The one year stints hurt a little, but have you thought about consulting? After 4 startups with one of my own fails in the middle, I was burnt out. I ended up getting a consulting / little bit of managed services gig at a large company. The consulting gig was on the tech one of the startups I was at 6 years prior... Large enterprises were starting to adopt. They sold my hours in 12 month contracts, all my clients renewed year over year until one just bought up all of my hours. They loved me and it was pretty much 20 hours a week of effort. I could have sat there for another 5 years easy without any discomfort, I assume.
I took a 4 year time out there and now I'm back at a startup. I think what I'm learning now is if I can survive a couple of years and pack my brain with a bunch of new shit I'll be able to get a very nice and chill consulting gig until I retire, if I want that. People want your beautiful and experienced brain and a lot of the shit you potentially have worked on or thought about is more relevant in the current and the future than in your past. A lot of the world is slow AF, you might be ahead.
To be clear I did not say start my own consultancy. That job was actually completely out of network and was me reaching out and applying. Start looking at big companies that have professional services orgs and find where the tech aligns.
You can go look directly at some of the bigger consulting & services firms - Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Accenture, Slalom etc. They all hire a huge spectrum of tech experiences and skill sets. Easiest to start there to learn what to look for.
You can find similar types of roles that those folks I listed above are hiring for within other large companies, sometimes. Some of those large orgs have a small army of consultants and managed services to keep relationships intact when a client decides to try out a different vendor for part of their stack. I spent my time helping clients figure out how to be successful with a competitor to help us keep the existing business we had. It gets weird, but it's out there and I admit I kind of fell into it, but it was because I blindly applied and they were very excited about my past experiences.
Maybe more related to youtube than I thought, but I have trouble closing tabs and firefox with 15 or 20 tabs would eat all my CPU. Pages loaded much slower and the experience across the board was often pretty poor. I had to go back to Chrome and I don't miss FF at all. I tried.
I am taking a look at the Nvidia shield, which also uses the cast button. I have 3 Chromecasts that need to be replaced, but the cheapest Shield is $150!!
I guess each time Google kills something and I remove one more part of my life from their ecosystem they are doing me the real favor.
They are hoping you will subscribe to their streaming service, but it works just fine without subscribing to theirs. It also aggregates multiple streaming services into a consolidated guide rather nicely.
Not as nice as Channels DVR (which also lets you record streams and will strip commercials), but one of the nicer streaming boxes for the money.
Kinda ridiculous but I'm on a stream that changes every snow melt and gold is so $$$ I've been considering panning and/or getting a metal detector just to mess around in the stream bed. I don't know if it's the value of gold or if this is another thing that happens as I age...
You should look up the way that Japan filters streams for Iron. I cant find anything on it at the moment but essentially they would find/make bends in the river and set up ways to capture it since metal is heavier it would get caught in the bends.
Laws are going to depend heavily, but most often anything “powered” is likely restricted. Sometimes there are distinctions between hand powered vs motorized contraptions, sometimes there aren’t.
Dropping off a box in a river could be considered littering, or something along those lines. Basically ask yourself “could a complete piece of shit do what I want to do in such a selfish and destructive way that forces someone to make a law against it?” And you’ll start to realize it may mot be so simple, anymore.
For gold what you want to do is find spots where gold has likely accumulated due to falling out of the stream, fill buckets and then work through them.
It’s more something to do for fun than for money. An excuse to get outdoors, learn local geology and engage in the very addictive activity of “searching for something”. Prefer agates and plants myself.
> Basically ask yourself “could a complete piece of shit do what I want to do in such a selfish and destructive way that forces someone to make a law against it?”
I think I spent too many years in fintech, because I had to read this twice to make sure I understood it :)
Not in practice in most the places it happens. Much of forested Guyana and Brazil is wide open to ANYONE, no law enforcement and no immigration enforcement.
I recently found myself down the gold prospecting corner of YouTube. There is some really fun content out there on amateur prospecting. It’s worth watching a few videos.
Be careful about those chargebacks. I bought two new pixel phones directly from Google and only one arrived. Google support was of course awful and Fedex did absolutely nothing outside of asking me what color the phone was. lol
I ended up reversing charges for the missing phone and Google immediately wrecked me - I was using Fi at the time so they killed my cell service and killed my ability to use Google Pay for anything - including the Play Store. Probably some other stuff I don't even remember.
Between my personal account and my business accounts I realized at that moment that Google could completely wreck my life. Be careful about retaliation for a chargeback, if you live within one company's ecosystem it can be a brutal retaliation you're not ready for.
Retaliation for charge back probably elevates this from a civil matter to a criminal one; you should totally contact your local DA. They might think it's fun.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's just covered by the EULA. There's almost certainly a clause in there about Google being able to terminate service for any reason.
You don't necessarily have to engage in predatory pricing if you can sell in such volume that you can get better prices than a mom and pop as well as offering a one stop shop for most consumers. You don't even need to raise prices once the competition is gone simply because you are already making a decent profit.
Maybe a little different compared to the Bay area, but I live outside Jackson, Wyoming. It's currently about 16F outside and there is 12" of snow on the ground. We have access to fresh locally grown tomatoes, lettuce, and other things like that year round.
https://verticalharvestfarms.com/
Just as you mention, it is high quality and tastes great!
Also, it isn't trucked in from Salinas Valley CA which is 1,000 miles away.
Of course, grow-lights in Wyoming will be mostly coal powered, whereas a field in Salinas is renewable energy.
Assuming I am doing the math right, shipping 1 ton of food 1000 miles (refrigerated) is roughly ~30-40kg of CO2, or about 7g-CO2 per tomato (6oz tomato).
A tomato plant is roughly ~40lbs/sqft/year (hydroponic, 40W/sqft), so about 20Wh/g, or about 1.4kg-CO2 per tomato for coal. Maybe more like 1kg-CO2 for the mix in Wyoming.
... depends on what you are trying to optimize, I guess, and how much natural light you can harvest in the vertical greenhouse.
That's not factoring in that the field in Salinas has to use much more water, use pesticides and fertilizer, and tilling and harvesting, which all require more energy than the local hydroponic garden.
Of course the environmental cost should be factored in. I'm still curious if hydroponics (or geoponics, in this article's case) actually winds up having a better carbon footprint than traditional agriculture.
Couldn't some of the gains of indoor vertical farming be gotten with greenhouses? Namely protection against pesticides and minimal water loss from evaporation.
The whole premise of a 'vertical farm' seems bunk to me for this reason. If you want ultrafresh local food in a climate which doesn't support it, with precise control over the growing conditions.. well that's precisely what greenhouses provide. A 'vertical farm' is what you get when you make a greenhouse worse by removing the windows for no real reason, then try to compensate for that with futuristic vibes. Put a greenhouse 15 minutes outside the city and you'll save money with cheaper land and free solar power (greenhouses may also have supplemental lighting or heating if needed.) You get all the freshness advantages of local production, but cheaper. The only 'downside' of greenhouses relative to vertical farms that I can think of: greenhouses are old technology that won't make yuppies feel like they're living in a sci-fi movie.
IIRC in a documentary about spanish produce vs german greenhouse produce they calculated that german produce is much higher in co2 output than spanish, even when the spanish produce is delivered by a semi all the way from Spain! Simply because in spanish climate there is no need for a greenhouse to grow e.g. bell peppers or tomatoes.
I only found a german source: https://www.umweltdialog.de/de/verbraucher/lebensmittel/2015...
it says:
German, heated greenhouse outside of season: 9.3 KG of CO2 per KG tomatoes (well, that is unexpectedly high)
Non heated greenhouse: 2.3KG of CO2 per KG tomatoes
open land in spain: 0.6KG of CO2 per KG
open land in Germany in season, conventional: 0.085KG of CO2 per KG
open land in Germany, organic: 0.035KG of CO2 per KG
although it's from 2015, I don't think that much has changed in 5-6 years to make up such a big difference between heated, nonheated, open land and regional. It also factors in transport from Spain to Germany which is why open land in spain has a higher co2/kg than german open land.
edit: of course I can't find anything that compares vertical hydroponic farming to greenhouses, all I can find relates to CO2 dosing in greenhouses :/
It's less helpful in already highly agricultural nations like the US, but in countries with scarce arable land or fragile ecosystems, or just very small countries like Singapore/Cambodia, vertical farming is superior to greenhouses simply due to square footage
The economics only make sense for specialty things like fresh greens, micrograms, mushrooms, etc. That can't be farmed at a consistant high quality year round or be stored. It will never be economical for 80% of food.
I believe greenhouses and vertical farming are orthogonal. IOW, you can have a vertical farm inside a greenhouse, or a "horizontal" farm inside warehouse with grow lights.
I disagree based on the trends, especially in the US where few, if any, new coal plants are being built and most existing ones are scheduled to be converted to natural gas or shut down. But let's assume that a significant amount of coal will continue to be burned over the next 20 years. Do you think we should stop innovation in other sectors until we are off coal?
Most innovation doesn’t need massive amounts of electricity. EV’s being the only notable exception, but they are also offsetting significant CO2 emissions.
Further, the amount of electricity generated by fossil fuels is going to be heavily dependent on overall electricity demand. Keeping older less efficient and more expensive power plants operating is very much a response to electricity demand not an inherent lifespan independent of the electrical market.
I don't think grow lights in this area are coal powered.
I could see how you might think that because..Wyoming. But I assume hydro and wind, based on the power around me. I'll ask them to confirm. I don't think I'd support coal powered hydro.
I looked it up and Wyoming consumes a lot of coal (according to eia.gov). I don't know about your specific location, but statistically there is going to be a large percentage of coal in that energy mix.
For what it is worth, a tomato truck carries 50,000lbs of tomatoes from the field to a processor. Supply chains are complex, but refrigerated semis can carry a similar load of processed vegetables.
Co-Grow! Use the heat, light and CO² from the power plant directly to power the (growth of) plants, by arranging them around the fire. Use some technomagical glass boiler for that.
Solar + storage is now the cheapest option in the US.
Centralizing energy needs the way vertical farms do, incentivizes the company operating the farm to opt for the cheaper option and install solar on nearby land.
You have repeatedly brought up marrying someone rich in this thread saying it is "mostly an option for women".
So, are you some how saying rich women only marry rich men, but rich men will consider poor women? So much so it's actually a thing? Sources, please? It sounds extremely out dated and kind of gross...especially because you keep saying it like it is some valid thing.
It's definitely a thing in places like China where you have a much larger population of men, and it is harder and harder to find a woman (so much that some people buy their wives online from other poorer countries).
It's a well known data point. In general, women don't like to marry down, and men have less of an issue marrying down. Think of the classic "doctor marries nurse".
If you Google, you should find a lot of articles about it, as it is an important sociological issue. Now that more women are having a career, in fact, more women than men are having an academic career, it is becoming difficult for women to find adequate men.
Also women marrying up was historically the MOST important mechanism of social mobility (people moving up in status/wealth). Too bad that feminism does not allow it anymore, as any man who marries a less wealthy women is considered to be "abusing his power".
The other claim, women being attracted to men with more money, I am less sure about. I am sure you can find studies analyzing data from dating platforms yielding that result, but I don't know how well they generalize to dating in general.
I took a 4 year time out there and now I'm back at a startup. I think what I'm learning now is if I can survive a couple of years and pack my brain with a bunch of new shit I'll be able to get a very nice and chill consulting gig until I retire, if I want that. People want your beautiful and experienced brain and a lot of the shit you potentially have worked on or thought about is more relevant in the current and the future than in your past. A lot of the world is slow AF, you might be ahead.