You're probably talking about Peter's Pence collection contribution which is just pocket change (a few millions). Dioclesian revenue, lease income, Vatican's wealth fund generate billions. Lets not forget state support which the US doesn't have - for example if you register as a catholic in Germany 8-9% of your income tax goes to the church directly - to the tune of about 6 billion per year altogether.
> You're probably talking about Peter's Pence collection contribution which is just pocket change (a few millions).
Pocket change for sure (13.6 million/28.1%, says https://zenit.org/2024/06/30/the-ten-countries-that-made-the...), but there's also U.S. congregational giving of ~$20 billion, and the U.S. is the source of most large Catholic hospital, university, and foundation endowments.
Comments so far are sort of singling out the "negatives" i.e. make it seem like 40yo just don't want to put in the time anymore (for one reason or another) but the article also mentions stuff like:
- At 40+ you're more judicious about where you put your energy
- In your 40s, you have some accumulated wisdom: you recognize patterns faster and are more willing to change course
Do I have the blind faith to grind it out 5+ years in a stagnating startup on an off chance it might take off someday - especially if I've done that before? Looking for a better way is not always a bad thing. On another hand - my 20yo self wouldn't have believed my 40yo self - some things you just have to live through.
I'm the author of the post. I think you've discerned the central tension I was exploring here.
Part of what I'm identifying is a simple truth: in your 40s, you don’t have that same kind of “raw firepower” you had when you were younger.
That doesn't mean you can't still be ambitious or leverage your accrued wisdom, network, and resources to launch a company; it just means the dynamics are different.
Generalizing always misses things. I'm 65, and until recently, sometimes worked 15 hour days with no breaks. I value "being able to work" increasingly more with each passing year.
It's possible only because I've a had a lot of years to learn and experiment with how to have MORE "firepower". I had so many health issues when I was younger, I couldn't accomplish much. It affected my life goals and perspective tremendously. At the same time, if I don't do enough things right now, I suffer faster. Even with my issues at a younger age, I could get away with much more when I was younger.
I'm only 30 and honestly, sometimes I sit down at a side project and think "How the heck did I just sit here and grind out this entire desktop application" when now I'll struggle to work on it for an hour at a time.
Part of it is motivation in that it went from being a personal project I use to something others primarily use but I also constantly ask myself "Is this really what I want to spend my time on" which was never really a thought back then when it was just fun (and something I needed)
Not exactly the same but echoes of the raw firepower thing where it's easy to fully commit if you either have nothing else or you're fully sure of your dedication otherwise you're sort of one toe in the pool and aren't sure whether to save your energy
> Part of what I'm identifying is a simple truth: in your 40s, you don’t have that same kind of “raw firepower” you had when you were younger.
I wish this self-harming myth would stop being repeated as a "simple truth". It's a simple falsehood. It comes from a 100-year old idea about scientific productivity, that science (and specifically mathematics) is a young person's game. This has been widely debunked for many decades now.
The reality is that a lot of people use this myth to not admit the fact that they burned themselves out and lost their drive. Then they don't take care of their mental health and use this unscientific nonsense as the excuse for why things went wrong.
I see it in colleagues all the time in science. Some burn out, others get far better, smarter, and can get things done that they couldn't have a decade before. It has nothing to do with wisdom, network, resources, etc.
"In a study published in the journal Nature Aging in August, a team of Stanford scientists described “waves” of aging, where major biomolecular shifts happen in the body around ages 44 and 60."
> I wish this self-harming myth would stop being repeated as a "simple truth".
In an industry that exploits a pool of young workers, paying them less but assuring them that they're smarter and their skills are more up-to-date than those middle-aged coders of yesteryear, it's still effective rhetoric.
The WCC is just a tournament though, and the winner isn't always the best player. In 1993 for example Kasparov split from FIDE, and nobody thinks of FIDE's champions as "real" until Kramnik brought the titles back together in 2006. Meanwhile Kasparov lost a match and his title to Kramnik in 2000, but remained the highest rated player until he retired. And Magnus outranked Anand for years before bothering to contest the championship.
The top three classical players today are in their 30s (with Arjun right there behind Fabiano and Hikaru). The most impressive to me though are Anand in his fifties and Aronian in his forties, in the 10th and 11th spots. And then of course there's speed chess, where the youngsters are barely competitive.
I do think youthfulness can mean better performance, but don't forget that in modern times youth development has been much more optimized than ever before so the youth have advantage of that, getting the best development while the brains are most plastic to improve.
An he also said: “Don’t believe everything that is attributed to me as truth, especially question those who put “my words” under fake quotation marks.”
As far as I know, there's no available tooling for the public to detect SynthID watermarks on generated text, image, or audio, outside of Google Search's About this Image feature.
Unlike Gumroad, our goal is not to offer sales pages for digital products - at least not initially.
We found out creators don't necessarily need a complicated landing page when selling content through e.g. tiktok or instagram or a newsletter that already provides trust. In addition, we will also process and handle invoices and credit notes
Yes, the same was true for me. I literally only want to accept payments, the sales page and the fulfilment is already done externally, so I really just need a payment form that sends me a callback.
Stripe does this, but going through their whole KYC process has become extremely arduous (and they seem incapable of being clear about what they need/want, as well as understanding that Dutch people with a Dutch company sometimes do not reside on the Netherlands).
This will very likely end by both parties pronouncing they are the victors here.
For Ukraine the victory might be that Russia will most likely be unable to take Kiev and need to "withdraw" closer to their own borders i.e. the victory is not submitting in the "heroic" sense. However with a staggering economic loss and loss of life (including the refugees that might never return).
For Russia their victory will be claiming they "secured" the 2 rebel republics/Crimea. Also at a staggering loss - some of it army but mostly incredible economic sanctions. It remains to be seen if Putins regime will be able to survive that in the long run.
In terms of the classical definition I guess you could call it a stalemate - don't see how either of them can win - everybody loses. Who loses less - arguably I'd say economic sanctions still do not hurt as much as the decades Ukraine will need to rebuild. And Russia still has a huge amount of natural resources that others need and are willing to pay for.
I don't doubt that once this is over, the US and the EU will launch a generous reconstruction plan. Ukraine may end up with much better infrastructure in place of the destroyed one.
This could be financed from seized oligarchs' wealth. No need to spend taxpayer money. And Western construction companies will like those contracts, doubly so after Covid.
My experience with Flash is completely opposite to yours - I'd say we're for the most part pretending that by letting Flash die we're better off today.
My fans spinning up every time I open a random website definitely disagree with you. Wasn't that the #1 argument for getting rid of Flash?
I started developing Flash websites in Flash 3 in school, transitioned into Actionscript 2/3 and did some complex projects over the years. Can't vouch for Linux but on my Mac and on Windows it was definitely great, it DID just work and it was cross-platform. People have short memories - but cross-platform back then was also mostly referring to huge JS/website inconsistencies between different browsers. I mean - when you say cross-platform, what are you even comparing it to?
I had a huge offline collection of different SWF files/websites for inspiration and that I could just start up from the filesystem and they also just worked (if it was a single-file project of course). I'd wager that 95+% of the people also had the full Flash Player installed.
Today I do some complex JS/React/webGL stuff - and let me tell you it takes like 10x as much (money, time, knowledge, effort) to develop stuff that's comparable to what I did 10 years ago in Flash. And this comes with more or just as many cross-browser and performance problems.
Blaming Flash for "fixing your computer" or saying it somehow had "hosting issues" I can't really understand at all.
The "mobile era" just started when Flash started transitioning into smartphones/apps - first results were not ideal but promising. Were Adobe allowed to have 10 years of iterations on those - I do firmly believe it would have been a #1 app development environment today. There would have been no need for Unity or even cross-platform frameworks like Flutter, etc...
But it is what it is - sorry, but anyone who thinks Flash dying was not primarily about Apple or even Google not wanting to keep their walled gardens for themselves is delusional. Adobe definitely has a good part of the blame for not recognising the potential and fighting for it some more.
When you read negative comments, it's always someone who didn't really use it.
This is generally true, and for a simple reason. When people don't like something, they avoid it. And therefore they wind up not really using it.
Take me for an example. All that I needed to know about Flash is that someone, somewhere, thought my computer should randomly start flashing and making noise. And the way that they did it really sucked to experience on Linux. (Not that I wanted the intended experience.) The fact that the plugin that I needed to let them do so was a repeated source of security holes was just icing on the cake.
So I avoided Flash. And disabled the plugin at some point. With the happy result that a lot of particularly annoying ads went away.
Now I'm sure that there were a lot of people whose experience was better. It was popular for a reason. But it wasn't a better experience for me.
Not defending them in any way - but don't think security was the primary reason for Zoom taking off. It was stability - it just worked and at the same time competitors didn't.
Everybody used to have Skype and I would have gladly handed over my data to MS if only it would have been able to do stable video calls. It was often a disaster for just 2-way calls, let alone group.
> don't think security was the primary reason for Zoom taking off. It was stability
Stability was the main draw, but company IT departments would have had more power to ban it if there were bigger and clearer risks of corporate secrets escaping.
Industrial espionage is real. There are many companies who are concerned about this and take active steps to keep data secret who would likely not have approved zoom use if they'd known e2e encryption wasn't to the level they were told.
Some folks are concerned with more than stability and ease of use.
Once can't just delegate responsibility like that. Any company should enage in some form of due dilligence before procuring software. If there are expecations of privacy then those should be proven by the company procuring the software, not the vendor.
How would you verify e2e encryption on a proprietary protocol? Not every company that cares about privacy has crypto experts on staff. They should have a reasonable expectation that the vendor is telling the truth.
No, if a company was really worried they shouldn't have opted for a cloud product with a (partly) Chinese-owned company. A lot of companies go through the trouble of giving their employees (especially management) "throw away" phones and/or computers when they send them to "problematic" places, in particular China, but then they install Zoom for their C-level and middle management executives to use, huh?
Any company IT department's power to ban something is inversely related to how much it's users want to use it. Also, the videoconference provider stealing company secrets it not part of most companies threat model. Teams and Slack are incredibly popular corporate tools, and neither of them offer this feature. WebEx is the only reasonably popular tool I can think of that supports it, and any security department that cared strongly about E2EE, would be asking questions like "do you perform key escrow" if they were thinking of migrating off something like that.
Because in order to operate a business (or any organization), you have to at some point decide on a group of service providers and other 3rd parties that you trust. For most organizations, trusting a major videoconferencing vendor is going to be within their risk tolerance. For some organizations (or for some use-cases within organizations) this wouldn't be acceptable (or perhaps trusting Zoom wouldn't be acceptable, where a different vendor might be), but at this point you're starting to stray outside of Zoom's target market and into a set of more specialized requirements.
Defending against sophisticated state-level actors goes even further beyond the requirements of most businesses. Unless you had a specific reason to believe that you were a target of such actors (dealing with national security, or matters of significant national strategic importance), you couldn't justify investing much resource into such defensive measures.
Users were unaware this was happening. "It just worked" because it would install itself in the background unbeknownst to the user, thus obviating the need to take time to install it when needed.
> It was stability - it just worked and at the same time competitors didn't.
This is absolutely huge. We've tried Teams (and I have previously used Webex and Hangouts).
It seems like there is _always_ one person that struggles with other video services. Can't join, video/audio issues, CPU usage, latency, etc. Painful when 10%+ of a meeting is consumed by getting one last, key person trying to fix their issues.
It's much easier to make a stable communication product if you don't need to worry about security and privacy.
Just look at the troubles and hurdles Signal messenger need to overcome to implement some features, while the competition that is not so security focused has them since forever.
I think you may be viewing history through slightly rose-tinted glasses there - I used pre-MS Skype a lot and it was never anywhere near as reliable as Zoom is and didn't support group video chat at all. And the fact that it was P2P meant that some features that everyone would expect to work these days (offline messages, mobile support) were simply not possible at all.
I'm not sure what would be accomplished if the source leaked. Someone would still need to maintain both the client and now a new set of servers. This would be difficult given that Microsoft would almost certainly use whatever means they could to stop this from happening.
The client application was also the server application. Clients with good connections which appeared to always be online became super nodes which were the directory "servers" you would connect to. The code base contained a long list of previously known super nodes and would attempt to connect to those on first start. As it ran it would keep syncing the list of close super nodes. There were many hundreds of super nodes, so the odds of all of them changing or going offline were pretty slim.
I imagine some people at Skype probably kept a few instances of Skype running at the office. So they technically hosted a few super nodes, but it wasn't necessarily that they were running some vastly different server version of the app. It wasn't until Microsoft decided to cut down on the P2P aspect of the app and hardcode only Azure-hosted super nodes into the application that this changed.
Thats only partly true on a very broad macro level - for example someone mentioned Kajkavian, which is dialect of Croatian but sounds a lot more Slovenian :)
In fact its the dialect spoken by the majority of people in Croatia (even though Stokavian is the "official" Croatian) and sometimes argued to be more than just a dialect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajkavian
Personally I always found the comparison "Croatian vs. Serbian is the same as US English vs. British" a great oversimplification. It's not just an intonation or alphabet, it's also a lot more different words (that might mean the same things) than for example between the variants of English. Yes, people understand each other - but they're also attuned to all the different dialects within the "main language groups" so they actually know/learn more words for same objects (for example Croatians will be happy to list different words for bread/tomatos/etc i.e. synonyms that they might know the meaning of but don't necessarily use daily - and those different synonyms depending on the dialect might be closer to Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Italian, Turkish, Hungarian or old Austrian).
In a way I think this invalidates the premise of the article - that there is "a peculiar form of theater going on" and that the governments are pretending by needing court translators. If the countries are using not only different alphabets, but in part also different words (even though that other surrounding countries might somewhat understand those different words) - whats a viable alternative then?
British, American and Australian use different words too, and even have different meanings for the same words (eg. fanny, boot, thongs). Yet anybody requesting translation between these would be laughed out of court, and rightly so.
Also, doesn't your claim that BCS speakers are attuned to different dialect groups and understand their terms even further undermine the claim that there's an actual need for translation? By and large, speakers of English aren't (although thanks to Hollywood everybody knows some American), but an Aussie in NYC or a Brit in Melbourne is not going to have any real issues communicating.
Yes of course there are synonyms in all languages - but I specified "a lot more words". If you look at the link I included in my first reply under "vocabulary comparison" you'll see an example of what I mean. And thats just the biggest one - there are islands in Croatia where I (as a native speaker) might have better luck understanding Czech than the local variants.
Don't think that undermines my claim at all - they understand the words because they're familiar within the slavic language group in general (even though they might be derivations and used or spelled differently). Its like saying Italian/Spanish are the same because speakers might understand words between them. With the translation argument - you also of course have to ignore the fact that Serbia writes in cyrillic and Croatia in latin alphabet.
As a Serbian speaker from Belgrade, I'll understand a Croatian from Zagreb better than I'd understand Serbian spoken in Pirot.
Basically, the point is about what defines a language as a distinct one.
Grammar is pretty much the same with one standard preferring one form or the other (eg. infinitive vs "da" + present). Vocabulary is over 90% identical, though I am sure top 500 words in both spoken dialects have a larger discrepancy. Alphabets are different, but they are almost bijectively mapped (only differ orthographically in digraphs like NJ/Nj/nj where Cyrillic has only Њ/њ), and you may have missed it, but Serbian population actually uses Latin script for >80% of all Serbian writing.
The article mentions a push to differentiate languages further, probably most evident in Croatia in early 90s.
But three students in Bosnia speaking identical language (grammar/vocabulary thougj the script might differ) of 3 different nationalities would officially claim they speak three different languages. If you don't see the absurdity in that, that's up to you.
