Blind luck: You're walking and find money on the ground.
Luck of activity: You go walking a lot, if there's money on the ground you're likely to walk by it.
Luck of optimism: You know you're lucky, so you're always looking for confirming evidence. If you walk by money you're likely to notice.
Luck of eccentricity: You don't walk along the same paths as other people. If there's money on the ground, you're likely going to be the first to walk by it.
If the post-truth era has taught us anything, it's that humans aren't all that good at this either. It's probably a consequence of how logic works - to be reliable, you need a narrow field, the more open-ended the application the more likely it is to need to guess.
There is also a cultural element though. The laws and regulations may encourage corrupt behaviour, but if there was a strong cultural expectation that the most upstanding people go into government to serve their communities - and if that were actually who was attracted to the role - that wouldn't matter all that much.
I don't think it's precisely that people like people like them - it's that they like people who approve of their choices. The easiest way to signal that is to make the same ones.
I suspect the majority of it is that a lot of managers are finding themselves at loose ends. A typical manager in an office environment spends a lot of time interacting with the people working under them. Now they're not able to do the majority of their work and... the people under them are still performing, often better. It would take an exceptionally self-aware person not to flinch from that truth.
Cardio seems to be key to a healthy relationship with the plant. I think it has something to do with it accumulating in fat cells but I don't know the mechanism, that's just based on my observation of the difference between healthy and unhealthy tokers.
I would suspect that the online communities skew a certain way that may not be reflective of the people actually doing it. One of the most well-known FIRE bloggers is known for saying that he is as active after retiring as he was before, but that he now gets to choose his projects - and despite his blog bringing in an income comparable to his pre-retirement income, blogging was not one of the major 'pulls' in his life after a while. I imagine people who spend a lot of time contributing to such forums may temperamentally enjoy the fantasy better than the reality.
The basic assumption generally being, anyone who can save two-thirds of each paycheque and invest in a portfolio yielding 4% per year after inflation can retire in 10 years. Saving two-thirds of each paycheque is of course difficult unless one is in a high pay grade to begin with, but there are enough people with the necessary discipline to keep the dream alive for many of us.
>Scammers see that as "gullible," but I've been swimming with some of the world's nastiest sharks for 40 years.
This makes me think of the proverb, "You can't cheat an honest man". It sounds strange on the surface, but I think there's something to the idea that if one is too honest to be tempted into dishonesty by avarice that most scams fall apart.
I was curious enough to look it up, apparently it's the fallacy of "I can't properly start until I have <tool X>". In that sense I think it's not at all a problem among professionals, but perhaps an easy stumbling block that discourages a lot of amateurs (the study I heard about was actual trades, where going from amateur to professional is less of a hurdle than among creative pursuits).
I might say, "A journeyman makes his tools do the job, a master invests in his tools".
This reminds me of a study I heard about some time back, comparing the highest performers in various trades to the average. Apparently one major predictor is that outlier performers spend more, even as a percentage of income, on their tools.
The fact that you know more brevity would improve your style puts you ahead of some English majors I went to University with.
I'm sure you're sick of hearing it, but your generation does give me optimism for the future. I believe you'll have to do more with less than your predecessors, and for my own failures in mitigating that you have my apologies. But you do make it plausible that we might just muddle through the upcoming troubles.
Our generation did have a bit more of a 'happy go lucky' attitude, towards authority and the whims of circumstance both. To some degree I see the determination to buckle down and play a flawed system better than their eldars as the current generation's mode of rebellion against our 'anything goes' ethic.
Weird. I worked with a lot of truck guys in Canada for a while, and I'd be extremely comfortable mocking any of them for mentioning they care about the exterior look of their truck. A lot of contractors will even deliberately make their work vehicles look rougher so customers don't think they're charging enough.
Interior aesthetic is a different matter though. Strange how culture winds that way.
In my case, while I like the aesthetic, I think aesthetic considerations aren't supposed to figure into buying a truck. Trucks exist to do work, buying one on aesthetics seems counter to the whole reason to own a truck in the first place.
I'm thinking the rural/agricultural market might be quite a factor - I was pretty excited about the pneumatic option, if it can work as a small tractor that needs fewer repairs and recharges for pennies, it could catch on no matter what people think of the aesthetic.
> I don't know a better example for a vehicle being dependent on an always-on infrasructure than an armored electric truck.
Why? It is so, so much easier to produce your own electricity than your own gasoline. A truck running on slightly impure ethanol or gasified wood would still be more independent, but there are performance issues to consider there.
Blind luck: You're walking and find money on the ground.
Luck of activity: You go walking a lot, if there's money on the ground you're likely to walk by it.
Luck of optimism: You know you're lucky, so you're always looking for confirming evidence. If you walk by money you're likely to notice.
Luck of eccentricity: You don't walk along the same paths as other people. If there's money on the ground, you're likely going to be the first to walk by it.