do you know how far madagascar is from easter island? if you're talking about mediterranean and river travel, yes you're right. but the pacific ocean + indian ocean are utterly massive.
I believe more trade between China and the Mediterranean was transited via Indian Ocean trade routes than via the traditional Silk Road, though I'm hard-pressed to find actual statistics.
Location: New York
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Typescript, NextJS, React, Python, and million others
Résumé/CV: https://visualizeearth.com/
Email: john@vizearth.com
I've worked as a full time engineer and designer at the top tech companies in New York City. After working in person for the past few years, my preference is remote!
I'm all about world class UX, performance, excellent developer experience (DX), & documentation.
I'm a designer=engineer, and I feel like AI has given me super powers. Design has always been easy for me--it was just the incredible grind of coding that made creating my own thing difficult.
Looking for part time product design work. I have 12 years of experience in software and design. For the past 5 years, I have worked as a full time, salaried software engineer at top startup tech companies in NYC (ranked #1 on LinkedIn top startups) and the 3rd largest hedge fund in the world, where I was a hybrid developer-designer. I'm primarily looking for product design work as my brain is itching for UI/UX design work again.
Full disclosure, I also have plans to work remotely from SE Asia and Europe for a third of this year.
The "context" approach was the whole "Explainer" period that happened in journalism, most famously done by Vox (as another commenter mentioned)--but also many others.
What you end up getting is the approved narrative of "how things are" by the same class of people who all hobnob with each other.
Glad to see it's end. Look forward to what's next.
No, that’s not what I’m talking about. That’s presenting context in the same episodic format as news articles, and it only works to explain the thing that was published on that day, up to that point.
You're responding to the "noble savages" strawman -- the OP article never claimed such.
(Moreover, you're responding with a relatively isolated incident of Native Americans driving buffalos off cliffs, which I agree happened and Is Not Good. But it's odd to mention in the larger historical context that the American Buffalo became endangered due to industrial scale slaughter caused by European settlers--A Big Deal, relatively speaking.)
On balance, yes, Native people are often the best guardians of the forest for a mix of reasons. One is the animistic belief systems, which falls under the "Noble Savage" bucket. But the other is they more often than not don't industrial-scale commoditize their living spaces, part and parcelling out the goods as raw material inputs. Which other groups, like Asians and Whites, often have.
I'm someone who is naturally strong at design, but studied CS/software engineering because I ultimately wanted to be able to build my own things. For years I tried to find careers hiring those unicorns -- people who could design and code -- but they were few and far between. My last gig that required both was at a hedge fund here in NYC, where they don't explicitly hire designers. These days I work exclusively as a software engineer, and I definitely miss those times when I worked as a designer. Among other things, the hours are easier and the amount of praise you get way higher :-)
For what it's worth, I love this story! I took the opposite approach but with the exact same logic: Code came naturally but I wanted formal training in design so that I could really embrace both sides and shape excellent products (and in particular, implement all the ideas I had from start to finish).
What made you choose the software track this time around?
>The notion of hunter-gather societies living harmoniously in equilibrium with nature that some people seem to view as an optimal societal arrangement doesn't fit very well with this scenario.
Where is this notion? I've been involved in environmental circles and humans wiping out mammoths, giant sloths in south america, or logging easter island to bareness are pretty well known.
It's a very outdated but common notion, popularized around about in the 17th and 18th centuries by the likes of Rousseau. It often gets tied up with enlightenment ideas and is popularly espoused by many (naive) people even today.
It is associated with the controversial phrase "noble savage", which is sometimes said sincerely and sometimes sneeringly.
I think this notion is pretty common amongst the general population. I'm just speculating but I feel like a lot of people think of hunting and there being an apex predator as the natural order of things, and it's only post-industrial society that has meaningfully affected nature. I mean, do most people even know there were ever giant sloths roaming South America or know anything about Easter Island other than there being some big stone statues there?
Another giveaway is an extra pause before they start talking. This is call software that lets them dial a bunch of numbers at once until someone answers and it switches the person that answered over to an available headset.
If you answer and say hello and there's an extra second just hang up. They'll call back if it is important.
There’s also a very distinct “bloop” sound from their phone system, I assume it’s the sound of “connecting” you to their conference. Honestly, that is a 100% signal of a scam call that would be trivial to detect en masse in an automated system.
I honestly just literally never answer the phone unless its already in my contacts. If it's so important, they'll leave a message.
If the message mentions anything about stupid stuff like tax fraud/social security number its just immediately deleted, you'd 99% of the time receive official mail for anything about these items.
This is my advice to my parents now, who sometimes get anxious over the disgracefully manipulative bait these scammers deploy.
"If it's an Indian, hang up."
If there's a legitimate need to get in touch, they will find another way. My (naive) hope is that this might also discourage offshoring and/or reward companies employing Americans, if enough people do likewise.
