A very difficult aspect of indie game development is that the quality of the end product is easy to discern. We all can tell if someone creates a game that's got good graphics, sound, gameplay, is fun, etc. The indie developer who does all that has a great deal of skill in multiple areas. The harsh truth is that not everyone can be that good.

My daughter when she was around 6 years old loved to put on princess dresses and dance around singing. In her mind she looked and sounded like the cartoon characters in the movies.

One day, I pulled out an old VHS camera and set it up on a tripod for her. She danced in front of it for half an hour, recording a bunch of songs. Then she sat down to watch it. After the first few minutes, she turned to me with tears running from her eyes and yelled, "I stink!" She was inexperienced at dancing and singing, but she knew immediately from watching herself that she wasn't very skilled.

There's also a subjective aspect to art.

A game that I find tedious could be someone else's favorite game.

Your daughter realized she didn't meet her own standards of good, but that doesn't mean she would agree with everyone else on what singers are good or bad.

There's a great audio clip from Ira Glass about the gap between your taste and your ability.

https://vimeo.com/85040589

That's only true if the burglar knows that the owners ignore the dog's barking.

SSDs gave my laptops longer effective life. Turns out that the main reason my laptops felt so slow after a few years wasn't software bloat. It was cruft in the file system.

You'd think that would be the first sentence on their landing or at least their about page.

Anybody in the FOSS scene in Europe already knows what it is, it doesn't really need more publicity.

Why is the acronym more important than what is said in the first sentence on the landing page:

FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate.

Because that sentence is so generic it could describe pretty much any developer event anywhere.

I've known and participated in FOSDEM for the past ten years and never even knew what the acronym stood for.

The description is accurate and far more important.

Meh, what it is is way more important that what's behind the acronym that nobody ever uses written out.

Yes, freedom is in equilibrium with collectivism in any functioning society.

The mistake people make when acknowledging that a freedom/collectivism equilibrium exists is to assume that freedom/collectivism changes are also in some sort of balance.

The reality is that collectivism is like the dark side of the Force. It's powerful. Seductive. Once you go down the path of embracing collectivism, it's extraordinarily difficult to turn back. Sounds dramatic, I know. But collective state action is a slippery slope. It's really easy to say, "everyone should do X" and in a democratic society, all you need is a slim majority to make X a law. But X isn't always enacted properly. The unforeseen consequences of X are often really unpleasant. But rolling back X is always harder than putting it in place.

You have to remember that every time you hand over a problem X to people in government, X gives them more power. Power is almost never relinquished willingly by the powerful.

The US government should require schools to divulge this information and make sure that students/parents applying for government-backed student loans are keenly aware of and agree to the financial risks implied by the statistics.

Agreed.

I've always thought you should have to get career and financial counseling before taking out student loans. How many people get Psychology degrees and then can't find employment? Would fewer people take on 6-digit student loan debt if they knew they'd still end up working at Starbucks for a hair over minimum wage afterwards?

If you want to go to college for the sole purpose of getting an education, then nobody should stop you. But you should at least be made aware of your future prospects vis-a-vis employment and debt.

Fairness can only be achieved in a competitive environment without unnecessary and contrived leverage. It's really hard to find something fair when unions elect politicians who write laws for unions that allow strangling negotiations that give unions more money to elect politicians who write laws for unions... and on and on.

What happens with that high leverage, low competition environment is you end up with the richest country on earth having huge supply chain bottlenecks and rated as having some of the worst ports in the world.

> Fairness can only be achieved in a competitive environment without unnecessary and contrived leverage. It's really hard to find something fair when unions elect politicians who write laws for unions that allow strangling negotiations that give unions more money to elect politicians who write laws for unions... and on and on.

Corporations do exactly this, so sounds very fair actually.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan should be instructive of why we should not be eager to see a big power-grab from the current administration.

The main three causes of this shipping kerfuffle are: 1. Environmental regulations on trucking. 2. Anti-independent operator laws in CA. 3. Government subservience to the longshoremen union. 4. Overly-aggressive stay-at-home policies and subsidies from COVID.

The current administration would go in the wrong direction on every one of those causes.

Yes, the three big problems: environmental regulations, worker rights, and public health. Without those, industry would be booming.

That blog is a false dichotomy built on top of a strawman.

The strawman is that it's all about "getting rich". Ramsey (the one I've heard talk the most) is mostly about just getting people to stop digging themselves deeper and deeper into debt where they will have no hope for even the basic stability that you need to build greater wealth upon.

The false dichotomy is that you either need a side hustle business or you need to follow sound day-to-day money management discipline. Following sound money management discipline is what gets you to the point of having some discretionary income to build your own business.

Yeah, Ramsey rich is being an "everyday millionaire" by the time you retire. It isn't really rich, but it is just having a comfortable retirement and a large financial moat.

I agree entirely, but would phrase it differently. The baseline advice isn't about how to get rich, its about how to live a financially comfortable middle-class life.

I applaud your current open-mindedness, although your past open-mindedness could have used a tweak.

If you are serious about looking into meditation further, read Sam Harris’ book Waking Up. Sam Harris is about as far from a “woo-woo bullshit” practitioner as you can get. He was one of the leaders of the New Atheist movement, and has a PhD in neuroscience.