Recently I've seen startup, where you were earning XP points for quickly closing customer support tickets, and earning badges...
A college buddy worked at a place like that. But it wasn't a startup, it was a long-established company.
It was also 1996, and he learned that closing deals on copies of Windows 95 was worth twice as many points as other software, so he focused all his efforts on that so he could do half the work of his "teammates" in his cubicle farm.
Being Stoic does not require one to give up ambitions, self improvement or planning. It only requires that you stay open to the good and guard against the bad.
“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.” ~ Aurelius
"Our life is what our thoughts make of it." ~ Aurelius
"It's a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness." ~ Seneca
You can't go in to the real one. The real one was destroyed in 1687 when it was being used as a gunpowder depot(!), and then triggered by a mortar round.
They've been slowly rebuilding it over the last 50 years, but it's nowhere near done. It involves figuring out where each and every block goes, often undoing previous reconstructions. You won't be going inside it any time soon.
There are gift shops everywhere, of course, but I highly recommend the one at the Acropolis Museum (at the bottom of the hill). It does a great job of putting the site into historical and archeological context.
No, from what I could tell the greeks have tried to preserve the entire Acropolis as it was in ancient times. Unfortunately this means there is construction equipment everywhere as they are constantly trying to rebuild, at least when I was there.
Pretty much every shop/business surrounding the Acropolis is a gift shop, they all sell little souvenirs and stuff.
Many people need to take more responsibility. I live in a place on the Pacific Rim with tsunami, earthquake and volcano risk. I have a massive mobile first aid kit, equipment/training for swiftwater rescue, baofeng radios, etc. When things go sideways, members of the community need to be prepared. The justification for community preparedness goes up as the frequency of the concern goes up, such as with hurricanes.
It's a shame that we've strayed so far from "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country". Replace country with neighborhood, community, town, city, county, so on and so forth.
FEMA is a great extra layer of safety, but it's no replacement for community preparedness. FEMA's effectiveness is proportional to the preparedness of the community it is called in to help. FEMA is also a SPOF.
Everyone should operate under "No one is coming. It's up to us". When you assume the opposite, you create the conditions that greatly reduce the likelihood of a positive outcome in the event of disaster. You also consume resources that could have gone to people that do not have the means to prepare such as the poor, the elderly and the infirm.
>When things go sideways, members of the community need to be prepared. The justification for community preparedness goes up as the frequency of the concern goes up, such as with hurricanes.
That's a government: a community that pools resources, creates plans, and executes those plans to benefit the community members. I agree it would help for individuals to have emergency kits and some training. Why can't FEMA help with that?
"In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America, outside of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, which killed upward of a hundred thousand people. By comparison, roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. fema projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million."
No federal response will ever be capable of effectively responding to such a disaster without serious local support.
