You'd have to come up with the criteria for "best" but as an old hacker, "from MIT or Bell Labs" comes to mind as where to look. Maybe some of their spinoffs, but those sites did amazing things with basically nothing.
1972... One of the things we hackers did, when not doing Life or Star Trek was implement non-paper versions of CARDiac, the paper computer. The kind of task that made it easier to understand all that was interacting when a program ran (both writing it then running it).
Good times. Amazing what you could do when the day was young and the limits weren't known.
There was no guarantee it was the last significant mutation. Long Covid is a thing which many are still fighting, so delaying eliminating restrictions was a safe decision. Vaccine uptake was not uniform.
I didn't see a mention of paying off a place to live. Going into any form of retirement with a mortgage is a real problem. It's possible to avoid ownership if the rental market is reasonable, but ya gotta live somewhere.
Dealing down the amount of real work is an excellent, possibly crucial activity. If you define "you" in terms of the work you do, retirement will mean you have no hold on "you". You have to be able to define yourself outside of work to be ready when it's gone.]
With kids, you have to have a handle on their uni costs. You have to have a handle on medical costs until government-provided services kick in. And you have to be willing to let whatever you've been creating during your career go and to stop worrying about it.
This is (or is becoming) a problem particularly with index funds/ETF's that use market-value to weight ownership. You can certainly find out the top 10 stocks in an index, and can probably get detained information on funds you are participating in. But avoiding market segments, countries, individual stocks, ... might be hard if the funds aren't interested in working with you. Although I could see boutique organizations creating more-acceptable investments as there's money in doing so.
Are they forgoing living together, forming a financial partnership or just forgoing the ceremony? There's a huge difference between living solo and just not bothering getting a license (see Quebec). Although those lacking the paper might have some difficulties due to the definition of "spouse" that is in place wherever they're being called on it. HIPPA for example, or immigration.
The world was lucky the omicron mutation chose virulence over lethality - it could outcompete the older, more “effective” strains. This coupled with vaccines, isolation and antivirals (and treatment changes) kept the count down.
A different roll of the mutation dice might have made a sars that spread easily. That would have thinned out the middle aged folks.
They had done safety and effectiveness testing before deployment back then. These are retrospective studies using a real large dosing and placebo population.
The closest to “untested drug matter” that existed was the antibody cocktail that might have kept Trump alive.
Cars and airplanes were probably the tech stocks before the transistor. But don’t sell pharmaceutical stocks short as the correct stock at the start of a hot drug prints money. Look at Ozempic and montjaro, look at statins, look at painkillers…. The revenue from anything that honestly improves dementia would be damn near infinite. People pay lots of money to stay alive, look good and move without pain.
Imagine what the techbros would pay for something that repaired dna.
Remember that tariffs are paid by the importer. So, unless Canada or Mexico mirror the US tariffs, USians are going to be the people facing higher prices. And if the tariffs succeed with US companies taking over import business the prices will still be higher than before Trump 2.
Ctran and Fortran look similar if you ignore much of the flexibility of C and help the optimizer out re memory overlap. Wave the checkbook and you’ll have programmers. Way easier than COBOL.
Unless things have changed since Covid, "selling work" was consulting which was hard to scale while "selling software" had a multiplicative factor. Although consulting/customization work might be the only survivor if LLM's do what their backers wish.
They've had several decades to do this and it's not dominating the industry. Might keep at it and make it work. Or, it might be looking to AI to get rid of staff. But essentially all of N America is inaccessible to the tech barons if they want butts in seats.
The casual disregard of international treaties and responsibilities coupled by the arbitrary tariffs and other economic actions makes the us untrustworthy and unpredictable. Countries hate the former and business hate the latter. Therefore, if the us can be avoided it will be.
Remote work or satellite offices would permit working where housing was more affordable and it would encourage 2 professional families. It would also encourage families as spare resources might be available for munchkins.
But this seems to be the opposite of what the money wants. Edit: and nobody talks about climate or commuting costs.
I would not purchase a house unless you’re looking to retire into it or if you can change jobs easily without moving. Retirement is far easier without house payments, but they can be illiquid assets in downturns when people have to move for work.
We’ll see how the discussion changes if/when the us southwest runs out of water or gets too warm. Or if/when the crop production of the Midwest suffers. I guess at that point the us will have both problems?
+1 on the notebook although I prefer a grid-ruled version. Clairefontaine worked for me, as its pages deal well with the inks of the various ballpoints I throw at it. There are other vendors of merit, but a good pen and good paper is worth the expense. You’ll lose searchability but gain durability and flexibility.