burntoutfire

Do surgeons purchase any od they equipment they use on the operating table, or does hospital provide it all?

When I use usem, I mainly do that on the job and Jetbrains IDEs provide value to my employer, not to me.

I had to basically memorize a particular academic book for a tough university entrace exam. I created around 50 pages of dense hand-written notes on it, and could recall all the arguments contained in the book with detail. 15 years later, all I remember from that is that the book was about early humans, tool making... or something along those lines. The note making helped with short-term retention, but did nothing for long term retention.

Let's not forget about putting kids on the PIP.

In my city in Poland (one of the most destitute ones in the country), until very recently, there used to be regular coal train robberies. On segments of the track where trains were moving really slow (like 20-30 km/h), the thieves would jump on the coal wagon and open it up on the side. All the coal would spill along the side of the tracks for the next dozens of meters, and the thieves would prompty load it up on a cargo truck and go away. With recent huge coal price hikes caused by Russian aggression, I suspect this practice might come back.

Trading firms are paying $500k a year to people who just graduated from college?

At least in Poland, for whatever reason, the communist apparatchicks mostly didn't get rich off of their power. They had a higher standard of living - but that meant a house and a car, and not a small flat and a bus pass, like most of the population. I think the ideology was still strong enough to make such behaviours completely non-palatable and would mean exclusion from the party. Only in the eighties, when it was clear that the system is broken beyond repair, the communist values crumbled and the elites started to accumulate wealth. Even with that, there are very few if any former high party official on contemporary Poland's top 100 wealthiest people list. Of course, if the system continued to reign, as is in China's case, the people at the top of the party would probably amass giant wealth.

There's struggling, and there's "grab Starbucks on the way to work" struggling...

I agree. Tom Cruise was also well-cast for that. He typically plays hot-shots, and here he again is a hot-shot upper-class doctor, but one who by happenstance brushes with forces in the society that are way out of his league and whose existence he didn't even suspect. He comes out of it thoroughly humbled.

The classes got wiped out in all Central and Eastern Europe countries which went through communism. Pretty much all of their wealth was confiscated and they were persecuted to a various degree. From society's perspective, it's actually one of the positives of going through the horror of communism - the societies were reset to be much more egalitarian. Even to this day, wealth disparity in post-communist countries is lower than in Western Europe - there wasn't enough time yet for the true billionaire elite class to emerge from the egalitarian soup.

I think it's ok to cash out once your career is over. It's bad to do while creating, because the money people will inevitably influence your works. But, if you're not creating anymore, then there's no great harm in it.

We even stopped trying getting to cheap nuclear energy, which seems to be a vastly simpler problem.

Microtransactions required to activate heated seats in your car.

I'm sorry, but the fact that this is the first thing you list under "grim" is just comical to me. This isn't even a 1st world problem, this is a 0.1-world problem.

In my city, there's maybe a parking meter for every 20 spots. Plus, most spots are in non-metered areas. PLUS, the meter does not require a very high voltage power line...

There'd have to be charger every 5-6 meters or so along most sidewalks where I live to make electric viable. Certainly not impossible, but sounds like an absolutely massive investment.

Saving the world would still happen if these people got 20 vacation days. The main difference would be the small decrease of ROI for the investors.

Sounds like an addiction almost. Addictions are often a signal of something being wrong or off-balance in life.

I've had pretty similar path (minus the long exotic trip). I've also pursued personal projects and interests very seriously, only to find out that I don't know why I'm doing them really. I found that I'm most satisfied with hedonic/epicurean lifystyle: hanging out with friends, spending time outside, cooking, reading, playing some of my favorite games. Even a job is not that bad, given how easy we can have it in the software profession. I guess any interests and ambitions I had were imprinted on my by external capitalist pressures, and I only realised that when I no longer had to run on the threadmill (I'm leanFIRE already).

A job is a prison. Yours is just very, very comfortable, compared to most jobs (and prisons). It's not wonder you still yearn to be out.

Quite the contrary, you can and should blame Germany for hiding their head in the sand for the past 10+ years, while a massive threat was growing next to them. It was obviously a catastrophic policy failure. They must have some intelligence services warning the leaders what Russia is really up to. They were being warned by Poland's leadership for quite a while as well. They chose to ignore all that and instead chose to pretend that the threat isn't real - for the sake of short-term convenience and, no doubt, some profits under the table as well.

They "succeeded" because every ride so far was subsidised by investors. It's not a level playing field for the cabs, which have to make a profit.

...and I thought this is somehow about squashing commits in a toxic way, e.g. rewriting the commit message to seem that you've done all the work yourself. Was surprised that it's already a syndrome though.

Wait, what is MS doing with python?

Telemetrics and sensors data could (at least theoretically) produce billions of row per hour per single sensor.

Jordan Peterson always says that, when it comes to predicting success in life, IQ has the highest predictive value of all the traits that we can currently measure.

but I'm afraid that the EU is not that far behind the US on the path to corrosion, corruption, and ruin. What is happening in the US, I'm afraid, is coming for everyone.

If that's how you see the US, then I'm affraid our perceptions of reality just differ too much for us to be able to have a conversation. (My take on the US is that it's one of the strongest and most robust states in the world. Objectively, it's not doing great, but subjectively - the rest of the world is mostly an even greater mess, so the US comes on top).

Capitalism's "winning" of the Cold War was one of the biggest humanitarian disasters of our time.

Whoa. You're completely ignoring the fact that USSR's collapse allowed a lot of nations, comprising of easily over a hundred million people, to gain independence. A lot of them, since freed from Moscow's yoke, are thriving in an unprecedented manner. It's basically the opposite of humanitarian disaster for them.

Dollar is getting stronger because other countries either had similar irresponsible policies or are a shitstorm for different reasons. All things considered, the US, with its world-dominating and extremely robust economy, is the safest bet for weathering the storm, and so the whole world buys dollars to invest in the US.

I went into that calculator and it does not say anything about inflation... Do annuities get wiped out by inflation (i.e. they'll keep paying me the agreed monthly amount, but unfortunately it's not going to be worth much)? If, then they're pretty crappy.

7. Your company felt very distant; like it exists simply to consume money and doesn't care if the customer succeeds or not.

That makes sense - since probably a majority of their customers fail, it they cared about them, they'd be getting a major depression.