Your last paragraph is the perfect rebuttal to GP. Computers don’t exist in a vacuum. They still require mineral and electrical inputs, repair, orchestration… sounds an awful lot like our bodies!
As much as I might like people like Jello Biafra or Hunter S. Thompson, those shouldn’t be the _only_ people informing you on society.
You can completely wreck your credit and still bounce back and even prosper. I’ve seen it happen with bankruptcy and have fixed my own credit after a charge off in my youth, and now own a home, with paid off cars and student debt, and a solid cushion in savings. It takes time; everyone wants everything now, which to me is a sign of poor reasoning leading to poor decision making.
I think an important difference is: are you in dire straights because of poor decision making, or bad luck? If you consistently make poor decisions, you’ll eventually wreck your life and may not be able to get out of the hole.
If you make sound decisions, bad luck can just as easily turn into good luck. You just have to be executing when the opportunity arises. This is of course no guarantee, I definitely believe there are good people out there who were never able to make it. But that doesn’t mean that nobody good will ever make it.
To me, that is what the American Dream aspired to be. Something other than a caste or feudal system, or religious monarchy, that pretty much keeps everyone in their place, with no motivation to innovate or take a risk to try something new, and then propelling general society upwards with each breakthrough.
Gracious, I never said that they were the only people informing me on society. They make for some interesting seed quotes and ideas for further discussion. The American Dream as a concept is probably worthy of a series of books, not really something I can cram into even a page.
OK, but TFA is about the work part, not the passive part, despite the title. Even having a “portfolio of revenue generating products” will require work to maintain. Maybe full time or more so, depending on if you used log4j or an SSL cert from a provider that screwed things up, say. Or built on a fickle platform like reddit, twitter or Apple that changes the fundamental rules every so often. Just because you don’t have a boss that will fire you for not waking up for on call during an outage, doesn’t mean that outages won’t happen or need to be fixed.
It reminds me of people that consider buying a second home and rent out the old one to gain “passive income”, not realizing how much work it can be to be a good landlord.
I feel like "passive" income is anything that takes under 10 hours a week once it's up and running. There's rarely any opportunity that can be considered passive if your definition is 0 work ever once it's going. The only thing that [might] fit into that slot is investment dividends.
yeah I guess if passive means no ongoing work (beyond what it took to get them in the first place) then you're right. OP is playing a bit loose with the definition if that's what it's supposed to mean.
Investigate anything hard enough and it’ll tell you whatever you want to hear. Hard to imagine any result to that investigation that would be universally accepted.
Why not apply a little bit of technology to the problem so we can verify our vote was counted, and that only legitimate votes were counted?
Read the alt text. I can’t grab it on mobile, but it basically boils down to: never say never, and in service of that future possibility, we actually should explore it until such time that conflicts of interest naturally resolve.
If your tech friend says everything sucks in tech, then why should their judgement even be taken at face value? They’re part of the problem!
Grabbed it - not sure it disagrees with either of us.
"There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired."
I’ve long been of the opinion that you can’t love others until you love yourself. Between the NPC comment and breaking up with his girlfriend, I’d say he has a long way to go, if he ever gets there at all. Hope he does.
Hard to stomach but you can't deny honesty. I wouldn't be surprised that more business high brass people think that way about the workers but are smart enough not to be open about it.
Otherwise the guy doesn't seem to be having a crisis at all. The problem is he's been doing business for the past 10 years. Likely put in a lot more hours than needed. Now business is all he knows and catching up to doing something more meaningful is hard.
>Naming is for software engineering, not CS.
I figured they were referencing the “two hard problems of computer science”, those two being naming things, cache invalidation and off by one errors.
Everybody knows the hardest problems in software engineering are assembling promo packets and building consensus on number of spaces per indent.