burntoutfire

Do surgeons purchase any od they equipment they use on the operating table, or does hospital provide it all?

When I use usem, I mainly do that on the job and Jetbrains IDEs provide value to my employer, not to me.

I had to basically memorize a particular academic book for a tough university entrace exam. I created around 50 pages of dense hand-written notes on it, and could recall all the arguments contained in the book with detail. 15 years later, all I remember from that is that the book was about early humans, tool making... or something along those lines. The note making helped with short-term retention, but did nothing for long term retention.

Let's not forget about putting kids on the PIP.

In my city in Poland (one of the most destitute ones in the country), until very recently, there used to be regular coal train robberies. On segments of the track where trains were moving really slow (like 20-30 km/h), the thieves would jump on the coal wagon and open it up on the side. All the coal would spill along the side of the tracks for the next dozens of meters, and the thieves would prompty load it up on a cargo truck and go away. With recent huge coal price hikes caused by Russian aggression, I suspect this practice might come back.

Trading firms are paying $500k a year to people who just graduated from college?

At least in Poland, for whatever reason, the communist apparatchicks mostly didn't get rich off of their power. They had a higher standard of living - but that meant a house and a car, and not a small flat and a bus pass, like most of the population. I think the ideology was still strong enough to make such behaviours completely non-palatable and would mean exclusion from the party. Only in the eighties, when it was clear that the system is broken beyond repair, the communist values crumbled and the elites started to accumulate wealth. Even with that, there are very few if any former high party official on contemporary Poland's top 100 wealthiest people list. Of course, if the system continued to reign, as is in China's case, the people at the top of the party would probably amass giant wealth.

There's struggling, and there's "grab Starbucks on the way to work" struggling...

I agree. Tom Cruise was also well-cast for that. He typically plays hot-shots, and here he again is a hot-shot upper-class doctor, but one who by happenstance brushes with forces in the society that are way out of his league and whose existence he didn't even suspect. He comes out of it thoroughly humbled.

The classes got wiped out in all Central and Eastern Europe countries which went through communism. Pretty much all of their wealth was confiscated and they were persecuted to a various degree. From society's perspective, it's actually one of the positives of going through the horror of communism - the societies were reset to be much more egalitarian. Even to this day, wealth disparity in post-communist countries is lower than in Western Europe - there wasn't enough time yet for the true billionaire elite class to emerge from the egalitarian soup.

I think it's ok to cash out once your career is over. It's bad to do while creating, because the money people will inevitably influence your works. But, if you're not creating anymore, then there's no great harm in it.

We even stopped trying getting to cheap nuclear energy, which seems to be a vastly simpler problem.

> Microtransactions required to activate heated seats in your car.

I'm sorry, but the fact that this is the first thing you list under "grim" is just comical to me. This isn't even a 1st world problem, this is a 0.1-world problem.

In my city, there's maybe a parking meter for every 20 spots. Plus, most spots are in non-metered areas. PLUS, the meter does not require a very high voltage power line...

There'd have to be charger every 5-6 meters or so along most sidewalks where I live to make electric viable. Certainly not impossible, but sounds like an absolutely massive investment.