iancanada
2yr ago
I have been working in software for a long time and I find it extremely difficult to concentrate on mental tasks consistently over hours unless they are deeply creatively rewarding. Working on the boring and unnecessarily difficult tasks (eg. refactoring code someone else wrote on very little sleep) are difficult to force yourself to do. I'm not sure how a coding bootcamp would compare, but if you know deep down inside that the given task isn't actually worthwhile it might be hard for you to concentrate on it. I'm projecting, but that's how I feel.
The greatest weapon I have against the forces of distraction is pair programming because it turns programming into a social activity where your mind is held in place by someone else who is presumably also interested in getting the task finished.
I believe that many of the tasks we're asked to get through in a day are mostly meaningless and in-human. We're not meant to sit at desks staring out the window all day. If you can feed your soul with hobbies and social activity and the other things that make us human it's easier to treat intellectual work as a retreat and relax in to it. Nothing makes me more antsy than staring at my editor avoiding writing annoying code when what I really want is to get out on my bike.
Drugs sound like a great time if you have a project you actually care about, but don't waste drugs on an overall meaningless job for Uber But For Accountants 2.0 - The Revenge Co.
iancanada
2yr ago
Ok that's fair :) I think I'm confusing the magnitude. There are no other racial tendencies I do see, just not as stark as the US.
iancanada
2yr ago
My comment doesn't really address your question, and is more about the weird bubble that Americans seem to live in. The white people who live in all the apartment buildings near me make me think of The Wire more than any non-white racial group I've encountered in the country.
In my midsized Canadian hometown, Hamilton, Ontario, we don't really see a lot of direct racial segregation, so poor people are just whoever was here 100 years ago and gradually got dragged down to the bottom rungs of the ladder. The kinds of behaviours that people tend to apply to poor black people in the US so obviously apply to mostly white people in Canada because our cities don't seem to have a group of people who were herded in to specific areas and then continually oppressed with real estate and zoning. (Very much with the exception of indigenous Canadians who were royally screwed and herded in to small areas and continually screwed with by locals the government). I'm not an expert, but our "bad parts of town" tend to just be the old industrial areas that got wiped out thanks to globalization, rather than an area with any kind of racial homogeneity beyond "generic white Canadian"
I feel (I don't have good data to base this off of) that many of the Americanisms like racial segregation, long term outcomes of segregation, or your strange healthcare system are like water to fishes; it's impossible to see that you're wet and that there might be a world outside. This makes a lot of racial politics that get exported from the US feel strange here.
Why does my perspective matter? Hmm... I think there is a tendency for conversations about race to want to make sweeping claims about people with the DNA for darker skin, when my experiences in my hometown, and bigger and smaller cities in Canada are so tilted away from the idea that a single genetic population displays meaningful differences.
Also, I want to push back a bit on the idea that any meaningful universal things about people with dark skin can be acquired by looking at the population of black people in the US... but also, I don't want this to come across as pandering anti-racism or something...
iancanada
2yr ago
I'm with you on the lack of sympathy. I have been fighting with people I know who follow Alex Jones for years because of the silly things they come to believe because of things he says.
Nearly $1B smacks of this being a political decision, to me personally. I want someone to develop a principle or rule that could be evenly applied that fits this judgement against Jones and sets up guidelines for the future, because right now it seems more like Bad Man Get Punished, Yay!
A good take I heard was that Infowars promoted its self as a news/genuine information outlet and used that outlet to spread false information. Maybe if you represent yourself as a news outlet, you should be held to different standards. I don't follow other news outlets because I can't take the punishment, but if the NYTimes, CNN, FOX, MSNBC news divisions started engaging in spreading false information parading as facts, they would then be liable under this principle. Would they be liable in a lawsuit by Kyle Rittenhouse in this case?
iancanada
2yr ago
I tried skimming the top few responses to your post to see if I had anything to add. I see a very wide range of perspectives on this, both internally in my own mind and across my diverse friend group.
I am not addressing your discomfort with policies, because I share many of them.
A practical anecdote because my dad has severe COPD
My household (girlfriend, brother, father, myself) all got covid last December. My father is 72, has COPD, diabetes (afaik reduces ability to heal the body to SOME degree), 1 partially collapsed lung that never recovered after hospitalization, severely overweight, etc. etc. etc. He's on all the medicines. While he's surprisingly spry for someone in his condition it is clear that he is highly at risk from a respiratory illness. Even the cold makes me worry.
We got vaccinated summer 2021, and my father got boosted about 2 weeks before I caught Covid. Normally, he takes a while to recover from colds and other things, but he had a markedly shorter infection with Covid than my brother and girlfriend. He was like 2-4 days. I was 3-5 days and my brother and girlfriend took about 7 days to get back to normal.
Yes, there's luck involved, but luck must also get applied on a bell curve, right? How likely do I find it that the "vaccine" didn't perform it's utility function appropriately by giving my father increased active antibodies for a while?
Does that mean I support mandatory vaccination policies? Absolutely not, but I also push back against this idea that the vaccine doesn't do anything, or shouldn't have been approved or delivered to people.
Vaccine legitimacy
Why did they declare the "vaccines" to be 100% effective if they were never tested for transmission reduction? (and yes I am putting the term into quotation marks because they don't appear to be what is commonly thought of as vaccines, instead working as a kind of therapeutic with alleged short term effectiveness that must be dosed in advance.)
People seem to mix up "totally eliminates risk from a virus" and "primes the immune system in some meaningful way." A lot of people wanted total protection from the Covid virus, and what we got was a priming of our immune system to a virus which mutates rapidly. I feel like some of your argument falls (E.g. using "vaccines" in quotes) in to word games in order to discount the utility of priming the immune systems of the population.
If there was a medical intervention that reduced the chances of catching HIV or cancer by some amount (20, 50, 90%), how many people in the population would take it? At what efficacy threshold would you take a pill or injection against a form of cancer?
There was a really good ZDogg MD podcast with Paul Offit (on the CDC vaccine advisory board, voted against youth boosters based on the evidence presented to CDC [maybe that increases his credibility?]) https://zdoggmd.com/paul-offit-10/
They get in to some of the technical details on why a vaccine for a rapidly mutating corona virus has no chance of totally stopping the virus, and how that compares to a virus with different characteristics. The technical details matter.
Can you find a local coding group? When you're looking for work mention that you have got a lot of value out of pair programming and maybe you can find a place who practices it well. I miss it at my current employer.
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