Yea, Eve online had me for a while. It also had the strange effect of making all other games un-enjoyable for me. Eve is a true min/max game, where 2% of something often makes a huge difference. The desire to maximize the efficiency of everything I did carried over to other games and even aspects of my life.
Most games stop being fun when you make a spreadsheet for them, Eve is one of those few exceptions. Right around the time I stopped playing Eve, I started finding it difficult to play games just for fun without trying to min/max every aspect to gain an advantage. I guess I was really addicted to the meta-game rather than the game itself.
It has been said time and time again, Clojure is suitable for anything that Java is suitable for. Clojurescript is extremely similar, so much so that you can expect most lib's to be trivially refactored between CLJS/ClJ.
There are some issues you are going to face, there's no way around them.
First the tooling, it is beautiful in it's own right but takes a while to get used to. Leiningen is the preferred build tool, it cleanly handles almost everything for you but learning it seems to the beginner like just another thing preventing them from getting productive.
You will miss your debugger for a while, until you realize having a debugger allowed you to write confusing, messy code that could be funged into working.
There are many editors available, but when switching to clojure I decided to also learn Emacs 24 and now use it as my primary editor for every language/document.
Second is productivity, coming from php/js you will simply not have the background to lay down code quickly, let alone for-see potential issues. It took me approx. 5 months of study, every single day, to reach a comfortable point in the language where I could pump out Clojure code at a faster rate than C# code. I'm not even sure if it is faster or just my Clojure code doesn't have as many issues or is architecturally more sound. Why I feel more productive is a mixmash of things that I could probably write a book about. It's also very strange doing java interop with Clojure constructs. I often find myself getting caught up on clojure's lazyness or lack of types. Once you get a handle on it though it is extremely simple and my preferred way to write java code.
Lastly, I seem to have poisoned my brain a bit with these ideas, I approach almost every problem now as a functional one, yielding crappy looking C# code. I often have to take a step back, stop trying to make things fit into a functional category that are clearly OO.
I am risking sounding like an evangelical but Clojure has changed every aspect of programming for me, and made it fun again. I find getting in "the zone" is much easier when things seem to spookily just work. Looking at problems through the Clojure lens more often than not resolves in a simple, composable solution.
I used to be in the exact same position. Switching between different languages, paradigms, frameworks helps immensely in narrowing down you're area of interest. I spent a significant amount of time playing with python, tried thinking "pythonically" and using it as my side-project language. But after about a year I never got comfortable, maybe it was the mature community surrounding the language or its opinionated nature.
Anyway, I distinctly remember learning about Clojure, and being completely enamored with the ideas Rich Hickey talked about. I would still get bored of doing 4clojure problems, but instead of abandoning them for a different subject entirely I would watch a ClojureConj video, read a blog on a Clojure library, or even just practice some of the tooling like emacs key-chords.
I believe the learning process is better when it is erratic, both for you're own sanity and the overall completeness of a knowledge domain you can acquire after jumping around from topic to topic.
5 months in, I am trying to push Clojure/Cljs ideas into the C# shop I work at, and upholding my promise to do SOMETHING regarding the language or tooling every night.
Our brains seem to work best this way, storing an idea in our subconscious after rigorous study allows us to process it in the background. I find myself frequently daydreaming about language constructs or architectural designs.
Because it's Microsoft technologies locked into a Microsoft stack. And before people start chiming in about Mono: Good luck selling that idea in a large bureaucratic enterprise environment. For all the hassle involved you're better off sticking to something that runs on a JVM.
The American Dream is not "work hard and you will be successful", the American Dream is "Work hard at something people are willing to pay you to do and you will be successful".
The people who make the most noise about the American Dream failing them are mostly young whites who've chosen personal, liberal arts pursuits as a career, with the expectation that society should support them at it.
Comparisons to rich people are irrelevant and envy-driven. The rich are rich. So what? Do they deserve it - why do you care?
You can make yourself comfortable without luck or brilliance. Just look around you, see what the world is paying for, and do it.
If you choose not to do something in that set, you should acknowledge that you won't get the same pay for it.
Arguments that you should be taken care of the same way aren't really arguments against the American Dream, they're just a leftward political view. Which is fine, but don't convolute them.
> Comparisons to rich people are irrelevant and envy-driven. The rich are rich. So what? Do they deserve it - why do you care?
Not when their riches come at the expense of everyone else.
For instance the Walton family who occupy 6 of 10 slots on the richest americans list benefits from an estimated $15 Billion ( with a B ) a YEAR ( every year ) subsidy from the taxpayers to support their employees who could not survive ( as in feed their families ) without supplemental food assistance; not to mention medicare, disability etc. Not to mention the fact that the company they control got to be such a wealth production engine by arbitraging it's way around labor and environmental protections by exporting it's externalities to unregulated emerging economies.
All the people who got pushed into extremely bad mortgages and then lost their jobs because the economy crashed; they were stolen from by Rich People.
All the people who've had their lives destroyed by the financial shenanigans distorting our healthcare system were stolen from by Rich People.
I don't know about you, but given the trail of destruction left behind by rich people in the past 5 years alone; we should be handing them a bill, or showing them the door.
Now, I'm sure many rich people are very nice if you know them socially; but as a class, they're killing this country and this planet.
>All the people who got pushed into extremely bad mortgages and then lost their jobs because the economy crashed; they were stolen from by Rich People.
Those people share at least the majority of the blame for this. A bank does not put a gun to your head and force you to sign an ARM for a house you really can't afford.
"I lied to this guy, committed fraud left and right, and violated basically every sound principle of lending that's ever existed to get him to sign on to a mortgage, because I knew I could sell it on immediately into a CDO and face no consequences if he defaulted. But since he fell for it, it's at least as much his fault as mine that it happened!"
Caveat emptor is the disguise force and fraud hide behind.
Clearly WaMu, Countrywide and AHM (some of the biggest mortgage issuers) faced no consequences from people defaulting on mortgages. Clearly BankAm and Citi aren't sitting on massive losses from bad loans they made, desperately trying to push the losses into future years.
Well, if you're someone who doesn't really know finance that well, who's probably never had a mortgage before and so doesn't know the ins and outs, and doesn't have a lot of friends/contacts who know finance or have mortgage experience...
...and you're getting pressure-talked by a mortgage agent who keeps telling you all about how this has a super-low interest rate for the first three years, and no income verification or down payment required, and that $150k house will be worth $175k, easy, maybe even $200k before the interest rate goes up, and it's a great market so you'll be guaranteed to flip the house in time and make a profit, and real estate always only goes up in value...
...and you give in to the relentless sales pitch and sign the papers, then sure, we can assign a percentage of the blame to you. But if you think it's a precise 50/50 split or anything close to that, I think you are a terrible judge of the situation.
(and that's without getting into the bits alluded to in my previous comment, like the fact that many of the lenders knew there was no chance these loans would be good, but were happy to do it anyway since they also knew they'd never be on the hook when the loans went bad, which is out-and-out undeniable fraud and has basically gone unquestioned and unpunished because of "well, everybody was to blame" narratives that try to sweep those inconvenient facts under the rug)
>if you're someone who doesn't really know finance that well
Well, you don't have to be a financial expert to understand the generalities of what you can and cannot afford.
The rest of what you describe can be equally attributed to greedy people thinking, "if the price doesn't rise, I'll bail in 3 months. No loss." I know some of those people.
>But if you think it's a precise 50/50 split or anything close to that, I think you are a terrible judge of the situation.
I know you read stories about the strawberry picker who can't speak english "pressured" into buying the million dollar home, but those cases were extremely rare.
The majority were people with $40,000 in income deciding to buy the $750,000 house, rather than the $200,000 house, because, you know, the American Dream says renting is bad and looking wealthy is a necessity. Give me the most money you can for the biggest house possible! This happened across the globe.
Oh, and you're forgetting the other major factor of the American specific bust: people who used their home equity to fund consumption. Mostly boomers. I guess those were also the unfortunate, duped poor, buying vacation homes, jet-skis and third cars?
It seems that your understanding of the situation is drawn from the mainstream, "evil-bankster" meme. But that only works because it's a populist sentiment. There is plenty of blame to go around; give it to the greedy.
I know you read stories about the strawberry picker who can't speak english "pressured" into buying the million dollar home, but those cases were extremely rare.
The industry which sprung up around CDOs did two extremely dangerous things:
1. Because of the demand for mortgages from the CDO industry, created an incentive for lenders to make as many loans as possible.
2. Disconnected the people who were actually issuing the loans from the consequences, if and when the borrowers defaulted (since the actual lenders could immediately sell the loan into the CDO-bundling food chain, thus recovering their money so they'd no longer need to worry about the loan being repaid).
The combination of the pressure of (1) and the lack of consequences in (2) meant lenders drastically relaxed their policies, issuing loans to people who they knew they never would have lent to if they (the lenders) were going to be on the hook financially in case of default.
Meanwhile, it has been demonstrated beyond doubt that the larger entities which were offering CDOs to investors were promoting them as high-grade investments, with help from ratings agencies who either utterly failed in their function or were themselves complicit in the deception, even though those entities knew otherwise and were taking their own private actions in the market, aimed at profiting when (not if) CDOs failed to perform as advertised.
The result of this is was a large-scale transfer of wealth, largely from duped investors and duped borrowers (for make no mistake: knowingly issuing a loan to someone not qualified for the loan is a form of duping), largely to a relatively small and select group of people who were either involved in the lending and bundling food chain, or in offering CDOs to investors.
These are not memes. These are facts. This was a massive fraud perpetrated upon multiple groups.
You can, if you wish, say that the desire to play real-estate mogul or conspicuously consume played a part in driving people to take out loans, and assign some part of the responsibility to those people. You cannot, however, support in any way, based on the known and undisputed facts, the assertion that the borrowers bear (to quote precisely the original words to which I replied) "the majority of the blame" for this. The deliberate and knowing fraud in the CDO industry outstrips that as the noonday sun does a candle.
You can go on and on, but nothing will ever change the fact that no entity ever forced someone into a mortgage, CDO or investment. Each and every time was a voluntary contract between two parties, likely greed driven by both borrower and lender.
"Work hard at something people are willing to pay you to do and you will be successful".
Like picking fruit, working in a stockroom, or staffing the support phones? There's plenty of paid menial work out there that won't give you 'success'.
Assassination markets (and prediction markets in general) are fairly intimately tied to cryptocurrencies; writings on them included them as thought experiments back in the 90's.
It's actually particularly relevant because someone seem to be making a serious effort at one using, naturally, Bitcoin: Sanjuro's "Assassination Market" (see http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Road#future-developments for details).
It's hard to tell if AM's a scam or not by the nature of assassination markets, which turns out to be an interesting observation, IMO - it never occurred to me, reading the original speculations, that assassination markets would be so much harder to bootstrap than drug markets like Silk Road.
This long predates Bitcoin, although BTC gives it a new immediacy. Assassination prediction markets like this were a topic of discussion on cypherpunk mailing lists back in the 1990s.
It's one way to give anonymity (or strong pseudonymity) a political dimension, positive or negative.
Very impressive, I am glad I started studying clojure earlier this summer, I feel it will be a powerful tool in years to come. Currently working on a Cljs life simulation engine (flora, fauna, think Rich Hickeys Ant Colony demo)
I feel like a broken record for saying this but ... most production JS is shipped minified just like the code for this post. The entire code base is 25K gzipped smaller than ES6 generators + jQuery + Underscore + Immutable Collection Library + Promises implementation which is what ClojureScript + core.async delivers!
Most games stop being fun when you make a spreadsheet for them, Eve is one of those few exceptions. Right around the time I stopped playing Eve, I started finding it difficult to play games just for fun without trying to min/max every aspect to gain an advantage. I guess I was really addicted to the meta-game rather than the game itself.