My first job (2018) provided 2 weeks of PTO, with an increase to 3 weeks expected after _five_ years. Folks in the U.S. can't quite comprehend having more than that (or any at all, depending on the job).
I am very grateful for my current company's "unlimited" PTO policy, it's life-changing.
How unlimited is it, really? How much do people take off in reality? I dislike these "benefits" that no one then dares to use in reality. We have 6 weeks off, and you are literally forced to take them. This basically prevents social norms from putting pressure on people to not go on holidays as much or not during certain times.
That's a fair point! Fortunately, our company culture plays a big role here - unless folks truly don't want to take much time off, everyone seems to take about 6 weeks off. Some teams even plan entire weeks off near holidays so that everyone gets rest and work can be planned/scheduled more easily. "Unlimited" means: assuming you get your work
done and are a reasonable team player - take all the time you need (which seems to be 6 weeks, ha)
It can be a slippery slope for sure, I think it only works when the entire team buys into the notion that life is always more important than work (which can feel rare over here).
Happy to say this has been working for me and if the attitude started to change, I like to think I would speak up pretty quickly.
Neat! Pretty cool to see the traffic "snake away" right afterward. I was a few states over in Maine and can confirm it took nearly twice as long to get home afterward - I really not sure I'll ever see that kind of traffic in those areas ever again!
Yeah, the aftermath played out exactly as I hoped... From the perspective of my map toy at least! I was surprised not to see any red inflow leading up to it. I thought Friday or Saturday would see a surge, but I guess folx trickled in over time. Hope you had a wonderful Eclipse!
Any resources/examples you'd recommend for a Vue frontend w/django? I've been pretty firmly in backend land for a while and would to experiment with the other half of the puzzle!
I'll preface all of this with a couple esoteric design goals that I had in mind:
1. I actually _want_ an SPA. You might not need an SPA, if you don't need one then Vue/React/etc are overkill, etc.
2. I want to power as much of the SPA as I can using the same REST API as my core product, both for dogfooding reasons and for consolidation. Many people might argue that this is a bad idea.
---
With that in mind, some specific packages that I highly recommend:
2. Some sort of way to get type information (if you're using TypeScript) into the frontend. I use a frankensteined system of the OpenAPI spec that django-ninja generates + openapi-typescript (https://github.com/drwpow/openapi-typescript). This means when I add, say, a new field to a response in Django, I immediately get typechecking for it in Vue — which has been _tremendously_ useful.
If you really need VueJs in the frontend, consider, that you can simple serve the VueJs on any page where it is actually needed. VueJs does not necessarily mean you must create a SPA. VueJs can be delivered like any other script and this is often the easiest way without having to commit to build a full blown SPA.
As someone with moderate hearing loss in both ears since ~1st grade, I'm all for expanding access to hearing aids. It took changing doctors in high school to finally get a prescription, and it was life-changing. Not cheap, but entirely worth it - I'm grateful to have had access at that point.
Cost is still a challenge, of course. But I'd like to point out that my current set of aids ($2800 pair) just hit the 5-year mark of usage, and they are still working perfectly. For devices that I use ~16 hours a day, everyday, it's amazing. However, it took 3 visits to the audiologist to get the tuning/fitting just right. For the first month of use, these hearing aids were "garbage" (I was really frustrated). But once we hit the mark, I have had zero complaints ever since.
So, that all said, there is tremendous value to initiatives like the Bose SoundControl Hearing Aids (~$900 pair off-the-shelf hearing aids), but the biggest hurdle they face is the fitting/tuning portion. I've tried them, but they don't fit my ears well, so I can't use them effectively (yet - I want to try adjusting the receiver cables).
I'm hopeful this is just the turbulent beginning of a new hearing aid market that expands access to as many people as possible, because it is far from a solved problem.
Thanks for the links. I have to say, getting hit with an ad right as ignition was about to take place really encapsulated the whole experience for me. What a (weird) time to be alive.
I'd push back on that a little bit. I grew up on a farm that's still operating today, and it truly is difficult to find people to work those jobs. The farm pays just as well as any other job in my rural hometown, so from my experience, it seems to be more of an issue with the work itself. The hours are longer, and work is more sporadic/seasonal. When harvest rolls around, farmers need to get the crop out of the ground ASAP. That means 10-14 hour days for 4 weeks straight, otherwise, you'll lose product. It can be physically demanding and monotonous work.
But it's also incredibly fulfilling work, and it's a great example of a community-driven effort to accomplish something very important: providing food.
So I think it falls into a similar category of "college is over-emphasized and we have a dwindling supply of trades-workers". While in school in a rural farm town, I never once heard anyone say "what about farming?" when discussing future career choices. It's not marketed as an attractive option. Maybe it's as simple as "farmers have the work-life balance of an emergency room doctor while making ~1/6th" (source: Dad is the farmer, Brother-in-law is the doctor)
Anyway, it's a problem I think about a lot. I didn't get into farming, but in many ways I wish I had, because it's a highly undervalued skill with a very rewarding outcome: you feed communities. How do we change the narrative? Do we need policy changes? Continued technological advancement? A push to educate the next generation of farmers within schools? I'm not sure, but I don't think it's always as simple as saying "it doesn't pay enough". That _is_ an issue, but it's not the only issue.
> pays just as well as any other job in my rural hometown, so from my experience, it seems to be more of an issue with the work itself. The hours are longer, and work is more sporadic/seasonal
If it pays as much as other jobs with shorter, less sporadic hours, it's underpaid.
My uncle was a farmer, and I had odd jobs on the farm. I remember the potato harvest as being cold, back-breaking and utterly boring hard work. I've also been a fruit picker, wasn't much better.
But. I survived my early 20's on these kinds of jobs while I sorted my shit out. I'm grateful for the experience and the ability to support myself while I did that.
> But it's also incredibly fulfilling work, and it's a great example of a community-driven effort to accomplish something very important: providing food.
I'd love to take a break from my job once in a while to do some other, probably more manual work.
I think everyone used to go back to the countryside to help with harvest during summer, bur I feel overspecialized these days. How about incentivizing companies to take more part-time workers (as in, do not make it difficult to do so)? Together with minimal wages, it could be quite interesting. I also think having a broader skillset (more people helping) would help quite a bit: If I worked part-time at a bakery, I could probably help them with their computer/electronics troubles, for instance.
There was an artile on HN about the influence of movies on "cool".
After Jurassic park, there was a huge uptick in paleontology, and everything else related, even Veterianism (!).
Most of the currents that kids get from movies are destructive to society IMO, but if it could be tapped into - it is a source of influence. Humans naturally copy what they see.
If a series of movies with the hero being an entomologist came out, it would do us good. If there were a bunch of farm boys that played with nature in a way that made it cool, we would harvest the benefits for generations.
Certainly we need a cultural shift towards honoring ALL kinds of work, but if as you said, the work is hard, sporadic, and long hours, then of course no one wants to do it if there are other options that pay the same but lack those features.
Interesting...I've collected and read a lot of old Maine books over the last few years, and now I'm trying to remember if any of them mentioned this sort of behavior in passing. The qualities of lumberjacks that worked deep in the Maine woods were fascinating (and surely, at times, exaggerated), and I know at least a few descendants of Northern Maine Frenchmen...perhaps I need to give them a shout (ha).
Purely speculative: but I wonder if the daily lifestyle of a lumberjack, which was largely built around routine, rhythmic work and minimized social interaction (spending months in the woods at a time), coupled with shy tendencies to begin with (lots of lumber camps were completely male and had French/English language barriers = minimal small talk with coworkers), could've resulted in those kinds of reactions. I know that for me, it's easy to fall into a "trance" while doing manual labor for hours at a time, so I'd be curious if the amount of time they spent in that trance could've dampened their...social skills? Social reaction mechanisms? I don't know. Either way, pretty interesting. I'll have to search for some more references!
I wonder if reacting instantly to a command was also a positive survival skill when large trees could fall on you. People further away could see danger that you were too close to properly notice. If you didn't instantly do what someone said then you could end up dead.
I thought about the survival aspect too. I'm a very jumpy person, especially when tired. I like to think it's due to heightened survival instincts. When I get surprised, there's often a 2-3 second period where I'm not consciously in control of my body. Usually all that happens is that I jump and take a couple quick steps the other direction before I come back into control. I have, however, found myself on the opposite side of a fence more than once and recently came around in position to vault a 5-foot tall barrier. During those few seconds, I've usually already identified who or what it was that startled me, but I'm not able to process that information or stop moving away. It's weird and a huge source of entertainment for friends, family, and coworkers.
Yikes, I grew up in that area (on the U.S. side) and my neighbor down the street passed away from a disease related to mad cow disease about 10 years ago. The article lists mad cow as a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease...I wonder if this is what he had?
The area is largely agricultural, and the cancer rate for that region is high compared to the rest of the state (Maine). Hmm.
I grew up there and worked at the NB ministry of agriculture before heading to tech.
While Irving does have a chokehold on everything in NB, there's also a lot of agriculture in NB with very little resources to properly regulate. During my time there, small farmers would spray crops with unregulated herbicides/pesticides/fungicides, and even if we reported them, nothing would get done.
The area is a agricultural wasteland, scoured by repeated glaciation shoving everything down to and including the granite bedrock into the Atlantic. If nutritional value is coming out of something other than a bog or the ocean then someone first added it in as fertilizer.
No mad cow disease is quite literally Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, it's vCJD, with v standing for "variant", to specifically distinguish it from "normal" CJD which is heritable. usually CJD is caused by a specific mutation in the human prion protein that renders its susceptible to turning into plaques; vCJD does not require this mutation and happens in wild type protein, though it's unclear if other heritable factors can contribute to susceptibility.
(I worked in a protein plaque lab and did a small, inconclusive experiment about cross species CJD transfer)
I don't know why the CDC is saying that, it's just flat out wrong unless the CDC has a really stupid definition of "related".
It's related. They both involve the same protein. If you get a bone marrow transplant from someone with CJD, you will get "vCJD". Presumably also if you eat the brains of someone with CJD. The differential between the two is age of onset.
The next century of human existence is going to be filled with discoveries about how toxic everyday items are.
Take spray deodorants for example. I absolutely fail to believe that adequate studies were conducted to determine if inhaling small amounts of whatever is in there didn’t cause cancer after 50 years.
I had never even heard of Angkor until I listened to this episode of the Fall of Civilizations podcast (I highly recommend it): https://youtu.be/ghmjIBD2Fd4
Resource management intertwined with poor leadership is a common thread in the demise of societies. Our ability to adapt to our environments is impressive, but not nearly as impressive as Mother Nature itself.
I'd love if we took the hint from these histories, because the scale of change in our global climate looks like it'll far exceed past catastrophes. Some days I'm hopeful, but others, quite wary. Hmm.
I am very grateful for my current company's "unlimited" PTO policy, it's life-changing.