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Hot take. It’s also untrue. Software developers overall are not millionaires.

I am discounting non-liquid assets like the main residence.


> I am discounting non-liquid assets like the main residence.

That's pretty unusual. Do you consider someone with $1.5M but no house considerably better off than someone with $500k and a $1M house?


Why are you discounting real wealth? I am a millionaire. If I spent my millions on buying a modest house in Palo Alto, does that mean I am no longer a millionaire? Have I lost all my wealth just by purchasing a home?


For the purposes of discussing security, counting the price of the residence is not very useful, assuming the discussion participants agree it is an “average” residence that meets minimum expected quality of life standards.

For the purposes of discussing quality of life, if the person values living in the place they are which is higher priced than most others, then the price of the residence could be useful.

I see no reason to include price of house if I were to sell it in my picture of my financial security because I have no desire to live elsewhere (or if I wanted to live somewhere more expensive).


Being able to hold a pen in your hand and write a note that looks legible is a fundamental skill. One should be able to write a message on a card that does not make the recipient want to puke or at least wonder if whether the author survived what looks like an obvious stroke. It’s a matter of self respect.


I still can't believe we're having an argument about whether kids should learn writing...


The contention is not about whether or not kids should be taught to write at all, but rather that if it makes sense to insist on putting more emphasis on developing the skill beyond the minimum needed to convey things in a casual setting.

Personally I feel that people who associate poor handwriting with a lack of self respect or a lack of interest in their work are being too judgemental. It isn't really meaningful that their grandfather, who grew up in a time when handwriting was the only option when not seated at a desk, thought clear handwriting was a matter of respect. To put the extent of the fundamental cultural change in perspective, in a class I was teaching earlier today, there was an incident of many students asking others for pens to sign an attendance sheet with because even if they do handwrite their notes, it's with a digital pen. Even I hadn't carried or owned a regular pen in many years, having only about a year ago bought some and decided to keep them in places I might need them so I don't have to go digging in the handful of times a year that I might actually need one.

Then there's the other issue that comes with making anything a matter of respect, where, as a child I had ended up with a somewhat 'custom' writing style that was a mix of both cursive and print due to frequently moving between countries which taught things differently. It was easily legible while still being fast enough to take notes with, but because it wasn't the "respectable" style, I got plenty of grief from teachers at the school even though they too insisted that any assignment of actual value be typed up and the handwriting was only for classroom notes which would end up in the bin at the end of the year anyway.

It's fine if you want to try to encourage your child to improve the quality of their handwriting, but telling them that they need to do it for respect is, in my opinion, an outdated idea on par with the previously common ideas about how being a lefty needed to be 'corrected'. Wanting to teach them to take pride in their work is good too, but, pride in one's work comes from the quality of the work, of which the handwriting is an increasingly miniscule part. A doctor shows pride in their work by providing the most effective care for their patients, not by writing an especially legible note.


A self respecting person would type anything meant to be read. You sign your name and that’s it.


But how is it working for exams, they are not digital here in Germany. And I had the most problems in my life at university because of my bad handwriting. Especially when nervous I had to do so many exams involving a lot of writing, which was horrendous. But I am also left-handed, forced to write right-handed in elementary school. After my Bachelor's I started to write left-handed. What a relief. But really, exams are the only reason I think it is still important to have a good handwriting. Nowadays at work I need it for white-boarding. Where even a good skill in sketching is useful.


He is not deflective. Your comments are rather dense. The orthodoxy of ‘changing frame’ and ‘putting it in a language they understand’ is layman drivel. It is not always possible to do so and it is overwhelmingly untractable if you eskew the fundamental reasons in a discussion with a non-expert that insists on technical justification and just doesn’t take your cookie-cutter time/money/competitive advantage talking points and can’t provide you with specifics that can be quantified.


It's the job of an expert to communicate their understanding of the world in a way that motivates non experts to make the correct the decision. If an expert isn't successful in this, they need to improve their methods of communication. Everything else is an excuse.


This presumes that the expert shouldn’t be the one making the decision.

Law firms are run by lawyers. The chief of surgery is a surgeon. Architecture firms are run by architects at the top.

Why is it that in IT it is expected that all management of IT is “non technical” to the point of not understanding what they’re hearing from direct reports!?

Would it be normal in your mind for a chemical plant foreman in charge of the process to not know what atoms are!?


What real life project only involves experts on specific field? Are you working on toy problems? Isn't there cost/benefit analysis to everything? If I understand something well, I can explain it to non-experts in understandable way. If I can't, then I probably lack full grasp of the topic


> I can explain it to non-experts in understandable way

Ok? But you are required to motivate a decision that is based on terms, conditions, probabilities, consequences that can only be encoded at knowledge-level A. When projected down to knowledge-level C, it sounds like "otherwise bad things might happen".

The jargon is not what matters. The logic of the decision is not meaningful or believable without knowledge of the "physics of the system" at level A.

Most people understand nuclear bombs in layman terms, and they understand them intuitively from watching videos and pictures. Without videos and pictures, no one would care.


Nuclear risk is about the reaction to somebody using a nuclear weapon, not the bomb itself being bad.


'Eschew' is probably the word you want instead of 'eskew'.


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