As Percy Shelley said about Ozymandias, "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" We're all sand on a long enough time scale, and getting a TC 800k+ will not save you from that fate, in the same way that conquering an empire will not save you either. Other people have pointed out that you likely make a decent wage, but understandably that does not address your concern. If you feel that your only value is your accomplishments, then no matter how much you achieve it will never be enough. You get to decide your own goals, and whether you're reaching them. Don't let these proxies for ability and class decide what you want or how fast you should get it.
> If people don't equally well suspect `eval` then education attempts have seriously failed.
Haha yes, that statement was mostly made in jest. I would hope most people would be just as suspicious of an eval one liner with a singular emoji. Does make it slightly less suspicious than an equivalent eval which doesn't have 50 invisible bytes.
Good shout on fixing issues with eval in OSS--I think I might do that!
I'm curious about your third assertion--I am definitely not a fan of the US government's current laissez-faire approach to regulation, but I was able to find a few examples of the US levying larger fines:
In the article you linked, it mentions that this fine was 2.75b, or, 4% of Alibaba's 2019 revenue. I'm not knowledgeable enough in finance to state this as fact, but it looks like BP had a total revenue of 222B in 2015 [1]. 5.5b/222b = 2.47%. The total settlement would be 20b/222b = 9.01%
Now, obviously there are many examples of companies being fined paltry amounts for massive violations in the US, and I'm not sure how to reconcile 5.5b for destroying an entire ocean ecosystem vs roughly the same fine for anti-trust violations. But I don't think it's true that the US never enforces its laws against large and valuable companies. Do you know of any good sources that compare the history of corporate fines in China vs the US in more detail?
I am someone who was raised with a very similar set of values. I was homeschooled, and often believed that "public-schooled" kids had a worse, more limited set of values. I was not allowed to use computers till I was in 11th grade, and dove into reading as an alternative. Very little screen time, but I ended up with a lot of issues that did not even begin manifesting until I was an adult. I would urge you to re-examine your beliefs around this topic. It is too easy to elide the issues by reframing them as "a bit of arrogance". Based on my own experience, listening to the people around me, they are not experiencing it as "a bit" of arrogance. It is too easy, almost intoxicatingly so, to believe that you are better than those struggling. As long as you frame your own struggles as unique, you will deprive yourself of both 1) commiseration and 2) knowledge on how to progress past. Rather than say "everybody who sought solutions to their issues had issues", ask the question "how many people that did have issues did not seek solutions".
Homeschooling is too far for my liking. Kids really need to be around other kids. If anything, my siblings and I needed a bit more of that, because our neighborhood had 0 kids and my parents kept forcing us to hang out with their adult friends. But it was still ok, we still had real enough childhoods.
I started going to Catholic church in college, against my parents' wishes. I realized that everyone does have problems. But that high school support group was the classic where... idk a nice way to say this, kids self-diagnosed mental problems to feel special. It wasn't about self-improvement.
I can understand your POV perhaps surprisingly well, as my father was secular growing up and then chose to join Protestantism in college (against his parents wishes). I wonder if at the end of the day it's just teenagers wanting to rebel. My dad's parents were secular, so he became Christian, and I became secular again. I can definitely relate to not enjoying support groups where the suffering is "valorized" to a certain extent. I think I was mostly reacting to the sentiment of superiority in general, but that is also an interesting case because it is pretty clear that families like that tend to have better outcomes overall (at least in monetary terms). My POV is that WASP culture in general breeds these perspectives, and also reinforces them because of the monetary and social inertia.
The flip flopping of religion is maybe just that. It wasn't really the case for me, cause my parents were Catholic but became quietly atheist, and I didn't know until they started complaining to me. But it happens a lot.
It seems to work for WASP. Superiority (or I guess family pride) is also big where my parents are from, Iraq and Iran. But my parents didn't take it in moderation, so the outcome wasn't good in the end for them.
they do not have to do that in school. My (home educated) kids did lots of classes and activities where they met other kids. A lot of schools tell kids "you are not here to socialise!" and have strict rules about what you do when which also limits interaction (at least here in the UK)>
They can also get some of this from non-school activities, but personally I would want it to happen during those ~7 hours they spend every day in school too. They'll even interact with other kids during class, just in an educational way (I hope).
Agreed. I was thinking more of home educated kids like mine who do not have a fixed seven hour day (you can cover what you do in school in a much shorter time if being taught one to one or teaching yourself).
There are many young people (myself included, though not nearly as skilled as most) that are modifying their cars in pretty substantial ways. Just in my own friend group there are multiple under 30 with their primary car being a heavily modified sports car. I myself own 2 relatively old sports cars (90s Acura, and 00's Audi), both obviously in manual, both of which have had significant work done in my driveway. The way that I would frame it instead is that the concentration of interest has increased. Nowadays with social media, etc, there are infinite ways to learn about, do, and compare various modifications to cars. People who do not care about cars are now in a position where essentially zero knowledge is required to use them as a method to get from A-B. However, those who are interested in it for process of building itself still exist, and the resources are better than ever. For the time that I've been around, I've been seeing increasing, not decreasing, interest in older car platforms primarily for the reason that they are easier to work on compared to new cars.
Xyrem is just the brand name for GHB. The company that currently owns the rights (Jazz Pharmaceuticals) pled guilty to felony misbranding in 2011, and in 2013 raised the price by 841%. More recently, in 2017, they sued multiple other companies attempting to produce generics, before settling on an exclusive licensing agreement with one of them. Ironically the headline on their website is "Improving Patients' Lives", but I imagine they aren't reducing the price because Xyrem makes up 74% of total sales [1]. The entire thing reeks of PE--tons of acquisitions.
Not really relevant to your overall point, but I found it interesting that apparently F1 already tried that:
In 2005, tyre changes were disallowed in Formula One, therefore the compounds were harder as the tyres had to last the full race distance of around 300 km (200 miles). Tyre changes were re-instated in 2006, following the dramatic and highly political 2005 United States Grand Prix, which saw Michelin tyres fail on two separate cars at the same turn, resulting in all Michelin runners pulling out of the Grand Prix, leaving just the three teams using Bridgestone tyres to race.
They all could, but Ferrari built their car + strategy + drivers' style for multiple fast laps with multiple pit stops as the winning formula. Having just multiple tire changes without the same car, strategy and driver won't have the same results
