My son was in this program and got some wonderful books. When he aged out he got a nice note encouraging him to keep learning. Great program. Our current billionaire class could learn a lot.

It is my dream to someday travel to St. Helena and Tristan da Cunha.

St Helena has "recently" (inside last decade) got an airport and a weekly service from Johannesburg, South Africa via Walvis Bay, Namibia.

Before that it was only accessible via an infrequent ship which took 3 days out of Cape Town, South Africa.

But given the air link it is a lot more accessible now.

Tristan is still only accessible via sea, and even if you make it there, there's no guarantee you can land. There is no port, so ship-to-land transfers are via small boat, so the whole process is very weather dependent.

Both islands though have a really interesting history, and are well worth reading about, even if you never get there.

And these days you can get a flavor of local life via the local newspaper online. https://sthelenaonline.org/st-helena-independent/

Always like to scroll through available properties in such remote places

My father was the dentist on St Helena from 1998-2022. I visited, taking a military jet from Brize Norton airbase in the UK to Ascension Island, and then a 3-day boat on the RMS St Helena. I never took the 5-day boat from South Africa. It's a hilly and rugged place, and very green. I was a student when I went there, and I was with my twin brother and we met another set of twins who were visiting at the same time. They were our age and we all got pissed and shared the cheap cigs. My bro and one of them climbed Jacob's Ladder late at night after many beers, and they took ages while we waited at the top. They kept having to stop to vomit. That was an excellent Christmas and new year.

Thanks for sharing that story

I originally wrote 'fags' but thought I'd better re-phrase for the Americans amongst us.

Why?

I'd like to see Ascension Island too, but it is apparently quite restricted.

This is the sad reality. The education provided is based on an industrial revolution era theory of the worker as well. I’m not sure what a better alternative is.

Why would it be sad? They get to socialize with their peers, which is probably the more valuable part of the education process. Learning as I come to understand, are better curiosity driven, which don't necessarily need to happen at school. All the game hacking and number crunching on unit stats probably did more to where I am today than any school class.

It's sad because anyone spending a good chunk of the week with others roughly exactly their age is completely artificial. This doesn't happen outside of traditional schooling (until university level). It's no surprise that for some, it's quite toxic.

At least if there's learning involved, then one can say it was worth it. But if it boils down to nothing other than babysitting..?

Weird, I remember being told to stop talking all the time in school. Apparently those teachers were confused about the true purpose of school!

Great analysis. I think there must be even more going on in the comments section. There are a lot of shenanigans especially on “controversial” topics.

Right. What these luminaries mean is being driven to the airport and the flying business class (or on a pj) to your next totally frivolous destination.

If you have a family and are not already independently wealthy you will be enjoying very few of those. In my experience.

The corruption is bad enough at the local level. I can’t even fathom how much theft is going on at the state and federal level. It’s one of the more frustrating things to see how much money you are paying into the system for such meager benefits. We can’t even get sidewalks installed in my area, but the township can certainly give a sweetheart tax break to one of their buddies to build a new gas station.

Will have to give this a watch after the kids go to bed. I like a lot of Casey’s views even if I don’t agree with them.

I am just having a hard time with all this AI stuff. The other day I got some feedback on one of the products I own. It was a small tweak to an anchor tag to add a title and change the color for just that element. I made the change in the web inspector, showed it to the user, they said yeah that’s good. I walked over to one of my engineers and asked “can you make this change and get it in dev, I just pinged it to you”. No shit they turned around and pasted what I gave them into copilot with claude and asked the agent to do it. Well it actually didn’t do it exactly the way the customer wanted, so it actually took 2 tries with claude. Incredible.

So, you don't have a hard time with the Ai. You have a hard time with the intermediaries who's value is dimishing.

This is exactly the time to re organize. Not necessarily lay off, but some people might be asked to do other things or made redundant.