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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
I'm in Brooklyn. This thread prompted me to check the Spectrum rates. I was on Time Warner Cable pre-merger, and with Spectrum just called and got a 100MB upgrade that costs me $300 less per year than I was paying. Call was easy/fast with good service. No upgrade fees, etc. And they offered me a technician appointment with a one-hour window within 24 hours. Just one experience, but clearly for this NYC consumer, I seem to be benefitting from the merger.
From Spectrum's Brooklyn rate card (link below):
Spectrum Internet 200/10 = $64.99
Spectrum Internet Ultra 400/20 = $89.99
Spectrum Internet Gig = $124.99
Looks like TWC had topped out at 300MB, and they charged about $110/mo
To me, the interesting thing about these survey results was not that they convinced me this was actually likely to happen, but rather to contemplate that 31% of Americans (and likely voters at that) could actually believe this is likely in the next 5 years.
What does that say about the state of America? As I noted in another comment, at least somewhat it probably says people aren't very conscious of the immensity of what a US civil war means. So that speaks to civics and educational issues, which are real and relevant.
But I would just say that in a society people's feelings matter, whether rational or irrational. Irrational feelings lead to real world outcomes all the time.
So even if you think that believing this outcome is likely in the next 5 years is extremely irrational, the fact that a significant proportion of the voting population could believe this has real-world implications.
I agree. There is some priming in the cadence of the questions.
It's also likely that given the state of civic knowledge and education in the country that respondents conflated something like "violence" or "minor fighting with a political tinge" to "civil war" without really understanding how immense of a thing a US civil war actually would be.
But still, to me, even the idea that a much smaller percentage of Americans (let's say 15%) could imagine a civil war happening in the next 5 years was shocking on its face, and worthy of awareness and discussion.
Mike from craftcoffee.com here. I love 3rd wave style coffee but that statement from the article is very misleading. This is a common trick that 3rd wave proponents pull all the time. They conflate "3rd wave" and "specialty", as Oliver did here, and then pretend that "specialty coffee" metrics are referring to only 3rd wave coffee. In actual fact, 3rd wave != specialty coffee. In reality, 3rd wave coffee is just a tiny fraction of specialty coffee. Specialty coffee includes Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Peet's, and many others like that. All those companies sell "specialty grade" coffee, which is a technical term that more or less means the beans score above a certain level when evaluated for defects. So when people quote the size or growth of specialty coffee, that's the pool of companies they are actually talking about. And in fact, depending on the source it's often unclear if those numbers include things like frapuccinos. There's very little data on the niche because it's so small that it doesn't make the top 25 or 30 sources of revenue or consumption in industry reports, but 3rd wave coffee certainly accounts for less than 1% of coffee consumed in the US. Blue Bottle has 25 cafes, Starbucks has 24,000.[1] Starbucks is worth $80B today. In aggregate, Blue Bottle + Stumptown + Intelligentsia + [any other locals you can think of] are likely worth less than $1B. So yeah, 3rd wave coffee is delicious and fun, but unfortunately it simply does not account for that level of consumption.
We've successfully convinced our two-year-old that unsweetened, carbonated water is "juice". She frequently goes to restaurants and is very excited to get "juice" from the bar, and considers it a special treat. Eventually this will surely fail when her friends can explain reality. But until then it's working great to avoid massive loads of sugar in her early years.