I don't know why people even care about that. I go out of my way to not use my work laptop for personal work/projects/etc. Especially considering the amount they value the laptop at (which may be inflated) is deducted from your severance payment
Reputation. Have you not seen that post that pops up every three months or so about how some startup had their funds "stolen" (whether true or not) by Stripe?
Didn't Netlify have layoffs recently? Wouldn't expect a non-public company that needed to layoff +10% of their workforce to have the kind of cash to buy out another company.
I can't "hone" social skills because I have none. And at my age you can't "get" these skills because in order to get them you need to interact with other people, and in order to interact with people my age you need social skills.
Like I commented elsewhere: exposing oneself to more scenarios of rejection can only drive one deeper into misery. Like wanting to cure an autistic child's sensitivity to noise by exposing him to a string of loud, crowdy concerts.
I am under psychiatric treatment. And the way we treat it isn't by expecting me to magically integrate to society at my age with my lack of experience but by managing the despair.
That's why I wanted to comment here: I found most comments looking for "ways" to get these guys "dates". But some (and I bet it's most) of those who are sexually lonely (or romantically lonely) are past the social point-of-no-return. They are pestilent to others. Constantly exposing them to environments where they will face rejection at best, excoriation at worst is only going to drive them deeper into misantropy. And that may lead to violence.
Trying to "flirt" in those spheres is looked down upon just as ferociously as doing it at the office. Have you not seen the viral TikTok of the woman that was "angry" that some guy was "checking her out" at the gym, while the man was barely paying attention at her at all?
As a 30+ year old kissless virgin I have recently began noticing that the loneliness part has began affecting me more deeply than usual. I suppose noticing the first signs of aging in my face led to the realization of all things not-done. I've had a couple of episodes of despair in the past few months because of this.
Unfortunately people like me become helpless. You'll be alone because you _are_ alone: you don't have any social proof, any social skill, people your age don't "get together" to find a partner at the same rate as younger people, they have higher expectations regarding your experience and more.
The way I see it, once each man crosses a certain age without any or much sexual experience they will become stuck in that category the rest of their lives. Whether we have the tendency to lash out violently against others or ourselves more than the average, I don't know. I wonder if the solution by Western society will come in the way of some "Minority Report-like" way to identify us and pre-emptively lock us out.
Being inexperienced in your 30s as a man is game over. Sorry to put it bluntly but for those guys there isn't a path that leads to a relationship or real intimacy of any kind.
Amazon has around USD 58 billion in cash and short term investments according to their last quarterly report. Stripe's last "valuation" in 2021 was at USD 96 billion so today, based on the market cap behavior of similar companies like Square or PayPal, that number should be at USD 30-40 billion today.
It would be a large acquisition but not unheard of.
- Commodities will begin a new boom, aided by the war in Ukraine and the drought in South America
- Apple will collapse in the same way Tesla and Meta collapsed this year
- Europe will enter a deep recession. Lagarde will be too late to stop inflation by raising rates so the hard landing will be extra hard. The US is in a better position for a not-so-hard landing, but...
- China will start using their financial leverage to increase prices in the West and force further hikes/delay pivots
- Green energy sources fail to deliver in Europe and the US but they keep course with de-nuclearization. The non-Western-alligned take the opposite approach and begin investing in nuclear in bulk (Japan, India, South America)
- This is more longer term but the US market becomes a trading market for the next 10 years or so. Like after 2000 or after 1970.
Politics:
- Labor movements will begin gaining steam due to the cost-of-living crisis in the West.
- Neoliberalism and globalism breathe their breaths as the world goes back to blocks. This exacerbates the aformentioned cost-of-living crisis with not just price increases but shortages
- Left-wing parties in Europe manage to either win their scheduled elections (Spain, Finland, Greece) or win snap elections (UK, Ireland), turning Europe totally red. The new EU pressures Ukraine to capitulate and give up on the separatist provinces (both because they sympathyse with Russia since always and because this helps ease cost of energy)
- China doesn't invade Taiwan. They never even planned to do that.
- CBDC are introduced in Canada and Europe. The first right-wing individuals get locked out due to them.
- Trump is condemned for January 6th.
- A very serious and morally outrageous scandal is revealed about the United States and its politicians by someone who sells it to an American enemy to publish
Tech:
- Layoffs continue and get worse. Google layoffs a lot
- There is one "big" IPO from one of the remaining unicorns that ends up as bad as WeWork
- The AI-mounted-over-an-LLM startup becomes the new Web3 startup, nothing useful comes out of it
- The FOMO with AI becomes the the new FOMO for crypto/metaverse
- Politics will delay further research into AI in the West due to misunderstanding of what things like GPTChat and Stable Diffusion do
- Private equity tech companies will see their valuations cut at at least 60%. Many new startups will close even when they are "well-funded".
- Salaries will collapse. Not at the "teacher in rural Guatemala"-level but the days of the $500k senior salary are gone.
- As a consequence of that: "geoarbitrage" becomes the new thing. Developers moving to LCOL countries with low taxes to work remotely for companies in the US, Europe or wherever, keeping costs low but their savings rates high. Tech people with great resumes will flock to Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico, Portugal, Cyprus, Thailand, Malaysia and work as contractors.
- This in turn will bring an even bigger push for unionization of tech workers in the US. And protests (sometimes violent) in third-world countries against these economic nomads (my first guess will be either Portugal or Mexico, where people are already being priced out of their family neighborhoods)
- Linux notebooks begins to eat Macbook's share
- At least one of those "frontend" companies that spend too much time promoting conferences and meetups goes belly up ugly, like Polly did this year
Why should we reverse it? I'm much more comfortable being alone than having to fit in with what society accepts as proper nowadays. Not to mention how untrustworthy most communities are nowadays.