Would be nice if I didn't have to say that; in so many ways the bloom is off the rose of my (admittedly high paying) corporate job. I even recently reunited with some old friends who chose a more independent career path, and was jealous and nostalgic- they're definitely working far closer to their passions with more freedom than I've felt in a decade. But man, what a decade since 2013.
I would be foolish to dismiss that I had stable employment through Covid, and I still have a paycheck through the current economic turmoil. I also have my corporate health insurance, which covers my stupidly expensive regular medication which I had no idea I would need in those nostalgic days when these friends chose their alternative careers (I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in 2015, now in remission thanks to the meds)
So I agree with the sentiment that it's dangerous (especially to your soul) to just blindly conform and follow the money, but it's not always unjustified. In my case it was at least a little bit justified, since my parents were more or less broke and I didn't have a safety net.
I do wish I had hedged my bets better and been less of a workaholic, of course. Would be nice to be married now.
// I do wish I had hedged my bets better and been less of a workaholic, of course. Would be nice to be married now.
I hear you and maybe a word of caution - sometimes "I don't have X because I was too busy with Y" is a way to sweep the complexity/ambivalence of X under the rug.
After all, plenty of very busy and hard working people get married, and I doubt that it's very often "I am dying to go meet this woman but I am going to sit in the office instead" type tradeoff that's being made.
Along those lines, one of the things that I still struggle with after 20+ years of working, is squaring this feeling of not working enough/earn enough money to have a comfortable retirement, while at the same time trying to live my life and not just work myself until death (very original, I know).
So I've always had this conflict with the saying that goes something like "nobody regrets not working more, while in their deathbed".
The thing is... I'm pretty sure lots of people actually do, e.g. if they didn't manage to do well enough to have a comfortable retirement, or leave their children in a good place.
So sure, I'd love to spend my money traveling and enjoying the best years of my life... but I also see my parents struggling to get by with retirement funds that are suboptimal and I fear that I am not doing all I can to avoid the same fate.
Hopefully I'll be able to make sense of this before it's too late.
I normally heard "nobody regrets not working more" in the context of work that has bad or no ROI.
For example, lots of people work themselves to burnout by not taking all their vacations, returning to work very soon after their child is born out of fear of falling behind, working extra late or weekends from peer pressure from their boss/peers, etc. Most of which won't result in additional pay, promotion, and might not even help advance your career.
There's this other addage I heard that I quite like:
"Work harder on yourself than at your job. Invest in yourself, not in your job."
The idea is, don't spend your energy on your current job stupidly, instead spend that effort trying to find a better job, or learning skills that are more valuable, in keeping yourself relevant, etc.
I feel taken together, it forms the basis of how to balance work/life so that work can build up to a good retirement, allowing you to enjoy life in your later years, but also making time in the present to enjoy life in your current and younger years.
That definitely makes sense. However I do have heard it in the context of "hey, enjoy life more!".
Which I agree with but it's also a reality that you need to think about your future/retirement and it's a hard balance to make, especially if you live in a country with a poor healthcare system and lacking other social nets.
One third of retiring managers die quickly thereafter. The socond third finds a hobby and pursues it with the same ambition until everyone they know got gifted a perfect ship in a bottle and they need a new way to spend their time. One third keeps working.
That is a judgment on your part. There is no retirement in nature. If you keep doing what you love when you are "retired", it will be to your benefit. Both my parents teach, my father does something he likes for the first time i think. Could call it sad but why?
Obviously some professions like teaching, medicine, and a few others are different because they actually benefit society. As opposed to middle managers in a megacorp only working hard to make anonymous shareholders richer. When that guy is gone, they’ll be replaced within a couple of weeks and forgotten as they were just a cog. That’s when it’s sad to keep working imho.
For what it's worth, working more would build a habit of doing so. A good work ethic would mean that you need a bit less motivation or discipline to get things done, due to it basically being just something you do.
It doesn't have to be just for some corporation, but also when you're trying to build some personal project, especially the ones that might get a bit bigger (writing your own blog engine or static site generator, maybe even a game engine, or planting crops or building a shed for all I care). Sometimes there won't be many shortcuts to success, but just boring slog of legwork that needs to be done.
In that regard, I definitely regret not working more, because I still need to rely on motivation, which is fleeting, or discipline, which is unpleasant, all just to get through things sometimes, even when I take care of myself in every other way (sleep schedule, nutrition, activities, mental health).
As for the whole retirement aspect, sadly I don't have answers for that, the state of the economy is concerning sometimes.
You can make beautiful music, and someone else can create a beautiful choreography for it... their achievement will probably increase your joy, not decrease it.
To some degree yes, but after a while there are so many creators that it's just noise and nobody can really stand out unless they're truly beyond exceptional. So in that sense it is more of a zero sum game in practice.
Take Steam for example. After Greenlight was superseded by Direct and you now only need $100 to get on the platform it's practically drowning in games, making for near zero discoverability.
But especially in terms of idk, government jobs or certain positions at a specific company it's usually a fixed number of seats that will be filled from a large pool of people, making it a completely zero sum game. There can only be one president of a country at a time and a fixed number of them during your lifespan. What are you gonna do, make a new country?
Ngl I have always wondered how far one would get if they just started dredging sand onto an international waters seamount and made a completely new island, then declared it a micronation. In theory there should be a lot of market interest with gambling, server hosting and the like. Sealand still has the problem of actually being on built by and stands on Britain's territory.
In all realness it would probably take about 10 minutes before the US navy rolls up like "open the country, stop having it be closed" and declared it theirs. VLS missiles will continue launching until morale improves and all that.
I find this to not be a helpful frame of thinking. A divorce is not a random natural disaster that befalls you.
You have a lot of control about who you end up with, who you are inside and how you engage with your partner. So the fact that divorce happens "often" or "rarely" doesn't matter to an individual scenario - it's completely within those people's controls to make good or bad decisions.
I understand your point, agree to it somewhat, but I think is a bit unfair and simplistic.
People have externalities thrown at them (loss, grieve, missed expectations, sickness, depression,…)
Is a bit arrogant to think a person or a couple can navigate all these via their own choices. Reminds me of my hardcore catholic friends who think that divorcing equals to low commitment, willpower or maturity.
I appreciate what you are saying and I think we're mainly in agreement. You can't eliminate all risk and you can't guarantee success but you have a lot of ways to influence the outcome.
Using your example of depression. If you marry someone manic/depressive because you love how crazy and wild she is on her up days, her down days are going to hit you hard when you're living in the same house and sharing kids and responsibilities. So maybe that dynamic has a 50% divorce rate which could have been anticipated way in advance. On the other hand, there's always a chance that someone stable you marry will get into a deep funk years down the line and you won't be able to help her manage through that, but that maybe is a 2% probably. You can't control that 2% but you can manage to not be in the 50% and that's where your focus should be.
but it takes two. if your partner does not reciprocate then sometimes there is nothing you can do to fix the relationship.
but that should not prevent anyone from trying to find a partner. it just means that i would look for a partner who understands this, and is willing to look out for your needs just as much as you look out for theirs.
ok, it is in your control to pick a partner that is aware of these needs. but it is much easier said than done. and yes, not paying attention to that would be setting yourself up for failure. sadly many do.
Divorce happens often and the rates are climbing. It makes sense to follow statistical guidelines.
"Who you marry" is not in your control. People change over the years. Marriage changes your spouse, and yourself. Some people realize what they actually want as they mature.
Most of the smartest, most thoughtful people in the world get divorced. They all thought they had control over marriage.
the problem is that many get married blind. they have high expectations but ignore the tools to verify that these expectations will be met. they just hope for the best and think love will take care of the challenges. but checking your expectations takes a lot of self reflection and understanding of your own person, and consultation with your partner about your common expectations of life. pre marriage counseling is a good idea.
love alone is not enough, it's actually less important than common goals and a dedication to support each other. if love were a precondition to a happy marriage then arranged marriages (ignoring the downsides) would have had to all fail 100% of the time. when they don't fail it's because these people understand to care for each other and most likely were able to develop love for each other over time.
I mostly agree with this sentiment, but I think it goes too far.
> command economies have occasionally produced innovations by throwing enormous resources at particular problems, but for the most part they are stuck with copying innovations from free market economies.
Hmm. This seems unfair to the military during wartime? WW1 feels like a huge example.of advancement driven from very command-ey institutions; from the idea of the tank to deal with machine guns and barbed wire to nitrogen-ating fertilizer in Germany to withstand the British blockade. (Never mind DARPA and the internet or the moon missions during the Cold War, or the Manhattan Project)
(Yeesh, not that I'm suggesting it would be preferable to pursue this as a full-time model - it's literally fascism, but it's important to understand why these systems were pursued in the first place - the point is that there do at least appear to be high profile success stories)
For what it's worth, I (mostly) disagree with your detractors in the other comments and agree with your sentiment (I think).
Markets care about "aggregate
demand". Rich people can be lucrative individual customers because they have more to spend and often less price sensitivity. But they have limited capacity for consumption in many areas; they only eat three meals a day and only fill so many airline seats at once. The middle class and even lower classes have much higher capacity for consumption and are worth targeting - think McDonald's or even Google (advertisers want all the eyeballs they can get, even if they prefer wealthy ones)
One interesting thing about WordPad (at least from the Windows XP / 7 era) was that it supported the complete OLE2 / ActiveX stack.
This let you do all kinds of things like embed other types of controls (like canvases or images from Paint, or Excel tables) inside your document, and WordPad's UI would jump through all the hoops to update and transform into the embedded application's UI when that control gained focus. This made it a pretty useful testing app when I was interning at MS and working on embeddable Inking surfaces for Tablet PC. (Yes, I'm a dinosaur)
I have a story which predates WordPad, but concerns OLE support in it's predecessor Write:
At my secondary school, a long time ago now, they used PCs from educational vendor Research Machines (RM). These ran a locked down version of the Windows 3.11 Program Manager which didn't allow you to start any unapproved programs. I discovered you could embed EXEs from a floppy disk as OLE objects in a Write document and then start them from within Write by double clicking. In this manner, I could bring my LibertyBasic programs in from home and run them on the school's machines :-).
We also used PCs from RM at our secondary school in the late 2000s. At that time there was still a very similar exploit that allowed me to embed and run unauthorised programs inside of PowerPoint slide shows. Fun times.
Who can forget the first time they opened Wordpad and then tried to drag a text document into the window to edit it, just like you do with Notepad, only to have the text document turn into an icon inside of the empty text document you had open. Fun times.
"The WordPad sample demonstrates how to implement an application that imitates the functionality of WordPad, including the user interface elements and some of the capabilities."
I should have known it wasn't the real Win95 WordPad source code since this version is written using MFC and C++.
C++ was not an approved programming language for Win95 components in its quest to run on Brad Silverberg's (Win95 manager) mom's 4MB RAM PC.
Hmm. Murray Sargent's blog post states that Win95's WordPad IS written in MFC.
from https://web.archive.org/web/20070127011040/http://blogs.msdn...:
"...RichEdit 1.0 was wrapped in MFC to produce WordPad as an example of how MFC could be used for text processing. This was shipped with Windows 95 as mentioned in the previous post."
Lots of MS groups were using C++ before Win95, including the Exchange group.
Windows for Workgroups 3.1+ included C++ code.
I recall that in the initial Win95 group meeting, C++ wasn't allowed. I moved to another team, so I don't know if that restriction was relaxed or not and/or when they allowed C++.
The email client included with Win95 wasn't allowed to use C++, including the RichEdit windows control, which had to use C for OLE code - not many other codebases could boast about that - no one signs up for that sort of masochism by choice.
One neat OLE object (btw this works even in Windows 10 - i don't know about 11) is the "package" which allows you to embed any file as an OLE object. So basically you can drop an image file, PDF, video, program or anything else in WordPad and it'll put an icon representing it that if the user double clicks it'd be equivalent to them doubleclicking a file.
Of course most of the time it isn't very practical (and WordPad chokes at anything above a handful of MB) since you're making a bad archive file (using the default .rtf format will encode the binary data in hex which will actually increase file size), but i always liked how general the idea was.
(also it isn't limited to WordPad but to anything that uses OLE - e.g. you could do the same with Delphi which has a "OLE object" control that can embed any OLE object and the object becomes part of the executable - so you could, say, throw a PDF file in a package OLE object in a form and when the user doubleclicks it the control opens the default PDF viewer)
Seems like the implementation was impractical, but it's basically what we do with Obsidian and any modern knowledge management software. Feels to me like it was ahead of its time.
OLE has always fascinated me. I’ve wanted to play around with it just to see what sort of cursed things I can do, but my eyes glaze over looking at WinAPI docs.
OLE isn't any more "malware riddled" than anything else you install on your PC, at its core it is just a fancy plugin system for embedding stuff in a document without the document editor knowing about it. OLE is as susceptible to malware as any other plugin system - in other words unless you somehow[0] install malware, you wont get malware.
[0] "somehow" here includes said malware taking advantage of unrelated security holes but this is true for everything, not just OLE
The article mentions that you can track the Temperature of surfaces with an "inexpensive infrared thermometer". Then you could calculate the "operative temperature" as the average of Mean radiant and the air temperature.
But yeah, if you want to fully automate it you'll need to figure out a way to gather those readings from the various surfaces.
Seems like something folks would care about? It's adjacent to the "When I die, who gets my stuff?" part of the marriage contract which I remain convinced is the real reason governments need to be involved with marriage contracts. I also know a lot of folks who would rather their S.O. make medical decisions for them if they're debilitated than, say a sibling (especially if they're estranged).
But yeah, this doesn't explicitly prevent you from assigning power of attorney to an unmarried partner, of course.
Both of those goals can be accomplished without marriage; a will can be free although I consulted with a probate attorney and established a revocable trust, and a probate attorney can also help with the medical decisions paperwork.
Hmm, this is a bit of an exaggeration. The Gamecube was considerably more powerful than the PS2, (and Microsoft took a huge dive on the original XBOX hardware in order to compete - although it was indeed more capable than the GC).
The Wii was the first time Nintendo explicitly entered the market with hardware knowingly less powerful than their competition, and that was... 2006? So like 17 years, not 30.
You could make a case that their handheld hardware was always "underpowered" compared to the competition, like the Game Gear and PSP, but the justification at those times was better battery life and pocket-ability. The market results seem to speak for themselves, though
A lot of western pundits (and major studio executives) have been expecting Nintendo to "go third party" like Sega ever since the Gamecube, and yet they're still around. They seem to know what they're doing.
Depends on the location, many of the best arcades in Japan are multiple floors, and each floor usually has a theme, so like the ground floor is crane games, and then a floor for shooters/shmups, then a floor or two for fighting games, and then a floor or two for music games. Maybe a floor with card games or those giant horse racing games...
I was fortunate enough to go like 5 years ago, but I really fondly remember Taito Hey had a whole row of like 8 Super Sweet Fighter 2 Turbo machines which were basically continuously occupied, and then a floor down I watched somebody basically one credit perfect one of those Capcom Dungeons and Dragons side scrolling brawlers, and then on another floor was a widescreen Darius machine (which I'd never seen in the US).
In other locations there were floors of like card-based army formation strategy games, music games with circular screens, etc.
Pachinko is like its own thing, almost always in different buildings, usually like 3 times as loud as the arcades, and full of smoking.
Strangely I don't recall seeing any western style pinball machines anywhere, though.
Basically, it was arcade nirvana for someone like me (born in the early 80's) I heard things got pretty bad during Covid, though, so I don't know how much it's regressed. I do have a friend who just got back from visiting the first time though, and he mentioned he could still find tons of competition in old fighting games and stuff. (Man I wanna go back, especially since the exchange rate is so good now)
Some indies still make arcade games - Killer Queens comes to mind, and I'm pretty sure Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge got a full on coinop release. Of course, Japan still puts out all manner of new machines with all kinds of creative gimmicks (especially music-based, or arena fighters), but they're rarely available stateside and they might not always be the vibe you're looking for, if you're trying to scratch a 90's nostalgia itch.
https://sternpinball.com/ continues to make modern (awesome) pinball machines - I'm fortunate enough to work for a company that stocks a couple in breakrooms. They also usually have a big presence in the floor of California Extreme (https://caextreme.org/) which is totally worth checking out if you're in the Bay Area in August.
Huh. I'm a huge fan of instrumental music. I encountered Plini and Nick Johnston and through them discovered my favorite guitarist, Guthrie Govan. Then through him discovered his band The Aristocrats, with Bryan Beller (who's awesome, but I don't know too much about bassists) and the drummer Marco Minneman, who's now my favorite drummer after Neal Peart passed away.
I also really like all the Dream Theater adjacent stuff, like Liquid Tension Experiment...
Ok, guess I'm rambling. I dunno, for some reason I find it easier than ever to find all kinds of fantastic purely instrumental stuff, and now with YouTube you often get to more easily observe the musicians themselves, as opposed to listening to CD's back in the day.
Would be nice if I didn't have to say that; in so many ways the bloom is off the rose of my (admittedly high paying) corporate job. I even recently reunited with some old friends who chose a more independent career path, and was jealous and nostalgic- they're definitely working far closer to their passions with more freedom than I've felt in a decade. But man, what a decade since 2013.
I would be foolish to dismiss that I had stable employment through Covid, and I still have a paycheck through the current economic turmoil. I also have my corporate health insurance, which covers my stupidly expensive regular medication which I had no idea I would need in those nostalgic days when these friends chose their alternative careers (I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in 2015, now in remission thanks to the meds)
So I agree with the sentiment that it's dangerous (especially to your soul) to just blindly conform and follow the money, but it's not always unjustified. In my case it was at least a little bit justified, since my parents were more or less broke and I didn't have a safety net.
I do wish I had hedged my bets better and been less of a workaholic, of course. Would be nice to be married now.