Exactly, it sounds to me that the causation may very well run the other direction, if at all.
Low economic growth implies low interest rates, high indebtedness, high asset prices and extended asset duration[1]. Therefore it is so much more important to look at your contracts carefully, because they matter so much more.
If you don't see it then imagine what a true 0% (or around -1%, to account for risk premium) riskfree interest rate across the entire duration means. It means, for example, that it theoretically makes sense to level entire mountains just to create more farmland or to build slightly faster highways because it will pay back over hundreds of years. Imagine negotiating such deals!
[1] this is not just my opinion, but also the opinion of 2012 Jerome Powell; you can find it in FOMC transcripts from before he became the chairman of the Fed.
>it theoretically makes sense to level entire mountains just to create more farmland or to build slightly faster highways because it will pay back over hundreds of years
Is that not what we are doing, in the US and elsewhere? Creating massive debt, the proceeds from which are plowed into real estate development via cheap loans, infrastructure stimulus bills, etc.
Absolutely, though of course it's not even close to leveling mountains yet.
It's much worse in some places than in the US. For example the Swiss 50 year bond is currently priced at -0.36%, and this is "high" given recent yields history. Switzerland is already buying nearly every financial asset it can with printed money, including US stocks, but the credit markets don't give a damn. Swiss mortgages have theoretically infinite duration (you never pay it back by design). Austria has some extremely low yielding 100 year bonds despite not having existed yet for 100 years (in the current form). The deflation is just too strong.
Correlation might not prove causation (is anything in economics proveable?) but it does strongly suggest a relationship. It doesn’t take fanciful thinking to theorize a relationship here. It might be that both greater numbers of lawyers and lower economic activity are caused by something else (like more regulation), or that lower economic activity creates more lawyers.
Fine, but you could just as easily flip the arrow or come up with a common cause to come up with a plausible narrative. In areas with low economic growth, lawyers are a high status, high earning potential field, and so why not go into that field? Maybe areas with autocratic leadership see both more complex laws and lower economic growth, leading to a necessity for more lawyers overall.
Observational studies like this are not sufficient to answer these sorts of questions even if you can use them to come up with cute, cheeky headlines.
But what do lawyers actually create that would be part of any economic growth. It seems to me that they are just toll takers for access to justice and bureaucracy.
I am well aware that correlations can be spurious, but they can also be related. I’ve noted a very strong correlation between my use of a hammer and the number of nails in my wall...
Looks like a fun side project. In a similar vein, I'd also recommend the Synacor Challenge, which involves a set of gradually expanding challenges around implementing a virtual machine: https://challenge.synacor.com/
STL files are the 3D models that you put into your slicer of choice (which converts the project into the thin layers that the printer will gradually put down).
There's a dozen things to print in the zip. I sliced 3-4 of them, and none seemed particularly heavy. Something like $0.50 of filament each for what I pay for PLA, which would put the whole thing at ~$6 of material. Perhaps the cost is being driven by some sort of print-on-demand costs?
FWIW, you could also buy an Ender 3 for ~$200, and $140 buys a lot of filament, so you could get into the 3D printing hobby for less than the quoted cost.
Overpayment in credit card terms is typically when you pay more than the full balance, not more than the minimum payment. Getting a refund under the given circumstances (1500 on a 15k bill with a 150 min pay) might be possible from some lenders, but would almost certainly involve a lot of time on the phone with customer service reps.
Still, he literally said "do skilled work and spend your money wisely", the former implying that he focused on developing his skills, and the latter implying that he didn't live beyond his means. Hard to characterize either as some sort of undue "privilege".
As someone who has done a fair bit of tinkering with stuff like Arduinos, NodeMCUs, ESP32s, etc. along with Pis and similar, what sort of itch does this scratch for people that those wouldn't? From looking at the Rosco version, it doesn't seem like it's a cost savings or anything, and the hardware is certainly much weaker than modern options.
Most of the "modern" embedded stuff comes as a complete system-on-chip these days, i.e. all the peripherals and memory are integrated into the CPU on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. It's also rare for chips to offer an external parallel bus interface (the classic A0-A15 and D0-D7 pins), which means that any extra peripheral devices need to hang off an I2C/SPI port where the CPU core can't access them directly.
And the available chips (AVR, ESP32, LPC2xxx, etc.) are all proprietary designs with a single manufacturer. Even the ARM chips, which generally use some variant of a Cortex-M core, have wildly different peripherals. So migrating between families is difficult/impossible.
In contrast, "classic" chips like 8051, 6502, x86 and 680xx all have external parallel bus interfaces and are (or were) produced by multiple manufacturers (often as part of "second source" agreements).
So when building a system using these chips, the designer has a large degree of flexibility and freedom to design the system architecture. Whereas building something using modern embedded chips is mostly an exercise in parametric search trying to find an existing chip which offers exactly the right set of peripherals for the intended design. It reduces the system designer to a mere consumer of off-the-shelf SoCs instead of being a true builder/architect.
That's helpful; thanks. I guess coming from much more of a software background, having the ability to write C code (which feels like an acceptable veneer over the hardware to me and works well across chips) and having programmatic access to the pins feels pretty empowering and all-encompassing. However, it does make sense to me that someone coming from a hardware-first view of the world would feel those barriers to direct hardware access much more acutely and recognize the limitations that I don't.
I appreciate the thoughtful and detailed response.
Compared to Arduino & other microcontrollers, a 68k has more capabilities- you have the real system bus available to you, which I don't think you do on an Arduino (or a rasPi for that matter.)
Compared to a raspberry pi, a 68k SBC is more "knowable". There aren't any proprietary blobs there... You can still wrap your head around the whole computer- it's simpler.
But I think the bigger appeal is that a system like this can be understood in a much more complete way than what you can achieve with a Pi or even an ESP32.
Part of the difficulty SO faces is that there's sort of two similar but distinct problems that it's meant to solve, and as such there is no one "community". It's simultaneously a place to ask programming questions and get answers to them, and it's a repository of commonly asked programming questions with curated answers. The heavily engaged section of the community represented by your linked thread tends to focus on the latter goal, and the things they do to benefit the site for it (e.g., the aggressive closed-as-duplicate patrol) tend to be the things that makes it a hostile feeling place for the "long tail" community of new question askers and occasional answerers.
A trivial solution to this dilemma seems to be to consider stack overflow a place for the former, and have a system in place where you can vote specifically to elevate a question to the latter category. (god knows they don't mind adding stuff, with comments, votes on comments, votes on questions, on answers, votes on closing questions, votes on reopening them... – surely yet another kind of vote wouldn't bother them!)
Such an elevation may require some small edits. This adds all sorts of benefits:
1. Given that it is now clear that the question is moving from 'this answers the question asked by the original poster' to 'this is now like a blog post, generally useful information that should score highly on google', it is completely fine to edit the question and turn it into something that no longer entirely matches the original asker. I'd even go so far as to clone the question, and leave the real question unmolested.
2. The question (or, better yet, an answer) can be marked as obsoleted or outdated. There are huge swaths of questions on SO that have a ton of votes and an answer that was fantastic in the past, but is now flat out misleading or wrong, but it seems both onerous to begin the path of finding a few thousand people to downvote it, as well as 'mean' to the poster of that answer, and tricky for the historic purposes of the internet (imagine a fix in some source code has a comment that links to this answer!) - and for similar reasons, editing the answer so that it is nothing like the original answer is also flat out bizarre. It'd be so much better if it was possible to vote an answer as 'obsolete' or 'outdated'. But that doesn't work if SO is at odds with itself and at once a repo of common questions AND a specific question->specific answer forum.
3. Given that an SO community now has a presumably much smaller set of questions-with-answers that have been elevated to 'commonly asked question with great curated answers', they can 'police' their fiefdom of curated general knowledge vastly better, with mods and random passersby invited to ocassionally inspect one of these curated answers and see if it still seems useful, applicable, and correct in the current day and age. It also becomes far more feasible to browse through the entirety of the curated questions list.
This already exists as "Community wiki" [0], which is almost exactly what you describe, at least in theory.
It seems like a useful feature that often has a positive effect. It's not clear to be that it's improved the general attitude of the community or of management.
The community wiki is strange to me because it completely removes the gamification aspect. If your post becomes a community wiki, you stop getting reputation. If you edit a community wiki, you get no reputation.
But does it matter? The SO I know still aggressively hints at the 'I dont know what we actually are' problem; if you answer very obvious questions, you get downvoted with notes to 'VTC and move on', for example. I also get no option to vote to promote an answer into the wiki.
The community wiki feature as implemented does not fulfill what I'm proposing, I'd say. Or at least, the current policies do not mesh with the existence of the wiki in a way to solve the dilemma.
I was active from very early on but lost trust in SO when my best answer got turned into a community wiki. It’s an amazing resource but now I mostly consume.
Seems a little presumptuous to assume that the decline in outreach was personal and not associated with the heavy decline in companies hiring during uncertain times.
> I was still getting tons of messages after covid and shelter in place started. My snapshot is from 2 months ago, not 4 months ago. Covid definitely caused some drop-off but not much tbh, I still got a ton of recruiters who are playing the long game.
Covid lockdowns started 4 months ago. Companies took longer to react. Google only rescinded contractor offers end of May. My organization was hiring right through April. Things take time to propagate.
Yeah, my linkedin recruiter messages dropped significantly especially for management roles and I changed nothing. I'd say the drop began 1-2 months after covid started and only began recovering now. Seems to lineup with when he did his test.
