Delegate - Hire some competent people to take over sales, product and engineering management.
Depression - Examine heirarchy of needs: Sufficient exercise, sleep, nutrition, social interaction and maybe medication if CBT doesnt work. Feeling not depressed is like a release from constant internal judgement, cloud of doom, negativity spectacles. For some people, it's only temporary, situational and existential to change one's agenda; for others, there is a genetic component which causes permanent, unrelenting major depression which is unlikely to be addressed without finding a suitable medication.
Transistion to a social venture - Setup a school or hospital in Botswana or Somaliland, or join the Peace Corps. There is plent of work that needs doing. Teach, mentor and/or build something that builds people ready for tomorrow.
For first time purchases, there's the FHA program.
Also, it maybe cheaper to rent than to buy.
Or move to a more affordable area with a much shorter commute. Some people commute for hours just to say they own a home while they spend much more of their lives and more money driving for hours.
Next, some people just say "fuck it," buy a Sprinter or GMC Savannah and convert it to a commute vehicle / stealth RV. No rent, no mortgage and not piling on more debt to be a servant to for the next 15 to 30 years.
Inflation is the friend of the debtor, deflation and hyperinflation are the enemies.
Also consider property taxes of the future: they may greatly increase depending on political and economic conditions, especially if a "Greece" national, state, county or city debt default situation comes to pass, or expenditures like another large war occurs.
Finally, if a local housing market changes significantly it is possible to go underwater, even without climate change. In which case, people get trapped and may lose their homes. There are also legal, quasilegal and extralegal foreclosure risks which can wipe away equity.
According to climate models, much arable farmland will be destroyed by climate change. There will be increasing pressure for protein and calories from all sources. Perhaps whales could be domesticated. If not, rapid changes in ocean energy absorption and chemistry threaten the entire food chain.
Another long-term consideration is industrial protein manufacturing to skip the risks and mess of CAFOs in Brazil and Texas, and fish feeding operations like the horrible fish farms throughout the world from Thailand to Norway. It maybe possible to greatly reduce the risk of a global pandemic if animals and people aren't kept in excesssively close proximity.
Megafauna doesn't have much hope in the Holocene extinction event. One only need to look at the odd survival of avocados which were likely to have died out as humans likely killed their primary seed distribution omni or herbivores. There is little causal data, but it's a contributing factor.
Holocene extinction will likely continue until the entire planet collapses, humans die out or kill everything that isn't or cannot be domesticated. There is simply too much energy already absorbed forcing climate change to be reversed even by redirecting all GDP into geoengineering... Greenland and Antarctica will melt over a thousand years, sea levels will rise 100 m (~300 ft).
It's an incomplete charade. Feel free to wear noise-canceling headphones, sunglasses and a hat and close the door, the needy jerks will still suckle attention for their time-sucking, futility from all directions... the Mormons, Amway distributors, recruiters, parties, the help me move a couch, help me do this and that, on and on.
It's better to be a "grayman:" blend-in by being as boring, generic and forgetable as possible. Disappear, not seek to social climb, because that will only attract different sorts of "stalkers" whom also will have demands.
It's possible you may not have cultivated the right impression. It took me a while to figure out the psychological aspect of it and achieve the "I'm busy and I have things going on" look, but once I hit the sweet spot, the before and after difference was astounding. When I relocated to another country and a different professional and social circle, it was like I was perceived to be a completely different person, even though my actual behavior and personality had only been slightly adjusted.
I essentially molded my behavior on that of people who I myself perceived to be busy and "important". In some cases, I wasn't even consciously aware that I treated some people with more respect and others with less (those who showed the same accommodating behavior I did, or worse) until I critically examined my relationship with them. It worked like a charm.
The most encouraging development was that after while I actually became a person with "things going on". Of course, this was only the natural progression of increased confidence, focus and free time.
From your perspective, what specific traits or responses did you cultivate to give off the impression you mention? Which were most important for changing other people's perception of you?
A lot of it is hard to explain in a useful way because I learned it through imitating more charismatic people. I recommend applying this method yourself as there is likely no substitute.
I would say the single most effective response was to change the way I responded to people via electronic means. You have to artificially delay and shorten your responses (whether through emails or text messages/chat apps) and interact much more sporadically in some contexts (for instance, greatly decreasing the volume of your social media presence while not disappearing altogether). The first is common (even basic) knowledge for anyone younger than 35, and the second is a little less obvious but no less significant. It works in both a social and professional context, and I've seen it work for people of all ages, from my elderly boss to some of my friends in their twenties. Ironically by responding to a bunch of comments here I've clearly not followed this rule of thumb.
The most effective general trait was to conceal any trace of eagerness and idleness, while at the same time being present and in the moment. Being aloof and relaxed while at the same time not pushing people away completely. This is also common knowledge, but hard to apply consistently.
It sure looks silly and duplicitous when typed out like this (and it is!) but it works.
>You have to artificially delay and shorten your responses
Delaying responses in a professional setting can hamper your actual productivity though – and appear inattentive or disrespectful, not busy.
For one, there is a general reciprocity of responsiveness, i.e., the faster you respond to them, the faster they'll respond to you. And of course, that's relative. They won't necessarily mimic your response time, but your time will affect where their responses are in their normal range of response time.
I've witnessed this firsthand numerous times. A colleague will complain Bob takes days to respond, whereas I typically get a response the same day – and the inverse too. It's not hard data, but the pattern seems true.
The other part is that I see no real benefit in delaying a response. I happen to be in a legitimately busy phase right now, but I still try to be fairly responsive. The nuance is that my quick responses are sometimes just me saying that I'll respond in depth by the end of the day/week/whatever and to please let me know if a response is needed sooner.
I can imagine scenarios where that's not appropriate, but in general, that approach makes more sense to me. It still communicates that you're busy but doesn't artificially delay things or unintentionally disrespect people.
There's a book called "The Like Switch" which is written by a former FBI behaviorist who has devoted his career to answering questions including this specific one. It has specific answers to your question complete with studies and war stories to back it up. Fun reading!
The most common annoyance is the social ritual demand of being in a coffee shop and some fool asks others to watch their computer. Refuse by saying "No I may have to leave soon. Invest in a laptop lock."
Oops, hit logout on that throwaway account. Bye-bye, religious flame wars. ;)
Support is what it is, and it's a two-way street.
Most engineers usually don't have customer support or sales experience, and so don't have the experience to triage and communicate pro-socially. (I sold software as a high-school job and also had my own consultancy at 17.) It's important to push outside one's comfort-zone when young (or old) to acquire skills that will be vital later on.
Post the policies, requirments and desires in contributing.md promenently. (I think a CoC is redundant and tyrannical SJWing.) Setting expectations and not making promises is important.
Finally, there is a cost to FOSS on both supply and demand sides. I just had some company fork the repo of a project I fixed, make a pointless PR and then offer no contributions in a grsec-theft-style way.
PS: Subversion has a great talk about defending the community.
If he was going to invest millions in this project, you'd think he'd at least look into safety certifications, insurance, engineering design review, etc. first to make sure it was both safe and met annoying clipboard auditor's regulatory requirements?
may be, or may be not. However, does it really matter how long the browser takes to start when you don't ever really close the browser (but only the tabs)?
As someone that likes the stated Mozilla mission and always wished them the best, I unfortunately have to agree with /BrailleHunting about Firefox performance on Mac OS.
Not only does FF take a while to start up but when it is loading a mildly heavy page or even after updating, it can freeze up for several (as in 10-20) seconds.
Damn. I tried switching back to Firefox with the assumption that these issues were fixed. After using it for the past few days, it really 'felt' dog-slow, but I assumed it was just prejudice on my end :-/.
Huh. Doesn't happen to me. I'd suggest using about:memory to see if you have a leaky tab. In my case, it used to be that my FB and Twitter tabs both leaked a lot. I stopped leaving Twitter open and FB (or Firefox) seems to have fixed their problem.
Yeah, I tried that. the about:memory usage reported is much lower (and strikes me as more reasonable).
I use an unload tab extension so currently there should be no 'open' tabs. Memory usage is at 1.5Gb though. It doesn't seem to go much higher or lower, though, so could it be that FF just takes/keeps the RAM it can get and doesn't bother to unload stuff?
It's also true that my MacBook has become slower in general since I updated to the latest MacOS, so perhaps it's not FF fault. Still, very annoying.
A bowser isn't a Sun box. In the real world, browsers and computers restart occasionally. Also, opening a new tab in FF hangs everything for several seconds whereas in Chrome and Safari it's still responsive. It's like FF is doing everything on the main event queue synchronously.
Numbers. Even with a top-tier SSD and 16 GiB of fast RAM starting cold (with minimal, necessary plugins):
FF: 25s
Safari: 13s
Chrome: 8s
Without plugins, hot restart (absolutely worthless):
FF: 5s
Safari: 3s
Chrome: 2s
Using FF UX is like replacing an SSD with an HDD.
FF has a nice mission, but it doesn't matter if it's not better than the others, which includes both being usable and fast, in addition to privacy and security.
Conclusion: FF is nice in theory, but not currently usable in practice unless you enjoy wasting your time.
I mean, I have my browser and computer restart one 1-2 times a day, and I'd still prefer 25 seconds of startup vs losing functionality like close tabs to the right. I routinely end up with windows with 20-40 tabs when I'm researching an issue and will want to close all but a handful when I've found the information I need. Other people definitely use browsers differently than me, but it's FF is not useless in practice for everyone
Because "old" is "bad." Throw away everything that makes people happy and start with reinventing the wheel. Also, corporations are slow, unresponsive and inconsiderate because incompetent people can hide and also bureaucracy.
Hard work, being good does rarely equates with reward... those are worker-bee values. Gotta do those and assure minimizing getting screwed... that's capitalist values.
Depression - Examine heirarchy of needs: Sufficient exercise, sleep, nutrition, social interaction and maybe medication if CBT doesnt work. Feeling not depressed is like a release from constant internal judgement, cloud of doom, negativity spectacles. For some people, it's only temporary, situational and existential to change one's agenda; for others, there is a genetic component which causes permanent, unrelenting major depression which is unlikely to be addressed without finding a suitable medication.
Transistion to a social venture - Setup a school or hospital in Botswana or Somaliland, or join the Peace Corps. There is plent of work that needs doing. Teach, mentor and/or build something that builds people ready for tomorrow.