Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Where are you and where are you going?
basuragomi
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by basuragomi »

If you deliberately catch the disease, that way you could provide proof of recovery instead of vaccination while travelling. That way you can travel internationally without having to expose yourself to a novel pathogen with unknown long-term consequences.

I really enjoyed core logging when I briefly did it, but it's really a different experience at juniors where it's truly creative work, building and testing models on the fly.

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C40
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by C40 »

basuragomi wrote:
Sat Nov 06, 2021 9:59 am
If you deliberately catch the disease...... That way you can travel internationally without having to expose yourself to a novel pathogen with unknown long-term consequences.
uhhh, what?

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fiby41
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by fiby41 »

Even if you forged a slip, wouldn't someone find out? We never get a piece of paper; except the part where the needle pierces the elbow, the process is contactless. You get an SMS confirmation with a link to optionally view/verify/download the vaccination certificate. When I needed to travel, the ticket counter person scanned my QR code to verify it against the state's blockchain.

theanimal
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by theanimal »

The US isn't as advanced. Here you're given a paper card that is initialed and given a sticker each time you are given the shot.

You can get arrested and go to jail for multiple years if you are caught. I remember not too long ago someone was caught using one trying to go to Hawaii. Not sure what happened to her but they were talking about jail and a $5000 fine.

Your criteria for getting a job already eliminates many options, like others have said not getting the vaccine even more so. It's worth reconsidering.

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Viktor K
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by Viktor K »

Most vaccine hesitant aren’t gonna be convinced at this point

TopHatFox
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by TopHatFox »

Still alive, so that is good. Remote GIS job ended a few months ago, and I’ve been studying programming full-time via TeamTreeHouse.com. I’m now pretty good at HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, and SQL. I can also now speak Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French. Finally bought a used car and have learned how to dismantle it and put it back together via all of ChrisFix’s videos. I was extremely foolish to think bicycles are an effective form of transport or vacationing, and not owning a car was clearly not a beneficial choice. That said, it did teach me basic mechanics.

Remote work is where it’s at (as is not living in a city). Coding is also not as hard as Amherst made it out to be - definitely mad about that, as I was really into the subject/career before their intro class. Finally starting to not identify with undergrad or school in general as I’m almost 6 years out. I think I’m actually an INTJ, and I was “INFJ” cause the school was hippy-dippy and was disproportionately influencing me in a non-beneficial direction. It’s unnecessarily restricting how schools peg us into little “major” boxes, as it’s pretty easy to learn new subjects enough to get an entry-level job or even start a business in it. Almost always, what you learned in school isn’t even the information on the subject that you need on the job. HR ppl definitely like to peg us into job boxes using the major choices, unfortunately.

Not sure what to do about work as usual. I was thinking just taking random high-paying contract mining geologist jobs while continuing to learn to code and trying my own startups. It’s hard to convince coding companies to take me on since I have an MSc in Geology. On startups, the idea of them is nothing crazy and it’s annoying how much hype there is around the topic. It’s just solving an in-demand problem for people and putting the scalable solution or service on a clear website. That’s it. No $500/hr consultation or seminar required.

Relationship wise, still don’t want kids or marriage, but enjoying an ltr. Something interesting that happened is that I’m kind of okay with not getting into another ltr, str, or even fwb if this one ends, especially cause usually women end up wanting kids/marriage even if they’re unclear at first. That’s something I didn’t think I’d say having had multiple partners at once back in the day. I could take it or leave it. Relationships can be a luxury in time and money in the real world — where you’re working in remote places or building a startup, and they usually don’t help you in achieving those goals. One interesting thing I noticed is that when you’re working at a man camp in the middle of nowhere, anxiety goes down as there aren’t people to compare yourself to or people to ask out.

Speaking of comparing to other people, I honestly couldn’t care less anymore. I used to care WAY more. Other peoples’ successes or failures are largely irrelevant to me, as those people aren’t going to show up in my life and help in some way. Hell, even if you go homeless, most people don’t care. I asked a HS friend that sold an AI startup for $8M and he ghosted. A Gen Xer who made a successful GIS company hypocritically told me to get a job. IOW, success is often a road you kinda have to piece together for yourself, and you can’t even ask advice cause it’s so often contradictory. It’s similar when comparing yourself with ppl from undergrad or grad. Unless they have a job for me, their Senior Senior VP title means nothing to me, just that they work a lot in an overly competitive office.

One crazy thing I saw is that my first boss literally died a few years ago. Guy was a multi-millionaire. I hope he got to enjoy that money. Really makes you realize you have to enjoy your money too, and the path to getting there. The ironic part is that his business is still going strong with his absence, so he could’ve just hired a manager and travelled the world with his family if he wanted. Sounds way more fun than wearing a suit and tie in NYC.

Overall, I’d say the biggest disservice we do to young people is making them make decisions that will affect their real life for the foreseeable future, while exclusively in the artificial and ephemeral world of high school, college, and grad school. Majors that seem a good choice in the artificial world, are decisions you’d never make if you were already in the real world. Heavy socializing or dating seems important in the artificial world, but ultimately not useful when you realize you’ll never talk to 99% of those people again, and that 90% of the time irl you’re alone, with acquaintances, or with co-workers you can’t inherently be “real” with. This could be why homeschoolers are often better prepared for the real world — they’ve been in it for longer: teaching themselves subjects, starting a business in a subject they like, trying to make acauantences at a coffee shop or just being used to being alone, etc. Being dropped into the real world having just made a shit ton of seemingly-good decisions in the artificial world is still to this day the most jarring experience. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, and yet it happens every year around May.

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unemployable
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by unemployable »

Nice to hear from you.
TopHatFox wrote:
Sat Dec 24, 2022 10:38 am
Overall, I’d say the biggest disservice we do to young people is making them make decisions that will affect their real life for the foreseeable future, while exclusively in the artificial and ephemeral world of high school, college, and grad school.
What I experienced is that what you call the aritifical world is ruled by structure. Classes. Homework. Exams. Getting good enough grades to move on to the next level. Even the people you socialize with and the sports events and parties you attend are planned to an extent. The structure surrounds you and supports you.

Then in the real world the structure vanishes. No longer is success dependent on simply taking a test and achieving a certain score. Now some people are lucky enough to score corporate jobs or get tenure or whatever and are okay buying into the system therein, and simply replace one structure with another. But a lot of us aren't. And things like finding a partner, keeping a marriage together, raising kids and dealing with the vicissitudes of the economy can't be inured against. Never mind that corporate job might leave you at the side of the road at precisely the wrong time.

If only the working world were just a series of standardized tests, I could've retired at like 39. Oh wait...
Being dropped into the real world having just made a shit ton of seemingly-good decisions in the artificial world is still to this day the most jarring experience.
Yeah, you can get straight-A's and end up completely heartbroken by the real world, and not for lack of trying.

I never wanted kids for two reasons: My parents did a horrible job of selling parenthood, and the real world did a horrible job of selling adulthood.

TopHatFox
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by TopHatFox »

Yeah, you can get straight-A's and end up completely heartbroken by the real world, and not for lack of trying.

I never wanted kids for two reasons: My parents did a horrible job of selling parenthood, and the real world did a horrible job of selling adulthood.
Yeah, agreed on both counts. Having grown up with poor immigrant parents made me realize quickly how important ample, consistent resources are to raising kids, and living in the real world made me realize how erratic and time-consuming earning income (especially a high one) in the real world is. I don’t wish that on any unborn person.

It’s so interesting how success in the artificial world is not akin to success in the real world; the skills in the former aren’t very useful in the latter, aside from general things like a high iq, ambition, and the ability to eventually discern what provides the highest ROI for years of effort.

——-

On retirement, the traditional definition of living off your assets while never doing paid work is honestly trash. I’ve done that, and it’s miserable. It’s only fun if you have enough money from assets to pursue non-money making goals, such as climbing a mountain, buying supplies to pursue your hobbies heavily, or visiting places. Bare-bones asset withdrawal ends up deteriorating into spending most of your time researching this or that, kinda like a prisoner with room and board paid for and access to the library.

I think it makes more sense to just never stop paid remote work, but scale back on your business hours. Alternatively, one can do do high-paid seasonal work (like mining in my case). It’s nice to have non-asset income come in, especially during a down turn. A paid off house in a non-HOA, low-property tax area helps a lot too; at least you’ll never go homeless even if the economy implodes. I’m convinced one of the biggest reasons we all hate work is because the conditions of work suck: you can’t be genuine with your co-workers, you work 50-60 hours w/o overtime in a stressful city, etc. it’s not being a slave in ancient Egypt, but at least your life expectancy/sentence was a lot shorter.
Last edited by TopHatFox on Mon Dec 26, 2022 5:23 am, edited 2 times in total.

ertyu
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by ertyu »

Way back when, when I was dealing with these issues myself (I am another person who did well in school then floundered), I encountered a study that said that school does prepare you for the real world, but only if you come from a crap school. Basically, the idea was that the teachers who got to teach in the fancy private schools have fancy "teaching strategies" that are designed to reduce the cognitive load on the student and act as crutches, to parcel up and spoonfeed you information. Those teachers get better test results, but those test results are not well-correlated with real world success when you control for other factors.* However, the test scores of "crap school" students are, and this is because they're left to sink or swim, and if they swam, especially on top of holding a job etc, that means they figured out the skills to make their own structure - plan their time, motivate themselves internally, have ambition, etc.

* the outcomes of fancy private school students are much better correlated to how rich and connected etc. their parents are

Unsurprising, but I found it interesting.
Last edited by ertyu on Mon Dec 26, 2022 5:40 am, edited 1 time in total.

TopHatFox
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by TopHatFox »

ertyu wrote:
Mon Dec 26, 2022 4:58 am

* the outcomes of fancy private school students are much better correlated to how rich and connected etc. their parents are

Unsurprising, but I found it interesting.
Yeah, 100%. Many of the kids from Amherst who already had rich parents already have political positions, high level corporate jobs, etc. The poor ones have been at home figuring it out, or in low level corporate, or back in grad school. I must’ve reached out to 1000-2000 alumni over the years asking for advice, job leads, proposing business ideas, etc, and I received no tangible results— like a job interview, seed capital interview, etc—just advice. I think having family members in powerful places more readily produces tangible results.

I think it’s also that the fancy private schools still treat you in high esteem similar to high school, whereas the state schools are finally saying “you’re just a number, get the f*ck in line.” The latter really forces you to evaluate where you want your life to go years earlier than still thinking you’re the hottest shit for four more years (until reality crushes around you at 23).

TopHatFox
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by TopHatFox »

So what I’ve been thinking is doing the following:

1. Run through all the tutorials on TeamTreeHouse.com. They have hundreds of hours of tutorials and projects.

2. Apply for coding jobs at a mining company since at least my geological knowledge may be somewhat appreciated.

3. Make my own coding startups, since that’s both good for money making long term and as experience — since you basically have to be a full stack developer to make a startup on your own.

4. Finally, do freelance coding work for free and then eventually charging as I get more clients in.

TopHatFox
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by TopHatFox »

2023 GOALS

1. Gain remote programming job
2. Start programming startup
3. Enjoy/improve 5 romance languages
4. Learn basics of Russian and German
6. Road trip NE, midwest, AK + HI
7. Learn about home repair & maintenance
8. Take outdoor trips
9. Exercise, floss, brush, and sleep

-----------

After travelling lots of states, I kinda lost some of the urgent desire to travel. Now it's more of a "when travel happens, cool" sort of feeling. I've learned that a sedentary life can be good also, mostly as long as you're learning something new. It seems like every setting in life is a sort of prison, whether it's your house, your office, your mine site, your retail store, your classroom, and so on. What makes each prison enjoyable is learning new things and interacting with people; these factors keep your mind exploring while the physical world is obviously the same day-in, day-out.

zbigi
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by zbigi »

TopHatFox wrote:
Tue Jan 03, 2023 5:47 pm
2023 GOALS

1. Gain remote programming job
2. Start programming startup
Shouldn't these be either-or kind of goals? Both activities consume majority of one's energy and time, I can't see them being combined - unless the startup is supposed to be more of a hobby which brings in beer money.

TopHatFox
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by TopHatFox »

Yeah, but I need money to keep having the time to devote to the startup. So don’t really have a choice but to work double-time. Maybe one alternative is to find coding freelance projects to make enough per year to give me the time to work for my startup. Not really sure how to find freelance coding work yet.

Finally, there is also going back to mining, which has a 7-on, 6-off schedule, so I could do 7 days of mining and 6 days of coding startup.
Last edited by TopHatFox on Wed Jan 04, 2023 8:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

mathiverse
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by mathiverse »

It's normal to work on a start up in the evenings until it kicks off enough money (or you get enough funding) to go full time on it.

TopHatFox
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by TopHatFox »

mathiverse wrote:
Wed Jan 04, 2023 8:20 am
It's normal to work on a start up in the evenings until it kicks off enough money (or you get enough funding) to go full time on it.
Yeah, it also seems that funding is pretty hard to come by, so you're better off pretending you must earn the profit yourself. That's a huge reason why I chose coding: it's likely the only way to make a scalable business without already having a lot of money (just time and energy).

It's also one of the only jobs where what you learn on the job is usually useful once you leave the job. For example, aside from savings, the skills I learned in recruiting, administration, and even mining are ~useless now. Jobs with useful skills once you leave are usually in the civilian-level trades or trade-like professions (e.g., mechanic, plumber, carpenter, accountant, doctor, etc.).

zbigi
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by zbigi »

TopHatFox wrote:
Wed Jan 04, 2023 8:07 am
Yeah, but I need money to keep having the time to devote to the startup. So don’t really have a choice but to work double-time. Maybe one alternative is to find coding freelance projects to make enough per year to give me the time to work for my startup. Not really sure how to find freelance coding work yet.
You can do that with a regular programming job as well, no need to look for contracts. Work a job for 18-24 months (so that you don't look like an extreme job hopper) and save enough to cover living expenses for the next couple of years.

TopHatFox
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by TopHatFox »

zbigi wrote:
Wed Jan 04, 2023 4:39 pm
You can do that with a regular programming job as well, no need to look for contracts. Work a job for 18-24 months (so that you don't look like an extreme job hopper) and save enough to cover living expenses for the next couple of years.
That's a good idea. I thought about doing that with mining since I actually have some experience there, as well as degrees. Looks like GF is ultimately deciding she wants marriage and kids, so that means I can go anywhere again soon. My only concern is whether employers might get mad that I worked a coding job for two years and then quit for the next 5?

I could list my coding startup for the 5 years proceeding the 2-year job, but knowing employers, they probably won't give a !@#$. I'm also all for working toward making a unicorn startup in 5 years, but real life has taught me success is generally the exception to the rule; IOW, I should probably plan for a life of work.

zbigi
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by zbigi »

I would for sure not bother with spending years of my life trying to hit the lottery (the unicorn), unless it's doing an idea you're obsessed about and money would just be a byproduct. Otherwise, if you have a healthy relationship with money, $100m is just as good as $1-2m. So, the easiest path is to just get to high paying coding jobs, save for 5-10 years, and call it a day. Basically an easy-mode ERE.

TopHatFox
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Re: Fox's Journey: And Onto the Sunlight!

Post by TopHatFox »

I personally know a few people that have made successful coding businesses, many in their 20’s. Ironically, one got hit by a truck just before the co-founder was forced to sell. They said aside from the hundreds of thousands or millions they made or make, the main benefit is all they had to learn and sacrifice to get there; like they have the confidence to build a product or service again, or at least know what it takes first hand. I don’t think it’s that crazy to start a business, STEM or trades ppl basically already do all the actual work at companies — we just don’t get any of the equity. Making a business is just solving a problem and aiming it’s the right problem to solve & people want your solution. The other big thing is that it’s interesting and challenging. Life is pretty boring when you’re grinding on someone else’s idea, and unfortunately all the jobs I’ve had grind you like you are the founder. Agreed tho, $1-2M is basically identical to $10m or $100m if you’re not lavish or buying a house somewhere crazy like NYC or SF. Definitely more safe to double-time it with a remote job, just gotta hope you have energy at the end of the day to work on your thing, or like you said, work a year or two, then quit.

Interestingly, I think MMM & his ex-wife earned much more off their businesses than they did their jobs. If we high IQ, high work ethic technical ppl can’t build a business or freelance practice, who can.

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