The article speaks to this as well, "Pricing led to a drop in pollution across the greater metropolitan area, according to the study, published in the journal npj Clean Air."

So while this was/is a common sentiment about congestion pricing, looks like it luckily didn't pan out.

I love "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian". It's a fantastic cookbook, especially if you don't have a lot of cooking experience.

As long as I have books queued up on my kindle I'll read fiction pretty much every single night before going to sleep, and I really enjoy it. Books feel like they scratch an itch that's unrelated to any of the other mediums that involve reading. At the same time, I won't read anything that's not on my kindle, primarily because I read in the dark before falling asleep and the kindle is backlit.

If I run out of books to read on my Kindle I'll stop reading, sometimes for months until I have time to find books I'm interested in reading, buy/download them, find my now dead Kindle, charge it, and transfer the books to it. I love reading long fiction series in particular because I don't have to figure out what to read next.

>You have to be performing at the next level for several months

I worked at a slow pace large US tech company and this was an absolutely critical part of being promoted, which could only happen during the one or two promotion cycles a year.

For a bit of context, this was a place where the best of the best during good years (so not the last year) may get promoted from a junior engineer to an engineer II in 2 years, so climbing was pretty slow.

Yup. In larger companies, and honestly in most start ups I've worked in as well, I always said expect something you "deserve" to come a quarter or two quarters after you've "earned" it.

Frustrated that you havnt been promoted even though you have had all the conversations about getting promoted, your boss agrees you should be, and you consistently perform at that level? Give it 3-6 months and it will probably happen.

The machine moves slowly.

"expect something you "deserve" to come a quarter or two quarters after you've "earned" it."

... if you get it at all.

You don't earn anything. Pay and promotions are unilaterally controlled by management. They decide who to award promotions or raises to. If it were truly earned, there would be an unambiguous or non subjective set of standards that would definitively say that you deserve, and will recieve, a promotion or raise.

"Frustrated that you havnt been promoted even though you have had all the conversations about getting promoted, your boss agrees you should be, and you consistently perform at that level? Give it 3-6 months and it will probably happen."

I met the same criteria you listed for 2 years. It never came. Now I'm 3 years beyond that and am still a midlevel since I had to switch stacks twice.

Mollusks include Cephalopods like octopus and cuttlefish, which are on the higher side of the consciousness gradient.

Octopus have a pop culture reputation for being intelligent owing to lab maze experiments, but their intelligence isn't well known or defined. They have an average lifespan between 3-6 months to a few years depending on the species.

"Until the 1970s, researchers tried to classify the intellectual abilities of different animals and rank them within a universal intelligence scale with humans at the top. That view crumbled as it became obvious that the abilities of different animals were tuned to the circumstances in which they live. Rats learn some things slowly and others very rapidly. Just one experience with a novel food that makes them ill will put them off that food for life, even if they only become sick many hours after eating it. It's a useful memory feat for an animal that survives by scavenging. Honey bees remember the location of a flower that is producing nectar after a single visit and with just a few trips will learn at what time of day the nectar flow is at its peak. Octopuses are not very social so we should not expect their intelligence to show itself in observational learning. [...] True, octopus have huge brains. But they look nothing like the brains of the vertebrates that are so adept at learning. [...] some critics suspect that their intelligence has been grossly exaggerated by anthropomorphising observers-"they watch my every move, therefore they must be curious". On the other hand, because cephalopod behaviour and brain structure are so foreign, others argue that their greatest cognitive feats are probably still being overlooked. " -- https://web.archive.org/web/20120407062518/http://www.fortun...

There is this Netflix movie “my octopus teacher” where the octopus develops rather advanced hunting and camouflage techniques. Like how it knows how to handle sharks or how to build a shell for itself to hunt a particular type of food. That seems quite intelligent and beyond observing humans studiously in labs.

Octopuses have been known to:

* unscrew the lid of a peanut butter jar to get a treat without training

* hop from one tank to another to prey on the fish in the tank. This was observed quite by accident and not part of an experiment at first. In fact the octopus waited for its human handlers to leave the room before going in for the kill; the incident was caught on camera.

* gently grasp the hand of a friendly human with their tentacles, and squirt water through their siphon at a disliked human

All spontaneously, without training or prompting.

That last bit is particularly interesting to me, because they are recognizable signs of affection and dislike. Octopuses show some semblance of an ability to bond with us, despite having vastly different brains from us.

I live in Metro Atlanta (midtown) without a car, and I don't find it too bad. I'm walking distance from work and various amenities. Grocery delivery and Lyft makes it a whole lot easier, and the ~150$ a month saved not owning a car gets you a lot of Lyft, or a rental car if needed.

Camping and visiting family is definitely a bit tricky though.

I really liked one place I interviewed at that gave an option for the technical portion of the interview. You could choose a 4 hour homework, whiteboarding, or talking someone through a significant non-proprietary project of yours.

I interviewed somewhere that offered 3 options for the technical part of the interview. The options were a take home assignment, whiteboarding, and walking the interviewer through a non-proprietary project. I thought that was a great way to make the interview process more fair.

I bought a refurbed Dell XPS 15 9550 a little over a year ago. I love it. I run Ubuntu on it and I've yet to have any problems.

Only negatives are that the webcams in an odd place, the speakers are awful, and it's a bit heavy.

The only XPS competitor I considered was various comparable Thinkpad models. They have a very different look and keyboard feel, so it's really down to personal preference or what specific deals you can find. Older but still reliable Thinkpads can be incredibly inexpensive, and are also very easy to modify.

My very large company uses slack and Microsoft teams. Mostly engineers use slack, managers mostly use teams.

It's probably because of how much nicer slack is to use.