the implication is that most people have a limit to how much money they can reasonably spend before they start seeking things other than more money in life.
even a poor person can tell you that an extra $10M in their pocket will be no more life-changing than an extra $1M.
I feel like there's a big difference between $10M and $1M. At $10M you're free to no longer work because of high returns from that money, you can effectively never worry about money again and live a comfortable life. At $1M that isn't true, you still need to work full time to maintain quality of life. $10M is obviously more life changing than $1M in terms of opportunities you can safely pursue.
if you were previously living on streets and frequently going hungry, then you can likely sustain yourself very well still without working. 1M translates to 27 years at $3k/month expenses. if you chose to supplement that with work, you can easily double that runway.
obviously it's not the same as $10M, which would allow you and your children to never work again, but jump between that and no food/no shelter is not as significant. for those who already have financial stability, $1M only serves as a safety net or retirement fund and cannot act as an early retirement plan without significant cutbacks, so the jump from 1->10 is significant. in the same way that 10M->100M extra income for Bezos is not gonna change much.
please expound. i am in a similar predicament and feel like a lone voice in the wild when trying to express this to my peers. i can't tell if they don't see what i do or if they are on board with it.
E.g., (1) it took us 7 months to hire a (US citizen) post doc. (2) we lost a faculty candidate because HR took so long to generate an offer letter that the person applied for and started another job between when they got a verbal offer and when they got a written offer letter.
HR is completely non responsive and on the off chance you get in contact with them you get one of three answers:
- you're dumb because you didn't know about this other form/rule/policy
- you actually need to talk to X (typically the person who sent me to them)
- the policy from last time changed, or are claimed to have changed
I've worked at a bunch of places...honestly small company/startup HR scares me just as much.
Somewhere in there is a happy balance between 'no HR' and an 'HR run organization'. I haven't experienced it, but I would choose big companies over academia in a heart beat
There are legitimate services commonly used to buy stuff from US sellers who don't want to deal with the complicated shipping to Russia and other countries. I doubt he had any intention to obscure his identity – the seller would just not sell to him directly.
It's only legitimate so long as it isn't used to circumvent ITAR. The seller would probably not sell to him directly because exporting flight manuals for military aircraft was paper work the seller didn't want to deal with. By obscuring his identity through a third party the buyer violated ITAR, the seller probably also did as well by not doing proper due diligence.
Is there any suggestion that there was anything to learn from manuals being sold in eBay that wouldn't already be well known? Did the person selling the manuals get prosecuted? Was someone court martialed for releasing them?
I feel like this is such a cop-out response. It lets you dismiss this people's actions because "they're evil" (whatever that means) and disregard any of the larger systemic, sociological root causes that allow things like this to happen in the first place.
That's the point. It gives you a flimsy justification for leaving the systems and structures intact so "your guy" can use them in ways you agree with at some later date.
