For boring but sound financial advice, I recommend Dave Ramsey. His book “the total money makeover” changed my financial life in my mid 20’s.
I sleep much better being completely debt-free and knowing that I’m on-track to retire well even if I never hit it big or get another raise in my life.
I migrated from iCloud to FastMail about 5 years ago, and I'm very happy with FastMail. They do support YubiKeys, as well as TOTP.
Forwarding everything from the old account to the new account made it pretty easy so I only had one inbox to check, and I could take my time migrating all of my accounts to the new address. I also created a rule to sort things coming from my old account to a folder so I knew which accounts and subscriptions and whatnot I still needed to update to the new address. To this day I still have the old email forwarding, and occasionally something real comes through on it.
Fastmail also makes it easy to add other addresses on custom domains, so I have several email addresses that all deliver to the same inbox, with rules to sort them into the right folders.
It's probably because it's a business account and Google and LinkedIn have sold my address, but fwiw I receive about 100x more spam in my work gmail than I do in my personal fastmail account.
I don't think this was a bad approach; it may be better than the alternatives.
The "rip the band-aid" approach, while impersonal, avoids days of ambiguity over who is impacted by layoffs and who is not. I have been through a mass layoff; the most stressful part was waiting to find out who was impacted. I'd much rather know immediately, even if that means notifying me with everyone else at the same time, in a Zoom call.
As long as each employee receives a 1-1 follow-up call with someone in HR to review the details and get a chance to ask any questions, I think this was a sensible way to approach a horrible reality.
The problem is it's impossible to schedule 900 layoff meetings to occur at the same time, so you end up with layoffs ongoing for multiple days or weeks. Of course everyone knows what is going on within the first hour, so then there is a long period where all productivity stops while everyone waits anxiously to find out whether they should keep working or just pack up.
Whether leadership deserves criticism for getting to a point where such a huge layoff is necessary is another topic altogether.
I'm confused... clicking on the PDF source data (Data through Jul 16, 2020 verified as of Jul 17, 2020 at 09:25 AM), it clearly shows a 13.4% overall positivity rate. Where is the 31.1% coming from?
There was a period circa 2014-2015 that LastPass was pretty glitchy on Firefox in MacOS, but for quite a while I've had no problems at all with it - it just works. Even my non-technical wife has no issues with it, and sharing secure passwords is a breeze.
Unlike carpentry, the quality of our tools (keyboard and monitor, specifically) don't affect the quality of our output.
I think in many cases, people hide the fact that they're not competent with high-cost professional tools, because laymen use it as a proxy for talent that they cannot evaluate.
I think that's also why many exceptional programmers just use a 5-year old laptop -- they don't need to compensate.
A day-trader having 12 monitors mounted on the wall doesn't make him profitable.
I had a 34" 4K monitor in 2019, and it was a mess in Windows 10. I sold it and picked up an ultra-wide, 38" 3840x1600 (~109 PPI) and I couldn't be happier. I agree that a "good" monitor is a necessity, but I disagree with OP that "good" = 4K 120 Hz.
With any legacy application, and even many modern ones, UIs were either fuzzy, or tiny, or a mix of the two, even with all of the Windows per-program custom high-DPI settings tweaked. The UX was not consistent enough to be enjoyable, so I ditched it.
Have you ever been convinced to re-read a horrible book you were forced to read in school, and discover that it's /brilliant/?
Have you ever been forced to re-read one of your favorite books on a strict deadline, and discover that it's a slog?
I've been paid for doing my hobby a couple times, and it quickly becomes work; I don't even enjoy those hobbies anymore.
My 2 cents:
Anything, when forced, is less enjoyable than when you're doing it just for enjoyment.
Don't kill a hobby by turning it into work.
Find tasks, types of work, etc. that you enjoy, and find a job that lets you do those things. It's still work, but most of the time you don't really notice it, and you don't kill a fun hobby.
I disagree with some of the advise on this thread so far. Scales are boring (I agree that you need them to get proficient, but if you start there, you’ll be bored to tears and give up before you get anywhere fun). Watching YouTube videos and trying to recreate what they’re doing is hard. Learning to read music from a human teacher is frustrating.
The traditional way to learn piano takes discipline, hours of slightly frustrating study and incredibly boring and repetitive practice. Though I tried a few times in my life to learn piano the way everyone said I should, I always found it mind-numbingly boring. Why does it have to be so damn hard?
I’ve only recently found a better way, and I’ve been learning faster, staying interested, and having way more fun than I ever did before.
(I know this sounds like a sales pitch, I’m not at all involved with the company, I’m just a happy customer and a big fan of their method.)
Basically the method hinges around software that turns playing a piano into a game. Similar to guitar hero, but where it leads you through a progression until you’re sight-reading the paper sheet music as you play. It makes it really easy to get started playing real music from day 1, then your excitement about your progress builds faster than the difficulty, so you stay interested.
Basically it inverts the learning. Play first, and learn reading music, notes, fingering, tempo, theory, etc as you go. It makes the whole process way less frustrating and way more fun.
The software looks straight out of 1998, and the DVDs are similarly a little silly - but it all works really well.
The DVDs are geared towards parents who have never played Piano, to teach their young kids how to play, while learning themselves. Watching the videos as an adult without kids, I sometimes feel a little silly playing along with a 4 year old, but since it works, I’m not complaining.
Generally, they explain the bit of music theory after you’ve been playing it for a while (ignorant to the fact that you were doing something deeply important to music), so by the time they explain the concept, it just makes sense - there’s no struggling to wrap your head around some obtuse concept that you don’t have a mental framework for yet.
Anyway - I highly recommend it. It’s not cheap, but so far it’s the best money I’ve spent on learning piano.
Flippa is decent, but there is a lot of garbage to wade through to find anything real. Empire Flippers is a little better, they vet the sites some before posting them. Bizbuysell.com is mainly focused on brick and mortar businesses, but there are some online businesses for sale there as well.
Having said that, finding a true "passive income" business that is profitable and someone wants to sell is challenging. Most of them (that I have found) end up being scams. Do your due diligence and scrutinize their income and expense reports, traffic figures, etc. I can usually "smell" when something isn't right.
I use Oppo PM-3's for just about everything right now; listening to music while working, gaming, travel, etc.
I got them because I wanted something that blocked external noise (I don't like the "pressure" feeling of active noise cancellation) and they came highly recommended from The Wire Cutter.
I consider them 'fine'. They're relatively comfortable for 2-3 hour stretches (after that, the lack of ventilation makes them start to get sweaty, even in cool rooms), they sound decent, and the build quality and carry-case are great.
On the minuses side, the clarity doesn't match my old Grado SR-80's, the noise blocking isn't as good as my Shure in-ear monitors, and the in-line mic is worse than what's on Apple's standard earbuds.
Bottom line, they're not worth the $400 price tag, but now that I have them, they're good enough that I'm not out looking for another pair.
I have to say, I'm not as impressed with them as The Wire Cutter review led me to believe I would be... and that has affected my opinion of The Wire Cutter. I probably could have bought a generic pair of closed-back headphones for $60 and been just as happy.
I know of at least two other people from small towns whose IQ and life stories are similar to those shared in the article. I think high IQ individuals becoming isolated, social outcasts is more common in small towns, where accelerated curriculums and gifted and talented programs are more rare.
If you know a highly gifted child, refer them to the Davidson Academy, a free public school for the profoundly gifted. http://www.davidsonacademy.unr.edu
The Davidson academy is free to attend, and they can coordinate providing IQ-appropriate curriculum and work to the child's school for students who cannot attend in-person. Finally, there are paid, online options as well.
A friend of mine works at Davidson, and they have elementary age kids taking physics classes alongside master's degree students. When they say "profoundly gifted", it's not hyperbole.
Getting gifted kids into programs where they are surrounded by people like them can go a long ways towards helping them learn social skills. They may never be socially normal in larger society, but they can find friends, meaning, and happiness that can lead to a productive and brilliant career and life.