What are the odds that the solution involved a popular, mature tool that the developer could leverage?

I've been on multiple sides of this environment over my 3+ decades in the job market: managed people in office, managed people while I worked remotely, worked in an office, worked remotely (mostly for the last 13 years).

I'm very sympathetic to remote work, but my experience tells me that your "needlessly" is not well-founded.

The hard part is that often they're right, especially in California - as with the Sepulveda Pass Freeway Expansion Project, where TFA says that the commute times were actually increased.

You can argue that it's a somewhat self-fulfilling belief... but the regulatory state is where it is. The CAVErs today are dealing with what exists.

Government programs don't need Republicans to add the dysfunction.

For the month or so that it worked, it was pretty awesome. My mind felt like it was hammering away and as sharp as I was in my twenties.

Unfortunately, that feeling didn't last more than maybe six weeks. I was advised by some to just increase the dosage, but my heart was already fluttering in my chest at the dosage I was at. Also, my sleep was odd, with weird dreams that would wake me up, preventing me from falling back asleep for hours. Added to that, my blood pressure got stuck over 140 and wouldn't come down.

If I could get a prescription that would give me the benefits of those first weeks of use, without destroying my health, I'd be all over it.

Eventually, my GP noticed that I had a thyroid deficiency that I'm not treating with thyroid hormone. That's helped a great deal with the tiredness and brain fog.

I remember what computers people own, what the bread-winners of the family do for a living, and an insane amount of TV and movie trivia.

It's all about what captures your interest.

My daughter when she was around 6 years old loved to put on princess dresses and dance around singing. In her mind she looked and sounded like the cartoon characters in the movies.

One day, I pulled out an old VHS camera and set it up on a tripod for her. She danced in front of it for half an hour, recording a bunch of songs. Then she sat down to watch it. After the first few minutes, she turned to me with tears running from her eyes and yelled, "I stink!" She was inexperienced at dancing and singing, but she knew immediately from watching herself that she wasn't very skilled.

The mistake people make when acknowledging that a freedom/collectivism equilibrium exists is to assume that freedom/collectivism changes are also in some sort of balance.

The reality is that collectivism is like the dark side of the Force. It's powerful. Seductive. Once you go down the path of embracing collectivism, it's extraordinarily difficult to turn back. Sounds dramatic, I know. But collective state action is a slippery slope. It's really easy to say, "everyone should do X" and in a democratic society, all you need is a slim majority to make X a law. But X isn't always enacted properly. The unforeseen consequences of X are often really unpleasant. But rolling back X is always harder than putting it in place.

You have to remember that every time you hand over a problem X to people in government, X gives them more power. Power is almost never relinquished willingly by the powerful.

What happens with that high leverage, low competition environment is you end up with the richest country on earth having huge supply chain bottlenecks and rated as having some of the worst ports in the world.

The main three causes of this shipping kerfuffle are: 1. Environmental regulations on trucking. 2. Anti-independent operator laws in CA. 3. Government subservience to the longshoremen union. 4. Overly-aggressive stay-at-home policies and subsidies from COVID.

The current administration would go in the wrong direction on every one of those causes.

The strawman is that it's all about "getting rich". Ramsey (the one I've heard talk the most) is mostly about just getting people to stop digging themselves deeper and deeper into debt where they will have no hope for even the basic stability that you need to build greater wealth upon.

The false dichotomy is that you either need a side hustle business or you need to follow sound day-to-day money management discipline. Following sound money management discipline is what gets you to the point of having some discretionary income to build your own business.

If you are serious about looking into meditation further, read Sam Harris’ book Waking Up. Sam Harris is about as far from a “woo-woo bullshit” practitioner as you can get. He was one of the leaders of the New Atheist movement, and has a PhD in neuroscience.