Sample bias - I’ve lived in my fair share of big cities around the planet - but over the last few years, after burning out from chronic stress after a decade of building my business, I’ve made a focus of examining slower ways of living, closer to nature - I still do tech consulting, and off grid living suits my skillset handily.
These days, trying to stay put - been here about eight months and have no particular plans to move on.
As to how we choose - we do a lot of overland travel, and see a lot of places as a result. We’ll get to know a local in some forsaken spot who’ll be like “that cottage is for sale for cheap, it needs a lot of work”, or “the goatherd’s daughter has gone to university and he’s going to struggle this winter” or “there’s an old mill down by the river that only an idiot would buy”, and we just kinda do it. That’s all been in the three and a bit years since I stopped giving a damn and just decided to do whatever - I’m lucky in having a spouse who was willing to trust me when I suggested we both quit our jobs, stop being director of this and manager of that and just go be humans of earth. Before work got silly, we, and before that I, used to go wandering periodically - usually somewhere where people would stop and stare at the outsider - had a great time in the ‘stans, both times, and Siberia - and did a tour of all the bits of Latin America nobody visits - love the interior of Uruguay. Nearly settled down there, but only stayed two months, as I can see economic and environmental doom just around the corner for them.
Anyway. I digress. I’ve always had itchy feet, and I probably should have been an anthropologist or something.
The liking it, or the impending doom? I liked it as it’s down to earth and relaxed, the people are kind, and it has a lot going on in and around arts and culture, all over the place.
The impending doom - environmentally, they’ve problems. Tainted aquifers, severe topsoil erosion bordering on desertification from overgrazing, vast eucalyptus monocultures. Economically - they have a final salary pension scheme that everybody scams (e.g. we’ll pay you 30% of your normal wage for your last three years before retirement and then 400% for your final year), and a huge black market with Brazil - people smuggle everything from toilet paper to cars, and it’s universal and normal. They are resorting to foreign agribusiness investments to bridge their deficit, and that only worsens the environmental degradation. Mercosur could go a long way to solving Uruguay’s woes, but it suits the bigger players better to keep Uruguay on a tight leash.
I really recommend the interior - Salto, Carmelo, Fray Bentos, Tacuarembo (Patria Gaucha festival was kinda fascinating - all the gauchos and their families ride in from all over for a week of rodeo and country activities - it’s very much for them, not tourists, so you’d better like steak, beer, and watching people get kicked in the face by horses), Paysandu - charming little cities with lots to explore around them. We loved San Gregorio do Polanco - sleepy little town smack in the middle of Uruguay on a huge reservoir, covered with art, all slightly offbeat, beaches and swimming when there’s water, galloping bareback across the dried up lakebed, startling flamingos, when there’s not.
Coast-side, Punta del Diablo is a cute little beach town, but as you near Montevideo it just slowly gets more built up and crappy, until you reach Punta del Este, which is a sort of micro-Miami.
Montevideo itself is great, interesting, cosmopolitan city, and generally really safe - but it’s a mistake to treat it as representative of Uruguay as a whole.
I decided to look for a new job after our management only very reluctantly let us all work from home (it was very obvious they just don‘t trust their employees to still do their job when not on site). My productivity has gone up due to no more walk-ups distracting me with questions whenever they like and I don‘t have to waste an hour in the subway every day. My next job will for sure be remote, or at least for a company with strong remote support.
Well, a survey usually tries to extrapolate numbers from a sample smaller than the total. They do this by trying to get a representative sample. Also if you were to ask each and every American about their stance on remote work I think that would be called a vote and not a survey.
Here‘s an argument: The US is supposedly the land of the free, where everyone is allowed to live life according to their beliefs. It would be against this principle to force this re-education program you‘re proposing on someone.
A way simpler argument would be that it‘s unrealistic to expect this level of discipline for a stretch of time like this from people who couldn‘t even stop themselves from killing someone.
However, if you‘ve ever read „Papillon“, I think the methods he describes as using in dealing with his sentences seem to me to be pretty close to meditation.
Well, ideally you'd give them a choice between following an intensive meditation training (for instance, I don't think it can be only thing that's needed for rehabilitation) and just classic imprisonment. If you force it on them, it can have the opposite effect.
Not necessarily. Who says morning people have a problem with later school start times?
They can still get up earlier if they like and use those hours for something productive (e.g. doing homework in the morning vs. in the evening / at night)
Sounds nice, except programming is difficult and akin to magic for most people. Achieving what‘s proposed here, namely wanting to get a job done, but your requirements for it are different from how your friend uses it, is usually achieved by having a program that takes a lot of configuration parameters and then does the job according to them. IMO that‘s the more fitting analogy.
> except programming is difficult and akin to magic for most people.
So is cooking to quite many of them, myself included. I find programming easier than cooking - because although it takes much longer to achieve anything, it also doesn't cost anything on the margin, you can pause the process at any time, and you don't risk hurting or killing yourself.
> is usually achieved by having a program that takes a lot of configuration parameters and then does the job according to them
The ultimate form of "configuration parameters" is the code itself. Phrased alternatively, configuration is just code in a non-turing-complete language. Code is data is code.
There is a gap in tooling, there are currently no good Hypercard-like tools that would allow to make "personal software" and share it as recipes. That's perhaps because computing is still in its inflation phase and there's too much platform diversity; hopefully that will change in some way in the future. But lack of necessary tooling doesn't mean the vision is wrong, especially a vision that was true in the past.
Professional software engineers often struggle to get their development environment up and running quickly. My wife is a historian and does a lot of work with R. The process of getting the development environment working and keeping it working was a nightmare. "What the fuck does that error message mean? When I Google it nothing comes up. What do you mean I have the wrong version of python? What the fuck is a PATH variable?"
With cooking there are entire stores dedicated to selling you things that you can use. Almost every home comes with a working "cooking environment". Even just making it so you could recompile some software if you wanted to is way way way way beyond the expected capabilities for a typical person, especially since a tremendous amount of OSS code is not portable and built for linux while most people have windows boxes.
Philip Guo wrote a great post several years ago under the title "Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery"[1] that seemed to get somewhat mixed but mostly positive reception. Much of the negative reception seemed to be chained to sophomoric arguments originating from folks stuck in the second panel of the glowing brain meme who wrongly thought of Guo being stuck in the first.
The real truth behind the mess we're in[2] is that there is a ubiquitous, universal runtime that almost every computer comes equipped with, and the problem lies with the folks responsible for those ecosystems who either don't see these things as problems, or somehow believe that what the future somehow holds is native support for R/Python/what-have-you in the browser.
Tooling is a massive problem, though, and one that the browser vendors themselves don't seem to care to get right. (Although there is the Iodide project, in part supported by Mozilla.) And it really doesn't help that the browser realm has come to be conflated with the NodeJS community because they share a common language.
I've written a fairly thoughtful post[3] before, tying these two topics together:
> After finding out where to download the SDK and then doing exactly that, you might then spend anywhere from a few seconds or minutes to what might turn out to be a few days wrestling with it before it's set up for your use. [...]
> the question is whether it's possible to contrive a system (a term I'll use to loosely refer to something involving a language, an environment, and a set of practices) built around the core value that zero-cost setup is important
Neither of you is wrong. There's two basic models that I see.
Some people never cook, and only eat food from restaurants. They only use their kitchen as the place to store leftovers in the fridge and reheat them in the microwave. The way they get food is to have experts make standard items for them, and maybe sometimes ask the expert to customize it slightly.
On the other end of the spectrum are people who cook every meal for themselves. It's not that hard to get started, and the consequences of failure are pretty low. Various people like to do it because it's fun, or cheap, or social, or they have special requirements, or whatever.
Software is exactly the same. Some people want only standard pre-built units from experts, and want to pay those experts to build, customize, and deliver it for them. Other people think it's {fun/cheap/social/necessary/whatever} to build and customize their own software, and don't want this to be solely the domain of experts.
RMS is clearly in one camp, or if it's a spectrum then he's all the way on one end. It's true that a lot of software today is pre-built units from experts, with only minor customization possible. That wasn't always the case. RMS is presenting a vision of a future where we're not eating all our software from restaurants.
Having seen how childish and uncooperative corporations are with software, I think it's a great vision and I'm all for it.
sure the requirement differ, but so do circumstances under which a meal has to be cooked (differing number of consumers, allergies, different properties of ingrediences requiring changes,..). Cooking can be difficult as well, see french cuisine.
I was thinking of Unix command line tools. Every one of them comes with a buttload of parameters and some of them make me think 'why would you ever need this?!' :)
I see what you‘re saying and have been wondering the same thing for a while (although I don‘t have Jesus to back me up :D).
The way I see it is, there‘s only so many hours in a day and most of them I spend at work anyway. So, instead of clinging on to shallow forms of connection like commenting on the latest political scandal I try to take the time out of my day and get a good talk in with people I care about about topics that actually matter to both of us in the real world (friends, family, plans, problems, maybe some of the latest office gossip, etc.)
I guess the point was that for a people that react very strongly to even the slightest hints of decreasing individual freedom, it's kind of ironic to have so many podcasts financed by corporate interests, which decreases their constitutional right to freely express their opinions on whatever subject.
For the podcasts I listen to, at least, they don't ever seem to feel constrained by their advertisers. At worst they seem bored by them; they don't particularly want to advertise underwear and mattresses. But generally, the advertisers are trying to reach a market that shares an interest with the people who make the podcast, and it just seems unlikely that they're ever being paid off to promote or avoid topics that they wouldn't naturally gravitate to (or from).
Perhaps that's because I'm selecting content with little political or controversial content. But even there, I suspect that people who do want that content will find that the advertisers who want them are the ones who naturally appeal to them anyway.
Consumerism in general is always insidious, but that's hardly limited to podcasting. There are a lot of paradoxes associated with being wealthy enough to be in an advertiser's demographic, and yet still be vulnerable to wanting something to make you happy.
May I ask: Is this work-related that you live country-side in so many different places, or are you a restless soul? :)