I wonder whether government testing actually makes a material difference in food/beverage safety.
For example, when I worked for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, I was surprised to discover that the percentage of imported food/beverage actually tested for safety is very low. Like comically, microscopically, unbelievably low.
In the United States, I suspect concerns over reputation and civil litigation do more to keep our food safe than government testing.
Funding for inspection agencies has been cut again and again, and likewise mandated lab testing, on the basis of industry self regulation and the low number of incidents in commercial production. Many sources will be even more rigorous than we could imagine.
I think that incidents elsewhere have often been caused by substituting expensive taxed industrial ethanol for cheap industrial methanol. Which is an insane thing to do but money is money.
Until another mass poisoning occurs we will continue trusting paperwork.
Loved this piece. Especially that it is written in a Gonzo journalism style, including the author as part of the narrative, like a Hunter S. Thompson essay.
I sanity-checked it with two headshots of the same third party and it swung ~2.5 points, so it seems to capture state (lighting/angle/expression) more than trait.
Then I uploaded my own photo and got an unexpectedly high score, which conclusively validates the model and my rigorous n=2 study.
hahaha yeah you mog
but for the first part; yeah it does take into account the angle, expression stuff, and like at first i was not ok with that but then i realised thats fine. cos like obv photos affect how attractive you look to a very high degree, like in some photos you may look like a 10/10 and in some you may look like at 5. so it should reflect that.
Your workday isn’t a monolith; it is a series of tiny tasks. Try deconstructing your job to identify intrinsic motivation.
Which micro-tasks do you look forward to? Which raise questions you think about and work on in your free time?
Which tasks do you avoid, put off, or find immediately draining?
If you can’t identify interesting tasks, you are likely looking at too high a level of abstraction. Break “working with clients” down until you find the specific unit of work (e.g., “debugging edge cases” vs. “proofreading emails”) that sparks interest.
After sorting tasks into intrinsically motivating or not, look for a role that involves about 20% more time on the interesting micro-tasks and 20% less on the boring ones. If you do this every few years, you drift toward a career you enjoy without needing a radical “reset.”
This approach led me down an unexpected path: law firm attorney -> government attorney -> regulatory consultant -> small-business operator. Now, I am looking at moving to a role that involves at least 20% more time on software development (intrinsically interesting to me) and 20% less time chasing unreliable people (particularly draining to me). I never set out to change my “identity,” but focusing on the micro-tasks I actually enjoy has allowed me to engineer a career I enjoy on a day-to-day basis.
I, for one, don't even know anymore. I used to quite enjoy the art of coding and "big picture thinking", for lack of a better description. But now LLMs do the former and everyone and their brother are clamouring to do the latter as they see it as the only way to remain relevant in the software industry, leaving it to be a competition that is not fun to participate in.
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