Quite a few of these "opportunities" are asking a LOT of volunteers, implicitly asking for unpaid labor. These are not your typical "volunteer a few hours a week helping fix up a school/sorting at a food bank/helping the homeless" to give back to your community.
Look at this[1] particular ask:
> Applicants must be available to work a minimum of 32 hours per week.
> [minimum 3 month commitment with possibility to extend to a year] ... Weekend and holiday work is required.
> shovel snow for extended periods of time, hike-ski-snowshoe in extreme weather conditions with a 35-pound backpack at 7,000ft, live in remote locations with regularly snow packed roads.
> Groceries and shopping facilities are approximately 60 miles away; reliable personal transportation is required.
Some of these postings are indeed asking a lot, but I don't think this specific one is that crazy. It's essentially an opportunity to live out in the wilderness and go hiking regularly, with free housing provided in exchange for maintenance and rescue work. I know a lot of outdoors enthusiasts that would love to do that. Hell, I know a lot of outdoors enthusiasts that would probably do it without the free housing, or even pay out of pocket to do it (see also: PCT or Appalachian Trail hikers).
I'm going to suggest a new term here - "context dissonance". This occurs when you see something, and because it doesn't apply to your context, you can't imagine it applying to any context.
For example, you use Linux, and can't understand why anyone would use Windows. Or you're a work-from-home fan and can't understand why some people want to work in an office, or why management might need it.
Or, as in thus case, if you work primarily for money the idea of a job that pays in something other than money seems exploiting.
Whereas, of course, there are lots of people who have enough money to meet their needs, and are instead looking for something else. Solitude, Community, Experience and so on.
I don't say this to be disrespectful at all, but part of maturing is in understanding that others can have a different point of view of things. We don't all have to be the same, with the same goals.
These are unpaid positions, with specific requirements and benefits. Clearly they don't sppareal to you and thats fine, but perhaps, just perhaps, there's someone out there this is perfect for.
I can’t do it right now (young family, work responsibilities) but if I’m fortunate enough to retire at a reasonable age and am in good health, I 100% plan on doing these extended volunteering opportunities with NPS or other similar more localized efforts.
There are so many things I complain about in the US but our national parks and the services that make them accessible are not one of them.
I truly believe capital E everyone benefits from spending time in nature, and want to find ways to support this however I can. I really appreciate the feelings I get after extended periods of time in the woods/mountains.
Some people can't imagine picking up litter or caring for the elderly
as anything but torture and humiliation. For others, the chance to do
it, to feel valued is what makes life. Context might be that you
became unemployed and just got sick of seeing garbage in your street.
During the pandemic cabin fever drove me out to do volunteering at the
church and vaccine drop-ins.
I volunteered a lot in my 20s. Homeless patrols handing out blankets
etc. The typical "Kibbutznik" doesn't go to dig soil expecting it to
be a picnic, but to satisfy a bunch of other drives. At a certain age
you have a ton of energy, a desire to meet people, and the world you
know seems too small.
Of course that's always a good recruitment chance for armies, but I
was taken with William James' "Moral equivalent of war", at least the
abstract ideas and insightful social psychology. There are thousands
of environmental and rebuilding projects that need doing - but won't
get done - because it falls outside the realm of "capital".
The problem is when profitable interests and corporate workflows
intersect with altruistic labour supply. It's obvious the most cynical
sort of exploitation is afoot. Many large organised charities suffer
from being poisoned that way, I've heard.
I guess before volunteering for an org these days one should do a lot
of diligence, check out who runs things, who they're associated with,
and whose ethics are behind whet you see on face value.
No. It’s a legal status that says you will perform work for a registered nonprofit and they will cover some of the costs you incur, but you will not come out materially/financially ahead.
There are some people for who this is the opportunity of a lifetime.
PSAR volunteers are also called Trailhead Stewards and people who care a lot about the environment and the health and safety of people flock to these positions. You get training, accommodation that is impossible to obtain otherwise, and experience. There is almost always a waiting list for trailhead stewards.
I’m a watershed steward so I spend a ludicrous number of hours poking around storm drains, parking lots, and streams, writing and giving presentations, compiling reports, and wrangling volunteers for cleanup and drainage projects all in exchange for $0.00.
I like sailing and swimming and fishing and I want my local rivers and bays to be clean. If I liked hiking in the mountains I’d probably be a trailhead steward.
These full-time positions are fairly common at National Park Service (or other agency-managed) public lands, and are attractive to retirees. I was a paid (and housed) intern at one site, but I lived alongside three or four couples in their RVs. Some used it as a way to vacation, while for others it was more of a lifestyle, volunteering for four months at one location, then traveling for a couple months before volunteering at another location.
This feels like making something into a problem when it's not a problem. These are volunteer opportunities, no money is being offered and that's made very clear. People volunteer because they want to do something, or feel like it needs to be done. That's what volunteering is, that's the opportunity that's on the table, this website lists those opportunities.
Where exactly are you drawing the line before using scare quotes around volunteering? Is 10 hours a week too much? Is requiring transportation too much? Would working at 5,000ft vs 7,000ft be ok?
For what it’s worth: if I were at a time in my life where I could do the linked opportunity, I absolutely would. Even better would be an Antarctica opportunity for a winter season.
Some people may see the use of the word volunteering as virtue signaling, it depends on the audience. IMO, if you assist at the local blood bank during a donation drive after a disaster -- that's volunteering. If you are retired and/or rich and can afford to go do Antarctica to assist with research for three months as an essential role or not -- that's free labor.
A person living paycheck-to-paycheck may view the Antarctica opportunity as pompous, but environmental-club peers may view it as volunteering to save the planet and deserves a round of cheers with drinks in hand.
If I have a million dollars to donate to a charity, is not a donation nor an act of charity because most people don't have a million dollars to donate?
It's near certain that every person on HN is in the top 20% of intelligence in the world, and probably in the top 20% in their country. Are our actions and achievements less meaningful because we are lucky enough to be smart?
If someone has the ability to donate months of their life volunteering, I see no reason to diminish or demean their actions simply because I or other people couldn't do it.
Any labor deserves compensation. Volunteering is choosing to donate labor, not doing labor that doesn't deserve compensation. That's true if its 1 hour every other week or 40 hours a week, not a function of the time commitment.
IF and how much any given person is willing and, given their other circumstances, able to donate is, obviously, highly variable between people.
Then if I were you, I would absolutely not take any volunteer opportunities that don’t meet this criterion. Otherwise, in some cases these seem like amazing opportunities that pay in experiences much more valuable than money. Working at Crater Lake would be a dream come true for me.
No, it can't, but then, volunteering isn't a job, and its function isn't to pay your bills.
A particular volunteer opportunity may not be interesting to you, because of the time commitment and the opportunity cost of sacrificing paid work, or because you aren't interested in the particular area of volunteer work, or because you just aren't interested in donating labor in general, but... so what? The posting of the volunteer opportunity isn't a personal solicitation aimed at you, either.
This is a public forum, why are you so against a differing perspective that you go through two rounds of trying to essentially say there's only one way to think about it?
There are some things that are too much work for anyone to call it merely volunteering, and should be compensated. I don't care if you find that opinion acceptable.
> Do bills stop existing because one chooses to volunteer?
Bills don't stop existing because I choose to eat a watch a sunset, either, but I don't ask if watching a sunset is going to pay my bills. People obviously need a way to pay their bills, and lots of activities they might engage in aren't part of that. If you aren't in a position where you can do an activity because of what you need to do to pay your bills, than that activity clearly isn't for you, but unless you were personally and specifically solicited for that activity by someone who should have been aware of your personal circumstances, I don't see how that warrants anything besides "well, that's not for me".
It's called having boundaries. I volunteer on the weekends and some weekdays at a local homeless shelter. I volunteer at the local library. I will be volunteering at our local food bank to help support food insecure families. It's a good way to get grounded in your community and impart some real positive impact on your fellow neighbors.
What I will not do is be exploited for free labor by the USGS who can absolutely afford to pay someone to do the contract work they are asking for. But by all means, if you want to, go for it.
Your boundaries aren't the same as someone else's boundaries, and just because someone else has different boundaries doesn't mean they don't have any at all.
Some people wouldn't want to spend their weekends working at a homeless shelter unless they were paid for it, but would happily spend time in a national park without being paid for it, and don't see it as being "exploited". You have different values/interests, and that's fine, but I don't know why you're trying so hard to be condescending to people that just have different interests than you do.
They described a high of 4°c as "mild". Fuck that.
But that isn't my point: people do all sorts of things to volunteer for others/organisations. Just because you wouldn't do it unpaid doesn't mean it isn't volunteering.
This posting isn't for SAR, which typically requires specialized skills and the time commitment is different. This is for _Preventative_ SAR aka PSAR, which basically means just being physically present on trails to give people guidance, direction, and education about how to not get into dangerous situations. The time commitment for PSAR can be greater.
It's asking a lot because the vast majority of folks can't not work unless they also want to stop eating or become homeless after the end of the season not because they implicitly lack the commitment. It's also unpaid labor for a government with a 6 trillion dollar budget.
Most of the old folks retiring at 70 aren't doing any of these labor intensive affairs so its mostly a task for the idle children of the upper middle class to rich. Are we feting people for being born on third base again?
The target audience of volunteers for this type of position are people that are probably used to happily sleeping in tents and eating camp food for days/weeks at a time. I don't think they'd mind.
Why would you expect it to be an entire house for one person? It's a volunteer position in a national park, not Jimmy Carters newest deal: homes for extremely introverted humans.
As somebody that's enjoyed many months living exclusively in hostels:
You're out of your mind. Homes should be a standard. That's like, one of the basic human wants/needs as an organism. And having the privacy of your own space is essential to the human psyche.
I don't know how it works across the pond, but in Britain, some amount of volunteer activity is allowed whilst officially unemployed. This means that the country contributes National Insurance payments on your behalf so that you'll be able to receive treatment by the National Health Service and a state pension.
On this side of the pond unemployment is mostly 13-26 weeks of a fraction of the money you earned previously and requires you to be actively seeking and available for work. You can neither be volunteering nor pursuing education even if you are laid off and need training in another field.
In some particularly stingy places this is as little as the equivalent of 80 pounds per week whereas rent is oft closer to 800 pounds per month.
In many cases its something you receive later after weeks or months of bureaucratic wrangling after you would long ago have lost your housing if you didn't have any of your own money saved.
Hell we make sure you can't exploit the system by getting food stamps or housing help while going to college even if you are poor as a church mouse.
Heck we set the benefits threshold low enough that as you move from part time employment to full time employment the poorest households experience a hump where if you move to full time you may end up poorer than you started because you lose more benefits than you gain income. This is especially true if you go from free medical care to $500-$800 out of pocket.
Because most professions don't involve doubling your wages regularly one has to in effect agree to take on more work to climb into greater poverty in order to work your way out the other side IF increasing costs ever let you get ahead in the first place.
One of the most attractive ways OUT of permanent poverty is naturally a college education however this will almost certainly be by way of borrowing tens of thousands of dollars but since you don't qualify for benefits during your education and you need to keep eating and living inside you are liable to need to continue to work full time which creates a much higher chance of failure which stands to leave you without a degree with thousands of dollars of undischargable debt.
This concludes our tour of one of the shitty parts of America.
Thank you for the really detailed explanation! It sounds like a harsh system for those that don't have the right educational background. I think I can see now why some on this thread are so unhappy about US government organizations asking for volunteers when the welfare benefits are so restricted.
Objectively speaking of course, NPR* has been trending downwards on almost every metric since 2019-2020, funnily enough except the income metric.[1]
Also the objective data from statista[2] shows the same thing, but from an earlier date: 2017. I'll list the yearly data points(y - weekly listenership in millions; x - year): 2015-26; 2016-29.7; 2017-30.1; 2018-28.5; 2019-28; 2020-26.1;
Anyways, this sounds too obsessive, I actually still somewhat like NPR and they're still one of the more sensible sources out of the "legacy media" outlets. My points still stands though: MSM has been trending downwards for a while now; And even though data might not fully reflect the overall sentiment, you also have to take into account that: population grows, median of age usually rises, etc. (*) It also needs to be said: it's not only about NPR and podcasts filled this void, which is very understandable since it's the same medium(audio) but more targeted, personal.
> I moved from SF to Utah in ~2018, and managed to buy a few rental properties since then, and despite my "income" not keeping pace with my peers in the city my wealth is exceeding them. So the first thing is, the money argument is holding less water every day that goes by.
This is hilarious. You don't have to worry about the financial aspect of your job when you can collect extra income every month as a landlord.
It doesn’t mean I don’t have to work, but it does mean I could take a job working at Wendys, continue to save money, and not be financially ruined. When your only source of income comes from one place your employer has a great deal of leverage.
You do know we hire people who have to _write_ these libraries, and they can't just defer to something else with no consideration to time or space constraints. None of the questions are designed to be brainteasers or 'gotchas' but to get you to start discussing the problem and show your depth of knowledge/expertise.
If I ask you a question along the lines of "write me a function to tell if two number ranges intersect" and your solution is to grab a library instead of writing a simple predicate...then perhaps the role is not a good fit.
"Use a library for everything" is how we ended up with left-pad on npm.
> "Use a library for everything" is how we ended up with left-pad on npm.
bollocks, that's because javascript doesn't have a standard lib.
> You do know we hire people who have to _write_ these libraries
I know, because I'm there. I'm working in VR/AR. We have a number of people who are world experts for doing what they are doing. Do I go off and re-make a SLAM library because I don't like the layout? no because I have to ship something useable in a normal time frame. I can't just drop 3 months replicating someone else's work because I think the layout is a bit shit, or I can't be bothered to read the docs (I mean obviously there are no docs, but thats a different problem)
But, and I cannot stress this enough, having more than one person making similar or related libraries is a disaster. Nothing gets shipped and everything is devoted to "improving" the competing libraries.
Except, you don't own or control any of these sites or services. You're merely a tenant without any power. You're open for many threats outside your control:
1. Service shutdown
2. Price jacked up
3. Your account/instance terminated
4. Data abused
And many more. It's almost guaranteed you'll basically be hold hostage at one point.
So, if you're arguing against people having the ability to host on devices they own, you'd need a better argument, one that specifically show how that would be destructive and harmful so that they shouldn't have this freedom.
Running a webserver on your phone incurs all the same issues plus it might be out of range or your phone might be off. So having a webserver on your phone is actually worse.
Yes if none of those things are problems then it isn't an issue. Just that there aren't fewer issues with having a website on your phone by a company that doesn't have a core business of letting people serve http from their phone vs. having it hosted somewhere by a company where it IS their core business.
No, I’m saying that trusting [Internet service provider whom you don’t control] to keep your site up is pragmatically identical to trusting [web hosting company whom you don’t control] to do the same.
Why not work instead on reducing the number of roadblocks and services that you need to manage, rely on, hand over your rights to, and entrust them with your personal data?
I don't know about you, but that seems to me the logical thing to do
The third party doctrine means at any host your stuff can be warrantless searched, not the case for your phone except I guess that thing about anywhere 100 miles from a coast line or border or airport that covers most of the population.
By that logic, that's what you are on your phone as well, unless you collected the silicon material, diffused and soldered and programmed it yourself.
Even if you assume 'a physical black box, but at least you hold it in your own hands', that is barely making that position stronger since you're still reliant upon networking which requires both a second party and rights to use it, neither of which you control.
Essentially, you will never, ever be some silly idea of a 'self made server owning person' because without mutual agreements and trusts, you get nothing. Not even spare electrons to flip the bits in the CPU registers.
The best we can do is make a balance between our risk appetite and how we want to spend our time. Turns out random phones that will turn into e-waste faster than you can sneeze is what people accept, and thus that is what the suppliers supply.
You're focusing on the tenant part too much, it's about power. Their knowledge and means are generally not focused to be in power, no matter their tenancy.
Equating being able to run a webserver on a privileged port to power, and thus ownership is a bad take. That also goes for the other way around where it is equated to ownership first and power second: none of that is coupled to the ability to run a webserver on any port for that matter.
And on top of that, I made the case that even if you could, you're now just beholden to the power of the webserver maintainer, the OS maintainer and the baseband maintainer. You're not suddenly 'free' or 'empowered' by some sort of ideal.
Mind you, I'm not saying it's great that you can't always run arbitrary software, but staking power and tenancy on that seems pretty dumb to me.
Micropayments aren’t more of a thing already for a reason. There is friction and overhead with signing up for a 3P subscription service even if the actual dollar cost is negligible.
The reason is high credit card fees. If payment gateways allowed micropayments they'd be more popular. (Square, for example, charges 31-33c on anything under $1.)
If NearlyFreeSpeech.net needs to make $1 of profit to be sustainable, they would just charge $1.50 for their product, and I highly doubt there is anyone who can afford $1 but not $1.50
I had a similar experience, but came to the opposite conclusion. I walked away replacing vim with emacs as my daily driver. Elisp is far more extensible than vimscript and evil-mode is pretty much at 1-1 feature parity with the real vim. I don't care much for the emacs movement keybindings except for the readline movement commands.
> to this day I still don't see what the hype was about.
Most of vim is written in C with some interfaces exposed for scripting. Emacs is mostly written in elisp with some C code where necessary. The latter lends itself better to 'hackability' imo
For my own machines, I build emacs and import my saved init.el
On other machines, there is usually a standard vi/vim install that I can use if I am ssh'd in somewhere where I don't have my personalized copy of emacs. If I remember, I'll try to put these five lines[1] in the .vimrc for some saner defaults
I used to, and I probably would if I had to work with remote files more often. But in my experience I found it faster to just build emacs on the remote server and run it as a daemon there, since all the machines I was working on remotely had /home on an NFS mount. TRAMP took just a little too long to load remote directories for my liking.
But in case I am plopped in front of an unknown terminal/have to do something on someone else's machine ... at least I can rely on using the default vim to do basic editing.
Does that mean you have a nice setup for running emacs as a server on a remote machine and connecting via a local client? I've tried this a couple of times but it seems to be prohibitively awkward and I'm stuck with the idiosyncrasies of Tramp or even just saying in a vterm. I'd be very grateful if you (or anyone else) can explain how to do this.
I just run emacs on the remote server (inside tmux), emacs works great on the terminal, in fact, I don't use GUI emacs. code, orgmode, magit are just text.
Yeah, this is how I do it. If it's a reasonably modern remote image you even get color highlighting. And in a way, it lets me segregate, "on this host, I'm working on this project, on this host I'm on this project, all the state/context is there when I re-activate my tmux ready to see what's up.
If I'm writing a lot of code or doing a refactor needing more thought, I'll do it locally, to be sure.
I even started baking emacs into docker images we use for running debugging tools in kubernetes environments. Can quickly edit and run little scripts to do admin and operations and debugging tasks.
You can also use docker-tramp to enter locally running containers and do quick edits without worrying about installing an editor. It can be suprisingly useful.
Vimscript is a pain but these days you can use Neovim which supports Lua as a replacement. I’d recommend checking out what Neovim has to offer. ThePrimeagen has a great video on setting up Neovim as an IDE from scratch.
I mean it's a matter of preference, I personally find vimscript a lot more readable for vim configuration. Maybe not for more advanced stuff, I don't know, but how is the following:
While I wholeheartedly agree, you don't have to sprinkle Lua everywhere, you can use both. As a matter of fact, I do[0]. And when I want to enable a setting on the fly in the editor, I still use the vimscript version. But Lua is way nicer to work with the moment you do something non trivial. For example, I've never been able to make sense out of vimscript string interpolation.
Look at this[1] particular ask:
> Applicants must be available to work a minimum of 32 hours per week.
> [minimum 3 month commitment with possibility to extend to a year] ... Weekend and holiday work is required.
> shovel snow for extended periods of time, hike-ski-snowshoe in extreme weather conditions with a 35-pound backpack at 7,000ft, live in remote locations with regularly snow packed roads.
> Groceries and shopping facilities are approximately 60 miles away; reliable personal transportation is required.
[1] https://www.volunteer.gov/s/volunteer-opportunity/a093d00000...