brianvan5155

did the Fifth Avenue address play any role in the winding down of this business

So, in essence, just suck it up.

The funny thing is that JavaScript development isn't a goal. It's never the goal. Complex toolsets sometimes assist in the achievement of goals... but you can't say "JavaScript overload is totally the right thing" when you aren't talking about the goals that need to be met. Simply having a philosophy that developers should learn new things all the time to stay current... that's not a good argument to support the current tooling.

I'm glad there's a lot of people working on open source projects. I wish they'd publish more documentation about use cases and UNIFIED (not piecemeal) deployment configurations, though. After all, your toolset has valid and relevant use cases... right?!?!

It's not wrong

Learning in other industries is offered in institutional settings as part of the profession.

Learning in the dev world consists of aimlessly screwing around with an undocumented, unsupported, glitchy web/server stack for many many hours unpaid after you've already spent 40 hours that week putting bread on the table.

The whining has less to do with the "learning" and more to do with the yak-shaving part of it torturing us endlessly in the off-hours. And, unlike in medicine and law, there is precious little professionally-written, detailed, helpful literature to help us along the way. There's just "quick install" and then a command/api reference. That is... not up to the level at which medicine and law have their industry practices & standards documented.

This reads like it's from the original posted article

It is the ventilation building for the Holland Tunnel on the New York side; it's located directly above the tunnel, near the Manhattan portal.

It's not accessible directly via the street. It sits out on a long pier in the river, with a gate at the pier head. The public isn't allowed on the pier, but the gate sits along the Hudson River Greenway, a very big and very-highly-trafficked park. (With plenty of tourists)

It is common for both misinformed law-enforcement types and infrastructure agency employees (outside of the legal system) to hassle people for taking photos of infrastructure - construction sites, ventilation towers, power substations, sensitive landmarks, subway areas, aqueduct facilities, etc. As a matter of fact, since the WTC is itself treated as a VERY sensitive and vulnerable site, it seems weird for a PA employee to tell you to take pictures of it instead. The site is a fortress!

And yes, these people issuing warnings and making threats are all wrong. You can stand in a public place and take a photograph anytime, there are very few restrictions on this. It's also fairly safe; there aren't any reasonable vulnerabilities to public infrastructure that a single photograph from a public park can uncover. (If there is such a vulnerability, it's not a reasonable one; it should be mitigated through security hardening, not by hassling park-goers)

True and frightening.

There isn't a particularly good reason why a modern middle manager has that much power over their direct reports.

These factors indeed would stress people out. Put poor compensation and poor quality-of-living on this list as well, since we now live in a race-to-the-bottom global labor marketplace, and companies are aiming for absolute low payroll costs rather than location-adjusted costs. People will take a job at a unsustainable salary in the hopes of proving themselves and eventually receiving a compensation upgrade; there is a non-zero number of companies out there who have the exact opposite plan as a rule.

We can also say that not-every-boss is the irritant in a bad workplace situation, but that's a nitpick. Yes, I've had the bad-boss-in-a-good-organization and I've had the great-boss-in-a-rotten-job scenarios. In the latter type of situation, at least one human in a management or executive role made decisions that adversely affected my personal growth, workplace conditions, or feedback relationship with the company. It was often many humans up-the-chain making these kinds of decisions, in a loosely (sadistically) coordinated fashion, fully aware that their handling of resources was resulting in human suffering. If you have a great boss, both your job and his/her job can still be very, very stressful and limiting. Since we know that it's possible to run companies that don't have chronic worker stress issues, it's very much immoral to put people through this in the service of any business or organizational goals. (This applies to not-for-profit orgs, too)

Are you talking about married couples taking different bedrooms in one apartment? Or single individuals (not living as couples) taking different bedrooms in one apartment?

Yes, we do a lot of roommate shares here in the US; I lived in about 7 of them through my 20's. But I didn't live with my wife in a room share. I'm now married and I live with my wife, and we are effectively rent-sharers now.

It's still not enough to have a 20% cash savings rate, much of what would be saved as cash instead pays debt (mostly college debt + debt originating from emergencies/unemployment). But we almost certainly couldn't afford a local property of any type, save a studio apartment on the outskirts of the city, with a 20% savings rate over the next 5 years. And part of this has to do with down-payment financing arrangements nearly always losing out to deals paid in cash on-the-spot. (Indeed, there are people roaming the streets with certified checks from $800,000 - $2,000,000 who are viewing new-to-market properties daily)

That IS for a single apartment

I'm married & the thought of doing a "house share" with other married couples seems very cramped up & a recipe for disputes. This is aside the fact that it's absurd that dual-working married couples would have to resort to this at all, it's a completely unacceptable arrangement for most couples in the US at this point. But nothing's off the table it seems

The average sales price of a home in my county is $2,000,000

The lowest county average sales price within a commuting hour of my workplace is probably $700,000, to live somewhere fairly isolated and dead.

It would only be "that easy" if I made $150k a year. That is still a top-10% salary in 2016, and yes my current salary is location-dependent, so I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place on that. I would start planning for a purchase 10 years out, but my down-payment savings money pretty much flies out the window toward debt and utilities. And most of the homes in my area sell in instant cash deals anyway, down payments are a joke. (Thanks, anonymous LLCs representing foreign wealth!)

I'm in a very particular situation with a lot of unusual disadvantages, but I'm also a web dev working for a large consultancy in one of the big US cities. Every one of my peers in the workplace is struggling with suburban homebuying expectations; while every one of my urban social peers holding less-prestigious jobs is almost certain to be working poor by age 50. The grind is already happening. There needs to be more political support for regulation and infrastructure projects that create the opportunity for working-class home ownership investments. It sounds like you support this, and your efforts are needed in politics too.

My comment didn't speak to the pre-WWII era, but going back to the nineteenth century, the U.S. has always had a robust workforce more-often-than-not offering opportunity for upward mobility for those motivated enough to take on the work. What's significantly different now is that we have a much bigger safety net for the retired, young, ill and disabled.

But what's also different is the very recent lack of upward mobility. People born after the 70's are coming in behind their parents unless they inherit land or equity holdings. Does a worker stop paying rent to a landlord in order to build that "nest egg" as you admonish them to do so? It's hard to save for retirement when the landlord keeps coming back every year with a $300/month rent increase - because they can, because every landlord is doing it, and because elected officials and courts give them cover to do so.

I really don't see 70+ year old people working staff jobs for 50 hours a week with brutal commutes and skimpy PTO benefits, as is now the average for people holding a single role for less than 5 years.

I can see labor ages skewing upward, though, if a bigger share of the workforce adopts coworking, telecommuting and part-time/contract labor trends. This would make things easier for a share of the workforce that wants to take life a little easier than the average 30-year-old.

Recall that a union laborer with a pension plan can retire with a lifetime fixed income at age 55... and historically this sort of arrangement applied to a large share of the U.S. workforce (including many non-college-grads) not too long ago. And the people who lived/worked under that arrangement were either able to purchase cheap real estate that has since appreciated tremendously in value, or they were able to send children to college and post-college educations that secured high-paying professional incomes... or both... and this slice of society is weighing heavily on the rest of the workforce via high land prices, rent-seeking behavior, and anti-socialist politics. I think remedying this situation would help society far more than a mild economic boost due to retirement-age workers clinging to their jobs

I'm a supporter of a large transportation advocacy group that strongly believes in this shift in terminology. I believe in it personally, too.

Anyone who spends some time observing the news in New York - a city with a fairly low (relative) car ownership rate - would immediately notice how even the most shocking, violent, absurd automobile collisions are not just referred to as "accidents" but referred to as distinct forces of nature apart from their drivers. It's always the machine that did the colliding, the maiming and the killing... there is never any agency or responsibility given to the driver. (It's as if these cars just decided themselves to jump the curb, or race into oncoming traffic!) Flip it to a bicyclist or motorcyclist who caused a collision, and you'll see the language very precisely target the user, not the device.

Sometimes a collision IS just an accident. But not all collisions are accidents.

It's really important that policy and public perception change to dismiss the exceptions in behavior and risk-taking that we assign to most drivers who aren't drunk. If a driver is caught clearly speeding, turning through occupied crosswalks, or coming out of an assigned lane in an uncontrolled fashion, and if the result is (almost predictably) a collision, it must be stated that the driver chose to violate traffic laws & take harmful risks, which is no accident at all. The converse of this is that a driver who doesn't take these risks may get into accidental collisions, but they won't be of the sort where the car ends upside down very far from the roadway in a 25mph speed limit area.

"City Workers Repair Earthquake Fault"

give em a bonus this year