- Consider working towards an early retirement. There are lot of resources on the internet and you can see if any of them "clicks" for you.
- If you find that for extended periods of time, you have a persistent feeling of "everything is meaningless" and you fail to find joy or meaning in any activity, please see if talking to a counsellor/therapist could help you.
Indeed, this is why I also mentioned the second point. Sometimes, it's a matter of feeling trapped and getting out of it - which is not far off for someone being well paid but living well within their means. The goal can give someone a strong drive. At other times, it's a matter of finding what really is bothering someone deep within their soul. Something entirely unrelated could manifest outwardly as boredom. So, in those cases, seeking to find this, then facing it could help one find a way to accept things or perhaps find a new drive towards an entirely different goal.
That seems inapplicable. This part of the comments is just about being given the political authority to implement the course of action you determine is best.
Of course that always starts with developing trust and belief from the engineers and probably even needs to be based on what they know and their experience.
That’s a separate issue from being a political lame duck hire who, even with engineer support, is blocked from being effective.
Read well written books. George Orwell, for example, was quite particular about language. Another factor to consider is that brevity takes time. You have keep editing your work to minimise redundancy. After some practice, you will need fewer iterations and eventually some of it will be natural.
Not sure about that. Trucks generally have very powerful brakes and can stop faster than you'd expect. Crashing into the back of a truck can be catastrophic.
Truck do have big powerful brakes, (newer ones with disk-brakes are really awesome) but it still takes a LONG time/distance to slow/stop 80,000lbs from 100km/h.
Kinetic energy is a real bitch.
There are videos of new volvos with 'automatic emergency braking' that is impressive to watch; but that isn't real-world.
In the real world during a 'panic stop' the trailer brakes lock up and the trailer starts bouncing. If you are lucky the tractor wheels don't lock up, but while you have slammed on the brakes, you are still steering and trying to avoid hitting anyone.
316ft for a car vs 524ft for a truck.[1] Almost twice the distance.
And that does NOT match my real-world experience.
I'd say on average it takes 3x-4x the distance to stop a rig.
All the brakes can do is stop the wheels; you still have way more mass generally and momentum to actually get stopped.
While crashing can be catastrophic, I'd like to see some numbers on how many crashes into the backs of trucks were because the truck out-brake'd the smaller vehicle behind it as opposed to the smaller vehicle not paying attention.
The vehicles in the lane beside the truck do not have good visibility in the area in front of the truck. If a vehicle were overtaking the truck intending to immediately go to the lane with the truck, they'll not see the vehicle merging into the motorway from the other side. Thus the theory advises one that merging behind the truck is preferable.
While I'm very happy having chosen the path you suggest, I never suggest it to anyone because I think it is not realistic. What do you think the odds are, that the average person can win against one of the strongest primal drives with which every living being is born. Also, people (on average) do need to procreate if society has to continue its existence.
I would agree that having sex is one of the strongest primal drives. However, a drive to have sex =/= a drive to have children. Can you provide a source that shows having children is a natural, inborn drive of humans?
You are looking at it the other way around. The drive is ultimately to spread one's genes. We just invented a way to get enjoyment out of the process without creating offspring. I leave it to you to reach for your favourite search engine or to visit library if you wish to verify that propagating one's genes is one of the primal drives of living beings.
You might have a fundamental misunderstanding of how genetics and evolution work. The spreading of genes is a consequence of having sex, not its goal. There is no higher power that determined "spreading one's genes" as some sort of ultimate drive, then set about finding ways to make it happen.
You can think of it this way:
- Presumably, some mammals would have been born that did not enjoy sex. Those would not procreate and their gene would die out.
- Other mammals would enjoy sex. They would procreate, and their genes would spread.
It's the sex and enjoyment thereof that is the driving force behind procreation. When you hear people saying "the ultimate drive is to spread one's genes," that's just a hand-wavy explanation used for simplification (which, unfortunately, many people have come to interpret too literally - as is often the case when simplification is involved).
It's the same type of simplification as when a nature documentary says "Nature found a way to do X". As if nature is some conscious entity with a will that is working towards achieving some goal.
For the sake of a charitable interpretation and productive dialogue, I'll ignore your first sentence. From the rest, it appears that we are (mostly) in agreement. Genes which are more likely to spread and survive are the genes that remain. Also, it is not evident that many species enjoy sex.
I do have a question, actually, if you will humor me.
Suppose we take two human children - a boy and a girl. We separate them from their parents at age 1 and we isolate them from society. A professional caretaker visits them a few times a day, giving them food and helping them with their necessities. They are taught to communicate in one manner or another, perhaps given access to some form of entertainment.
Now, I'm going to be brutal - for science: the hypothetical boy has been sterilized. He doesn't know it, of course.
At no point do the children learn how humans are born. Nothing in their surroundings is an indication, and the caretaker never tells them.
Also, they never learn that it is "normal" for regular people to have children of their own.
As far as the kids are concerned, no other humans except them and the caretaker exist.
Do you think that:
1) Those children will experience an innate need to have children of their own?
2) What activities will the children undertake to satisfy that need?
- Adapting to artificial changes to environment/constraints requires a long time to evolve and that will be through countless generations. So, the example above needs to be thought of through large numbers instead of such a small sample.
- Additionally, consider that you could perhaps fool a duckling to imprint upon someone/something else as his/her mother. This one example is not useful if one were to attempt to disprove that this imprinting behaviour evolved to help the ducklings stay with their mother in a vulnerable period.
To me, this appears clear. However, I am not sure if I've articulated it in a way where you are able to also see where I am going with this.
I've read through part of it and I find it quite useful when I try to reason about how something ought to perform. I try to do this before measuring and checking if I'm right. Then I try to see where I went wrong (I'm seldom right) and again having an understanding of how the computer works really helps here.
I, honestly, don't know if it will help me in terms of my career because at my current job, it's not something I can put to use. However, I want to learn this because it is fun (for me) to understand things close-to-the-metal.
I find the front-page itself to have poor signal-noise ratio. New is much worse. So, I stick to the main page and the "ask" page. I seldom look at the "new" page.
- humans do not always act in their long term best interests
- humans do not always act in a rational manner
- often the former is indistinguishable from the cases where you are not aware of someone's incentives
- true change requires that people really accept it internally (and not just mere commitment to act differently)