jlangenauer

I'm similar to this - I like drinking, but I've cut it down quite a lot in the last few years. My main rule is that I only drink (with occasional exceptions) on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, ensuring that I have at least 4 alcohol-free days a week, though in practice I found I actually drink less even on the weekends.

The other thing I've done is focus on the quality of what I'm drinking, not the quantity. It's one thing to go and swill beer for a few hours in the pub (this is particularly an Australian and UK thing), but quite another to have a cocktail or two made by someone who actually cares about what they're doing.

A seriously incredible achievement, and I'm sure everyone at SpaceX is very happy with what they've done right now.

I was absolutely certain it wasn't going to make it when I saw chunks breaking off the flap.

It's a fair point, but the only way at all to land on a body that has no atmosphere is to use rocket engines that point down. The Apollo Lunar Module landed on its "tail", though it did at least have a separate ascent stage with its own engine, so might have had some chance of taking off again if the landing was damagingly hard.

And have significant externalities which democratic societies must bear, but allow for the tech monopoly shareholders to reap more profits.

This is not exactly the fault of VW/Renault etc. China has quite explicitly encouraged technology transfer as an important strategic imperative for their local firms, so if these companies wanted to play in the (obviously growing) Chinese market, technology transfer was the price to be paid.

(Another example of this is the high-speed trains in China - the first generation was built by JVs with Siemens/Hitachi/etc with an explicit policy of technology transfer, but the newest trains in China are now local, built on top of the technology that has been acquired.)

Or alternatively, "*technology will be used to extract profit, or preferably rent, from you and constrain your agency even further than it already is."

Oh that sucks. I recently rented a Model 3 from Sixt in Australia, and they said bring it back with any level of charge you want, which was great - I only had it for 3 days, and the initial charge was enough for that.

Both those brands are exactly that - brands - where a lot of the cost of the product is recycled right back into advertising to convince you that the brands are actually worth the prices they charge.

When buying clothing, it's worthwhile to spend a little bit of time learning what makes quality clothing and what doesn't. That's very helpful in avoiding over-branded garbage being sold for far more than it cost to make in a sweatshop.

I was born in Australia and live in Germany, and I think I see something of the same: in both countries, there is no sense of purpose, no raison d'etre. There is no national project beyond managing a series of externally-imposed and self-inflicted crises, and no obvious direction for the future to guide the decisions taken today.

So our politics (in both countries) becomes reactive and unanchored, solving whatever problem seems most pressing today, and ultimately devoid of meaning. What do individuals do in such an environment? They look after themselves, they partake in consumerism, they try to protect themselves against things the state can no longer be bothered to. It's all very nihilistic, and thus the deep anomie that seems to have infected most Western societies, and the younger generations most of all.

I have a Canon printer which I use with Windows, and I get exactly the same thing. I think your diagnosis is correct.

I see we're going from "UI changes, the cause or reason of which we don't know" to "geopolitics" without considering any of the obvious alternative explanations.

If China decides (and no-one is saying that it has) that it no longer recognizes Israel, then it will simply announce that, and not get a private company to make subtle UI changes to reflect a secret policy instead.

One of the other nice features of Swiss rental law is "imputed rent", which is rent the government assumes you have collected even if the property is empty, and upon which you are taxed. Discourages keeping properties empty.

It's not even a "crime problem". It's much more often people expecting their class prejudices to be embodied in the built environment, so that working class/poor/immigrant folks - which has nothing to do with crime, I hasten to add - are not defiling their beautiful suburb.

To be fair, this is how most "advanced" economies operate. It's identical in Australia (although there the consulting companies run the sweatshops directly so they can skim more cream off the top). Same in the UK.

Because you need to pay VAT on imports into the country above a certain value (which is much less than the cost of a Macbook).

I see it less as an aristocracy (most of which are sidelined and/or laughed at), but instead a highly-evolved technocracy which runs Europe according to their ideal of what the citizens should want, and with a certain fear of democracy based on the occasionally vile things that European democracies have done. There is a definite fear of the people, and a elite consensus that they must be managed for their own good.

What the hell? This isn't a slight negative, it's a compelling reason to avoid them completely.

A low-risk SaaS business has their account terminated for no reason at all? Good lord, that's not what you want in a bank.

It should be noted that no-one was forced to put their money in a VC fund, so when the author is whining about VC's playing with "other people's money", he's ignoring that those "other people" very deliberately put their money there, for VCs to do exactly what they do.

And if not VCs, then how should capital be allocated to innovation? Soviet-style central planning, where a government department decides who gets investment? EU-style grants, where those most skilled in manipulating the grant system get the money?

And fundamentally, if individuals are allowed to own shares in private companies, then there will always be people willing to make speculative investments with their own money - VC is simply a professionalization and formalization of this.

I detect a certain decline in almost all activism: You can spend years fighting any issue, but the other side will have too much money, too much patience, and even if, by some miracle, you eke out a temporary victory, you know that the same forces you oppose will rapidly regroup and launch a whole new assault, and you'll have to start fighting it again from square one.

In addition to that, you have to work harder than every just to live. The energy gets sucked out of you, and it becomes harder than ever to sustain a fight you know you'll be lucky to win. No wonder people burn out, and simply give up. Everyone has their limits.

I think it's something analogous to Jevons' Paradox.

Jevon's Paradox, originally written about the use of coal, noted that as it become more efficient to use a resource, the end result was generally not that less of that resource was used, but in fact more.

I think the same thing has happened in frontend development: Tools which were written to make development easier have not had the effect of making it easier to do frontend development, but have made it possible for outside factors (product managers, customers etc) to demand ever more from frontend devs.

Another vote for Caro's magisterial biography of LBJ. I read all 4 volumes this year, and cannot praise them highly enough - not just a masterful biography, but an exposition of the country and how it changed, plus penetrating analysis of power and how it is gained and used. Let us hope that Mr Caro finishes the 5th volume in 2023!

I also read Don Quixote this year - Edith Grossman's translation is excellent, capturing the joy of the original, and laugh-out-loud funny in places.

Why do "indiehackers" want attention from and create products for other "indiehackers"? As a group they seem the people with the least amount of money to spend on products, and are some of the most cheapskate people on the planet.

Here's some advice: if you want to make money selling a software product, sell to people who are able and willing to spend money on it.

You tax capital gains, interest income, dividends, royalties etc etc etc exactly the same as income from labor is taxed.

Why is it astounding? Leadership is there to serve the interests of shareholders, not employees. For obvious reasons, this truth is usually elided behind talk of "company families" and "valued employees", but it never ceases to be the truth.

The idea that 10% of tweets are reported is a huge over estimate. I'd say at most 1% of tweets are reported, and it's probably more like 0.1%.

Twitters actual numbers (from https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/rules-enforcemen...) show that 11.6m reports were generated in the period July to December 2001, which is roughly 65,000 reports per day. ML could easily reduce this number further, but with 100 employees doing moderation, even without ML, that's 650 reports per day. That's getting towards doable.

Twitter has around 190m daily active users. You're going to struggle to run something like that with an engineering team of 20-30 people (although WhatsApp did exactly that for many years), sure.

But I don't see why an company and an application of that size couldn't be run by a company of, say, 1500 people, instead of 7000. 250 engineering staff, 250 doing moderation/support, 800 doing sales & account management and 100 in management and 100 doing sundry tasks.

The thing about energy crises is that they provoke new forms of innovation and can usher in necessary change. Europe made a strategic mistake, but they are correcting it, and even if the next few years are hard, it's not going to have too many deleterious long-term effects.

As a very broad generalization, Europe treats businesses as businesses, rather than financial instruments. They are expected to grow and be profitable, rather than be fattened like cows for an eventual slaughter.

That's why Europe has thousands of "small" companies whose revenue might "only" be a billion dollars or so, but they are sustainable companies who generally have accrued a competitive global advantage through years, and decades of R&D. The end result of this is that Europe - certainly Western Europe, and increasingly Central and Eastern Europe - has one of the highest standards of living in the world.

Sure, the VCs and investors who only want to make money without producing anything of value themselves don't like this model, but fuck 'em.

Reminds me of an old joke.

Back in the 60s, a Soviet diplomat ran into an American diplomat on the sidelines of some conference.

"I want to congratulate you Americans", says the Soviet diplomat, "your propaganda is amazing, it's much better than ours".

"What do you mean?", replies the American. "We don't have propaganda?"

"See what I mean!"

I've seen a lot of this, and I've started to pick up a few red flags you can watch out for.

- The biggest and most obvious is that they don't have a functioning webcam that clearly shows who they are. If I encounter this, the interview ends immediately.

- Another one is, if you do hire a person, they suddenly want to be paid through some unrelated company. ("Oh, it's my brothers company, I do this for tax reasons").

There are other red flags which aren't as certain, but should definitely raise your suspicions:

- The CV has been professionally designed or laid out.

- The most recent job entry is a vague "Remote contractor" or similar which doesn't list specific companies they've worked for.

- The name on the email doesn't match the name on the CV.

- You get a series of emails following up after a few days, as though someone is running a drip email campaign.

- The application email is sent directly to any of your employees, rather than to your standard recruiting email address, almost as though someone has used a sales tool to find internal contacts.

These last 5 points can occur in legitimate applications, but when you see them, it's a sign that additional suspicion is warranted. These fake employees are generally not individuals, but professional operations.