And, FWIW, the type of person who ends up self-selecting into this kind of work are serious people who deeply care about airline safety. It is a rather thankless job with a lot of onerous, tedious paperwork that is not very sexy.

These do converge I think at

10^12 = Short Trillion/Long Billion

Which makes for some non-frictionless translating since 10^6 and 10^9 are all in-between words, and 10^12 is not a commonly used number to count anything in everyday life.

But what are you going to do to Carnegie? Not have steel? Rockerfeller says something antithetical to Elite Beliefs? Good luck getting oil.

And if you switch to doing this full time, you become self-employed, which drastically increases the cost of taxes, healthcare, social security, etc. Medicare tax doubles. Social Security tax doubles. You must buy your own healthcare, which drastically increases in premiums (unless you have a spouse who can add you as a dependent on their W-2 sponsored plan).

This really goes for any self-prop business/freelancing. In exchange for freedom of being your own boss, you pay in stress, variance, and taxes.

To make this work, you'd probably have to make double that per 8 hour session. Which is insanely difficult to do as a poker pro and sustain as a "full time job".

The Internet definitely has changed this, and now we are back into a creation capable metaphor.

Or as Postman himself put it, "the medium is the metaphor". And he strongly disliked the metaphor TV was bringing to bear on the Western World.

And everyone should note this is the television of the 1980s. You still don't really have home recording, there are a limited number of channels, and the monoculture truly exists.

Good luck to your daughter!

The synthetically added orchestra hits or background string chords I want to exclude because they are not the mainline voice

But good musicians will quickly fall into the correct tempo when playing with each other.

The instrument is held in a quite unnatural position. Beginners must learn to become comfortable with the contortions necessary. You hold the violin up by squeezing it between your collarbones and your chin. Your hands/arms are to NOT provide any support.

You have no frets on the fingerboard with mere centimeters or millimeters of gap between notes. You must be absolutely precise in your placement at all times at all tempos to make sure you are in tune. Due to the nature of most classical music, you are constantly shifting your hands up and down (forward and backward) on the fingerboard, thus eliminating the ability to "anchor" in one place. Only hours of dedicated practice can develop the muscle memory for such precise placement.

These placements must be done very quickly. A full 4/4 measure of sixteenth notes at 120 bpm means you are placing a finger down approximately once every 0.125 seconds.

Now, while all of this is going on with your left hand, your right hand is manipulating the bow to draw the sound out of the violin.

You must, at all times, draw the bow across the string with the exact amount of pressure, speed, and angle to produce a clear sound. If you are playing a full 4/4 measure of sixteenth notes at 120 bpm all separated (so a different stroke for each note), you are also moving your bow every 0.125 seconds. At the exact pressure, speed, angle and position on the violin. Be wrong in any of these and you will not produce the desired sound.

Often times, due to the rhythm of the piece, you will be moving your bow hand in a pattern very different from the left hand. So you are effectively doing two very different things at the same time. For example, if in that 4/4 measure described above, every group of 3 notes were to be played by a single stroke before changing directions, you are now taking an action every 0.125 seconds on the left hand and an action every 0.375 seconds + one extra 0.125 second stroke at the end.

Now do this while reading sheet music, listening to your fellow ensemble mates to balance sound, watching a conductor to match tempo, express emotionally the intent of the piece.

So then, one must commit enough practice to make all the necessary motions to produce good sound an act of muscle memory. So that there is no conscious thought put into expressing anything the music needs. Thousands upon thousands of hours of drills so the cognitive focus can be on musical expression. To make it as effortless as speaking.

Only then can one sing with the violin. Child prodigies aside, it seems like it takes approximately 3 - 5 years of consistent training before one plays at a level considered "adequate". Elite orchestral players require nearly over a decade of training just to be basic orchestra members. Virtuosos and stars report practicing every day for 4+ hours and will note that any extended break will result in rapid degradation of sound quality and motor skills.

It is a very difficult instrument with an incredibly high skill ceiling and a very long tradition of virtuosity.

Playing the violin at an elite level seems to require a much earlier starting point, so I think that signals a higher level of difficulty. The range of possible sounds while being an incredibly unforgiving instrument in terms of sound quality add to this.

But I believe its stardom comes from its versatility and timbre.

Versatility: It can play any key naturally. Its relatively small size allows for fast passages to be played relatively easily. It can play two notes at a time, and even three or four in quick succession to simulate a chord. It is expressive in a way a tuba isn't.

Timbre/Expression: The Western classical tradition valued the Soprano voice as the "main" voice for melodies. The violin was more or less designed to emulate this voice and the characteristic agility, lightness, and clarity that defined any melody line given to it. So, composers would reach for the violin and make it the star of their compositions. As time went on, the tradition stuck, the virtuosity increased, and the ensembles grew ever larger and larger so the violin sections grew larger and larger.

For whatever reason, the Western Classical Tradition doesn't quite like the sound of, say, a French Horn, dominating the melody line the same way violins do.

What leads me to believe this is all the musical traditions that started off with violins and then quickly ditched them once an instrument that provided the needed versatility and timbre the tradition demanded. Here, I'm mostly thinking of Jazz. Jazz violin was common during the early days of the genre, but quickly fell out of favor in comparison to the guitar, the trumpet, the saxophone, and the piano. For many of the same reasons the violin became the star of the Classical world.

It's also why violins don't really go with rock music. The guitar has the versatility required and the vocal expressiveness that suits the genre.

You ever try organizing and managing the work of multiple skilled tradesmen that feed into a single integrated product on tight deadlines? Do you know what works really well in that kind of environment?

Telling people what to do and then checking in on them to see if they’re doing well.

Is this kindergarten? I don’t remember being a skilled tradesmen working on building components for complex assemblies on tight deadlines in Kindergarten.

I concede that I am unfamiliar with what a normal “scrum” session looks like outside of what is said in the Agile manifesto and the many anecdotes floating around. I do know that Scrum took a lot of cues from TPS/Lean of the 80s and tried to feed it to Software.

And as far as I can see, it’s not working because the profession and the products do not fit this factory model.

What everyone seems to yearn for seems to match more closely to the model followed by magazines and other such publications. Product Management the profession mirrors more the Editor than the Production Manager, SWEs mirror writers/editors-at-large, etc.

Self respecting writers in any newsroom would balk at being subjected to daily scrums that take away from precious research/writing time. And to put some kind of regular pace on progress, metrics, etc. to what really is very bursty, deep focus work is also ridiculous. Whether it takes you 5 hours or 5 days to write the piece, so long as it is of quality and meets the deadline what does it matter. And even if you miss the deadline, you could alway be slotted into the next issue unless the piece was a cornerstone piece to the issue, in which case a good editor would have assigned it with ample time or given it to the best writer on the roster.

Hell I like this analogy. Might spend more time thinking about it and talking to SWE friends about it. Feel free to expand. Maybe this will free everyone from the shackles of Scrum.

Which I suspect comes from the manager/PM going “so what’d you do yesterday?”

I’ve been taught, and I teach others, that in the standup you drive the questions. Usually along this framework:

1) I assigned you Task A yesterday. Did you finish Task A?

2) If yes, awesome. I have Task B for you. Or, go help Bob with Task C.

3) If no, cool. Why? What happened? Is there anyone in this circle that can help you? How can I help you.

4) Open Ended Questions/Comments that we need to circle up on later

5) General Announcements

15 - 30 minutes depending on the size of the team, scope complexity, etc. No one should be talking for more than two minutes. If whatever they need takes longer than 2 minutes, that’s taken offline and a flag something is wrong.

If you’re going to treat the software development like a factory, you must assign and manage work like a factory.

If you’re going to treat it like magazine publishing, you must assign and manage work like a publication.

Pick one. And stop having hour long standups y’all are crazy.

1) Anything longer than 15 minutes is insane 2) What do you even talk about for an hour? 3) Why do you even do standups for design work? What "blockers" could you possibly have that require daily, 15 minute tagups with the entire crew?

Guess what! All those three things is marketing. There is no other way to get some information out there adults simply do not have the time. This results in a lot of games, but what part of human life doesn't? We are critical thinking creatures, we can judge for ourselves.

They struggle right now yes, but the major organizations in the great cities (London, New York, Los Angeles, Vienna, Berlin, etc.) all seem to still stay afloat.

I haven't looked into this too much, but I hypothesize this might not be the case due to attendance numbers. Top-line symphony and philharmonics still sell out regularly. I know locally, the LA Philharmonic's shows at both the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl have robust attendance.

I want to explore a different avenue -- donors and patrons. I wonder if the new generations of millionaires/billionaires don't donate the way they once did to the classical arts.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/951... -- the LA Phil does rather well for itself, but with $64mm in artists' salaries/fees in 2023 and only $42mm in contributions, one cannot help but wonder if this could be helped out by a couple of more billionaires setting up endowments?