimistic, and I don't think things are moving fast enough in the right direction. But if I do not hope for that, try to find where I can use my skills (and what I love to do) to help tackle those challenges, what do I do ? Because yes, egotistically, I still want to work in CS.
In Poland, the rule is that basically if you and sibilings can afford to pay for the nursing home of your parent, there is no state assistance. The state only kicks in if the family is too poor to cover the costs. The rationale behind it being probably that caring for parents is the responsibility of family, not state.
Does the state expect children who have emigrated to also contribute toward those costs? I know many younger Poles have moved to other EU countries for better job opportunities.
“Marketing” might be more precise, though not originally in the context of business. Specifically, Propaganda fide, from which the term “propaganda” entered general usage, was the older name for the Vatican organization that is now the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.
It's just someone's prediction. Could be true, could be false. Maybe the singularity will happen in 10 years, maybe in 10000 years, or maybe it's actually impossible for us humans to accomplish.
"Many who have ''plied their book diligently," and know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain underbred and pathetically stupid to the last."