Achieve some level of financial security (say 6-12 months savings), then just do whatever you want.
The hard part is the former. Once you've done that the negotiation bit is trivial because you don't really need to care - you can just take it as a given that eventually you'll be paid more (unless you're taken ill and stop/slow down working).
I made this as a test of what can be done locally in the browser without a backend, and because I was frustrated with certain things missing from traditional maps.
You can draw routes around the tube network, get time heatmaps from any station, use alternate maps, disable lines, etc.
It should work in latest Firefox and Chrome desktop, Chrome mobile, and hopefully Safari (though I couldn't test it myself yet). IE definitely doesn't work until I've had more time to play with it, it doesn't support maps/sets without polyfill...
I'd really appreciate screenshots from Safari if anyone feels particularly helpful :P
Looks like the ad network I was using was being naughty and included popunders randomly (which hadn't been caught during testing). Removed now and should work fine.
Many of these discussions seem to leave the elephant in the room of what is 'enough'.
If your company can only extract 50K per employee, and a home costs 500K in the region, then I don't think you have a legitimate business, and I don't think it should be surprising that people leave for pastures new.
I've spent far too long trying to improve companies' profitability to the point that they can actually afford to pay my mortgage - it's looking likely that I'll be lounging on 10 hours / week for the indefinite future.
Burn my youth so I can rent a fancy apartment? No thanks!
This looks cool and the price is appealing. For me personally, the range is a bit short and 30mph doesn't cut it - in some cities it'd work, London is full of 50mph roads.
I'd love to buy a Zero (linked lower in the thread) if I had a safe place to store it or some good insurance (motorcycle theft is common in the UK).
WRT weather and other concerns - frankly, the time saved by riding a motorcycle in a congested city blows that out of the water, IMO. In conditions other than gridlock you can maintain an average speed ~50% higher than all other traffic.
I'd love to see electric bikes go mainstream because I think they address almost all of the concerns people have about cycling (sweaty, no good for the unfit/disabled, etc).
You can park 4-5 scooters in a car parking bay, tuck them away at the side of footpaths and in front of stores, if the roads became populated with them it'd possibly double or triple throughput for single riders.
I currently own a 125cc motorcycle and it's a godsend. Especially in the summer months it turns commuting into a joy, and reduces the time taken to perform errands by 5x over public transport (there are plenty of places I can ride to in 20 mins or take a combination of buses and trains to get to in 1.5 hours).
I think living in a large metro area for an extended period of time would be unbearable for me without owning a motorcycle. Most cities have radial transport networks - concentric journeys outside of the core have ridiculous routing as a result.
Living in Europe, a moped can be an utter joyous way to get around the world. I've dusted mine off and gotten it ready for the road, and there are great days ahead, on it. Having an electric version - no brainer for me. I'd buy an electric replacement for my Vespa in an instant, were there one...
Maciej (HN handle 'idlewords') has an interesting take on this that I'm struggling to find in my history right now. The basic idea is that all of the data these companies collect is still ultimately useless in practice. We still don't have advertising that is even close to being relevant.
But the data retains its toxic qualities (of being a database of every action I take on the Internet and some in the real world).
I fire up the YouTube homepage and all of my recommendations are for UK daytime TV. Celebrities, 'Jeremy Kyle' (the UK Jerry Springer), etcetera.
YouTube sends me adverts for female hygiene products and dog food. (I am male and I own no dog.)
Even when I get advertising that's not selling me stuff that would require I buy something else first (sex change, dog) it's invariably for something vastly overpriced or some sort of megabrand.
He fleshes out the toxic waste metaphor most fully in this talk, which he gave, rather boldly, at a big data (Hadoop) event. It's text and images but there's a video link at the top to the actual talk if you prefer it that way:
That's quite a good talk. The takeaway is to treat data, especially personal data, as a liability rather than an asset, to discard data by default, and to retain only with a very specific goal in mind, and even then to transform the retained data into some kind of useful aggregate and discard it.
In my experience, the content recommendation on YouTube is the best. I've been learning about electronics and watching a few videos about it. Now YouTube recommends me new content and channels that are extremely relevant.
My brother is into guitars, and his frontpage is all about that.
They're not great. About 40% of the recommendations are things I'd never watch, 40% are things I've already watched.
YT has trouble figuring me out because I watch a lot of gamers that also appeal to a younger audience (eg Yogscast). I get recommended a lot of terrible stuff targeted at that audience that I have no interest in (eg PewDiePie and Markiplier).
I have no idea why they recommend stuff I've already watched.
I too can not figure out why YT wants me to watch things again. Or also common, the last 10 seconds of a video is just links to the user's other videos, so I move on. Then YT wants me to "finish watching" it. No, I don't want to finish watching the last 5 seconds of an outro.
My own daughter uses YT almost exclusively as a music jukebox so sure, here comes that Taylor Swift song again, why not.
IF YT even understands that different populations use their system in completely different manner, then perhaps they've miscategorized you.
Something interesting to think about is we may be raising a population who see personalized suggestions as mere spam, if it suggests it you should ignore it because its always wrong. A poisoning of the well. In that way the whole concept of personalized advertisement might disappear.
YouTube recommendations have been improving, and I do find a lot of material of interest, which says something as my interests are obscure.
But, and this is a big but: YouTube doesn't provide the options to either dismiss any given suggestion, nor to block specific channels. There's sufficient crap on YouTube that both are essential. I've been campaigning for both features for some time now.
Google's recently implemented an account-wide blocked-users manager. It applies now to G+ and Hangouts, though it may move beyond that. "Google doesn't comment on future plans", as they're fond of saying. I have hopes.
I use Youtube while logged in. The recommendations are total trash. It takes accidentally viewing one wrong video and all your recommendations become related to that one video.
That's the thing... There's one company that figured out that the way to make money on ads is by simply making them relevant to the user, and that's Google.
The majority of the other ad companies are still--despite all the massive dot-com failures during the boom--trying to just throw in ad referrals everywhere hoping something will stick, and trying to hand off those connections to the highest bidder... like, maybe if they just keep doing it for decades, somehow it will magically become profitable.
It's not bad, but it doesn't seem get the hint if you don't care about something, even you go out of your way and click the "No interest" option. Clicked that 20 times for a channel, it still showed me suggestions from them.
The hard part is the former. Once you've done that the negotiation bit is trivial because you don't really need to care - you can just take it as a given that eventually you'll be paid more (unless you're taken ill and stop/slow down working).