171–180 of 230 posts
No wonder Humanity is not property of family relatives only.
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I feel you on the 'life' part. Only people that have been deeply commited to academia, and realizing its role in this era, can understand the emotional impact on this choice.
Quick question for you and the GP, if you would be so kind: I'm currently working on a project which is set to become my master's thesis (I'm writing my final undergrad exams this month). I started it a few weeks ago; before that I never thought I would go to grad school and I had a severe distaste for academia. Now I'm feeling academia suck me in. It's hard to describe, but I'm "good" at the aspects of academia that…
Getting married to a women who drives me to be better person. Has improved every aspect of my life.
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Agree with this. Recently stopped (around 6 month ago), games just look boring now and they waste so much of you're time.
I don't even try to play multiplayer games anymore, as within moments I get the feeling of time wasted. I do however, from time to time, play single-player games (like Portal, or Modern Warfare series, or more recently, Bioshock) for their artistic / story value. The best games have stories much better and deeper than most of the movies, so I find them important intellectually and artisticly.
Spec Ops: The Line is one of the first games I've really seen traverse from the collection of descriptors we normally use for video games (childish, immature, time waster, brainless fun, etc) into the realm of what I'll call "deep media". I'll define deep media as the collection of literary and artistic work which is created not with the primary goal of entertainment, but with conveying an outlook or a perspective of the world.
Spec Ops: The Line is not a pretty, nor particularly fun game, but by golly is it good.
Life: Doing my MBA - hear me out before you guys go all nuts. I have a BA in Computer Science and I wanted to learn more about business, so I chose to do an MBA in Finance. Best. Decision. Ever. The reason being is that I now see the world through a different lens. For instance, when everybody blames bond markets for trashing the bonds of Greece or Argentina - I understand why it is the fault of the government and th…
Hey, I'd like to know a bit more about how you look differently with a finance foundation. Are there any resources you could recommend for a laymen? I have some basic economics but not much else.
I like to see high-quality products that can command a fat margin in the marketplace, because it usually means that the company will be profitable and can continue making high-quality products (all other things being equal - like they don't commit PR suicide or they don't fumble on the production, etc.).
So that's one subtle way, another way is by evaluating public figures.
One of the most eye-opening things I have experienced is seeing "knowledgeable" people talk absolute garbage and many people listening to them without questioning what they are saying.
One such example is when Jack Welch did his rant about the jobs numbers right before the elections. I am not even talking about from a political perspective, but here you have a "world renowned" ex-CEO of a large company (one of the largest on the planet) and he is talking shit. He knows that the numbers can't be fabricated easily because of the way the system is setup, he also knows that any candidate that fudges the numbers has more to lose than to gain. As in, if Obama did fudge the numbers and the word got out, that would be the end of him. Period. No questions asked. The risk is too large for the reward.
But there are many people that would see who he is, and what he did and assume that he is speaking gospel. But because they don't understand the way the system works, and the incentives at play (Welch is going to be hit with much higher taxes, so obviously he has a vested interest in attacking Obama) they are oblivious and they believe him. Obama "must be" fudging the numbers. It doesn't quite work like that.
Yes, gov'ts do hide things and there are stuff they do that they don't want to get out - but when you understand the incentives that reporters/journalists (and more recently bloggers and every day ppl with smartphones, etc.) have to break "huge stories" you appreciate that it is harder to keep "huge" things secret.
Plus, I see startup ideas and companies differently - again...one of the most drastic changes is that I look at margins more, because they kinda tell you what type of company you have to build. In a thin margin company, there is very little room for error....because the profit you earn on each transaction is so small, so it takes you longer to build up a buffer to help you weather storms. Whereas if you have fat margins, you are more likely to be able to weather winds that will kill thinner margin companies.
One glaring example is looking at the differences in margins of two large companies. Walmart & Apple.
Walmart - $445B in revenues in the last reported year, $15.7B in profits. Apple - $156B in revenues, $41.7B in profits.
So Apple did 1/3rd the revenues, but 3X the profits.
I would much rather run Apple than Walmart. That's just a personal preference. Many people thrive in the low-margin business....Walmart & Amazon are.
That decision, dictates the culture of the company you create. With a fat-margin business, you can invest more liberally in innovation and pay a premium for talent - it's much harder to do that (at the same scale) as with a fat-margin business.
Hope that provides some clarity, let me know if you have any other questions.
Edit 1: As for resources, I would check the finance & economics section of Khan Academy for starters. Then from there just do some reading on the various topics you have learned and start to consume quality journalism like the Financial Times or the Economist. It is staggering the garbage printed/shown elsewhere. Also, try to turn off CNN if you can.
Life: dropped the TV subscription, stopped reading newspapers and generally disconnected myself from the mainstream world. Thinking outside the box becomes natural then. Programming: Teaching myself Lisp and Emacs, dropping Agile methodologies, ditching OOP for functional, writing my code as if I'm replaceable and the next guy needs to pick up where I left without any trouble. The last point actually gives me more va…
Not questioning your choice, I disconnected myself from the mainstream world once as well. But now I'm starting to think that our tendency to do this (specifically stop reading newspapers) may be leading to a disconnect from participating in the community. Which leads to a lot of decisions being made against the interests of the community due to people not participating in local governance issues. This combined with…
I'm a programmer so for me mainstream translates to Singleton mainStream; and that's, as Steve Yegge would say[1], a case of the Simpleton pattern; as a fun note, it's about the appropriate LISP to C++ translation too!
If this were the only API offered to you, you'd probably hack your unfiltered stream library on the side too; oh but it's C++ and everything useful is private under proprietary licensing, good luck. Isn't that how open-source was born in the first place? It seems to be doing pretty well compared to proprietary mainstream software nowadays.
Secondly, I believe sticking to your own world is a very good thing. This is where your imagination lives, this is where you create links between ideas to better picture them and therefore understand them. Be it for art, science or faith, this is where fresh ideas comes from to then be adopted by the mainstream, who forgot they too have this ability.
People don't participate in governance because they believe it isn't their 'job', they did vote and it ends there for them; they just had a hard day and want to spend the evening watching American Idol, the results of a consumption society. Our society is based on work for money, not work for the bettering of said society. Otherwise we wouldn't need marketing, public relations, sales, and other jobs we had to came up with to keep the illusion of it all going on.
This led me to disconnecting from the mainstream. However, you don't really disconnect from the community since the internet provides an open and free media platform to build your own filters upon; it also happens to build critical thinking. What you disconnect from is the endless stream of bullshit goods and services produced for the sole purpose of profits going through the mainstream pipes.
I've always liked to view capitalism as a dog chasing it's own tail; produce goods or services to make money, to spend on goods and services. If it does so for a while, you'll notice all the money going to the center due to the centripetal force of its circular motion. Why isn't society about collectively working to go forward instead of in circles? Mainstream.
I'm not for anarchy either, that's just as bad on the opposite end of the spectrum. But the open source model would definitely be interesting to apply to society as a whole; drop the ideas of government and corporations, structure society as an hierarchical flatland and let everyone contribute to everything they want to.
Until then, I'll be quietly hacking away since I actually learn useful things that way, which I can then use to help create a better world.
[1] https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/singleton-consider...
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Why? What if someone is going through it and wants to talk about it with someone else who's experienced it? I'd LOVE to help them. My wife would LOVE to help them. We can't do that very well if we keep it a secret or speak about it anonymously.
Because I would feel odd knowing what you just disclosed if I were to ever cross paths with your wife. Your wife might be OK with it, but that's not an issue. How other people feel about it is. To put it bluntly - nudism belongs to a nudist beach.
Your comments (and the others saying this should have been anonymous) are really saying that you think scottmagdalein should feel ashamed about this part of his life -- in his replies he's telling you that he doesn't. It's worth reflecting on why you feel that way.
Giving up video games in my 20s. If I hadn't done that, I'd still be stuck in front of a game somewhere. Those things will eat your life.
Life: Slow carb diet and P90x. (a little embarrassing, but true) Programming: Diving farther into photoshop. I know thats not programming, but I really like to play around in photoshop during long code sessions. It helps my brain relax.
I want to try P90X soon and was wondering if you've felt it's made a difference?