I feel seen. I can't stand drywall work - although I'll do a patch'n'texture that's too small to hire out if i absolutely have to. The folks who do drywall for a living are magicians that can knock out the job 5x faster than me, and 20x better. I'll pay all day.
Electrical on the other hand I find to be a blast. It's more a hobby than a chore, although there are some things I won't touch, like running conduit for lv or installing a sizable solar system. The pros are just so good at it.
Cars too - I'll change every fluid, do brake jobs, install short shift kits, dashcams, even got a windows VM running so I could use old software to read OBD-I codes on my old car. But timing or a top-end rebuild.. I leave that to the pros.
I think there's something to be said for doing like 80% of the things yourself even when you can afford more. It's so gratifying to do even a simple job and when it's done, it's done. It's so unlike most of our day-to-day that's full of multi-month efforts that depend on other people.
I once stumbled upon what I thought was a car show, but was actually an exhibition of miniature engines (!). Is this a thing? It seems really interesting and I'd love to build a miniature engine with my kids someday.
It just sucks. I get non-deterministic reactions from "turn off the lights" vs "turn off every light" vs "all lights off".. one of those phrases eventually works. I had to set up a custom action ("goodnight") to reliably do the thing.
If they focused on getting voice control for home automation perfect, it could be a real winner.
Small appliance repair is/used to be a thing, remember TV repair shops? Vacuum repair shops I still see around occasionally.
Problem is people buy a $25 hamilton beach blender that doesn't make any financial sense to repair but makes huge amounts of sense as an initial purchase. If you buy a $500 vitamix, you can keep it running forever with new parts, but that's the same price as 20 of the cheap blender. And blender technology isn't really advancing at a huge rate compared to, say, cell phones.
> And blender technology isn't really advancing at a huge rate
That's part of it, but also the vitamix and hamilton beach really have quite different capabilities. For most peoples usage, it doesn't matter much, but the vitamix (at least the core one) show their commercial kitchen background.
The real problem is that there isn't anything much between the $25 one and the $350 one. From a technical point of view, there isn't any reason someone couldn't produce a $90 one that was robust and repairable but less powerful etc. than the vitamix. I dont' think i've ever seen one - if you do find a $90 one it's essentially the $25 one in a fancier looking shell.
The market, as they say, has spoken. In most cases you are better off going for commercial suppliers if you want longer life, repairability, etc., but often the only things on offer there are way overkill for e.g. a home kitchen.
Small appliance repair is alive and well in parts of the world where it is easy to access parts supply close to the source (i.e. you are paying roughly small batch wholesale prices).
> I dont' think i've ever seen one - if you do find a $90 one it's essentially the $25 one in a fancier looking shell.
I think this is a huge problem. If you don't know a good brand (or can't trust the brand), why risk the $350 one when you can buy 14x $25 ones for the same cost and maybe get lucky?
Take the humble toaster for example. Are there some nice, well built, repairable ones that can (possibly) make the toast of angels? Sure, I've heard good things about Dualit[1]. But I bought a generic Black and Decker toaster for $15 over 20 years ago and it continues to work just fine. I would have had to replace that toaster roughly every 3.5 years in order to get over the cost of the cheapest Dualit toaster. It's not fancy and not consistent, but it is functional, and I can more or less guarantee that walmart will be selling it or a similar item for decades. Buying a more expensive "repairable" toaster from a small brand is just a risk that doesn't make a lot of sense, even before you factor in that repair shop labor is going to be in the $40-50/hr range.
A large company I work for declined to buy licenses from a supplier that had this clause. From my understanding it's not really legal - or at worst it's a gray area - but the language is just too risky if you're not looking to be the test case in court.
Exactly. It’s not about whether it’s enforceable, it’s about the fact that a sketchy license indicates that they might not always operate in good faith.
It's the typical case for Bay Area-HQ tech companies, at essentially all levels for Tier-1 companies, higher levels at Tier-2/3 companies, and specialist roles beyond that.
"software engineering" doesn't print money any more than being "in finance" does, you'll make more or less depending on what company you do it for.
I have kids, my older is 11 and reads almost whenever she can. She loves to read herself to sleep at night.
We've taken her to the library since she was a baby where we'd find new baby books to read to her. Over time, we stopped picking out books for her and let her wander the isles, picking whatever seemed interesting to her. She usually chooses a wide assortment of things from comics to YA fiction.
My son is much more interested in screens, but he still reads a lot. Whenever we restrict the screens his next default is to read.
We read a lot to both of them as infants & toddlers. We have a couple bookshelves worth of books in the house, but honestly they spend almost their whole reading time on new-to-them library books. We've hit the library checkout limit pretty much every time we go! And it's no waste - every book is returned read.
> if you have a kid who doesn't have an existing strong reading habit, how do you find books they'd be interested in?
I'd start by taking them to the library and letting them explore. Chances are they'll find something that interests them!
Sort of. The Stabilization Act of 1942 (act of Congress) authorized FDR's Executive Order 9328 [0], which was a price/wage stabilization Order meant to keep the economy stable during WWII.
Because companies could no longer compete via wages, they began competing with fringe benefits -- health insurance being chief among them. It's been that way ever since.
> average consumer is with their health insurance provider for about 3 years
Are they? That sounds right for how long they're with an employer, but if I move companies I'm probably going with the same insurance carrier under the new company's plan. The total list of carriers [0] is pretty dang small (and not every licensed company is doing new policies).
Even if what you say is true it seems like reciprocity would make up for it - Company A pays and Company B benefits like you say, but for every situation like that there's a situation where Company B pays and Company A benefits.
> That sounds right for how long they're with an employer, but if I move companies I'm probably going with the same insurance carrier under the new company's plan.
At least middle sized companies seem to change insurers commonly enough that both my wife and I have had our employers change said insurers in the middle of our employment.
Electrical on the other hand I find to be a blast. It's more a hobby than a chore, although there are some things I won't touch, like running conduit for lv or installing a sizable solar system. The pros are just so good at it.
Cars too - I'll change every fluid, do brake jobs, install short shift kits, dashcams, even got a windows VM running so I could use old software to read OBD-I codes on my old car. But timing or a top-end rebuild.. I leave that to the pros.
I think there's something to be said for doing like 80% of the things yourself even when you can afford more. It's so gratifying to do even a simple job and when it's done, it's done. It's so unlike most of our day-to-day that's full of multi-month efforts that depend on other people.