But I just mean making a spreadsheet calculating income/expense/savings by year until you are age 100. Of course, assumptions have to be made about inflation, investment earnings, payrates, and benefits.
Thinking about what huge sweeping world events happened from 1922 to 2022 and how it affected people around the world… for an ordinary person there’s really no point in making such a spreadsheet. (Well, unless you’re born in one of those filthy-rich elite families like the Rothschilds, who have all the power they need to plan ahead…) I mean, maybe it’s a good idea to plan a few years ahead to survive in a ruthless capitalist society, but other than that I really don’t see the point. Only a few of us are going to buy an actual damn house at this rate nowadays.
I think it’s best to think that (for the majority) our very moment of our life is contingent on the historical forces of the world, and there is no stable-enough historical tendency that we can exploit to calculate out our whole life trajectories.
>I mean, maybe it’s a good idea to plan a few years ahead to survive in a ruthless capitalist society, but other than that I really don’t see the point
The purpose is not to pinpoint whole life trajectories. Obviously predictions decades into the future are a crapshoot. But it does not cost anything to copy paste the formula down that many rows.
The purpose is to establish upper and lower bounds and adjust expectations properly. In the context of this thread, it does seem reasonable for a high schooler to be able to predict some spectrum of their quality of life if they were to pursue a PhD in <x> field.
Finding a partner, buying a home, having children, etc all happens within 10 to 20 years of high school. They can take their student loans, amortize them, and calculate if $70k/$100k/$120k/$250k per year will buy them the future they want. And they may decide that a PhD in whatever has too low of a probability of allowing them to achieve other goals they have, such as having kids or living in a certain region or owning a certain type of home.
And it goes beyond money. Kids should be taught to research or ask people what their day to day, month to month, year to year is like. A 16 year that wants to research medicine should get data from a 25/30/35 year old about what to expect, such as hours worked per week, vacation time, where the jobs are, job security, etc.
You know all kinds of things can happen during a PhD right? Many don't even make it to the end, some get burnt out and leave without a degree (along with their career prospects), some meet abusive professors, some find themselves in illness (bonus points if you are in America, don't know wtf is happening with their healthcare system), some find their advisor suddenly leave academia and their lab fucking disappears (which I have experienced), etc.
Anyways, I think planning decades into the future to get what you want with a spreadsheet is only possible from a petit-bourgeois "middle-class" standpoint. From David Graeber's paper "Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class" [0], he talks about what that mentality is:
> What being middle class means, first and foremost, is a feeling that the fundamental social institutions that surround one—whether police, schools, social service offices, or financial institutions—ultimately exist for your benefit. That the rules exist for people like yourself, and if you play by them correctly, you should be able to reasonably predict the results. This is what allows middle-class people to plot careers, even for their children, to feel they can project themselves forward in time, with the assumption that the rules will always remain the same, that there is a social ground under their feet. (This is obviously much less true either for the upper classes, who see themselves as existing in history, which is always changing, or the poor, who rarely have much control over their life situation.)
And guess what, that middle class is shrinking (since the things that welfare capitalism has promised are starting to not be true anymore, like if you work hard enough you can buy a house and start a family...) Many people in first-world countries have already been woken out from that fantasy.
I think we are talking past each other. I agree that life is volatile. And it is very lucky to be able to even plan a few years into the future.
But I do not think Graeber's quote is applicable here. The exercise of planning future cash flow can help you increase the quality of the bets you place (and/or adjust your expectations). Singular choices have no guaranteed results, but the sum total of choices can be influenced by gathering information about the world and keeping your models updated, allowing you to make choices where the odds are more favorable to you.
I don't think it's your mistake. It seems HN automatically removes certain leading/trailing words from titles so as to reduce clickbait but it doesn't seem to be very smart about it.
It gets annoying, because in cases like this it doesn't make sense, but in other cases it actually changes the meaning of the title. I honestly don't understand it given the prohibition against submitters changing the title.
I'd be much less annoyed by it if dang finally made it a pre-submit check (maybe with a checkbox "Overrule") like the "too long" check. But no, it seems to be important that the submitter has to check manually whether the title he just typed in is still there.
> When you turn a tree into a house you create value.
Of course, because the tree has no value, right? As long as you call things you don't care about "externalities" you can trivially prove anything is a positive-sum game.
I might just be biased by selective attention, but it seems like more and more of these are popping up lately.
I feel like we will eventually recognize a variant of Greenspun's Tenth Rule as common wisdom:
> Any sufficiently complicated build system or configuration management system contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Nix.
(Although to be honest it might make more sense to replace "Nix" with "Guix"...)
I think it’s a cyclic pendulum sort of thing. We crave the networking/herding effect. So we promote a bandwagon, and try to get everyone on the same. We get there and realize we’ve turned a trip to Starbucks into an Artemis launch. Frustrated that we’ve rediscovered you can’t please all the people all of the time, we race back to individual tooling, each doing one task and one task well, factionalized and repeated in hundreds of tribes. It’s lonely at this extreme and we crave the networking/herding… coda.
I tend to think about it differently: Some ideas get reinvented and simplified until only the idea is left. And the idea then seems so obvious to everyone that no one considers it necessary to have a reusable implementation. That isn't the same as NIH. It is sharing ideas rather than code.
was going to say the same thing - but for ansible.
an inventory file is literally a static list of pets in its simplest form, and with some simple convention you could have a directory per-host with any playbooks required. plus you have docs, community modules, etc.
I came to Ansible from Puppet, buying in to the claims I'd heard about Ansible being so much simpler ("it uses YAML for its config, which is so much simpler than configuring Puppet").
Turns out that, like Puppet, Ansible seems to have been congealed rather than designed, and it's a mess of inconsistent spaghetti code.
All the other config management systems I've tried, from Salt to Chef have exactly the same problem.
I'd be thrilled to find a config management system that actually was simple and elegant.
Ansible is like a fifth wheel on a car, since all of the configuration can be done inside of OS packages, and orchestration can be done via SSH (which is exactly how Ansible does it). Put those two together and Ansible is a solution to a non-existent problem.
Not by hand! With configuration packages in OS-native format!
1. When a system comes in, it is scanned and entered into the asset management database, which then triggers a process to enter the scanned MAC address into the DHCP, by generating a new DHCP configuration package.
2. the previous version of the DHCP configuration package is upgraded with the new DHCP configuration package.
3. the system is hooked up to the network and powered on.
4. the firmware is permanently reconfigured to boot in this order:
1. HD0
2. HD1
3. network.
5. since HD0 and HD1 are not bootable, the system boots from the network, whereby the infrastructure automatically provisions it with the standard runtime platform, which consists solely of packages in OS-native format, including configuration packages which configure things which all servers have in common.
6. as part of the automatic installation, the server is automatically installed with additional configuration packages based on which profile it is in, turning it into a specific application server.
7. the server comes up after automatic installation, and reports back to the infrastructure that it is ready to serve.
