I recently started a new job and it goes a bit like this: the 5 weekdays I average about 11 hours per day (office time only, no commute). My commute is about 45/50 minutes in total (2 ways). I usually spend at least 2-3 hours on each weekend day, but sometimes it can be as much as 7 hours. When I am on holiday I usually login 2-3 times for a few hours (2-3).
I work definitely more than the average in my company, although not by much, and the weekend/holiday bit not many people do, although some do it. I find it that I am extremely productive the whole time: I constantly create new things and I get a lot of ground covered. It often happens it is 6pm, I have an idea, and instead of going back I push it. 2 hours go by but the idea is finallized and I know tomorrow I can start something new.
I don't feel burn out, but genuinely interested in my job. I read a book every night before sleep, exercise for 30 mins after work, and spend time with my partner. I thoroughly enjoy weekends, I often work on side projects and hobbies, and I do chores with my partner, and also speak with relatives.
The only reason I would ever need more time is if I have kids one day. But otherwise if I had to work 9 to 5 I would feel like shit because I will be watching netflix for like 3 hours in the evening, which is what I used to do in my first job. So constraining myself actually is great for not wasting: I am direcrly converting my time for knowledge and money, until I need to have kids.
Long story short, some people find extra free time pointless unless they have something meaningful like kids to spend it on. I do believe a lot of people are not willing to work so much, but to those that want free time, I will tell you this: be honest with yourself if you are making the most of it.
I tried to read this article, I really did. I tried to read the comments and to be emphatic. I really tried. I just do not feel pitty or any empathy towards anyone in the comments, or the author. I think I am emphatic towards the people I love because I actually deeply love my partner of many years, and my parents. But somehow the idea of homelessness disgusts me: I do not feel any positive emotion towards people who have experienced it, or are experiencing it. Maybe it is my upbringing: I did not grow up in a developed Western country (although I live in one one) but a developing country, where everyone is struggling to some degree, so the homeless there to me always seemed like they are homeless due to their own bad choices. The ones that beg are truly repulsive and I have my own experience of why I will never give them money: when I was a little kid I saw a drug addict begging and I stopped to give him cash out of pity. When I took out my wallet he became aggressive and wanted not only to take what I gave him but all my money. I was very scared, it was dark and late, and people around pretended nothing was happening and would have let him do it if I didnt board a randomly arriving bus! This lesson taught me that no one will help you in bad situations, bad people want to hurt you, and people who stop you for money want to scam you and exploit your naive pity. I was also mugged, twice, arround the same time by teenage boys who threatened my life both times. So I really cannot understand how people can feel empathy towards the not-well-off, especially as I myself was poor as my parents were struggling at the time and yet they didnt steal or beg or do dodgy things while the drug addict and those teenagers did. So either I am a psychopath, or everyone here truly is a Western naive person who has no idea how the world works even if they were homeless (to me being homeless in a Western country is something my brain cannot understand given that most such countries in Europe have wellfare states). Can someone help me understand? I am not trying to start a flamewar, I just want to know how can my opinion be so vastly different? Am I missing something here?
I appreciate your inquiry and articulation of your position. I agree that the homeless people you describe are in the direction of repulsive. I can give my answer to your question.
> "so the homeless there to me always seemed like they are homeless due to their own bad choices."
Contrary to your perspective, when I see a homeless person (or anyone) who is being unreasonable, hostile or indecent to me: I try to reflect that they did not have the resources and upbringing that allows them to be decent. I did not choose my upbringing therefore I did not choose my capacity to be a decent human being. It doesn't change them from being repulsive, but I begin to see how I could have been them if I didn't have the resources I had during my upbringing. Resources does not just imply financial capital, but also includes social capital (good relationships, family life), environmental capital (health, nutrition, safety.) So yes you can grow up "poor" (financially/materially) but become a decent human being. Your parents had good virtues instilled in them to not steal or do dodgy things.. I wonder who instilled those virtues in them? I'd like to thank them and make their practices ubiquitous.
Some rhetorical questions I ponder about:
Why am I a decent human being? Am I a decent human being? How much of my inherent decency is from underlying cultural fabric that I may be unaware of and take for granted? What I am doing do insure that I continue to be a decent human being?
.. do I have "blinders" on as the actor in the video suggests. What am I taking for granted that could be taken away? For all I know I could have a future medical condition that breaks me psychologically, or fall to some financial scam that puts me into ruin and I could become an indecent person. How do we create a society that makes it very difficult to become an indecent person? How do we create a society that protects everyone?
When I see an indecent homeless person: I see that society has failed them. Society might fail me too.
We are all a product of our environment. Those raised in developed countries, especially those who grew up with money, or at least not without money, will have certain attitudes toward the poor and homeless that likely won't be the same as people who grew up in poverty.
You had some horrible experiences as a kid. That sounds awful. I was mugged once as an adult, and that shook me enough, and took time to emotionally deal with. I cannot imagine what it must be like to have that happen to you as a child, and more than once.
> but a developing country, where everyone is struggling to some degree, so the homeless there to me always seemed like they are homeless due to their own bad choices.
This just doesn't make sense to me. You claim two seemingly conflicting things: that everyone is struggling, and also that those who have struggled more to the point of homeless must have gotten there through their own bad choices. Do you believe that everyone -- including your family -- who was struggling, was in that state due to their own bad choices? If not, it seems pretty arbitrary to draw the line at homelessness. Because it can be a very thin line between being housed or being on the street.
> So either I am a psychopath
I don't think you're a psychopath. I think you were scarred by your experiences, and decided to leave it at that. It's hard to have empathy for a group when some subset of that group has treated you so poorly, especially at such a formative age in your life.
> or everyone here truly is a Western naive person who has no idea how the world works even if they were homeless
I think "how the world works" isn't any one thing. How the world worked in your -- understandably very narrow -- experience as a child in your country is not the same as how the world works in some other country, which is not the same as how the world works in yet another country, and so on. I obviously can't say this for certain, but I expect that your experience was not even "how the world works" for everyone in your own country.
> (to me being homeless in a Western country is something my brain cannot understand given that most such countries in Europe have wellfare states).
Just because some governments offer large welfare programs, it doesn't mean that they're distributed equally or equitably, or that the people in need are able to navigate those systems all that well. Another commenter somewhere here pointed out that Germany's welfare bureaucracy is notoriously hard to figure out, especially for the mentally ill. Many homeless people have been so damaged by their experience that they aren't able to get the help they need.
All of these problems do exist, I assure you, and yet you claim to be unable to understand that they do. Please take some time to think about that fact, and of the broader implications. You speak of the "Western naive person", but maybe consider that the people of the world are in a huge variety of different circumstances (both good and bad) than you originally thought was possible. And while some of them do end up using those circumstances to attack and exploit others, some are just genuinely in trouble and would appreciate some help getting back on their feet so they have the stability to get their life back on track.
But also! Consider that those people who use their situation to try to attack and exploit others may have gotten to that point because they are just as cynical about the world as you are about them. You see one act that is the result of a culmination of their entire lives. You have no idea if they were always that way, or, more likely, they became that way as their circumstances crushed them.
I read your wall of text. You make some interesting points. But I will be honest with you: I also used to think like you, in these long convoluted ways where I was trying to explain everything I saw via programming and all sorts of mathematical extrapolations, and I for a time I believed my own bit. But then I realised: it was all cp and youthful arrogance.
In a nutshell, you are nitpicking. You can always define an arbitrary scale at which nothing matters: you used time in your rabbit example very effectively to discount the usefulness of the "rabbit category". Or you used these XX males as a counter example to a rigid definition of gender. You even yourself realise that this way of thinking is completely useless as you yourself say that the category of species is extremely useful:
> So strictly logically speaking, this definition is useless. Nevertheless, the concept of species is clearly a useful concept that helps us communicate things about the real world. How do we explain this?
I can explain this for you: you are thinking life is logical and "discreet" because you are a programmer and this is what you were taught. It is not: life is... continuous! Like the integral: each point has measure 0 but when you "add" a transfinite amount of 0 measure points you get... non-zero area! This resolves your rabbit paradox: each generation of rabbit is a point with measure 0 since its "difference" is so small with the generation before and after that it we can model it as 0...
Or second model: Rabbit_n = 0.9999 * Rabbit_{n+1}
After 100 generations: similarity is already 0.99
After 1000 generations: similarity is 0.90
After 10000 generations: similarity is 0.36
Tadaa: problem solved. So don't think so hard about this, use your common sense and realise that most people are men and most people are women and a few edge cases do not matter for practical purposes. And this is the crux of the matter: we need to make decisions. Hence we do what you very well describe: we categorise the particle soup around us and we act. So the usefulness of categories/abstractions CAN ONLY EVER BE MEASURED BY THEIR USEFULNESS FOR DECISION MAKING (sorry for caps I but want to emphasize). When I say decision making I mean almost everything: from deciding what sandwich to eat to deciding on how to prove Fermat's last theorem. If categories help you to do things, they are useful. End of story (for me, you can go write a book about this, make sure to send me a free copy).
Finally, this is also all bs so don't take it too seriously: I am a person on the internet.
> you are thinking life is logical and "discreet" because you are a programmer and this is what you were taught.
Perhaps I did not express myself clearly, but my point is _the exact opposite_! Life is indeed not logical and discreet, as witnessed by the fact that vaguely defined categories are clearly tremendously useful. But these categories become misleading when one makes the mistake of identifying them with logically defined sets (ie when one thinks in logically reductive ways, the style of thinking you attribute to me). This is the mistake that I claim to identify in listenallyall's post.
They make the claim that XX _equals_ female and XY _equals_ male. To be clear, I don't actually think that the statement "men have XY chromosomes and women have XX chromosomes" is wrong or must be qualified every time. It's "mostly right", in the same sense that Newtonian physics is "mostly right", and adequate for most discussions where you're not looking at the edge cases of sex or gender, which is most such discussions.
But when talking about transgender people (it has not been explicitly stated that this is the subject of our discussion, but given the context I think it's fair to assume that it is), we are arguing _exactly about the edge cases_ of the gender categories. listenallyall's argument boils down to: the "male" set and the "female" set are clearly, logically defined by sex chromosomes, therefore there are no edge cases, and (speculating a bit from here on about what their point is) trans people just have to suck it up and stop claiming they are what they are not.
This is an argument based on the assumption that life is logical and discreet, that the universe has some obligation to provide you with neatly defined sets to help you understand the world. My way of showing that this is wrong is by making two arguments:
1) Life is not logical and discreet, as I tried to illustrate with the rabbit example (and I think you and I are making exactly the same point there),
2) If you go along with this discreet, "logical" reasoning, you end up with absurdities (the XX-presenting male example). I think this is where my post perhaps got a bit confusing: I am _not_ arguing for this style of thinking, but I'm going along with it to show that it is unproductive. It is undeniable that if you accept listenallyall's argument, you must either insist that a male-presenting XX is actually a woman, or be logically inconsistent.
A far more useful way to see gender is like the rabbit example. You have a bunch of sex-related characteristics which are bimodally distributed, and from that you can have a "maleness" and "femaleness" value for every person. How you weight individual variables (like "broadness of shoulders") is a bit arbitrary. Sex chromosomes are just one variable among many in this equation, with no special status. In fact, they are for most discussions probably one of the least relevant factors, as evidenced by the fact that we got by with our "male" and "female" categories for millennia without even knowing about chromosomes, and in everyday life our views of sex and gender don't seem to be particularly informed by chromosomes. We can then move on and treat gender as a "duck typed" property: if someone presents as a certain gender, refers to themselves as a certain gender, etc, they are that gender.
In conservative circles, statements like "gender is a social construct" are basically a meme, a clear proof that progressives are detached from reality. To be clear, I'm not sure I fully agree with that statement either. But for _decision making_, this is clearly a more productive view than "gender = chromosomes". I have XY chromosomes (I think) and a penis, but this is for most practical purposes much less relevant than the fact that I interact with society through the "male" interface (although I appreciate that I can use urinals). Why should I be not be free to choose which interface to interact through?
The progressive argument to treat transgender people as their preferred gender is the stronger argument for any sort of practical decision making: to refuse to do so causes needless suffering in people who have done no wrong. Insisting that a trans woman is actually a man, should be treated as a man, should be referred to with male pronouns, etc, makes the lives of these people significantly worse, and makes no one else's life better. It is also no different than insisting a male-presenting XX is a woman, which I think is also obviously cruel.
The only conservative argument I've ever heard against this is based on precisely the reductive thinking you attribute to me: to insist that one variable (chromosomes) out of many is not just more heavily weighted than what is justifiable for any practical purpose, but actually _strictly defines_ gender, ignoring _all other factors_. They then throw themselves up as champions of science and reason, because clearly progressives are detached from reality. This style of thinking is both wrong (as in, it leads to inconsistencies and is based on a high school level understanding of science and epistemology) and unproductive (you don't gain anything in terms of practical decision making).
> Finally, this is also all bs so don't take it too seriously: I am a person on the internet.
No worries, I enjoy these kinds of discussion, otherwise I wouldn't spend any time on it. But I can't help but take it somewhat seriously too. The outcome of this debate doesn't affect me very much, but there are people whose lives will be worse if "my side" loses the debate.
The maturity of the article is laughable. I'm sure my age is the same as the people who wrote it, but this is unacceptable: dropping databases in prod is a serious issue, not a joke. I think the culture of the company is toxic and not professional at any level. #change-my-mind
The only reason I found out was because I'd done that: I've set uBlock to block JS by default, only turning it on for websites that don't work without JS at all. I've gotten used to seeing the purple sign with 10 or 20 blocked requests, but seeing that number hit 30 for a simple blog was... shocking.
I think the author is arrogant and closed minded. He underestimates the levels of complexity of software systems and strives for some utopian "elegance of design" which I think doesn't exist. The only thing which matters is to deliver results and move forward. Requirements change: back in 1990 the internet existed in a much much smaller form, and WWW was just about to be invented. Linux had yet to be invented by Linus. Unix and Linux survived and adapted, VMS (or whatever it was named) didn't. Also the argument about "speaking English" is again so arrogant and closed-minded: not all of us are native English speakers. To me rm or delete or del or banana doesn't really matter...