I'm 40 right now and just started my first real career-type job this year. At 39 I was still a co-op student. It's honestly fine. The world is changing and it's way more common for "adult learners" to be part of the co-op, intern, and new hire cohorts. Most of the older ones are admittedly in their 30s, but I knew a guy that was starting over in his 50s and it was fine.
That's not to say getting a career will stop you from having miserable thoughts. I'm not sure why it's the case, but some people are just more miserable than others. I fantasized deeply about blowing my brains out all morning, for example, just because I had double-booked two clients in the morning and didn't know how I was going to handle it--luckily one of them cancelled, so I'll live to see another day.
In other words, a career might not solve all your problems. Many people here have suggested therapy, and though I don't personally believe in therapy as I think it's a way to enforce compliance to an increasingly dysfunctional society, it's probably the right advice for both you and also me.
Therapy aside, I would like to give you advice about how to salvage your resume after more than a decade out of the workforce.
The key to this is community colleges that have work placements. Here in Canada, those are called co-ops and they are a really good deal. If you do everything right, and get all the bursaries available, you'll likely make a small profit on your college career, rather than lose money--but that's in Canada, and it could be different in other countries.
The great thing about co-ops is that they put applicable experience on your resume where you had none before(1). And if you need more, many community colleges also have additional year-long certificates co-ops (in Canada they are called graduate certificates) that can give you even more applicable work experience.
After just two years and 3 co-ops, all my NEETING days had finally disappeared and my resume now looks stacked.
Something that is important, however, is you pick something that actually has jobs. That narrows down your choices quite a bit, and it's mostly going to be IT related, but it could also be trade related, like a line man or even getting your CDL (commercial truck drivers license).
I would even suggest not going into IT, if your battling with your own mind, as it requires a lot of mental fortitude to consider systems and code and humans not doing what you thought they would do--that's a big trigger for the miserable among us, I suspect.
I would actually suggest lineman instead. Think of the freedom and the fresh air and the lack of clients. It's not such a bad future, once you dig into it. And please don't do anything stupid. There's still lots of life to live.
1--It's also a different hiring process than finding a regular job, and it's understood that you don't yet have experience when you talk with potential employers.
I think it might be an allusion to alchemy. Basically, the alchemists believed that ash (what was left after burning something) was the soul of all things...And-- this is where my complete lack of understanding about science shows-- I'm pretty sure Ash has lots of carbon? It's, you know, poetic. Many have claimed that poems are the "language of paradox" so it's okay for it to be a little non-literal. My interpretation of it, though, is that the soul is something impure that you must burn away, or maybe that the soul is polluted by our own words and behavior. It's definitely not meant to be scientifically accurate.
"Ticketmastered" is one heck of a verb! It honestly strikes fear into my heart to think what else might soon be "ticketmastered" in the future. Hopefully it at least affords opportunity to create a counter-resistance that champions "anti-tickemastering" legislation.
>Their methods are many, varied and wackily named. A “death cross” is when a short-term moving average of an asset’s price falls below a long-term moving average.
I think the author is a little overly skeptical here. A moving average is by no means voodoo black magic, it's actually very simple. You take the price over the last x periods, for example 50 days, and find an average. Then you do the same with a different amount of periods, say 200 days, and then you compare that to the price. I think it's reasonable and useful to make inferences based on these three pieces of data. Is the price under the two averages? If yes, then it's likely a little low right now and might go up. Is the price way over the average price? If yes, it could go down. That, to me, is a reasonable analysis of data.
Taking it a little further, if the shorter period average is going down way faster than the longer period average, does that indicate something? Maybe that the price has been going down faster recently compared to the average of the longer period of time. Is that not a useful observation to make? If the short term average is going down so fast that it crosses the long term average, and the price is way above the two, isn't that a useful bit of information to know(that's a death cross). Perhaps you don't want to bet your entire life savings on this information, but it's also an exaggeration to claim that finding averages has no statistical merit.
If you then look into things, you'll find a lot technical indicators are derived from simple statistics and especially averages. Consider the very popular MACD, or Moving Average Convergence Divergence. A lot of people like that one, including myself, and it's made some people at least a little bit of money.
For me technical analysis is like the icing on the top of a very tasty fundamental analysis cake. You don't want a cake that's only icing, but if you do get the icing just right, then you can sell your cake for quite a bit more money.
More complicated averages do play a role in legitimate analysis of random walk processes, but taking fixed-window averages and comparing them to one another is effectively useless.
I worked as a quant trader at one point. I think there’s something to be said for technical analysis.
The simplest thing you can do is chase returns. Maybe you do that by looking at assets that have yielded large returns over the past N days. If you do so using total returns (i.e. price appreciation plus dividends, coupons, or whatever) that will bias you towards high yield bonds and high-risk equities. History says that’s honestly not a bad strategy.
If you decide you want to be less prone to buying high-yield assets that usually pay out but that could crumble at a moment’s notice, the next-simplest thing you can do is ask whether an asset has produced a good return relative to its long-term history. There are all sorts of reasons this could happen: maybe it’s a stock in a sector that recently became popular. Or maybe interest rates are falling and it’s a long duration bond.
In any case, it’s not obviously a bad idea to buy assets with recent good performance. “Hop on the bandwagon” works ok as an investment thesis IMO.
The key is that you operate in as many markets as possible and let diversification do the hard work for you. If you eke out a small edge that works across markets, on average you’ll do ok.
That’s my 2c on the systematic technical trading mentality. You don’t need to swallow it wholesale, but I don’t it’s fair to characterise texhnicL traders as a bunch of swivel-eyed loons either.
> Maybe you do that by looking at assets that have yielded large returns over the past N days.
So what is the performance of a technical analysis trading bot using such a simple algorithm for making buy and sell decisions? I don't trust myself to trade with discipline like that but I would totally trust software to do it for me.
I've observed that technical analysis is great when the price is simply oscillating. Plenty of money to be made in that back and forth... The problem is at any moment something can screw up the pattern. Maybe someone comes and places places a massive order worth hundreds of millions and the unexpected change in price wipes out any profits. A bot can probably close the position before it's too late but I'm only human.
>taking fixed-window averages and comparing them to one another is effectively useless
Is it really that simple? I'll fully admit that most of my understanding of the stock market is based on intuition and reading books with flashy titles. In other words, I'm far above the moving charalatan average in most aspects of my life, and you also sound like you might actually know what you're talking about based on how definitive your answer is. If you also, for example, back-test a moving average strategy it usually ends up terrible I've noticed--either making almost no money or losing money.
Yet, I really like watching the stock market. It's my favorite hobby in fact. It certainly feels like a death cross is going to be a bad time when it happens, but maybe the truth is more complicated then the cryptic silly lines I gain so much joy from.
You might already know this, but the stock market death-crossed around January and then it went down for a long time after that. But it also doesn't always go down so dramatically every time there is a death cross. I'm not keeping accurate tallies on the whole thing, but it seems like it's often bad when those two lines cross and often good when they cross in the opposite direction--the so-called "golden cross". I did actually put a little money on a stock because it golden-crossed recently and it went way up today, which was pretty exciting news. And I'm also avoiding a lot of stocks because they are about to death-crossed or just have recently on the weekly charts, but you know, I can also understand how the language I'm using might be mistaken for a seance organized by a bunch of teenagers dressed like vampires.
Mostly I listen to smart people like Warran Buffet and buy value stocks with good p/e, price-to-book, lots of equity, less debt, good earnings etc. It would be silly not to listen to the richest man in the world about what kind stocks to buy. Yet, it still feels like there's something else there, even if my little hobby is about as realistic as playing a round of magic the gathering. It's, you know, my little hour of make believe, that I put some money into in order to escape my otherwise mundane and factual existence.
Yes, I had to move for a job this year and the rent is basically unsustainable. I went from paying $500 a month to paying $1500 a month. After taxes, that's half my pay. I know that it's not exactly all the fault of inflation. The town I was moving from is very poor, whereas this one is a little more well-off, but even two years ago a similar apartment would have been around $800. The real killer is cars, though. I'm driving a 20 year old car and I'm terrified of it not working, because I simply can't afford to buy another car with the way inflation has changed the price of cars. All I can think about is once this car dies, there's no hope. This is my first time having a middle-class $65k IT salary and I feel less wealthy than I was as a starving artist 10 years ago.
I almost told my job that I simply couldn't do it because of housing and suspect we are leading into catastrophic employment shortage. Similar to how the climate is cooled temporarily by short-term weather patterns, I think our society will be temporarily "saved" by the recession, but when the economy starts running back at full there will be regions where you simply can't hire people to do certain jobs and any executives who cut jobs now will actually bankrupt their entire business a few years from now. I resent the situation I'm in every single day and do not feel like the extra work and responsibility is worth the compensation. I dream every day of being laid-off and will gladly walk away from the whole thing once my contract is up. There needs to be incentive to continue and I just don't really see that any longer.
I’m in full agreement with you and this is something I talked about before the 2009 implosion as well.
I’ve received a couple of job offers in San Jose for positions that require a significant education and skill but won’t even cover a mortgage once everything is taken into account. I really think they will either be forced to raise their offers or hire a dwindling pool of already established locals.
This might be true, and I'll admit that I didn't read the article, but I would add that not everything can be explained by economic efficiency. For example: poems--a really bad use of your time (think of the opportunity cost), drawings from your 6 year daughter--almost worthless on the resale market, a ticket for free hugs--completely unsustainable business model. But you know, sometimes it's good just to be a human, with memories of other humans doing human things. Naps, too, are bad for business, but somehow I never regret taking one.
This must be one of the most awful sentences I've ever read. There is so much stink crammed into so few words, that I'm actually slightly in awe of how terrible it is. There are so many ways its bad that it feels like a rich knot of bad actions that you could unravel for a whole day and never be bored. At the same time, one of the biggest headlines today is about how Zuckerberg thinks WFH is wrong. I'll tell you something: this is is what's wrong. The people involved in whatever this was should be the ones to be fired most of all.
>This may be the beginning of the end for what Silicon Valley calls "tech"
There's something about the way you phrased this that just made me just realize there's a very real possibility that the internet could turn into television part two. If you think about the most popular platforms, they are mostly video and now the other very popular ones are trying to follow in kind. There's also all the streaming platforms that are not really thought of as the internet, but work basically the same. It really might be that the internet as we think of it--text based--might be a bit of a niche interest (not that this is necessarily a bad thing).
>There's something about the way you phrased this that just made me just realize there's a very real possibility that the internet could turn into television part two.
How? I can enter any URL I want and go to any page I want. Anyone can start a website, and I can effortlessly visit it.
Does not seem at all comparable to being locked into what some bosses at a cable/satellite TV/TV channel company decide you have access to, at the time they say you can access it. With no ability to upload.
Boggles my mind how. Unless it is an arts and crafts or mechanical or some other hands on video, it is so inefficient to watch someone talk rather than just read the transcript.
It's well known that not everyone does best with text. It's why most college lectures have a text/notes, a lecture, and a discussion component. Some value the interactivity of the discussion, some the audio of the lecture, and others the text itself. For the longest time the internet mostly gave value to people who preferred to interact in text. Now the internet is wide open to give value to people who prefer interacting in discussion, video, audio, and more.
I do. My time is valuable. And text is also much easier to archive for future reference.
It's also much easier to skip through parts in a written document because you can see the context before and after easily on a written text. Whereas with video you have this kind of catch up every time you skip.
It’s not the only difference. If I think along with a video/audio, I lose tracks quickly and have to rewind, but there is no obvious cue to where. Text has a fundamental property of being in sync with whatever level of attention I’m paying to its parts. Talk doesn’t have it.
TikTok and IG are mostly for entertainment not for learning, not sure how efficiency apply. Also we are talking about an instant stream of short clips, not old school YT where launching a video requires clicking and waiting.
Human attention generally isn't zero sum like that, so I've always been puzzled by this perceived "war" against text on the internet. People who previously didn't want to interact in text probably only used the internet sparingly or only used the internet for certain tasks. I've always been great at interacting with texts but had a strict rule not to try to learn mechanical skills on the internet and checkout picture books from the library, or better yet ask an experienced friend/professional. Now I can pop up Youtube and find out how an electrician changes outlets in a home. I now strictly do more things on the internet.
> Human attention generally isn't zero sum like that
How so? There's only 24 hours in a day, and so many things to do in them. During those hours, one can pay attention to multiple topics but even then, the time limit means only so many details and thinking time can be acquired during them.
TBH, for me this is already happening. I am mostly using Youtube as a source of news and information. News, there are many local news services of places that I lived in that I can't watch on "normal" TV and can now enjoy in this way.
Summary of sport events check). Opinion panels on video games and movies (check)
The discovery algo is still terrible. But the content is there.
I agree. I find the name off-putting too, and they have also embossed the product with name in big bold letters. If they like it, more power to them, but I would honestly be hesitant to own this trackball because of the logo on it.
Specialty mice aren’t quite as image-focused as social media, but it does give Mastodon’s “toot” a run for its money. There’s also a fine line between not being marketing-focused and deliberately sneering at the sensibilities of folks who culturally associate less with FOSS culture. Some day he might admit to himself that clinging to his juvenile sense of humor kept his product out of people’s hands and cash out of his pocket. The number of upvotes this product gets on HN indicates he should be selling a ton of them but I’ve only seen one or two comments from owners.
I would say record yourself speaking and then listen back to it. It will take a little bit of time to get over the discomfort of it, but you'll be happy you did once you get used to it. Not only will it improve your ability to speak, but it can also have added therapeutic benefits (not real medical advice :). The reason why this can be helpful is because you notice that, though it might feel like you are stammering while speaking, you are actually more eloquent than you realize. The small pauses are actually not that noticeable and you are already more coherent than you realize.
That's not to say getting a career will stop you from having miserable thoughts. I'm not sure why it's the case, but some people are just more miserable than others. I fantasized deeply about blowing my brains out all morning, for example, just because I had double-booked two clients in the morning and didn't know how I was going to handle it--luckily one of them cancelled, so I'll live to see another day.
In other words, a career might not solve all your problems. Many people here have suggested therapy, and though I don't personally believe in therapy as I think it's a way to enforce compliance to an increasingly dysfunctional society, it's probably the right advice for both you and also me.
Therapy aside, I would like to give you advice about how to salvage your resume after more than a decade out of the workforce.
The key to this is community colleges that have work placements. Here in Canada, those are called co-ops and they are a really good deal. If you do everything right, and get all the bursaries available, you'll likely make a small profit on your college career, rather than lose money--but that's in Canada, and it could be different in other countries.
The great thing about co-ops is that they put applicable experience on your resume where you had none before(1). And if you need more, many community colleges also have additional year-long certificates co-ops (in Canada they are called graduate certificates) that can give you even more applicable work experience.
After just two years and 3 co-ops, all my NEETING days had finally disappeared and my resume now looks stacked.
Something that is important, however, is you pick something that actually has jobs. That narrows down your choices quite a bit, and it's mostly going to be IT related, but it could also be trade related, like a line man or even getting your CDL (commercial truck drivers license).
I would even suggest not going into IT, if your battling with your own mind, as it requires a lot of mental fortitude to consider systems and code and humans not doing what you thought they would do--that's a big trigger for the miserable among us, I suspect.
I would actually suggest lineman instead. Think of the freedom and the fresh air and the lack of clients. It's not such a bad future, once you dig into it. And please don't do anything stupid. There's still lots of life to live.
1--It's also a different hiring process than finding a regular job, and it's understood that you don't yet have experience when you talk with potential employers.