Hey man - Have so many feelings and thoughts in reading this. First, I'm sorry you're suffering. As an obviously articulate and educated person who is in reality fairly young, I'm 100% confident you have so much more potential than you're giving yourself credit for. Also, as you can see from all these responses, there's more compassion and empathy out there than it might feel like. It's ok to reach out to people for help. It's great that you took this step. I hope all these replies can serve as positive motivation/momentum for you!
I completely understand how deeply you feel these things, but I hope it empowers you a bit to know that I for one am 100% certain you absolutely can find love, have kids and get a job in your 40s.
You mentioned wanting to move back to the US, which could be a great medium/long term goal. If that feels like what you want, I'd consider setting this as a goal on the horizon and then working backwards from there to put together a realistic plan for how to achieve this. Otherwise, set a different med/long term goal like moving to some other location you prefer or maybe getting a certain type of job. Setting a clear goal and then planning towards it can have a remarkable impact on getting shit done. It doesn't need to be perfect. You can adjust your goal and your plan as you go. Take baby steps, and celebrate the small wins along the way.
Finally, since you have an engineering educational background, with remote work and online resources these days, my sense is that it would be so much easier than you feel to brush up your skills and start working again. The world is big and filled with quite a few CRUD apps! I don't have enough context to know what fits for you, but there are so many tutorials and online courses that walk you through practical exercises to build real stuff. Once you set a goal and put together a sketch of a plan, consider if it feels right to pick some online courses/tutorials and build some stuff to refresh your skills and give you some recent work to point employers/clients to. Some that I just happen to have seen lately: Buildspace (fun weekend coding projects), Replit has coding tutorials. I always like Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial.
This present post is from the organization that discovered the issue and fought for the industry to recognize and study it. It includes a nice searchable database of test results on the bottom of the page.
"the kidney is very adept at excreting excess sodium. But there’s one thing that inhibits sodium excretion by the kidney—insulin resistance. High insulin levels increase blood pressure, even with relatively low sodium intake. And many people are insulin resistant—and those people do need to lower their salt as a treatment of the disease."
Correct, for most people. The book I quoted is by Dr Robert Lustig who is a leading voice on that point of view. He would more or less say insulin resistance is the root problem. Chronic conditions like hypertension are symptoms. The whole book is an argument in favor of curing the underlying metabolic disease with diet adjustment.
Cutting out sugar and carbohydrates is key. Recommending lowering salt intake is a low priority when the root cause is usually insulin resistance/obesity.
Just for background, there's nearly always a lengthy opinion explaining the reasoning in great detail. And if there's a dissent, the dissenters' reasoning is typically laid out in great detail as well, and included along with the opinion. Here's the full opinion for those interested: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf
The concern, which is fair, is that 1password's cloud is a target. And those targeting it have only one intention, which is to steal people's passwords and other information stored in the 1password cloud. In contrast, of course using the dropbox sync approach with 1password does put your information in the cloud as well. But, it's in your personal dropbox account. That dropbox account could absolutely be hacked, but very unlikely by someone with such clear intent to steal your 1password vault. Basically, 1password's cloud is the ultimate target, and your 1password vault in your personal dropbox account is not.
That's a good definition, and a very useful one for VCs . It's also not how most people are using the word. It's not how dictionaries or wikipedia define the word either. So I think we need to be a little careful and make sure everyone agrees on whose definition we are using at the start of a conversation.
The article is just content marketing, sensationalizing a mistake made by an extremely small, early stage startup as a marketing ploy to lead you to the conclusion you should buy this company's software to avoid a similar fate. So not surprising it's light on details. For what it's worth, startups at that stage almost never have a CFO nor any admin/accounting staff. That said, obviously it was a mistake and they should have paid their payroll taxes. But the sentiment in this piece is crafted solely to lead the reader to the conclusion that they should pay for this company's software.
Content marketing is content and marketing, not just marketing, and in this case the content is a good warning to others. Yes, they are trying to sell their product, but they are making a good point, and they aren't shoving their product in your faces. I think you are being hard on them for no good reason.
Startups are hard and early stages are always messy. If the piece was journalistically motivated I'd feel differently, but as a marketing post I don't love the vibe. Just my two cents.
