When I looked up the laws in my state it maxes at about 1/3 of what I currently make. UI works well if you're within a certain salary range but going above that can make it extremely painful. With what UI would pay, I'd be bringing in barely enough to pay my mortgage and utilities forget about anything else. My house is actually pretty average to low end for the area I live in too so it's not like I'm living way better than the typical homeowner in the area. It certainly doesn't help that I'm the only income source for me and my wife.

As someone working at a company that does 2 of those 3 things I'd like to modify "listen to your concerns" to "listen to your concerns and actually consider/act on them". Listening is easy, actually doing something is difficult.

Yup, that's already part of the plan but thanks for the advice.

I'm going through this exact thought process right now. I plan to get a job and leave my current employer with no notice. The reasons are many but the company (and the leaders in particular) have systematically disrespected and upset everyone on the technical side of the company. The only bridges I'd care about burning would be with the very people supporting me in my decision to leave without notice. Everyone's looking for a way out.

I think it all really depends on why you're leaving. If the company isn't respecting you as a professional I see no reason to give them professional courtesy in kind. I feel like the whole idea of "acting professional" is something that frequently supports a system that holds up corporations at the expense of people. That's honestly not something I can agree with.

I fully agree with this. I frequently try to hire people and a vast majority of the applicants are abysmal. I filter resumes by looking for evidence of some degree of programming experience. That removes a ton of applicants that just apply for every job they see. Then on the phone interview I ask them to code a CS 101 level problem and almost all of them fail that too. This is when I'm looking for somebody that has the basics and potential to become good. I can't imagine how tough hiring must be when you're looking for more senior level people. I should also note that many of the people failing my interviews have 5+ years of industry experience supposedly.

You'd be hiring and firing an awful lot of people if you were hiring purely because they claim to be good. If there's one lesson I've learned from interviewing people it's that most of them don't know their own strengths and weaknesses. Most people either lie about their abilities or don't actually know their own abilities. When I interview people I end up filtering out 90+% of them from a fairly simple coding test. If people aren't taking a chance on you that means you don't interview well or there's something wrong with your resume (depending on where you get filtered out). I think that most "soft" interview questions are completely worthless and I don't even bother asking them. When I interview someone I ask them about their past experience and ask enough questions to make sure they aren't just BSing about things they've worked on. After that they get a coding test that's a simplified version of the work I would expect them to do. I do a more extensive version of this for on site interviews.

I agree with your point but you're creating a false dichotomy. Sure, many people can't think very well. Those same people never seem to think "Hey, I can Google that". Someone with timely, intuitive thinking skills and access to instantaneous knowledge is a winning combination. Based on all evidence I've ever seen, people by and large are smart/stupid in roughly the same amounts pretty consistently throughout history. Most people are average and don't do much to help or hinder progress while a relative few continuously drive forward and fight against the ones actively trying to hold things back.

An obvious explanation would be selection bias. The ones that didn't listen "back in the day" are dead. You can't ever use an argument of the form "Me and my friends did X and we're fine" because you're obviously fine by the very fact that you survived. The proper way would be to really dig into gun death statistics. I don't have these in front of me and don't have the time to go looking right now. My guess is that the proportion of kids playing with guns today is roughly on par as the proportion in the past.

I wouldn't say that our moving is constant but we have moved twice in the past five years due to job relocation. Arguing that the root of the problem is somebody moving is completely ludicrous. I actually think that the primary cause of the problem is a point that you touched upon: government control. There are numerous stories of doctor's getting screwed because they mistakenly prescribed pain medication to somebody faking symptoms. This creates a culture of fear that causes doctors to be much less trusting. There is also in many cases a failure to address underlying problems. However, when you have an underlying issue and are seeing specialist after specialist to try and resolve that issue you shouldn't be left to suffer because you're unable to find the cause and a doctor is suspicious of your intentions.

I touched on this point elsewhere but most doctors are woefully ill-equipped to deal with strange cases. Their training is great for dealing with common problems but solving anything outside of that is pretty much blind luck. In my experience most doctors seem to have one or two pet theories that they look at before saying "Sorry, nothing I can do. Go see another specialist"

My wife has had a good relationship with a qualified pain specialist in the town we grew up in. After our frustration dealing with doctors in the new places we moved to we ended up driving 4 hours each way to continue visiting that same specialist. Unfortunately that specialist has just retired so we now have to try and find another one which is going to mean starting this horrible process all over again. The "profile" that seems to make doctors suspicious is saying you're in pain and asking for pain medication. If that's the behavior that makes people suspicious then the system is fundamentally broken.

While a lot of your points are valid one issue I have with the medical community in general (at least in the US) is that there is almost a default assumption of malingering. Pain in general is not taken very seriously in my experience and the doctor's seem to assume that you're just a drug addict looking for a fix. This causes severe problems for people that are genuinely in a lot of pain and have shown no tendency to become addicted to pain medication. My wife is a perfect example. Whenever we move to a new area it takes us forever to find a doctor that's willing to continue prescribing her the pain medications that she's been on for years for fears of addiction. She hasn't increased her dosage over time which is what you would expect out of an addict but that evidence is conveniently ignored. There's obviously an underlying cause but no one's been able to help us diagnose that root cause. Until that time it's just cruel to let somebody suffer because you fear that they might become an addict.

I think that tools like this should be great for strange medical cases (the "zebras"). As you mentioned there's too much for a person to keep in their head so the predominant idea is to always go for the more mundane/common causes of an issue. This frequently leads people (like my wife) to suffer for years because specialist after specialist proceeds to think of common causes. If you have something rare/odd you have to stumble across the doctor that happens to be familiar with whatever your rare condition is. A machine could compute a likelihood much more easily and say "Here are the potential conditions". Then it's easy to go down the list and start ruling things out as appropriate.

The ant workers/defenders wouldn't be the ones affected by this trap anyway. The breeding males do nothing but eat and mate. With ants evolution has stronger pressures on the colony as a whole than any individual ant

That's just messed up. I tend to use those expressions when I'm telling the truth but I don't really want to because it's going to make me look bad to some degree. i.e. "Honestly, I'm not really sure how to solve this problem"

Anthrax is natural too, I always make sure I get my daily dose.

I've never understood the idea that something natural is inherently better than something non-natural.

I'm also familiar with coursera.org and udacity.com These aren't textbooks but have a bunch of small video lectures in whatever course they're offering and may be worth looking into.