I kept my dishwashing job on my resume for far too long under the title “hydro ceramics engineer.”
It was grueling work, but I met a lot of interesting people, one in particular turned me on to studying Chinese which changed the whole path of my life. Also gave me entre into bussing then waitstaff. Paid my way through high school car insurance and college surviving. Definitely under appreciated and under paid, but I learned a ton about working for a living.
> Definitely under appreciated and under paid, but I learned a ton about working for a living.
a lot of the discussion about wages ignores the value of experience; students pay to spend their days learning but it's somehow unfair for someone to get paid to learn job skills that transfer to other jobs
From my experience crossing eras; the tools have improved, and there are still some amazingly brilliant people, but the amount of overhead and the ratio of top level, passionate builders has dropped meaningfully. I have had a priority project stuck in legal hell for six months because it’s just a morass of logistics. The project is benign but it doesn’t matter. We are ossified.
I look at it as somewhat inevitable considering the path the company has taken, but it is certainly different. We are cranking out money and that’s fine, but it is a change.
Small nit - coffee beans are often times better after 10-14 days of roasting and have had some time for degassing when making espresso. Earlier than that and you will get a lot more creme than you really want if you are going for a balanced shot. But in the end it’s all taste so I can also be wrong for your personal situation.
In the supermarket you'll never find coffee that fresh, so you won't really have to worry about that. If you buy directly from a roaster you do have to pay attention to this, though some roasters write that date as well on the package so you know the coffee should still rest a bit.
One of my friends I grew up with was “that kid;” smartest in the community, funny, played a mean guitar. Everyone loved him. Top of class. Harvard. Harvard med. Top placement for residency. Something happened during that time and he killed himself. It was absolutely unexpected from all of his friends. Shocking to say the least. Apparently it turned out to be stress from work, his hours, his fear of failing. Who will ever know, but it has been many years and it still stings.
My wife's a doc, in residency, and also Swiss, so I find myself referencing this study [1] on residency hours in Swiss residency programs over years. Bottom line: there are limitations on hours/wk and consecutive shifts, but enforcement of that is a joke + nonexistant, especially among residents (note resident's interest in maintaining their resident status and remaining 'bureaucratically blessed'). [2]
See the Albuquerque neurosurgery resident walkout for an interesting business case of the real value of surgeon residents and what might motivate them to cause a big kerfuffle in hopes of bringing about changes. [3]
I'm mostly acquainted with attending physicians who don't mind the 60hr weeks when they don't have a choice, and residents who pick up the rest of the work that attendings financially benefit from. Surgery attendings seem to be a special sort of animal.
It's just not as simple as limiting hours, unfortunately -_-
Last I heard (this was early 2010s) at least it Texas, it was capped at 80 hours/week for residents. Seems like a lot but probably better than the 100+ they used to pull.
> Apparently it turned out to be stress from work, his hours, his fear of failing. Who will ever know
You are saying that 'it turned out to be stress from work, his hours, his fear of failing' but then 'who will ever know'.
Also why does it matter that he was such an apparent (to stress) academic high achiever? That doesn't make you immune in any way to anxiety or making other life choices that could be detrimental to your health. Understand that you are adding color to your story but really the 'loved, funny, played a mean guitar' why does that matter?
Easy answer appears to be he was pushed by others (or himself) and went into a field that he was not (mentally) able to do. After all most Physicians are not killing themselves (high achievers who go to Harvard or a less impressive school). Literally the same thing could have happened to him if he went into any number of high pressure fields or had other mental issues.
It's not the pressure or hard work that breaks us, it's the frustration from not being able to control anything. It's the knowledge of knowing that if you had some amount of say in what was going on, things could improve for everyone. And knowing that people who are not impacted by this in the least have all of the power. So you can either quit what you love, or keep doing what you love in a psychologically unsafe, unhealthy, and toxic system.
I used to be into Olympic weightlifting and worked out at a gym of people that also took it very seriously. They were for the most part the farthest thing from “meat heads” as one could imagine. Except the one guy…
He found a container of powdered caffeine someone had brought and decided that he didn’t have to follow the instructions like normal humans. Not only that, he mixed up the measurements. In the end he took what very well could have been a fatal dose. Even with a visit to the hospital his heart rate was above 200 resting for over a day. They had to work to flush his system and whatever but he said it took weeks to sleep normally again.
Not particularly to do with caffeine, but tangent to the weightlifting: Eddie Hall deadlifting 1102lbs / 500Kg world record and the moments behind the scenes with paramedics unable to get a reading on his heart rate, and then having it read over 200bpm
During my powerlifting days, me and my fellow meatheads used to get ephedrine powder from Mexico and mix with Mountain Dew before contests. I almost had a heart attack once, but I totaled over 1700 pounds that day, so it was all worth it. Not. I totally regret it now. Live and learn.
When my wife was diagnosed with thyroid cancer our doctor said the same thing was being discussed about reclassifying her diagnosis as well. His assertion was that a lot of thyroid cancers aren’t even discovered until post mortem from another cause of death. Also that the standard treatments are so effective, and in some ways unique to thyroid cancer (radioactive iodine treatment specifically) that the cure rate was very high.
This was a decade ago and while I remember reading up on it at the time, I don’t have any primary research to back this up so take it with a grain of salt.
Depends on how advanced. I had a relatively fast growing papillary thyroid cancer that was already 3cm and spread to my lymph nodes. Still relatively "easy" to address, and I've been in remission for 10 years, but if my thyroid was not removed, and I didn't take the radiation treatment, I probably would have been toast long ago.
The censorship levels are off the charts; I am at a basketball game with my wife who is ethnically Chinese. I asked for an image of a Chinese woman dunking a basketball. I was told not only is this inappropriate, but also unrealistic and objectifying.
It was grueling work, but I met a lot of interesting people, one in particular turned me on to studying Chinese which changed the whole path of my life. Also gave me entre into bussing then waitstaff. Paid my way through high school car insurance and college surviving. Definitely under appreciated and under paid, but I learned a ton about working for a living.