I think equally interesting is whatever Dario's wife was able to do in order to wipe her foot print from any search/chat results.

I've worked for a number of small company billionaires who all have suspiciously small information footprints online despite being somewhat public figures for 30 years. Most of them do such a good job it is not even clear what state they live, if they are currently married, and if so what their current (or previous) wife(s)'s name is/was.

Would be interesting in your observations on the other side of this, but to me it seems related to those studies showing the trough of happiness is on average the mid-30s to mid-50s.

Most studies ascribe this to being the overlap of peak career hustle, childrearing, taking care of aging parents, and personal health scares all hitting at once.

Putting aside the obvious emotional toll, to me it looks/feels like a dearth of free time. Personally I find it hard to find blocks of time to do anything "for myself" that are more than 30-60 minutes. Video games now, compared to my youth, seem to be much deeper and entail much longer time commitments.

His strategy was to trade on MNPI available to him via relationships that no larger fund/bank compliance department would sign off on, in a portfolio no fund/bank risk department would allow.

Now you hear about people being "on call" for basically minimum wage jobs, called in for half shifts, sent home early, etc. Stringing together 40 hours at a job like this is basically a job in itself.

Fast food, in my lifetime, seems to have moved more to the lower end of the demographic spectrum in terms of customer base.

Some combination of wealth driven taste changes and health concerns within the top half on the customer side.

I used to enjoy 18 hour flights to Asia pre-WiFi for true disconnection, plus time zone difference to US East Coast made the time spent on the ground there feel at least half disconnected

Most of us spend our work time balancing 100 different things, putting out fires, bouncing between meetings, answering adhoc pings via calls/zooms/slacks, and struggling to do the deep work we are allegedly paid for in between.

There's a therapeutic aspect to certain kinds of physical hobby/chore work or full focussed hobbyist time that counterbalances this.

Otherwise at the end of a day of being burned out, we ruminate & doom scroll which only makes things worse.

And across time you have to adjust acceptance rates for the fact they are all way lower now because kids send out 2-3x as many apps.

A lot of kids even 20 years ago were applying to schools in NYC/Boston/DC on east coast because they wanted to be in NYC/Boston/DC. Many of my friends went to said schools for psychology/film/etc type programs at schools that as an engineering major were decidedly for me "safety schools". Many of these were 50% admit then and 10% admit now. I don't think they suddenly became as difficult as MIT.

Meanwhile many engineering schools (the types with Institute in the name) that were in cold rural boring areas had higher acceptance rates than my "safety schools" in Boston.

This trend has seemingly only accelerated. For example picking 3 schools in Boston to isolate just the difficulty feature:

* In 2005 MIT acceptance was ~16% vs 4% now (1/4).

* BC was ~30% vs 15% now (1/2).

* BU was ~68% vs 11% now (1/6).

So theres an argument that the harder the school the less dramatically its acceptance rate has compressed, while desirable good but not super hard schools (which have fluffy majors available) have had a larger effect.

20 years ago UofM had a 50% acceptance rate, from some light google searching. Apparently they received 115k applications last year vs under 25k in 2005.

The biggest factor is that applying is a lot easier in the age of web applications, common application, and students being advised to send 10-15 applications out. In the 2000s even a good student might apply to 3-5 schools and feel they had covered enough.

Voice is almost always the worst, most frustrating interface.