twobyfour

Yeah, there are a lot of bad ones out there. The best way I know is through networking. Chances are that someone in your network has worked with a good recruiter; or worked with someone they liked who was incidentally hired through a recruiter.

If you're sifting through recruiter spam, pay attention to which ones are talking about opportunities that are relevant to you and why. I keep an email folder just for messages from recruiters - it helps me keep a pulse on what people are looking for. And if I do start looking it becomes a) a well of potential recruiters to work with, and b) a training set for my own neural network (aka brain) to work out how the best and worst are communicating.

Let's take a look at this month's spam so far. I'm a full stack developer slash engineering manager in NYC with almost 20 years of experience in web development mostly in PHP and Python. The recruiter who just sent me a mid-level front-end opening is toast. So is the one who sent me a senior opening on .Net. And the one who sent an opening in Cincinnati. And the one who asked me to send HIM names of good candidates for his opening.

The one who sent me an opening similar to what I'm doing now, but with a 50% pay raise might get an email back if I happen to be looking. So might the one who sent me a VPE opening. Both personalized their messages to reflect specific details of my profile - which means they actually read it and didn't just mail merge me into a spray-and-pray mailing. And they're not just trying to fill an opening with a body who matches qualifications but also putting consideration into how the candidate might want to advance in their own careers.

After speaking further with them, I may or may not end up working with either. I already have a recruiter I like who found my current position, and working with more than one recruiter at a time if you're already working full time gets to be exhausting. (Heck, juggling 3 or 4 when you're between jobs can be a full time job if they've got robust pipelines.)

Good luck!

How is that "baggage"?

Ah.

Set yourself a price ceiling before the call.

Develop a habit of applying a skeptical attitude towards anything you hear, especially from someone you know has motive to persuade you.

Ask to be put in touch with current clients with similar use cases to yours. Ask those contacts tough questions.

Take a couple days to "sleep on it" and consider what you've heard / research / apply critical thinking before committing to a purchase.

The ability to run entirely different operating systems from the host, for one thing.

Find a good recruiter.

Make a practice of taking the occasional personal day / mental health day even when happily employed and not looking.

Yeah, except the effect only lasts past the next good night's sleep for 5% of patients.

And I can't speak for about anyone else, but having experienced moderate depression, I'd rather be depressed than chronically sleep deprived.

Empathy, self-awareness, and self control.

Your description is way too vague to even begin to evaluate and respond to.

Former member of Freelancer's Union here, though the only service I ever used was the health insurance. A decade ago it was pretty solid, and certainly better and cheaper than you could get on the individual markets. AFAICT these days it's about on par with the open ACA markets.

What is it you want to know, though?

Most of the "gig economy" is not contracts like a freelancer negotiates. It's tons of tiny jobs at non-negotiable rates like Uber or Fiverr pay their "contractors".

I agree that they're terrible jobs that one should take only if truly desperate for work or perhaps to supplement another income. But talking about whether people taking them are cut out to negotiate contracts totally misses the point.

Because rail never has to sit in traffic.

Also, someone did a calculation that for buses to carry the same volume of passengers and NYC's L train alone when it's shut down for repairs, you would need to run them essentially bumper to bumper during rush hour.

When my grandmother became too old to drive safely, we sold her car and had her use the proceeds for cabs to where she needed to go. When that ran out, her kids and grandkids covered the cab fare. It wasn't all that much more expensive than the car itself. I can imagine it being a hardship, though, for those with less means.

That assumes the customer is the one who chooses. With most Americans getting insurance through their employers, they don't have the option to choose a less crappy insurer even if they trusted the claims of better service.

Protect yourself in what sense?

Join a pen testing firm?

That's a good point. There's probably a way to highlight unexpected characters. I wouldn't use "Unicode" as a criterion (that's an encoding, not a character type that excludes ASCII). Perhaps the browser could define a set of "expected" characters based on the user's locale and highlight anything outside that set.

That seems to me like a rather anglocentric view. How are people who speak Arabic, Hindi, or Greek supposed to use the internet? And believe it or not, not everyone's keyboard allows for easy input of ASCII characters.

Besides, it's too late. There are already non-Latin TLDs out there - in part to support languages with non-Latin alphabets.

I prefer a newsgroup/Google Group over either of those.

Anecdatum: lack of protected bike lanes. My commute is a perfect distance for cycling, but the idea of sharing the road with drivers terrifies me.

Additionally, as that quote points out, we tend to have higher sanitary standards for spaces where we clean ourselves.

Yes. Some blue collar workers and most white collar workers get Christmas Day off. A fraction get Christmas Eve off or a half day. Many white collar workers get New Year's Day off. In between, you work unless you want to spend vacation days. In many places and types of work (especially retail) they work even on Christmas Day. And work starts back up full force on January 2.

I would hypothesize that we measure our free time in boredom. With smartphones in our pocket and the internet always available, we're rarely bored out of our minds any more - there's always a distraction to be had. So we feel like we have less free time and thus less time to spare for others.

Taxes formulated like this tend to be regressive, since people with lower incomes tend to spend a higher proportion of their income than people with higher incomes do.

What are you planning to do with the money when you return?

But by that logic, Germany makes zero sense.

Maybe. But then why would there be more in Germany than, say, the U.K.? Or Italy?

Switzerland and Japan, maybe. What is now Germany was not particularly stable during the Middle Ages. Or the Early Modern era. Or the 20th Century for that matter.

Right, obviously they're not going to be in the New World. The question is why those countries, of all the ones in the Old World? There's very little in France, the UK, Norway, Albania, India, Syria, and a heck of a lot of other places with thousands of years of history.

The older tiers of this list seem to be heavily dominated by Japan, Germany, and Switzerland. Is that reflective of something other than the demographics of non-"New World" contributors to Wikipedia?

Those clamshells are now recyclable. Do you not recycle your cardboard?

BTW, landfills aren't great environments for decomposition even for paper and cardboard - the weight and compression make for a hostile environment for aerobic microbes and for the larger animals (rodents, insects, worms) that usually help with the first round of decomposition and increasing the surface area available to the microbes. If you dig into a landfill, you can often find 75-year-old newspapers (made of some of the least durable materials around) completely intact.

Mid-to-late 20thC landfills are the worst of all because there's so much plastic and styrofoam, the ratio of decomposable materials is very low.