“Damage your reputation”…for a very narrow definition of reputation over a subset of people whose “positive” opinion and influence may actually be detrimental to your goals, your nation’s goals, and the world’s well-being, both long-term and even short-term. Meh.
Point of clarification: Silicon Valley is not the entirety of the “tech world”. Not even the majority of the tech world. It’s a significant, very noisy minority, focused on Information Tech World.
Even on HN, that distinction needs to be made…maybe especially on HN. That sort of conflation will eventually lead to inane arguments that waste everybody’s time.
Alpha types might appreciate sitting alone in a café more if they realize that it is the ultimate power flex. I remember a quote from many years ago: standing on a street corner, waiting for no one, is power. I appreciate that much more in retirement.
“So by the ’70s or the ’80s, Bell is not doing so well business-wise. There aren’t as many people that are working there.”
Assuming she’s referring to “Holmdel” when she refers to “there”, this is not correct. She’s off by a decade. In 1985, they were tripling up in two person offices at Holmdel. Shrink started at Holmdel and other Bell Labs locations in the mid 1990s. Imagine seeing your favorite Silicon Valley location totally empty with grass growing in the cracks of the parking lot. That was Holmdel in the mid 2000s.
Opposite for me, I read more physical books, primarily >50 years old. Reading more for pleasure now, I find the physicality of books deeply satisfying. Also prefer paper magazines for hobbyist content.
I still refer back to ebooks I had bought primarily for the novelty value, and especially PDFs of public domain works that of which I purchase paper copies when I have the chance. For staying current, it’s predominantly electronic media.
Condemned out of my first undergraduate apartment, first grad student apartment was the basement of an old former church that had been flooded with sewage too few months prior. But none of us can match the lurid pasts of the Four Yorkshiremen.
Do you really want CHSR to revisit anything at this point? Planning started with the CA High Speed Rail Act in 1996, and it currently has zero ridership.
The NM Rail Runner planning started in 2003 and has had a functioning system starting in 2006, 100 miles growing to 15 stations, with the entire system operating for over ten years at this point. At a cost of <$400M dollars, or $.4B dollars in CHSR-speak.
CHSR is less about rolling stock and more about laughing stock. Maybe CA should formal cede jurisdiction of the ROW, actual ownership and governance of the land, to NM so something could get done outside of the morass of CA political processes.
Embarrassed by the HN comments here. Lunch ladies, along with other low-status government workers, are as close to an Absolute Good as you can get. Co-opting the warranted praise for these heroes to attempt to score political points for any side is pathetic. Such commenters should be forced to prepare and serve lunches for hundreds of hungry children while also being forced to listen to screaming political rants through taped-on headphones. The lower middle class, my native land, gets too little applause for their contributions.
My whole family was working poor at best and I was (at best) most of my life too. I've always liked this Barbara Ehrenreich quote about the dynamic.
“When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.”
> Co-opting the warranted praise for these heroes to attempt to score political points for any side is pathetic.
The sentence "Lunch ladies, along with other low-status government workers, are as close to an Absolute Good as you can get" is itself an attempt to score poltical points for a poltical faction. As is calling them "heroes".
Specifically, this is a leftist poltical argument associated with the Democratic party in the united states, suggesting that it is good for the government to be in charge of running civic institutions that are legally obligated to serve all citizens in exactly the same way, in order to dissuade people from spending their money on services they prefer which might be better than those poorer people can afford; and also that the government employees who do the frontline labor at these institutions are laudable and morally superior people. There are ideological associations here with official Soviet propaganda lauding the worker in the abstract.
Someone who didn't like their public school experience or the way the lunch lady there did their job might resonably grow up to take political stances that reject the idea that low-status government workers are as close to an Absolute Good as you can get.
Perhaps the high excessive drinking rate in WI means more residents need to be reminded in which State they actually are, other than the State of Inebriation.
We’re all retired in some sense. Some on farms, some elsewhere. But in a broader and deeper and more meaningful level, we’re not retired at all…working harder than ever.
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