paulHarkonen

The median income in the DC metro area is about 100k per year. In a few counties it's well above that. DC has tons of money, but cost of living is insane as a result.

For context, starting salaries for teachers here are 50k+ and that's barely enough for a place on your own, maybe.

Kick starters from large successful firms are fascinating to me. Essentially using a Kickstarter campaign allows companies to fund development by borrowing money from their customers at a 0% interest rate and allows them to pay back that loan with product instead of cash. The result is that kick-starting a project is an incredibly easy way to drastically reduce the risk of a new project. Even if you could find the project in house you have an enormous incentive to kick start as a risk mitigation method.

Could they fund it using the profits from previous projects? Probably I'm not their accountant but I would guess they have the cash. Should they run a Kickstarter to reduce the risk to almost nothing? Of course.

So, to make sure I understand this correctly, your company retains you on staff to draw whatever requests\pieces happen to come in? Is the work that consistent that it makes sense to do it that way?

It is always interesting to me to hear how people discuss modifying behavior for small % changes in risk. A 5% increase in risk is tiny. Heck, you have to get to pretty large study sizes to even detect that type of change and differentiate it from noise.

As a point of context, roughly 4.4 million people (NSC numbers), or approximately 1% of the US population were injured in a car crash in 2015. Small percentage chances of devastating events are scary, but really should be evaluated in a realistic broader context. Safety is important, but it has to be evaluated from a rational cost benefit (including aesthetics, emotional impact and other qualitative factors) when making decisions. You can never be 100% safe, so its better to make decisions for the best quality of life (balancing risk and happiness), rather than the smallest risk possible.

I can't speak to their experience but I lost my voice about two years ago (as in laryngitis that never ended) so I can speak about the changes to your inner monologue and sense of self in that regard. The change literally happened over night (one night I could speak normally, the next my voice was gone) and it was really dramatic (and really messed with me for a while).

For a couple of months (while I tried to figure out wtf happened) I really struggled to speak and my wife and I developed some basic sign language type things and a lot of texting. I never really lost my inner monologue though, but I got a lot of practice with limited non-verbal communication and with dramatically shortening my speech patterns.

After a few months of speech therapy I got used to my new limited voice and my inner monologue changed with that. At this point, I honestly don't remember what I sounded like.