Planet money episode Waste Land (https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912150085/waste-land) was also quite informative: plastic recycling was never a possibility. It was simply a marketing tool for the industry to sell more of it
I guess your comment is provocative intentionally. There are many countries in the world where - thankfully- certain public schools/universities are more prestigious than private ones (it comes to mind Germany, Switzerland, Spain, France).
About B) and C) I sort of agree though
What is so bad about just going out and doing sports with people and having real contact?
I guess that everyone is different. In my case I really enjoy participating in HIT workouts with people; the group competition drives me to push myself.
That's one of the reasons for having better results in a marathon than during training: group competitiveness
The second benefit is also obvious to me: socializing. Just the fact of doing sports together gives you a sense of bonding, of going through similar pain and succeeding.
One can argue you can achieve the same with VR meanwhile for me is just a poor replacement.
Coming from Scala and Kotlin I don't find working with Ruby extremely productive.
The IDEs have partial autocompletion but obviously not as good as with compiled languages. Same for finding where a method is used or how to refactor code without breaking the world.
Those are all IDEs features that made me more productive, made my codebase more robust and helped me refactoring often fearlessly.
Sorbet is a good attempt to fix some of that, but it then adds a lot of verbosity and it is difficult to use in practice since is not adopted by all the ecosystem and when relying on third parties you'll find yourself doing a lot of T.cast, T.unfase, T.must
That said I can see a lot of value in Ruby: concise code, powerful iterators, very expressive and very flexible. Perhaps so flexible that it gives you many ways to shoot yourself
We are too often caught up in the inertia of our life, telling ourselves lies like 'the future will be better', 'just a little more', 'what are they gonna think about me if...', 'this salary raise is very important'.
Once you step out and remind yourself your time in this world is limited, a list of priorities will start to take shape, based on the following questions:
1. which cause is worth it for you to spend your effort and money?
2. which activities bring you pleasure and joy?
3. which are the reasonable sacrifices to fullfill 1 and 2?
There is no universal answer to those questions but everything starts with slowing down, gaining perspective and diving in