> 4. Donate the rest wholesale to charity. Tax deduction should be around $25k - likely more financial benefit than selling piece by piece, with infinitely less hassle.
What charity wants these antiques? Less hassle for you, I'm sure, but now a charity is going to have to deal with the stuff. Will they just throw it in the trash?
That's the reality with a lot of stuff. I do donate books to my library's book fair every year. But having gone to the book fair, I have little doubt that most of the donations will end up being pulped in the end.
Most things that people don't want don't really have value to most anyone else either. They may be recycled at some level. But mostly it's just friction to get rid of it.
There's an interesting series of fantasy novels by the author Graydon Saunders, occasionally recommended on this website, that almost entirely avoids the use of pronouns: https://www.goodreads.com/series/242525-commonweal .
The avoidance of pronouns is a stylistic choice, but not a didactic one—you might not even realize it until you're a third of the way through the book and you start questioning whether a character you'd imagined as male or female might actually be a different gender, or not gendered at all. It's interesting to see how the author achieves this in dense but readable prose, without drawing attention to it.
Ancillary Justice is told from the point of view of a character of a culture that doesn't draw the distinction in language. It is occasionally remarked on, but generally from the point of view of the main character being always a bit paranoid that they'll cause offense by not referring to characters of other cultures and languages correctly.
It doesn't even require a big team to be useful—I won't remember how I organized a set of styles a few months from now, and having Tailwind require a minimal set of constraints, and keeping the styles easily editable in the place you use them makes things more maintainable over time.
Does this effect taper off as you get further away from the edges of the pool? Wondering if you could eliminate the unfairness by just leaving a few lanes empty on each edge of the pool.
I agree with this; I think part of the societal problem is one of poor urban planning. I’m lucky to live in a neighborhood in New York (Sunnyside) that has a park that is the hub of everyone’s social life—most nights of the week, people show up, bring some food, and chat/share dinner and drinks while the kids run around playing unsupervised. This is extremely rare in the US, which is dominated by suburban typologies that feature individual homes and relatively few communal spaces. The shared spaces, like restaurants/bars/etc. tend to be places you have to drive to, and therefore have less of a connection to their community and less of a regular clientele. Everyone wants to have their own backyard…which is fine, but leads to people hanging out alone in their own backyard rather than with their friends and neighbors.
People speculate this is what happened to Graham Linehan—I heard a funny story on a podcast in which somebody, a number of years ago, sent him an email saying that they were a big fan of the IT Crowd, but there was an episode that they felt used trans people as the butt of a mean joke in an unfair way…and he wrote back with a very thoughtful and sincere-sounding apology! But it’s easy to imagine questions like these being the start of the rabbit hole that he went down, starting to self-justify those aspects of his work, finding support from more radical people online, and ultimately transforming himself into a person with monomaniacal focus on this one issue, leading to the ruin of his professional life, the estrangement of his own family, and the loss of his own mental health.
i suspect this happened with j.k. rowling as well, but maybe i'm giving her too much credit. pretty stunning the difference in results for each based on their similar mental/social curdling. i guess it's easier to stay at the top when you're already there.
I’m familiar with the Grasshopper visual scripting environment for the Rhino CAD system, and what you’re describing happens there as well…but I don’t really perceive it as a negative. Users who aren’t comfortable with text programming continue to use the visual method, and users who are tend to migrate their more complicated functions to single blocks. There’s a limit of complexity beyond which the visual programming becomes an impediment to understanding. It’s OK if moving things to a text-based block will make the internal logic of that block inaccessible to some number of users, given that those users would struggle to understand the visual version of the function as well.
Your salary was the exact kind of thing that needs to be balanced against the cost of fraud; if it was larger than the amount of fraud you prevented, then the company would have been better off just accepting the fraud as a cost of doing business. The closer you get to zero fraud, the more expensive it becomes to reduce it further (and the more likely your countermeasures will negatively impact the business in other ways), so there definitely is an "optimal" balance to be struck between fraud and preventive measures.
This is what I do—it can even be a detailed slack message. I start writing the message with the goal of asking for some guidance, but in the process of carefully outlining the problem and what I’ve already attempted (in order to respect the time of my colleague) I usually arrive at the correct solution. I then delete the email without ever needing to send it.
What charity wants these antiques? Less hassle for you, I'm sure, but now a charity is going to have to deal with the stuff. Will they just throw it in the trash?