throwawaymsft
Unfortunately the internet has a large selection bias. Anger, outrage, etc. are more viral than quiet contentment. Misery loves company and all that.
It’s hard to change opinions online (especially when people go online to vent or already in a bad mood), but I’m sure you’re inspiring those with your real life interactions. Keep on keeping on.
Tell the Black Plague its strategy of killing 30% of is suboptimal. Or to the species driven to extinction by a disease. “Inanimate object, that was suboptimal to your existence!”
Did the populace decide they like bread and milk in the back corner of the grocery store, or does the capital-maximizing system decide its best if you walk through the aisles to get there? Are impulse purchases of gum at the checkout aisle because people really wanted gum when they walked into the store? On and on it goes.
I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam I am.
Meanwhile, people who have actually used it, find it great. It's a wonderful framework.
Instead, work to free yourself from needing that system at all. Then you don’t need a life of playing politics and keeping CYA emails from your manager.
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
If you like hacking, you can arrange your life to do that.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
On a sports team, coaches are rewarded for championships. There is no room for waste, and underperforming people get cut.
If someone has a request, the first instinct shouldn't be to write more code, it's to clarify what they are trying to accomplish.
"How do I get the last 3 letters of a file? I need a feature for that."
"Are you trying to get the file extension? We have that in the metadata."
Many want to have had done a startup.
Imagine you are designing the McDonald's hamburger wrapper. "Oh, your work will be shown to millions of people!" And nobody really cares. I'd rather design something smaller that is truly appreciated.
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...
You can move towards a life designed the way you like it. Good luck.
You may enjoy the elephant curve: https://www.brookings.edu/research/whats-happening-to-the-wo...
The very rich and moderately poor have seen wealth increase while the top quintile (E.g. many Americans) have seen wealth stagnate. Globally we’re richer on average but not everyone participated. Clearly it’s best if we can lift all boats and not certain subsets.
We take natural resources, often plentiful, apply labor + skill, and get a more valuable product. We're wealthier as a result.
Yes, natural resources are finite, but not the limiting reagent for most things. There's a zero-sum game in that land used for farming is not available for an entertainment complex. But we have so much used for "nothing" that switching it to "something" is a giant increase in wealth. You can buy an acre in Kansas for a month's worth of minimum wage work. Las Vegas was built in a desert surrounded by hundreds of miles of wasteland. Did turning land, earth, trees, and iron ore into Las Vegas add zero value? (Not saying it was the best use of resources, just that assembling buildings improved the value of the raw materials.)
As a counterexample, consider melting down a car into slag. Are you less wealthy with your charred steel than a working car? Of course -- charred steel is less valuable. The number of atoms is the same. In other words, is an assembled watch worth the same as a pile of gears? Are you indifferent to the two?
If wealth were fixed in the earth, we must be getting poorer as the population grows. A few thousand years ago we had 1M people on earth. Were those peasants 7000x wealthier than us?
Uber created a lot of wealth. Some got more than others. Is that objectively bad if the wealth didn't exist before?
The internet and other tech doesn't create new wealth? Why has the size of the economy grown exponentially since the industrial revolution?
If wealth were fixed, as population in increased we'd be getting vastly poorer worldwide (1.6 billion in 1900 -> 7 billion people today). Have we gotten 5x poorer on average?
(These facts are easily googleable.)
https://www.google.com/search?q=world+gdp+per+capita+over+ti...
I’m not saying local deviations don’t exist - I can lose my job - but globally wealth has been growing continuously and poverty is being eradicated. This is only possible with wealth creation. Look up Hans Rosling’s work.
Potential wealth is ‘finite’ because humans are finite but there’s no practical limit. (Just like there’s no practical limit to how much art can be made. If art isn’t being made it isn’t because there’s only so much creativity to go around.)