It's called having boundaries. I volunteer on the weekends and some weekdays at a local homeless shelter. I volunteer at the local library. I will be volunteering at our local food bank to help support food insecure families. It's a good way to get grounded in your community and impart some real positive impact on your fellow neighbors.
What I will not do is be exploited for free labor by the USGS who can absolutely afford to pay someone to do the contract work they are asking for. But by all means, if you want to, go for it.
Quite a few of these "opportunities" are asking a LOT of volunteers, implicitly asking for unpaid labor. These are not your typical "volunteer a few hours a week helping fix up a school/sorting at a food bank/helping the homeless" to give back to your community.
Look at this[1] particular ask:
> Applicants must be available to work a minimum of 32 hours per week.
> [minimum 3 month commitment with possibility to extend to a year] ... Weekend and holiday work is required.
> shovel snow for extended periods of time, hike-ski-snowshoe in extreme weather conditions with a 35-pound backpack at 7,000ft, live in remote locations with regularly snow packed roads.
> Groceries and shopping facilities are approximately 60 miles away; reliable personal transportation is required.
> I moved from SF to Utah in ~2018, and managed to buy a few rental properties since then, and despite my "income" not keeping pace with my peers in the city my wealth is exceeding them. So the first thing is, the money argument is holding less water every day that goes by.
This is hilarious. You don't have to worry about the financial aspect of your job when you can collect extra income every month as a landlord.
You do know we hire people who have to _write_ these libraries, and they can't just defer to something else with no consideration to time or space constraints. None of the questions are designed to be brainteasers or 'gotchas' but to get you to start discussing the problem and show your depth of knowledge/expertise.
If I ask you a question along the lines of "write me a function to tell if two number ranges intersect" and your solution is to grab a library instead of writing a simple predicate...then perhaps the role is not a good fit.
"Use a library for everything" is how we ended up with left-pad on npm.
I used to, and I probably would if I had to work with remote files more often. But in my experience I found it faster to just build emacs on the remote server and run it as a daemon there, since all the machines I was working on remotely had /home on an NFS mount. TRAMP took just a little too long to load remote directories for my liking.
But in case I am plopped in front of an unknown terminal/have to do something on someone else's machine ... at least I can rely on using the default vim to do basic editing.
I had a similar experience, but came to the opposite conclusion. I walked away replacing vim with emacs as my daily driver. Elisp is far more extensible than vimscript and evil-mode is pretty much at 1-1 feature parity with the real vim. I don't care much for the emacs movement keybindings except for the readline movement commands.
> to this day I still don't see what the hype was about.
Most of vim is written in C with some interfaces exposed for scripting. Emacs is mostly written in elisp with some C code where necessary. The latter lends itself better to 'hackability' imo
For my own machines, I build emacs and import my saved init.el
On other machines, there is usually a standard vi/vim install that I can use if I am ssh'd in somewhere where I don't have my personalized copy of emacs. If I remember, I'll try to put these five lines[1] in the .vimrc for some saner defaults
You have to present ID to buy tobacco or alcohol in the states. These places do not store any information on your ID. They glance at it to verify your birthdate, then you put the ID back in your wallet.
There is not a snowball's chance in hell I am giving my government ID to a social media company that will undoubtedly store that info in their database.
> America is really big and things you need to do or places you need to go are rarely just down the block
The continental United States has about 3.5 million square miles of land. By comparison China has about 3.7 million square miles. Roughly the same, give or take a few. Observe the number of public passenger rail lines that China has and the timeframe in which they were built them.
The idea that America is just too geographically big for public rail or any kind of public transportation system and we must be beholden to the car is categorically false.
> My point is people want to drive to work, run errands, and conduct business
Driving is not a precursor to running errands and conducting business (unless your business is dealing with cars) in any established nation with a robust public transportation network. I have heard the argument that cars are necessary mainly from people who have lived their entire life driving from place to place and cannot fathom using public transit. Either because it is woefully underfunded in their area or it has the perceived notion of only being for the poor folk who cannot afford a vehicle.
> It is the same problem that presents with pushing everyone to electric vehicles, electric cooking, and electric heat. We can barely meet the demand now ... NYC has 4.4MM cars moving through it each day.
This is a strange argument. It doesn't take a genius intellect to see that the energy cost to move a person per unit distance travelled is far greater driving solo than it would be taking a tram, bus, or even cycling.
As a plus, we wouldn't need to use so much space for parking these vehicles and we could use the land for other projects that 1. generate more tax revenue and 2. serve a more useful purpose for the general public; i.e. shops, living quarters, third places[1], etc.
All in all, it would be nice to have the ability to go some place without needing the car. The removal of parking lots and reclaiming that space is the cherry on top. You can thank early automotive lobbyists for shaping the current state of affairs[2][3][4][5]