Thanks for clarifying. Being mindful of opportunity cost allows people to retire early, to spend more time with their loved ones, do better financial decisions.
I have seen too many of my loved ones work until their 70s because they didn't think about those concepts enough. That is what is sad.
Don't forget though there are things you won't be able to do at 50 even if you're retired. I'd hate to think of someone being a virgin hermit finally coming out the shell at 50 thinking the world is their oyster now. Some things you have to do when you are young.
My experience is that most decisions aren't of the type. It's not that you're choosing fun at 20 or longer fun at 50.
Investing or not. Renting a cheaper place for a while or buying a bigger house right now. A lot of the time you will get more money and more fun if you do it right.
Probably far fewer things than you think, though, as long as you're healthy. You can still have love affairs, travel the world, go to festivals, climb mountains, learn to dance well into your 70s or even 80s, as long as you are healthy. Sure, you might be climbing a small mountain instead of Everest, but small mountains are beautiful too.
Health in old age is something that you invest in, much the same as wealth. Of course you can suffer an accident, or lose your investments from bad luck. But in both cases you're guaranteed bad results if you don't put the effort consistently and starting when you're younger.
For health, this means making exercise, good sleep, and good diet a part of your daily routine. Much like investments, you can go as deep on that as you like, but if you start early all you need is basic knowledge.
I'm sorry, but this is just a terrible take. He told the story about how they were thinking of calling it "Khanpanion", but apparently that has a bad connotation in Latin America, so while they were brainstorming, someone mentioned "Khanmigo", as in the portmanteau of "Khan - amigo", and it stuck.
Sal Khan did an interview at the Commonwealth Club this past week where he stated that the reason for region locking is one of availability and cost. It seems like MSFT is only footing the bill for US use, rather than for the world, so there's still the matter of figuring out how to further reduce costs to make it cheap enough to give away everywhere.
I'm not sure why that implies that the paid plan is not available outside of the US.
I thought that too on the graph, but I think that's a bug in labeling. When I look at the actual scale, that colour appears to be nuclear (and the other straight line is geothermal). This also makes more sense as they are sources that actually cannot be turned down to respond to electricity demand the way in which natural gas can.
I see 1.14 GW nuclear, and 1.1 GW natural gas at 12:20 PM PST, the nuclear is a flat line at the bottom of the graph (and I agree it makes sense), the natural gas is a dark blue section in the middle-ish, which shrunk from ~3GW overnight and does vary with time.
I don't think that what I'm seeing suggests a bug with labeling.
I personally have really not had this experience - especially given that a lot of companies in tech seem to have landed on either remote or hybrid (3 days in two days optional). I also think that this is fundamentally a city design issue (expenses, time, mental health), rather than a work issue.
I find this type of argument about RTO to be pretty poor. I think it’s pretty lazy to crank out a vibes based article describing specific grievances and generalizing to an entire population. I think the real discussion about RTO, pro or con, is a lot more nuanced, and this type of argument does a disservice to the complexities.
In my experience, a lot of the compelling arguments I’ve heard are actually complaints about poor North American city design, rather than necessarily anti-being in a reasonable office.
Completely agree; I think an argument can be made that there are a lot of benefits to in-person interaction. Most anti-RTO arguments I’ve seen boil down to “I don’t like my commute” which has less to do with RTO and more to do with America’s lack of meaningful transportation infrastructure.
I believe, most of the companies that we hear instituting an RTO mandate have distributed teams, so that in-person interaction wouldn't manifest in these cases. Also, I live in a country with very meaningful transportation infrastructure, I still wouldn't want to spend 1.5-2 hours every day crammed into said infrastructure at rush hour for no good reason. Buying a car would have saved me 30 minutes tops and I find it irresponsible when public transport is available.
Thankfully, I no longer work for a company that mandates in-office work and even the telco (!) I used to work for had unlimited home office even before the pandemic, which worked beautifully and saved them lots of money.
Having an office to go to helps the more socially inclined employees, but doesn't boost productivity uniformly, especially when everyone is on calls all day anyway.
Just like home office, full in-office work needs a very special setup to be truly effective and given global hiring, may be harder to achieve that a remote culture.
> I believe, most of the companies that we hear instituting an RTO mandate have distributed teams, so that in-person interaction wouldn't manifest in these cases.
I agree that RTO makes no sense if you’re going to spend your entire day in calls. That said, I would actually go a bit further, and argue that distributed teams themselves are a bad idea for that reason.
That then becomes a hiring problem as that's limiting it to one geographic area. If it falls out of favor in 5 or 10 years, it's really hard to move the company. I've seen effective remote teams, but it requires a high degree of independence from everyone. Typically, it's also much harder for people early in their careers.
The pandemic helped me understand the cost of infectious disease and made me realize that I could work effectively remotely and that the cost of in-person on my health wasn't worth it.
I used to live right next to the office, but I wouldn't go today even if I still lived that close. Also, living in a more rural environment is pretty great.
Couldn't agree with you more, and honestly I think you're softballing it here:
> I think it’s pretty lazy to crank out a vibes based article describing specific grievances and generalizing to an entire population.
In that the article doesn't even describe _specific_ grievances, really; we get three quotes in this order:
- A Paul Graham tweet where he says "multiple founders" have changed their minds; the _personal_ opinion he expresses is that "he doubts things will go all the way back to the way they were before Covid, but it looks like they will go most of the way back." Nothing specific mentioned about why the founders changed their minds.
- A truly stripped-of-context quote from Keith Rabois that gets closest to saying something specific i.e. 'that younger workers “learn by osmosis,” which requires in-person interaction' (false as presented, and if this is a genuine reflection of his opinion then he doesn't actually understand training) and 'supervisors discover hidden talent by watching [younger employees]' (true enough, but presented as a problem with remote work when it's actually not)
- Absolute banger from Sam Altman: “I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity ... I would say that the experiment on that is over.” - the implied grievance here is that "remote work makes startups less creative" which is, to its' credit, an actual position for which one can make a coherent argument. He may even have gone to the trouble of doing this at some point, for all I know. The rest is pure sophistry, though - "one of the tech industry's worst mistakes ... was that everybody could go full remote forever" is just not an accurate reflection of what actually happened, and if he's exaggerating for effect, then I'd be interested to know what effect he was going for; he's also really softballing the reason why remote work happened in the first place: it wasn't an "experiment," it was a forced response to a world crisis with existential implications!
There's significant overgeneralizing happening here too, as you suggested; at best, you can say that these guys are referring to what's true of _startups specifically_, where they're at least domain experts, but even if their arguments ARE true of startups (and I am deeply skeptical that this is the case) you can't assume that they'll be true of OTHER organizational types.
I don't really understand your complaints about API keys, but if you did want to make an issue of something perhaps it should be that you get your API key sent to you by email, in plaintext. Not amazing, but I guess for their threat model it's generally ok.
I saw their pricing page, but I’m a little confused. Do they have funding? Is this someone’s passion project that they are paying for out of their own pocket? I’m unsure how or why it’s free right now?
You can get a copy on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/cnc-red-alert). I don't believe that this is copyright infringement. I think that we're just that old.
I can assure you, we are not that old. For works created in 1978 or later (which is the case for these) work-for-hire pieces like this get 95 years of copyright protection:
My understanding of why companies cannot purposely show that they take perf or years of service into account has more to do with labour law than a lack of caring. You cannot take into account perf in a layoff - if you did, you are not allowed to call it a layoff, AFAIK.
That doesn't sound right at all. You would want to lay off the bottom performers, it isn't a lottery. Imagine if a company said 'we need to get rid of 20% of our labor cost' and just ran a random number generator and got rid of the people who's number came up.
No, you want to get rid of just enough of the top performers to significantly lower labor cost while keeping enough that they feel safe. You can shed as many of the bottom performers as you like without worry. Gotta make those top performers do 2x the work for one paycheck.
Companies absolutely take perf and years of service into account for layoffs. It’s not always the same process or formula but those are popular terms in such a formula, along with pay, location, role.
Also regardless of the quality of the examples, it may be the case that the point (opportunity cost is important to consider) is still valid.