Wow, this is really great! Soft Skills 201 could be a book unto itself, nice to see this stuff being discussed.
In general, I think the soft skills sections should get a lot more promotion (it's buried so far down the sidebar I had to scroll!). The technical stuff is already well-documented elsewhere, but nobody ever told me how important being politically savvy was in this niche until I had already blown both feet off several times.
I wonder why you still managed to use the term "loansharks" when trying to defend their quite obviously predatory business practices.
"Higher interest rates" doesn't even begin to define the exploitation of these people who are desperate for cash. The rates for these loans are on the order of 400%, which makes the comparison laughable.
It's almost like saying "the US national debt is $22 trillion, which is more than the average American makes in a year."
My point is that a theory that says their business practices follow from moral failings doesn't explain anything about the world. Some businesses just mysteriously seem to always be run by bad people.
Conversely, assuming that every businessman is about equally greedy forces you to look elsewhere. Their loans are almost by definition high-risk, that's why they are expensive. Low-risk borrowers are a different market.
The fact that we can learn something by thinking about their business does not mean anything like "defending". It's just that sometimes the lessons are clearest with extreme examples. We can learn interesting things from studying drug gangs, pirates, kidnapping schemes, too.
We can also ask questions about whether the world would be made better by prohibiting loansharking, and I actually don't know enough to have an opinion. But it's clear to many that prohibiting drug-dealing has had some nasty side-effects.
I once was able to confirm (with reasonable certainty) that the caller was using Twilio, because the message they left was a verbatim text from a Twilio example[1] for detecting whether a human answered:
"You did not reveal yourself to be human. Goodbye!"
Since then I've filed Twilio alongside Cogent in the "doesn't ask too many questions about who uses its services and for what" category.
I find it strange to give this advice, then provide 3 alternate example routes that add a mile or more of climb to the ride. Gravity isn't friction, per se, but it does pack a wallop all the same, especially if sweat or fatigue (or injury) is a concern.
Are these roads safer or prettier or something that I'm missing from the map?
Note the author isn't just a commuter, but a somewhat serious competitive cyclist. For cyclists, fighting against gravity is fun, or at least feels rewarding; fighting against friction or wind is not. I don't know exactly why - both simply require more effort - but everyone would agree.
Amtrak from Dallas to Austin is a 6h22 trip for $29 (value fare), departing only once per day (11:50am) and taking about 2 hours to reach Fort Worth, a 30-minute drive.
By contrast, there are 11 Greyhound buses from Dallas to Austin per day, from $13-19, and the ride is never longer than 3h40 (mostly 3h to 3h10). There are usually 3-4 Megabuses in each direction per day as well, for around $12 for an unreserved seat.
Heck, they won't even quote you for Houston-Dallas. This is an improvement: they used to show a ridiculous two-day route connecting through San Antonio.
Amtrak in Texas (and most of the rest of the country outside the NW corridor) is set up as a cross-country sightseeing/nostalgia tour service. Sunset Limited (New Orleans to LA) runs three times a week. It's not meant for actual, you know, transportation. Really, they ought to fully embrace that and operate more like a cruise ship with day stops for sightseeing. An American version of a Rhine cruise.
Probably this is because they can't compete on either price or time with busses, planes, or cars. I think there's many city pairs in the country where center-to-center rail service at a price and speed between bus and air would work well, but I doubt that can be achieved on the freight rail network.
I've done a lot of cross-country train trips, and in addition to NE corridor, travel radiating to/from Chicago and within about 500 miles is generally pretty transport-oriented (not just vacationing). And even in a lot of the other places, there are many of the more rural parts of the country where Amtrak is much more accessible than the nearest airport, and people there use it accordingly.
>(and most of the rest of the country outside the NW corridor)
I assume you meant NE corridor although I understand that Seattle to Portland by train works reasonably well. Even on the NE corridor it's really segments. Boston-NYC and NYC-Washington DC work well. Boston to DC really takes too long although I've done it.
There are some other segments here and there but even when they seem like a good way to get from A to B (like Raleigh to Charlotte), in my experience it's not heavily utilized.
> the fact that most ops positions at a non IT company are a lot less stressful, yet much better paid than all other jobs.
Which is it?