This was the original purpose of Twitter-- it was advertised as a network where anyone could post what they're doing and notify their friends immediately. Even until recently tweets could be received via SMS (not sure about the current status of that feature) so you'd see in real time what they're up to.
Of course, Twitter/X/etc are a far cry from that now-- but it could be worth trying where you and your friends use the service like that.
I'm going to nitpick on this line a bit, but bring it back to his core argument at the end. And I'm going to nitpick because in part, lines like this raise my hackles, but also because I think lines like this undercut his own argument:
This type of modern conservatism (which is what this take from George is, and is very tied to a new type of non-religious social conservatism) has lost the plot when it comes to basic justice. Threats in person to people are just plain old crimes. But package them in a funny picture online and it's free reign. Free speech absolutists (not sure that's what George is, but just using this as a broad label) have pretty convenient takes when it comes to the basic rule of law. Often those takes are pretty circumstantial, in some cases they're more than happy to deem speech threatening, but in the vast majority of threatening speech people actually experience, not so much. And remember, if the law is arbitrarily applied, it makes people less interested in a democracy, but they don't seem bothered by that.
Nor do they seem too bothered about the tens of thousands of people who suffer legitimate threats online daily. The social media companies know who those people are, down to what they had for breakfast that day. If we actually dared to, you know, enforce laws around threatening people our jails would be overflowing.
I agree to a very minor degree: you can google "jailed for memes" and find some questionable choices, but to use your voice for those handfuls of situations when literally thousands upon thousands of people are legitimately threatened each day online? I think I can guess what your true intents are: its to further a brutal status quo so you continue feeling good. It doesn't help his argument that the sentence before this line bemoans the end of empire.
And the frustrating thing is that one of his recommendations is kind of good: end the funny money system of business (not sure I agree with the how of the gold standard, but I'd have to defer to others there). But George just undercuts his argument with lines like this about memes, because if you pick it apart it just means he's advocating for the funny money version of enforcing the law. Ah, so George you're not against funny money in principle, it's more like "Funny money for me, but not for thee."
I like arguments like this because it's a reminder that details matter. I clearly see them as the manipulation they are, but I do like them nonetheless.
I remember watching a story about asylum seekers who had to use Skype to dial in to get an appointment. At one point, one of them says to the camera "I often dream about the call music." I would be surprised if the call music isn't (at this point at least) configurable in some way, but it's still humbling to realize that a minor thing like a loader or sound file can represent the entire product to someone at a very stressful time in their life.
Overall I like posts like these, as they are a reminder that you're not really paid for agonizing over eloquent or great code, but just code that "gets the job done". But then if you over-index on this viewpoint, you'll end up needing posts which remind you that this is a craft and that code needs some agonizing over.
What I've been pondering lately is another way to sum this up that is more future focused: Let's say a genie walks into your project and says that you can have 1.5 times the features you have right now, for 3x the code. The genie promises that the code will be "alright, maybe just kind of a bit bad". I think around 2/3 of developers would say no, but I suspect 2/3 of people in product management, sales, marketing, etc would say yes. Everyone would be sympathetic to the problems this would create, but the allure of getting 1.5X ahead on your roadmap is probably too hard to ignore for those other disciplines. It's basically accelerating all your other work streams by 1.5, at the expense of potentially bogging down dev. Obviously, countless caveats exist, but it does in general feel right, and feels like it hints at the fundamental causes of tension between business and development.
Speaking as a PM and a former Eng, if you could get 1.5x your features at this trade-off, the topline revenue that those features drive could very likely result in significant additional resources to provide to dev. I realize you can chase your tail with tech debt, but you're calling this "alright" code, not horrible code. I'd take that trade-off in either role I had.
PMs never consider who will manage the code down the line. They never consider the implied difficulty multiplier because if you can't party poker it, you can't build it! That's what the agile ninjas say! Code that is "kinda bad but ok" will end up being the cause of a SEV0 eventually. This kind of tradeoff is made by management because the entire field of software engineering is a joke to them.
There's a trade off to be made. But it isn't the one posited. Creating code that is manageable implies it's better than "kinda bad but ok" but not all the way to a magnum opus in software engineering.
Leave decisions like these to the engineers. If management isn't willing to give "significant additional resources" to engineers they get what they pay for. Enjoy your extremely high turnover. Of course, it'll never be your fault. The engineers will also suffer the consequences. It would be nice to see even one PM eat shit for their terrible project management decisions done in the name of "agile".
Maybe for a 1.1x increase in features, but for 1.5x (provided the new features solve actual customer problems), I will choose the genie every time. /PM
1.5x the features, 3x the code would roughly result in 1/3 development velocity, 3x bugs, and 3x incidents going forward.
Even assuming all your developers are magically given a solid understanding of the new code, all remaining velocity will be entirely consumed by bugs and incidents. No more feature development will occur.
You could try to grow to outrun the code debt you've just acquired - but that's what literally every start up tries to do, and less than 10% succeed.
The most likely outcome is that the company would enjoy a one-time massive feature feast before slowly dying over the course of 5-10 years or so.
Great if you're a founder looking for a quick exit or some other position that is super focused on short term growth, I suppose.
> significant additional resources to provide to dev.
Ah sweet, even more problems to deal with then. More people to onboard to support you in writing the 3x more code, more managers needed, or more strain on the managers, etc. We'll just fix it by hiring even more people.
Whether or not adding more people is a problem greatly depends on the existing workload and where in the development cycle those folks are added. It also depends on the quality of the people. My comment was certainly not advocating for putting more meat into the grinder in favor of chasing the mythical man month.
My point was more that if you can magic your way into 1.5x the features for 3x the code, and it's "alright", you can probably add 1.5x to the top-line revenue over the same time frame. A 1.5x increase in top line revenue, especially at a larger organization, is absolutely massive and opens up many possibilities, including hiring significant additional headcount. The headcount comes in /after/ this magical moment, not prior to or in the midst of. And yes, if you have 3x more code, you'd probably want more people to help manage resolving technical debt, fixing bugs, and generally dealing with the ongoing keep-the-lights-on work that is inherent in that.
It greatly depends on what the "features" are. We're being intentionally very hand-wavy here. If you are adding features that are incremental for existing customer markets, then of course it's not going to drive linear revenue (it may not even drive /any/ additional revenue), but if those features open up new markets and use cases it can grow revenue beyond linear for effort. It all depends, and we're not being specific enough to say one way or the other since this is a contrived hypothetical with vague inputs.
Engineering output doesn't even scale close to linearly, though. You _might_ grow revenue 1.5x but now you have 3x as much code/system and need 6-9x as the engineering headcount.
We probably just took a nice small/medium profitable business and completely fucked it.
Of course you can always run out of time and go bankrupt and these people could go to other companies to work on a probably even worse codebase. Also everyone lost years of their lives chasing the CEO into perfectness
Even if the code is the same quality as existing code, having 3x of it will slow down development considerably. And will probably make developers less happy with their jobs, and increase churn. And hiring more devs will initially slow down development even more.
If I had a dollar for every time a SWE was promised “resources” to address tech debt I could probably retire. If you’re “not that PM”, good on you, but any seasoned SWE hears “we’ll address the tech debt {in the future}” and either laughs or cries on the inside.
For most anything but a very new project, 1.5x the features isn't just advancing the roadmap, it's hitting the end and not stopping. At work, that'd probably be something like five years of work poofed into existence. Getting that for free is absolutely worth a fairly large amount of mediocre code.
That's generously assuming that the executives will accept stopping of adding new features. Even more generous assumption is that they will give engineering time and space to grasp the new code and make it more maintainable.
How much does it bog down? If for the next two years you're adding features at half the rate but you got a five year boost you're still head and some of that work can simplify the situation.
Yeah that's the thing, it's hard to say how much you are bogged down. As time goes on the value of the 1.5x multiplier increases in value, but then you also run the risk of massive spaghetti code (more or less, depends on what the genie considers good).
I don't know if there's great value in trying to figure out if you would quantitatively get ahead though. I think the value is in just realizing that some groups are inclined to perhaps take that risk, and some groups are not.
If your code has increased by 3x, that means 2/3 of the entire project is unknown to your developers. It’ll take a lot of work to just get everyone across that much extra code. To say nothing of how much work it would be to tame it.
I agree with the GP. Business people would probably salivate over this, but if it were up to me I’d want to say no.
The code needs to work, but given that the actual writing of code is not most of the work to be done I think it's worth the extra time in polishing the code. Like how Apple designs the internals of their products to look as good as the externals. Once you've spent billions on R&D for custom chips, PCB layouts, optimizing heat transfer, etc. you really owe it to your product to spend a couple million on the finer things.
Likewise, there can be an attitude of "Who cares about the code? I met the needs of the feature" that some devs will have. I've spent many an hour reading others' code, re-reading my own code over and over to learn the subtle differences in readability, cleanliness and maintainability between approaches. I want others to have some craftsmanship when writing code if we're working together. That also means getting the little details right in the user-facing parts.
Most importantly you need humility when it comes time to throw away the code you felt so good about. All code is trouble. The best code is no code. Don't let your well crafted code get in the way of deleting what needs to get deleted.
I have found it's more practical to invert this train of thought and work backwards. In most codebases I've worked in, there are fairly clear divisions of labor between vanilla line of business code and critical path code that merits extra infrastructural investment.
Working backwards from the critical path code to reinforce it with the infrastructure it needs to support robustness and ease of maintainability is valuable because it makes the path to ROI for the business very clear, and candidly, there is often lots of code that just wouldn't be high ROI to reinforce too much.
as a counterpoint, this is sorta similar to how Apple creates products:
there's quote about magic:
> Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect. - Teller
The 3x code is all the magical "stuff" and that goes on in the background to create the illusion of something magical just working as well as non-essential "flourishes" like animation of different font support
However the key difference is that one magical feature is worth more than 1.5x a list of features to sell to various customers who only care about a different subset of those features.
In both cases though, it's understood that there is an additional burden of complexity and upkeep in order to achieve an end goal. Every line of code adds additional entropy to the system until it caps out based on whatever rate of entropy expulsion the culture can maintain.
The diminishing return on additional lines of code may be an unavoidable part of large systems. So it always feels like returning to the "Beginning" via a new project or new startup increase agency and leverage. Which is then perceived by marketing/sales/etc... as a constant refusal to move into the "future" b/c of "bad code danger".
The problem is tech debt blows up sometimes. Maybe a critical engineer quits. Maybe there's a big outage. Maybe a big client churns because they've run into one too many points of friction.
There absolutely is a time and place to ship "good enough code". But we have to factor in that for every ounce of credit a dev gets for shipping early there is three ounces of blame for when it goes way wrong.
Thanks for positing this thought exercise. You kept me thinking on it all week! I reworded the hypothetical slightly to avoid magical loophole thinking and posed it to my team but they assumed I was being a trickster anyway. I posted some of my thoughts on it here: https://niedzielski.com/log/2023-08-20.
I think that taking the bargain would depend on the project... If it was software for a product that was on the market and had a lot of competitors, then it's a good deal as it would allow you to get ahead of the competition. Or, say, it was a new market and the features allow you to establish a strong lead. I'd definitely take the deal and then set up a team to do a refactor/rewrite or something.
If the deal was used on internal software that already did it's job relatively well, then it's probably not worth the long-term trade off.
I think that your larger point still stands, that most business people don't care about software engineering issues, but just want features, or solutions to problems, or whatever. Negotiating those issues in a business can be tough.
Knowing what quality of code to ship when is part of the craft. This skill applies to a lot of professions. No carpenter puts the same detail into framing that they do into stain grade trim. Nor will they go furniture grade fasternerless install in a cheap tract home.
This isn't a revolutionary idea, but for some reason, software devs suffer from an excess of black and white thinking. Things must always be done a particular way. It's such a bad tick, we have created a host of tools that try to enforce as much rigid uniformity as we can manager to automate.
> you're not really paid for agonizing over eloquent or great code, but just code that "gets the job done".
Somebody might interpret this statement as if nobody (in their context) should worry about writing good code. If you're writing good or bad code it doesn't matter as long as it works. Package and ship it and call it a day.
But the author addresses this:
> It's not even about good work. This is also a given. That's the default expectation, it's part of the package. The cake will be good.
Then I'd say that you're paid for "good code that gets the job done".
>Somebody might interpret this statement as if nobody (in their context) should worry about writing good code.
The comment you quoted refers to great/eloquent code. But you took it to mean something different.
Given the rehashing of these same memes in dev communities since the dawn of programming, I don't believe there is a strong agreement on what "good code" even means practically speaking, even though we mostly agree on abstract principles.
IMHO, I think there is an understandable hesitation among developers to accepting that they're doing 'job for hire' work, instead aligning more with the idea that they're put in charge to produce something "beautiful".
Ultimately, it's all messy machine code with goto's and jumps everywhere and "elegant" data structures turning into bits mashed together in memory. The comments, naming conventions, coding formats, etc are all long gone.
This is in stark contrast when producing something physical where the finer engineering aspects shine through in the final product.
People are taking this comment literally and ignoring the spirit of it e.g. “for 1.5x I would but not 1.1x”… okay fine, what about 1.2x? The number doesn’t matter… the point is that SWEs care about code quality more than PMs and other non-devs ever will.
One thing that you do get paid for is productivity, which has tradeoffs if you're not agonizing over maintainability that will eventually catch up to you.
This is really cool. I like it. I think a few simple things would be:
-- a toggle to ensure that what you get back is automatically translated to english, and the translation is easier to read. In fact, making sure you can always see translations right away would help, even for suggestions.
-- Much simpler conversations to begin with, my Spanish is basically non-existent from when I took it in school, and the teacher input and the cafe prompt was already too far over my head.
Getting English translation is a good idea, but it should be "hold down 5 seconds" to reveal -- Allowing it to be shown instantly might actually slow language learning. Users should be allowed to struggle a few seconds first (struggle === learning) before translating.
Alternatively, it might be nice to be able to translate only individual words. If I understood 60% , inferred 35%, and was clueless about 5% of a foreign text, I think I'd end up learning more by using the smallest amount of translation possible and only translating the word I was stuck on.
It would also be nice to see support for more widely spoken languages. Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and Hindi could be your killer apps -- If supporting non-latin text is a bottleneck, you could launch these languages in beta with some features disabled!
Overall, great product OP! This is definitely good enough to start charging for. Spending 5 minutes a day speaking Spanish is a very appealing idea for me. As silly as it sounds, I'd try selling door to door (in person) for the first few users. I think that could be much more effective for early stages. You should also consider adding a intermediate tier for people in lower income countries.
I will keep your site bookmarked -- I tested it for Spanish, but the language I really want to learn Arabic. If you can add Arabic language support, I will be the first person to sign up!
Hello, generally, Arabic is taught with two accents in language schools: Formal "Fus-ha" Arabic, and Egyptian dialect Arabic (most common by far). If you can add both here, I will go ahead and sign up for premium membership. :)
I would rather invest in a Marketing person. A lot of stuff in the language learning space is sold thru content marketing. There are a lot of influencers. And they are very open to test drive stuff like this.
@gorpomon and @jjkeddo199 Great talking points! I thought about this a lot, but still don't have a good answer: how easy should it be to translate?
- If you make it too easy, like jjkeddo199 pointed out you don't learn.
e.g. it's much more useful to watch a movie and understand say 60-70% of it than to have your work cutout for you and understand everything with subtitles.
- But this also depends on the current level you're at… And getting the difficulty just right is what gets people to feel good, learn and be "in the zone" (FLOW)! Such a good feeling!
- It's more beneficial to use THE FEW WORDS ONE KNOWS than to spread oneself too thin, seeing too many words and reading too much translated text. Time spent 100% in the language is super valuable. Story time: when I first lived in Hungary I talked like a 2-year old, but became fluent (in the sense of fast, no need to think) on ultra-limited topics in two months. This created a solid basis I was later able to build on. It's a method that works.
- At times, only translations will make a meaning crystal clear.
But I may also be at a bit of a disconnect. I learn languages by just pushing through, but not everyone has the same learning style (my wife is much more organized and does just as well.)
Sorry if this turned into a ramble…
Anyway… Would love to know what people's experience and feelings are with the whole shebang of translation.
Downvotes shall come and that's ok-- but it's really interesting how radically different the experience of filling gas is for men and women. I've had multiple conversations with female friends where they discuss factoring in personal safety and the chance of being bothered while filling gas. It's a captive situation and hard to leave quickly. Aside from the odd request for money, I don't get bothered while filling gas, but that's not true for many many people.
Interestingly enough, if a women can charge at home and doesn't do alot of distant driving, they can cut gas stations out of their life completely with an EV along with predatory mechanics during routine maintenance.
That second bit is a criminally underserved market. It's fucking stupid that I have to call one of my guy friends to go to the mechanic with me and pretend to be my boyfriend so I don't get ripped off.
If anyone figures out how to align the incentives you'll have a customer base basically immediately.
As a guy who gets attempts at being ripped off by mechanics (unnecessary work coming very highly recommended), my solution was not to somehow introduce more masculinity, but to educate myself by hanging out on forums specific to whatever car I'm driving, and mix a bit of that education into the conversation with the shop, bordering on what could come across as knowledge bragging. For example, while waiting for work to finish, I'll watch a video on something it ostensibly needs and then bring up the fact that I did and might DIY it. Typically the service writer will then be on my side instead of seeing me as a money tree, and the frequency of ridiculous recommended work after that drops to almost nothing. Ymmv and indeed people will write posts on those forums with male salutations for no apparent reason, but otherwise that's where I found the truth.
Which is great! You only had to exert a bunch of extra effort, and it sounds like you've enjoyed the results.
Now read some stories from women who've also made that extra effort and then some, having more experience and knowledge than the mechanics trying to rip them off, and still being given the runaround more often than not.
A shady mechanic will be shady to some degree to everyone to the degree they think they can get away with it. No amount of self-education on the part of women lets them escape the shadiness.
Whenever people talk about restaurants completely replacing staff with robots/kiosks I get the same safety fears. I wouldn’t stop at a McDonald’s on a road trip if it didn’t have any staff. More people, like staff, equal more social pressure for potential bad players to act appropriately.
Which is a reason to put them in places where the occupants can get out in a relatively safe place and either be productive (store parking lots) or entertained (zoo).
Yet those are where most 1st gen chargers were placed, and are the same places the quoted woman in the article is complaining about.
Yes they're less convenient, but so is charging an EV (compared to refueling). Until charging only takes 5-10 mins, the best way to offset inconvenience of time is to place chargers in places where you can multitask.
Does HN just not pay attention? Women get hit on, talked up, harassed, pretty much every place they go. Men seem to think it is their right to do this. So, yeah, women want to feel safe.
"People who harass certain types of people will harass those people" just doesn't convey much information, so it's not worth saying. Any thoughts on how to best phrase this pattern?
If approximately half of the population is at all afraid to exist in public, then maybe your feelings getting hurt about sweeping statements is a little less important in the grand scheme of things.
You may not feel safe, but "safer" is a comparison word, and I'm not sure on what basis you claim to feel as unsafe as a woman would in the same situation.
Do you also fear being sexually assaulted every time you walk to your car in a dark parking garage?
Are you often sexually harassed in public spaces?
An un-housed person asking you for cash at a gas station doesn't put your experience on par with what women experience every day.
I knew the answer in the article was safety before I read it. We live in a society where women feel unsafe in normal situations us men never even consider.
Moving the goalposts from sexual harassment to violent crime doesn't change reality. I don't know any men who fear violent crime every time they step foot out of the house, unless they are actively involved in a lifestyle that tends to violent crime. Most women I know fear sexual harassment and worse every time they step foot out of the house.
Violent crime includes sexual assault and rape. And the GP post is a man discussing his experiences with aggressive panhandling, which can escalate into an assault or attempted mugging. My point is that perceptions of risk and societal willingness to acknowledge risk differs between men and women. Men are incentivized to play down risks to their personal safety to save face, while the dynamic is reversed for women.
As to how this relates to the overall discussion, I'd suspect that men and women have similar safety concerns, but men are just more likely to lie about it on surveys.
> I'd suspect that men and women have similar safety concerns, but men are just more likely to lie about it on surveys.
Talk to more women, I'd say.
I have been scared in my life, and I have known many men I would describe as being generally-fearful people, but I have never met any man who spent as much of their life considering physical safety as one of their highest priorities every single day of their lives, and I have talked to many women who describe that feeling in different words.
I think it's good to acknowledge that men can be, and sometimes are, scared. But I think you do a disservice to both men and women when you look at "violent crime" stats (skewed heavily by gang activity most of us will never encounter regardless of gender) and believe that men and women are generally equally concerned about safety. That flies in the face of the experiences of nearly everyone, I think.
Put another way: there are some neighborhoods in which I would not like to walk alone at night, but I have never once worried about being attacked while walking for exercise in a tony suburb in the afternoon. Any time I've encountered a woman while doing so, they would cross the street, be holding keys in their hands, or both. I don't think I'm a scary-looking guy, but as an unknown man they encountered, even in a tony suburb in the afternoon, concern for their safety prompted them to take action.
You don't have to believe me, and I can't convince you. But if you ever listen to women, read women, or even believe the comments you see on this page from women, you might just understand life a little more.
> and I have talked to many women who describe that feeling in different words.
This illustrates my exact point - you are basing your opinion on the number of people who have opened up to you about their feelings. Men in general don't do that, especially when it involves fear and vulnerability.
> But I think you do a disservice to both men and women when you look at "violent crime" stats (skewed heavily by gang activity most of us will never encounter regardless of gender)
Inter-gang violence is definitely overrepresented in murder and shooting stats, but I doubt it has much of an impact on general violent crime stats. Gang members typically don't call the cops when they are victims of crimes, and are unlikely to answer crime victimization surveys from the government.
> Any time I've encountered a woman while doing so, they would cross the street, be holding keys in their hands, or both.
That isn't normal. Either the women in your neighborhood listen to way too many true crime podcasts, or you are scarier looking than you think.
> But if you ever listen to women, read women, or even believe the comments you see on this page from women, you might just understand life a little more.
The condescension really is not needed or constructive.
You don't know me nor the men I've talked to. I have had deep meaningful conversations about fears and vulnerability with many men, and they almost never involved physical safety. Conversations about shame, and emotional pain, and fear of failure and being perceived as weak, yes. About being attacked on the street, almost never.
You doubt, and you suspect, and you believe. More than three-quarters of rapes and sexual assaults are not reported[0]. Violent crimes involving injury, or murder, are reported by the medical personnel involved. When you rely on one set of statistics to negate widespread fears, and ignore all reports or statistics that support them, you don't end up with a clear view of things.
The experiences I describe are 100% normal in suburbs all around America. It's not just once or twice, and I'm not the only man to have noticed this.
If you don't want condescension, base your opinions on facts rather than counter-factual beliefs and feelings. I'm linking to statistics and reports, and you're parroting stereotypical generalizations countered by comments from women on this very page.
I am taking your statements at face value, but at this point it is starting to honestly feel like you're trolling, so carry on.
I'm the one who gave hard numbers showing that men make up the majority of victims of violent crime, which you tried to handwave away by blaming gang members...
Agreed that this discussion is going nowhere useful though.
All I have is 47 years of life experience and in those years not once has a male friend or acquaintance asked if I could walk them to their car, follow them home, or pretend to be their SO because they felt unsafe in a public situation. The number is significantly higher when I switch the context to female friends.
If you want to play red pill semantic games around it's not safe for men either, I pity you and the lack of empathy and understanding you have.
As a 47 year old man, would you feel comfortable asking another man to walk you to your car or follow you home? Or would the social embarrassment of violating cultural norms for men outweigh the perceived safety risk? It is not a "red pill" argument to point out that cultural norms for displaying vulnerability and weakness are different for men and for women.
I would and I have. I used to frequent dive bars in sketch neighborhoods and I wouldn't even step out for a smoke without someone else. In college we would regularly group up for walks back from downtown.
It's also very infrequent where the thought of my personal safety crosses my mind in locations like malls, rest stops and gas stations. I've never felt the need to carry pepper spray or a weapon. I've never used my keys as improvised brass knuckles to cross a dimly lit parking lot.
I stroll the world as a master with all the privilege afforded to six foot tall white male.
downvotes shall come because this is HN, but that's ok...
perhaps it's time to admit that modern western ideals are not compatible with the natural laws embedded in our body by several hundred thousand years of evolution...
I'm someone who's been suffering for years because of some trashy people who do whatever they want without considering their impact on others.
I'm not saying it's beautiful. I'm saying it's how life works. Don't like it? stop bringing new people in this world. That's what I'm doing.
About most people not doing it: first, it's a lie; there's a huge amount of rape hidden away in homes. Second: people don't do it because they are scared of the other people with guns and cages; which proves my point that might makes right in the real world.
What? I don't want to misinterpret you, so what are you actually saying? Because it sounds like an argument to switch to a Handmaid's Tale-like society.
I feel that I have the right to be friendly to every person I see in almost every situation I'm in, including starting to chat with them. If they seem receptive I would feel that I have the right to escalate to flirting ... and then stop if it's not well received. With those provisos I see the time and place for sexual pursuit as most times and most places. But if the other person is not friendly and responsive, and you pursue the "chat up" or flirtation anyhow, that's not right regardless of time or place.
> With those provisos I see the time and place for sexual pursuit as most times and most places.
But if collectively, women are saying, no it is not most times and most places, you're in the wrong.
Look, it's really simple. If you want a better chance of meeting someone who might be receptive to your flirting, you do it when they're feeling safe and secure.
I whiled away so many afternoons at Barnes & Noble. We'd drive 30 minutes from our small town to the nearest big city and go sit and enjoy an afternoon reading. I would say maybe 1 out of every 3 visits would result in someone buying a book, but we never felt compelled to buy anything. For where we were in the country, the magazine selection felt incredibly cosmopolitan, and a window into the broader world.
To me, a Barnes and Noble still symbolizes the joy and worldliness of reading. Whenever I'm with family and shopping, if I'm not out to buy anything I still opt to spend some time reading in a B&N. I'm glad this chain is back on its feet and growing again. For lots of places, and lots of people, B&N is a lifeline.
As others have said, if you're in reasonably good health, IVF is definitely an option for having kids. It could be good excuse to get that big enterprise job, as I know SalesForce offers IVF insurance as part of its comp.
Barring that, fostering is a possibility, but the requirements to do so and the ease of it vary on where you are. Fostering is not something to enter into lightly, but it seems to be highly rewarding. I have a friend adopting the child she fostered, it wasn't always easy, but she's very happy.
I am not sure if OP has considered fostering and I think many people (including myself) don't know how it works. The foster parents make a big difference in a person's life and it seems to be quite a different experience than adoption.
One trick to parenting is the almighty ROUTINE! Don't sacrifice it for anything. If your kid goes to bed at 7pm 6/7 nights a week, that's not a routine. Kids can't recognize complex routines, I find they're all or nothing.
We implemented a routine of bedtime at 6:30pm and it liberated our evenings. The routine means in evenings one partner always has to stay in unless we call a babysitter, but that's a small price to pay for being able to go out, or stay in and follow your hobbies and passions.
Now, to be fair, we have a good sleeper (but not a good eater, seems like you only get one!), but routines of all kinds help, and I think they can help all kids. Stick to the routine, it pays dividends.
Of course, Twitter/X/etc are a far cry from that now-- but it could be worth trying where you and your friends use the service like that.