exasperation

Career wise? The two metrics that matter is how well liked you are and how valuable you are perceived to be. Actually working hard and being nice can contribute to being well liked at work, and sometimes can increase one's own perceived value to the employer. But being nice and working hard aren't going to be rewarded in themselves.

I'm nice to people because it's the right thing to do. But it also has generally made me well liked my whole life. So I've never had trouble negotiating above-market pay for my jobs.

And I used to work hard when the situation called for it. Which isn't all situations. Most of my jobs had clients or customers, so doing right by them was usually more important to me than doing something right for the employer actually paying my salary.

But I also advocated for myself, made sure that a significant chunk of the "working hard" I did was towards actually documenting my value, or getting recognized for current contributions, and building my reputation for having the right skillsets and problem solving ability for future assignments.

Plus luck always plays a big role. Similarly situated workers at a booming/growing company paying out a bunch of bonuses, versus a failing company choosing which workers to lay off, are going to see very different results even if they're equally perceived. Much of my own success is simple luck of timing, right place/right time type stuff. If I were born 5 years earlier or 5 years later, or simply 500 miles away from my place of birth, I think I would've been struggling a lot more.

This is probably my favorite one of his comics. He has a knack for "things as heads."

When clover is mowed and the clippings mulched back into the soil, the decomposition of the leaves adds nitrogen to the soil. If you remove the clippings the nitrogen goes with it.

Yes, "green manure" is taking nitrogen fixing crops (like clover and beans and peanuts) and to mulch them while still green, and incorporate that decomposing mulch into the soil you're using. That adds nitrogen in fewer steps than the traditional way of using animal manure (where the nitrogen still ultimately comes from plants).

Of course, the modern Haber process also fixes nitrogen through industrial chemistry rather than agriculture, so most commercial fertilizer today gets its nitrogen from chemical synthesis of atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia.

No, my point is that auto liability insurance covers the people you hurt while driving. It does not cover yourself or your own car, and it's perfectly legal not to insure your own car against your own negligence, even when it's required to insure everyone else's property against your own negligence.

The thing being insured is different, so an auto liability insurance mandate is fundamentally different from a health insurance mandate for oneself.

That's insurance for oneself.

Mandatory car insurance for drivers is liability insurance for everyone else. The driver is perfectly free not to insure their own vehicle (or their own injuries caused by their own driving).

I still have no idea how they made money.

That's the neat part, they didn't.

They wanted to pivot to ads, or paid subscriptions, but neither revenue stream really materialized for them.

Google had a text to search service, too, that didn't make money, but turned out to be pretty valuable user data for developing smarter semantic search.

My late 20's and early 30's were a really fun time. It was late enough that I was comfortable in my own skin, and no longer felt like I had to fit someone other people's standards. I didn't need to pretend to have interests in things I wasn't actually interested in, and at the same time I no longer needed to feel embarrassed about the things I was interested in.

Career wise, I was in the middle of a reset, so I was technically in an entry level job again, but just carried myself with the confidence of someone who knew what I wanted out of a career, and comfortable understanding how my work fit into the bigger picture.

It was liberating.

So when I turned 30, that was me feeling like I was finally allowed to be myself. I think it worked pretty well when I moved cities right before my 30th birthday, so the 30th birthday itself seemed like a bit of a door opening into a comfortable life.

That's not quite the right comparison. You can't expect the old AC to keep working for 25 years. For stuff like that, it's really a question between replacing now versus replacing later, and the net present value of the combined cash flows when you compare replacement timelines.

I live in a walkable neighborhood, and I have a version of this with the other parents in our neighborhood, where we have a designated night of the week where anyone who can make it meets up at one of the patio restaurants where the kids can run around while the parents hang out. Not everyone makes it every week, but we've got a good group of friends.

I'm amused that the implicit limit in your comment, that the thing that makes drinking 10 beers a day impractical, is the cost.

Yes, the place we hang out is called a "signal thread" and we share stupid memes with each other every day.

Might be a mixup from some of the rights history. Paramount held the distribution rights to the first 5 MCU movies (aka "phase 1" up to Avengers) but Disney got back those rights in 2013.