I wish I had this advice sooner. The new part for me here, beyond merely keeping a paper trail, is to make sure that everyone knows about your consistently kept paper trail, so that it wards off bad behavior before it starts.
I've been told that opportunities are easier to spot in areas where you don't spend a lot of time.
I'm guessing that this is because you haven't already accepted the status quo in those areas, and because people with your skillset who would beat you to it may not have spent a lot of time there yet.
I think opportunities are easiest to spot in places where you are newly spending alot of time. You are quickly coming up to speed on the status quo, but haven't been inured to it yet.
You also still have this sparkling energy at all of the possibilities that can only fade with time, whether you tackle a problem in the space or not.
I feel like the opposite's true for me (sample size: 1). I spent a bunch of time in tech support, then built a bunch of tools to speed up stupid manual time-consuming stuff. That got me a promotion into programming, and now I'm out of direct contact with the day-to-day issues in support so I generally rely on support staff to make additional feature requests now.
But then, I don't tend to accept the status quo. I think there are certain personalities that never do. There's always something else to challenge/improve.
Edit: there's a correction on this in the child comments.
The math on this is misleading. $10k invested for 30 years to become $1M implies an interest rate of 16.6%. Even as a nominal interest rate in the US, that would be an extremely lucky result to consistently achieve. My advice to you would be to start a hedge fund immediately with whatever secret knowledge you have, and then all money concerns will become irrelevant. :-)
A good choice for a real ('real' meaning non-nominal) interest rate in these types of projections is 7%, which would make $10k equal to $76k in 30 years. Because you used a real interest rate, the $76k is $76k in today's dollars, not in 2047 dollars. The conclusion is that you will need to invest a bit more than $10k today to retire in 30 years.
I like to use this type of calculation to frame my short-term purchase decisions. Would I like to spend $20 on this thing I don't need? Yes. Would I like to spend today's equivalent of $300 on it 40 years from now? No thank you.
Yeah, I've been intrigued by this cognitive dissonance for a while. Are we going to visit, or would contaminating the planet be a disaster for science and our understanding of the nature of life?
This reminds me of autoimmune disease like MS. They are more common in higher latitudes (where there happens to be less sunlight), and there is a connection to low Vitamin D that isn't understood.
While attempting to understand the link better, UW-Madison researchers recently produced data implying that the ingredients of some sunscreen products may provide benefit in preventing MS.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/07/28/sunscreen-ms-and-hard-b...
There was a piece in the New Scientist a couple of years ago that said type 1 diabetes seems to be correlated with higher latitudes. They suggested it was related to Vitamin D.
Yes, like MS, type 1 diabetes is considered to be an autoimmune disease. It's surprising to me as someone who hasn't studied medicine how related to each other autoimmune issues seem to be. Rheumatoid arthritis and latitude is another one that follows this same pattern. This article from 2010 about rheumatoid arthritis also mentions the link to low vitamin D levels, and that the link isn't understood.
ston3r, I'd be glad to help improve the audio and give you pointers on doing it yourself. Just send a link to uncompressed source audio to me at cwiltgen at Gmail.
I'm not really sure about this metaphor, but I love what Schoenberg had to say in Harmonielehre about choosing voice registers in the parts you write. It never occurred to me how much art went into something seemingly subtle until I read this from him in a section about four-part vocal writing.
"Obviously the range of solo voices, yes, even of choral voices, is in reality larger than, perhaps different from, that indicated here, which only aims at a fairly correct average. The middle register, which should be the one chiefly used, lies a fourth or a fifth from the highest and lowest tones, so that we have:"
<image of vocal ranges>
"Of course the pupil cannot get along with just the tones of the middle register and will have to use some from the higher or lower registers- naturally, at first only the adjacent tones, but then also on occasion the highest or lowest, if there is no other way. In general, however, he should seldom overstep to any significant degree the bounds of an octave whoever wants to write parts comfortable for the voice will avoid, even in actual composition, extended passages exclusively in one of the outer registers. The pupil should therefore enter these registers only for a short time and leave them as soon as possible. Whenever the treatment of solo or choral voices in practice indicates otherwise, it is because the composer sought some compositional or acoustical effects irrelevant to our present aims."
"The characteristics of the voices indicate the requirements, supported by experience for their combination in choral writing. If no voice is to stand out, then all voices will seek out registers whose acoustical potential is approximately the same. For, were a voice to sing in a more brilliant register, while the others move in a duller register, that voice would naturally be quite noticeable. If this voice is intended to stand out (for example, when an inner voice has the melody), then it is well that it sing in a more expressive register. But if it is inadvertently conspicuous, then the director would have to rely on shading, he would have to create equilibrium by subduing the prominent voice or by strengthening the weaker ones."
I once joined a successful, for-profit, private company, because I liked its mission, despite being offered lower compensation and benefits than I could have accepted elsewhere. This was very naive of me, and didn't turn out how I had hoped at all.
It turned out that the mission was more of a very well executed recruiting and sales strategy than what I felt every day at the organization. Looking back, the recruiting effort talked about their culture and values so much that I should have known they were very insecure about something. The lower compensation wasn't required by the company's financials from what I could tell, nor was it made up for by especially meaningful work. Unsurprisingly, the organizational flaws of not valuing employees and cutting corners also showed up in other ways, most painfully in the form of amazingly bad code and hostile managers. The job was unbearable for me, as well as for many others.
I think the takeaway is that honest, successful companies should be willing to fairly compensate their employees. If a company can do that but doesn't, you should reconsider working there.
