After being locked inside for months and trying to start a few of my own side hustles - I'm now convinced that the barriers to "success" outside of a salary or specific industry (even discounting intelligence and raw "ability") is motivation. Simply motivation. How much you truly want something. Being honest with the answer to that question and asking yourself if you'd be happy with your current answer in three years has fundamentally changed the way I set goals, motivate myself and look at life.
It's why plenty of smart people don't make lots of money, why dumb people at times can strike it big, and an interesting mental fringe to find a way out of the rat race / salary man ladder.
The big issue in my view is that it seems like quite a few of the ATF's actions over the years don't seem to conform to rule of law, or at least not consistently. For example, I don't know what statute they could be citing to support their current action and of course the back and forth over pistol braces.
The behavior of the ATF seems reminiscent of the Russians prodding US air defense systems by flying bombers right on the periphery. They want to see what they can get away with and what causes too much hubbub. Like you mentioned, their latest action with pistol braces seems to follow this questionable line of unlawful infringement and overreach.
This is great. However, even as a Biden voter I find the latest ruling regarding state election laws deeply troubling. It basically sets a precedent that election laws can now be permanently finagled.
However, this will likely be taken care of for me, because I'm 1) not an essential healthcare worker, 2) not a senior citizen and 3) live in a large urban area. Those people will get the vaccine first, and in mid-june (or later) based on the fallout of the vaccine if things seem normal I'll get it.
In the best case, supply constraints nicely follow the change in risk/reward this way. Then by the time you are eligible, the risk profile looks right...
Yep, politics aside I'm very pro vaccine. Vaccines have done amazing things for the world and anti-vaxxers especially those with resources to influence hundreds if not thousands of others are horrible people.
However, a vaccine that's been rushed through gives me pause. To be honest, I'm mostly worried about cognitive and cardiovascular side effects. I've distanced thus far and remain covid free even though I've been in NYC the whole time. It'd be stupid to throw all that away because I got side effects from the vaccine.
Unfortunately, I think the pledge of past presidents to be "vaccinated on tv" is poorly thought out, largely because it will basically just sow conspiracies that they "just had saline injections to influence the masses".
Yeah, I would assume the majority of the people answering 3 would probably be required to wait anyway.
I'm 31 but Type 1 diabetic so I'll be interested to see how early I can get it. The main risk factor for COVID seems to be Type 2, but with how much Type 1 can ruin just about every aspect of your health, I wonder if I'll be able to get in line sooner. If I can, I will.
That said, something like ~50% of Americans said they won't get the vaccine (we'll see what really happens when folks' doctors say it's ready and they should get it) so maybe nonessential non-senior citizens might be able to get it faster than expected
They're not including them because this site, although portraying itself as an act of outreach and charity in a sense, is really just angling for even cheaper and misguided labor than is currently available in the US. (obviously, this does not apply to companies that have been founded in Africa. I'm pointing to the Amazon, Uber and MSFT listings)
We should by all means support companies in africa, Ghana is an incredible source of genuine groundbreaking businesses. I've visited and can attest to this first hand. However, the big tech co's posting here really just seems like the 21st century form of colonialism. Taking advantage of a market that unlike the US still doesn't see the less "happy" side of these huge tech companies in light of these tech companies having to put up with H1B legislation in the US that actually treats immigrant workers fairly. Which means big tech can't treat hoards of H1B's as modern day slave labor.
Go Africa! But this website left a bad - very suss taste in my mouth.
I don't get this take - the founder mentioned he grew up in Africa in one of the threads (of course this doesn't preclude him from taking advantage of folks in the African job market, it doesn't exactly scream colonial mindset) and I'm just not sure what you're talking about for the big tech co's not hiring locally. Would you rather they just hired abroad but then those people would build products for Africa? Seems worse. Or would you rather every African country build its own MSFT, Google, Apple, etc. competitor domestically?
Yeah I am also a very opened mined person and really don't get your comment, What would you see me do differently? Whats your main issue here? Lets find a solution together.
I'd generally still argue that marketing is the hardest part of any side-hustle / startup in general. What is lost on many here is that $100/mo. spend on solid marketing could speed up the growth curve (without that much more engineering effort) so that it would take maybe a year instead of three to reach the point you could quit your day job.
I released my own app a month ago after working on it on the side for a year... and I am finding that marketing is important indeed. Just having something in the app store doesn't guarantee eyeballs.
You have to find ways of getting your message out. No matter how good your product is, if your users can't find it, you won't sell anything.
This is probably why it's important to make sure you're not doing it for the "easy money" and also why it can take months or years to make a nice little passive income; the word takes a while to get out.
Totally agree, I have a number of non-tech related side hustles and quite frankly I prefer these to tech ones because they took maybe 50hrs each to setup and 2 hours max per week to operate. I know for a fact it'd take much more time tech wise to get something of equivalent revenue up and running.
I have to question these "I spent years making $40 a month working 8 hours after hours to built <project> but now <project> makes $60k a month" stories, since at some point you really have to ask yourself how much your time is worth. Thousands of hours for $1M pre-tax, not to mention how much life you gave up for that is kind of idiotic IMO.
My metric generally is, "if someone on etsy selling magic rocks is making more than my tech project after three months, time to move on". I'm not being shitty, this is just a standard I hold myself to when it comes to valuing my personal time. Also, don't worry, I'm not one of these people who thinks my time isn't worth cooking or cleaning (like many YT gurus and even Financial Samurai now claim).
We had the same issues at Amazon. We all had the lowest end spec of the 2019 13" macbook pro (issued in 2019), even SDE3 level engineers. It fucking sucked.
