If I never hear the theme to "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" again, it will be too soon.
We don't let our kid watch TV at home, barely watching it ourselves, and have no streaming subscriptions. My American niece, on the other hand, a mere two years my son's senior, has had a TV in her room since at least age 5 with access to Disney+, and my brother and sister-in-law let her fall asleep to it. She was a good little hostess, putting on something she thought her younger cousin would like, and she was, sadly, correct. However, while she had spent her life with constant AV stimulation, my kid couldn't sleep.
I eventually had to tell her that if she wanted her cousin to sleep in her room, she had to turn off the TV at bedtime. This was very, very hard for her, and she couldn't understand why he couldn't sleep.
They still had Software Test Engineers (a different role from SDET) in 2001, when I was an STE intern in MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit), which at that point, was basically a compliance department in the wake of the US DoJ's massive anti-trust ruling against MSFT a few years before. Every month, the MacBU STE team lead would award "Scariest Tester" for whoever had found the best (scariest) bug.
We were also, essentially, Apple's Mac OS X post-release testing team (10.0 Cheetah was released while I was there, but I missed the party because my grandmother had died and I was back home for her funeral) - we ran into all sorts of exciting problems with basic OS functions.
One of the things MacBU prided themselves on was having fewer people putting out the whole Office suite PLUS Internet Explorer for Mac than there were working on Word for Windows alone, yet still managing.
But those social security taxes (theoretically) cover your future pension, and at least in Germany, health insurance also covers your sick days, which is why only true workaholics show up to infect the office.
My scheduled C-section (which my insurer likely didn't question me about because I was 40 and have other health issues) plus three-night hospital stay was about 5,000 EUR, all paid by my health insurance (private, so I know that 5,000 was the "retail" price), in a fairly prosperous part of Germany.
Not that the German health system isn't facing down some of the same demographic issues the rest of the well-off world is, but comparing wait times for specialists now that I'm on public (more like, very strictly regulated) insurance with my dad back in Texas on a combination of Medicare and supposedly good supplemental plan, I'm still in a better situation.
A strong public/heavily regulated independent insurers system gives the private insurers enough competition to keep prices in check.
Plus, I don't know of an insurer here, public or private, who also owns clinics or employs physicians, and they don't own pharmacies.
If I felt the need to optimise things like infra setup and config at an early stage of a project, I'd be worried that I'm investing effort into the wrong thing.
Having an LLM churn out infra setup for you seems decidedly worse than the `git push heroku:master` of old, where it was all handled for you. And, frankly, cheaper than however much money the LLM subscription costs in addition to the cloud.
Everyone back home in Texas wondered why my husband (a German) wouldn’t “let” us move to the US.
He was open to doing at least a few years over there; he’d enjoyed his exchange during university back in the 90s.
I was the one who said no, having seen the hell my colleagues married to Germans and other western Europeans were going through with US immigration.
Instead, I got a German residence permit without much fuss, and converted to a permanent one (Green Card equivalent) at a renewal when the clerk pointed out I was past the minimum time needed on my renewable one and encouraged me to apply.
Everyone complains about German bureaucracy, and I did have to bring in a fair bit of paperwork, but they do a prep appointment where they give you a list of exactly what they want to see from you specifically when you file your application.
For every anecdote here about a (very) bad experience with US immigration policy, there are 1000s daily that go on fine. It is a very large complex system that has issues, but for the majority it is working.
Find the specific issues and fix them.
Counter Anecdote: My wife won the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, aka Green Card lottery. Came here with close to nothing and not speaking more than a sentence or two of English.
Makes sense - and I have interacted with bureaucracy in a lot of countries. The FUD that US immigration seem to install in immigrants seems uncalled for.
The Republicans have never liked immigrants. They have succeeded in keeping things underfunded so the bureaucracy stretches out far longer than needed in a sane system.
And underfunded to the point of delaying things despite fees for comparable activities being far more expensive on the US side than in Germany, and even before this year.
It's helping teach my five year old patience and not to flail around hitting the keyboard when something doesn't happen immediately. He only gets to watch videos and playlists I search out for him, and only when I'm in the room... no YouTube Kids here. Once he's able to spell well enough to search, I'll have to re-adjust.
I have found, and this might just be psychological, that if I hit pause, wait a second, then play, the video starts playing within a few seconds.
Gutenberg was active around 1450, not 1550, and that’s important, because Luther nailing those 95 “theses” (complaints) to the door of that church in 1517 wouldn’t have had nearly the impact it did had there not already been a network of moveable type presses throughout Central Europe for a few decades.
I used to joke that I made some of the most expensive socks in the world: 20 hours per pair, and I’m a run-of-the-mill IT ops person in western Europe - do the math.
I have decided to up the cost by taking up fleece processing and hand spinning. Even on the wheel, it takes another twenty hours to clean, comb, and spin enough wool for a pair of socks.
If I were doing this for income, I’d definitely get faster at all the steps.
As I pick up more of the steps in making clothes, it’s mind-boggling how cheap even “luxury” clothes like the 500 EUR pants discussed above, much less my sturdy midrange jeans (Tom Tailor, 60 EUR, pockets that hold an iPhone 13 mini, even in a ladies’ cut), are.
Yep, lots of people doing knowledge work vastly underestimate the material cost, effort and skill associated with artisan goods. On one hand I blame modern manufacturing which justifies this ignorance somewhat but on the other hand I die a little inside when I hear about people willing to fork over large sums to something better advertised.
Though it's worth mentioning that some people are jumping into hand crafted stuff as a business first, cranking out subpar cookie cutter designs and while not terribly expensive and still a minority it's worth making sure you support people who care about the craft first. A category to watch out for is minimal leather wallets, while quality leather and correct thread selection practically guarantee the wallet will last, the care put into making it determines how enjoyable it will be to use.
We don't let our kid watch TV at home, barely watching it ourselves, and have no streaming subscriptions. My American niece, on the other hand, a mere two years my son's senior, has had a TV in her room since at least age 5 with access to Disney+, and my brother and sister-in-law let her fall asleep to it. She was a good little hostess, putting on something she thought her younger cousin would like, and she was, sadly, correct. However, while she had spent her life with constant AV stimulation, my kid couldn't sleep.
I eventually had to tell her that if she wanted her cousin to sleep in her room, she had to turn off the TV at bedtime. This was very, very hard for her, and she couldn't understand why he couldn't sleep.
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