I find the incredibly involved deception of WWII fascinating. See also Operation Mincemeat[0], where the British Army dressed the corpse of a Welsh homeless person as an officer of the Royal Marines, gave it a number of fake documents, and dumped it in the ocean off Spain to deceive the Germans about the invasion of Sicily.
We have a compost bin in the back yard where they sprout from seed spontaneously. I have grown a couple of trees and given some seedlings away to friends.
Fingers crossed, they bear fruit eventually. If not, they make a fairly fast growing tree (2m after 3-4 years) - although this week the leaves burn quickly in the summer heat if inadequately watered.
I have a large avocado plant that I grew from a pit. At only 2.5 years old, it's about 3 feet tall. Definitely won't be ready for fruit any time soon. Maybe when my grandchildren are born (for the record, I do not yet have children).
Fun fact: most Swedes are covered by unemployment insurance, which gives you 70-80% of the income from your last job for a year.[1] I imagine this helps, as it's not only a safety net if your startup tanks, but also a runway for starting risky ventures.
If you own the company that tanks it is harder to get the unemployment insurance [1] (in Swedish) but it is possible. The 80% maxes out at 18 700 SEK / month ($2300) before tax.
> The 80% maxes out at 18 700 SEK / month ($2300) before tax.
Many unions will offer you cheap insurances covering up to 3 times that amount. And you can actually be in the union and get many benefits even as an entrepreneur.
In the US you can't collect unemployment if you quit and you have to demonstrate that you're looking for a job. Are either of those the case in Sweden?
There is a quarantine period of a couple of months if you quit. You have to be looking for a job, which means submitting reports of what jobs you have applied for to the job exchange. There are quite severe restrictions on what you can do while on unemployment, but if you want to do a startup there is likely some program that allows you to get the money and do that.
(German here, but pretty much the same situation.)
Not really. It's really hard to try and get fired, since the employees are protected pretty well. So in order to get fired you would have to mess up pretty bad, to a point where you would usually leave a lot of scorched earth, so very few people do that.
If you are on good terms with the company you can also "get fired" (I've heard of that in a few startups), so you can collect the benefits, but that only works in a small set of companys I think.
If you're fired for cause, they deny unemployment benefits.
You can't just stop doing your job, show up drunk, and yell obscenities at your boss all day. Well, you can, but you probably won't get unemployment benefits.
If you show up drunk or with anger management problems, the company is by law required to provide you with professional help. If that doesn't work, they can fire you and your benefits kick in from day 1.
Are you positive? I checked with Google and I may have the wrong keywords, but I'm not seeing that as a law in the United States.
Sadly, I have not just one - but two friends who have lost their jobs for showing up incapacitated. One wasn't alcohol, though. They were stuffed full of amphetamines - but the first one was drunk. Neither mentioned any employer offers of rehab.
It's a good point, though they did also measure how time-stressed people felt. People who felt time-poor but didn't buy time-saving services had poorer life satisfaction. If you were time stressed and bought the services, you were protected from some of the negative effects.
"In contrast, for respondents who spent money on time-saving purchases (n = 804), the negative effect of time pressure on life satisfaction was relatively weak, B = −0.03, Z = 1.46, P = 0.144, 95% CI (−0.08, 0.01). These results suggest that using money to buy time indeed buffers people from the negative effects of time stress on well-being."
My personal definition is that a programmer is someone who can write a computer program, and a developer is someone who writes computer programs for money. So you're a programmer, but not a developer. In the same way that you might be called a woodworker, but not a carpenter.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat