Ultimately tech is a tool to help automate and solve people’s problems. You want to get close to the people your solving problems for so you can get feedback and figure out how to do your job. Your organization may not do this for you. I spend a lot of time on forums listening to my users, and do a lot of extra testing to make sure I’m solving there problems and not making new ones.
Pure capitalism favors the wealthy and the unscrupulous. That is if there are no laws in place protecting peoples rights then the business owners have little incentive to treat there employees well (they will trade short term profits over long term stability.
On the flip side a pure communist system favors the lazy since there is little to no reward for doing more than the minimum. That is to say the status quo is unchanging.
This is why we have government, to correct the selfish nature of capitalism, while hopefully still retaining the innovation and drive that it produces (winner take all is a strong motivator).
This only works in the long term if government is fair and balanced, looking out both for the interests of business and society (the poor, the environment, the common spaces, etc). And where an idea like socialism actually strikes a good balance between both extremes.
The idea that the markets will sort themselves out is a fever dream thought up by the right. The markets will quickly consolidate into monopolies and then exploit there power. It is only fair competition that produces benefits. And that is an unstable balance that must be carefully maintained by outside forces (government).
I fully understand how scary it is to try to talk to someone in a language your just learning. I’m shy and hate talking period! But it is one of those things where you have to allow yourself to make a fool of yourself.
Trust me, most people are very happy you are trying to learn there language and will be exited by anything you can produce. If you do find someone who is rude or offended by it, give them up as a bad job and shake it off. And never be embarrassed to say “I don’t understand”. We assume the people who know the answers are the smart ones, but the people who admit they still need to learn are in fact the geniuses.
Besides, unless your using Google translate, then your English comprehension is plenty good enough. It is time to face your fears and make a fool of yourself. The rewards are worth it!
I agree with the first point completely. The apps are usually good for practicing vocabulary, but languages are dynamic, and change based on what was previously said. Talking to someone, anyone, is going to get you up and going a lot faster. Granted, finding someone willing to spend hours talking to you when your just learning can be hard. Look for apps that try to hook learners up.
I’m not sure where you are, but try to find an English community. If your in an English speaking country that is basically any community. If your not then look around for where the English expats hang out. When I was in Cameroon we had an “american club” that everyone was a part of. Having a common interest helps a lot in motivating everyone to talk together.
In a pinch you can force yourself to watch English television, possibly with subtitles. This helps your comprehension but lacks the back and forth of actually talking.
Get a tin whistle, they cost nothing, are simpler than a recorder to play, and they sound great. You can find books or videos that will help you learn to play quite quickly.
My advice is to do things that bring you joy, and if there a hit then consider that an added bonus. I’m a computer programmer and some of my most popular projects were started by me being curious how something works without any intention of doing something with it. If I set out to do something amazing I would have failed outright.
So write a short story, then write another one. If you end up writing one you feel is with showing off then find a writing club to share it with, or post it to a blog. If that is successful then find a website or magazine to submit it too. Go on up the ladder till your the next Douglas Addams. But do it in many small steps, rather than setting out to conquer the world in one go.
We need to implement ranked choice voting for all of elections. A third party candidate should not be something scary we hide from.
I agree whole heartedly with this. The worst thing you can do is drift into your first job and give up. It does not matter where you start, or what direction you end up going. What matters is that your searching around trying to find your place and not just coasting hoping an amazing life will jump up and find you.
I know it is not your question but… Everyone says pockets for women’s fashion but that is not the most important. At least here in the US the most important is having proper sizes on clothes.
For the most part men’s clothes let you pick things right. You know your waist and inseam for pants, and often have a proper size for shirts and collars.
Women’s fashion often has no size other than the ambiguous s/m/l/xl indicator and teen/woman’s/plus often use the same tag to indicate wildly different sizes. On top of that, when close use a measurement it is not grounded in reality, so a 14 at one shop may be a 16 at another, and neither are a direct measure of your waist. Finally women’s pants only come in 3 lengths (petite, tall, or not specified) and it is difficult to find most combinations.
The best thing we could do for fashion in any sex is to standardize sizes globally and make them all based on a tape measure measurement. That way you could buy 32x30 pants online knowing they will fit, no matter the brand.
Vegan is a very wide array of things ranging to not eating red meat all the way down to not doing anything that could hurt a plant (only scavengering fallen fruit).
https://theminimalistvegan.com/types-of-vegans-and-vegetarians/
A quick google search puts the middle class between $50k-$150k a year for a 4 family income. We’re closer to the top end of that but don’t have a lot of disposable income.
Our two luxuries are not thinking about money every day, and eating out more than we should. We both work so cooking is tiring.
With all of that our savings is nothing to get exited about. Especially now that we have two kids in college. It is less than 10k.
We could pay $10k a year to college without making a radical change, but it would be a real struggle.
I’m not sure you know what middle class looks like, I think your assuming were rich. Obama has an interesting show on Netflix that looks at a few businesses and profiles the lower, middle, and upper class employees. It is an interesting watch and does a good job of showing just how much or little the middle class has.
Finally I feel that low cost or free child care would be one of the best things the government could do. My wife wanted to stay home with the kids, so we struggled financially but did not need to worry about child care (we both made the same amount at the time, it cut our income in half). But we had plenty of friends struggling to pay the daycare. Being able to go back to school or work when you have kids would be a big plus to the economy, as well as a great way to help lower and middle class people get a small leg up. A great investment in my mind.
In our state schools spend around $10k a year to keep a kid in public school. My guess is that kinder and daycare cost about the same. They only add a few extra years of schooling, so we’re talking a 20% increase in the school budget to let everyone have daycare after the first year.
I did not read the story, but I am upper middle class with two kids in college. I don’t know that discriminates is the right word, but college is a huge burden on middle class families. If your income is low enough then you qualify for federal aid, and the vast majority of scholarships are class/race/gender based so it is difficult to get much support for middle class students.
My kids did qualify for a small merit based scholarship that the collage provided. But in spite of having very good grades, and very high SAT scores, neither got any other assistance.
The reason I don’t call it discrimination is two fold.
the assistance is there to try and help make it possible for lower income students to go to college. This is not a bad thing for our society and we should not be turning on each other crying unfair.
the real problem is that college is unaffordable. If it cost $10k to get a 4 year degree then middle class parents would have little trouble paying for it. When it is closer to $50k-$100k, then that is out of reach and no one can really bear the cost.
We need to focus on making colleges more affordable (probably by making them simpler, with less “perks”), and not focus on who gets the smaller slice of the pie.
Not really, my parents voted for him twice, and will vote for him again, but they are very careful around me to act like they would not.