What’s funny is I just typed a comment trying to analyze what types of jobs would allow for this, and one category was the “discrete projects that have a defined beginning and end” type jobs, and it did cross my mind that movie-style heists tend to have this kind of arrangement.

It works if you can build up the relationships and reputation, which will depend heavily on the industry and the job.

I know two people who do this, and they have jobs that allow them to.

One is an emergency room physician. His shifts are staffed through a middleman at 3 different local hospitals, and the nature of the work is that he just does work during the shift and doesn’t bring any home with him or continuing onto the next shift he works. He gets paid very well when he’s working (average annual salary of an emergency physician in the U.S. is about $375,000 per year). And occasionally just lines up a long sabbatical, does volunteer work overseas (Doctors Without Borders/MSF), and takes time off for himself and his family. He basically budgets a $200k lifestyle and takes unpaid time off. But his pathway basically required him to just dominate school, from kindergarten through a bachelor’s degree and 4 years of medical school, and then put in his time as a resident.

Another friend of mine works as an electrician and lighting crew member on TV shows and movies. He always has to line up his next project after the current one ends, but occasionally can line something up in the future so that he can take a calculated 3-6 months between projects. He’s got a good working relationship with some producers and directors, so he basically knows he can find a job anytime with whatever production those people happen to be working on. Whenever he has enough cash, he can go and travel, timed out to where he’s not paying rent for an unoccupied apartment. Then he lines up another gig, signs a new lease, and then continues working. I think he lives very frugally on the job (I think stuff like food is covered when filming on location, so not a lot of out of pocket expenses for food/drink while working), and saves money that way.

With that, I think there are a few opportunities to think through which careers might actually allow for this.

Project-based jobs, where people work for a few months or a year towards a particular project completion, might be good for intentionally taking gaps between projects. I wonder if construction and similar industries would allow for this. Academia often has formal sabbatical policies, too, but that’s relatively late career.

Personal independent gigs can do this, if you can earn enough money doing it (so, like, not Uber and Doordash). Some people do contract design work, create independent art, write essays and op eds for different publications, etc. If you’re paid by the job, taking a break doesn’t really hurt your “resume,” so to speak. Even some who are expected to publish on a defined schedule can get ahead of the curve by producing a bunch of work for publication on that schedule (some webcomic authors and social media influencers are known to do this).

Jobs where you are employed by some firm but actually work for a client that hired your firm might also be a good candidate, if you have the seniority and flexibility and credibility to just take unpaid time off while still being on the books and website as an employee. I know people who took off a year of parental leave as lawyers, but it really depends on practice area and firm culture whether that will permanently hold them back on career growth.

Jobs that are basically shift work are designed so that no one person is totally indispensable or non replaceable, which gives the worker the flexibility to leave without hard feelings, and come back whenever they’re ready. My emergency medicine friend probably fits in this category. But also, maybe any kind of 24/7 coverage job sorta fits this category, too, in health care, IT, critical infrastructure, etc.

any male born after 2003 can’t date… all they know is 4chan , lift they weights, goon, be incel , eat hot tendie & lie

anti-aging research.

I mean, there’s plenty of anti aging research going on. It’s just that aging isn’t any one thing. At the genetic level, telomeres are getting shorter and mutations are accelerating. In cells, certain metabolic waste products accumulate, and the cells experience increased oxidative stress.

At the tissue level, you see blood vessels stiffening up, accumulating calcium deposits in the vessel walls themselves, and arterial plague within the vessels. Conversely, bones lose strength and lose calcium, and muscles and joints and tendons and ligaments deteriorate in strength and range of motion. Skin loses elasticity. Plaques and other abnormalities form in the brain and throughout the nervous system. The endocrine system undergoes changes as the hormonal balance of people changes in late adulthood (most notably menopause in women).

Each of these effects of aging is being investigated, researched, and potentially treated. Dermatologists can make old skin look younger, or at least slow down the rate of apparent aging. There are pills that give 60 year old men the boners of a 20 year old. Some hormone therapies reverse some of the age-related decline in particular hormone levels. Each treatment treats its own thing, reversing or stalling one tiny aspect of aging.

And they’re continuing to work on it. There’s plenty of research being done, with lots and lots of funding behind it.

Nothing quite prepared me for the first time I had a doctor who was younger than me.

Depends. Will I still have my glasses, now that I have time to read all the books in the library?

Dude don’t you have a department of health and human services to run?

The proper way to use it in a sentence is “stigma dick in your mouth.” Trust me, I’ve got a really good vocabulary.

There was an OkCupid analysis about this in 2010, with a mostly bell shaped distribution of self reported heights slightly skewed taller than the real world, with an an interesting stretch of a larger portion of people willing to stretch slightly more to a self-reported 6 feet tall.

Yes, it’s true.

Are we all assuming everyone in this conversation is white? Because I know plenty of black and Asian friends who I don’t recall having wrinkles. Most of them have pretty solid moisturizing/lotion/sunscreen routines, though, so it’s hard to tell how much is cultural versus genetic.

If you have wrinkles at 40 you need to wear more sunscreen and drink more water.

But also even if you don’t have wrinkles you should wear sunscreen and probably drink more water anyway.

The result is insane in my opinion, it means any sensible math system with basic arithmetic has a proposition that you cannot prove.

Stated more precisely, it has true propositions that you cannot prove to be true. Obviously it has false propositions that can’t be proven, too, but that’s not interesting.

with a rigorous, needlessly convoluted proof.

Again, Goedel’s theorem was in direct response to Russell and Whitehead spending literally decades trying to axiomize mathematics. Russell’s proof that 1+1=2 was 300 pages long. It was non-trivial to disprove the idea that with enough formality and rigor all of mathematics could be defined and proven. Instead of the back and forth that had already taken place (Russell proposes an axiomatic system, critics show an error or incompleteness in it, Russell comes back and adds some more painstaking formality, critics come back and do it again), Goedel came along and smashed the whole thing by definitively proving that there’s nothing Russell can do to revive the major project he had been working on (which had previously hit a major setback when Russell himself proved Russell’s paradox).

how about:
x = 2
2x = 3,000
omg! they’re inconsistent!

You didn’t define x, the equals sign, the digit 2, 3, or 0, or the convention that a real constant in front of a variable implies multiplication, or define a number base we’re working in. So that statement proves nothing in itself.

And no matter how many examples of incomplete or contradictory systems you come up with, you haven’t proven that all systems are either incomplete or contradictory. No matter how many times you bring out a new white swan, you haven’t actually proven that all swans are white.

And formal logic and set theory may have seemed like masturbatory discipline with limited practical use, but it also laid the foundation for Alan Turing and what would become computer science, which indisputably turned into useful academic disciplines that changed the world.

but I feel like people in union jobs making enough of a salary to buy a comfortable home is going to drive up wages for everyone

Even if that is an effect where increased unionized non-supervisor wages push up supervisor salaries, my point is that there are simply fewer middle managers to benefit from that effect.

Plus the second order effects of a hollowed out middle choking out the pipeline for promoting and training future business leaders, so that it’s a small number of big corporate executives overseeing jobs they’ve never had instead of the older system of a lot more small and medium sized business leaders supervising jobs they used to personally work.

It was a response to philosophers who were trying to come up with a robust axiomatic system for explaining math. Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica attempted to formalize everything in math, and Goedel proved it was impossible.

So yes, it’s a bit of a circlejerk, but it was a necessary one to break up another circlejerk.

I don’t think the McAllisters were in union jobs. I think they were pretty high up the tier of management.

People talk about union jobs going away, but don’t forget, non-unionized middle management has totally been gutted by outside consultants over the same time period. So the changes in the workforce have hurt the earning power of both the line workers and the middle managers who used to make up the middle class.

This whole thread is kinda wild to me, but I think this Princess Bride answer helps me distill it down to: I’m ok with you not liking movies that I love, but how can you say that you don’t understand other people liking it?

I don’t care for Star Wars or Lord of the Rings but never has it crossed my mind that this is more than just a matter of taste, that there are people whose preferences are outright wrong.

If you take 100 joules of electrical or chemical energy, and then direct them to a heater in a house, it’ll create about 100 joules of heat. That’s 100% efficiency.

But if you use the 100 joules of energy to run a heat pump, it might bring in 300 joules of heat into the house. That’s 300% efficiency, when measured locally at the place you actually care about (inside the house). Zoom out and laws of thermodynamics still make it impossible to create more energy than was put in, but if you look at just the part you care about, it’s possible locally.

start supporting serious nuclear energy to drive down electric costs

Eh, I can see a resilience based argument for why we need nuclear, but building new nuclear is never going to be cheaper than solar or wind.