> Hiring is not an entirely rational process

Agreed! I'd go so far as to say hiring is irrational in the aggregate.

The usual "rational" artifacts, if we can call them that (coding challenges, resumés, etc.) serve almost exclusively to eliminate candidates rather than boost good candidates. Firms are generally ok with false negatives from these artifacts as simply the cost of doing business.

> From there, it follows that meeting someone and letting them know you exist increases the chances (however small) that they can and will assist you on your career path.

I've seen this described as "people hire who they vibe with", and I've yet to see it play otherwise in my career. I'm not saying this is good, or fair, or desirable. It just is.

The folks who get offers are the ones who can meet people, tell stories (even true ones!), listen, and demonstrate that they can empathize with and contribute to messy, flawed organizations.

Humans have yet to invent a technology more powerful than social relationships, and I think technologists downplay this at their own peril.

Networking involves more than just letting people know you exist. I'd say that's borderline useless. Actually networking requires building real relationships with people. For me, that means continually meeting new people who do the same kind of thing that I do, having pleasant or exciting conversations with them, learning as much as I can about them (showing a real interest! asking serious questions! listening to their answers!), and demonstrating to them that I'm hungry and I want to do Big Things. It's hard to do this effectively. I'm sure it depends on your field and it certainly requires continual practice.

I feel like networking at events is valuable, but networking events are less so with some exceptions. You ideally want to bump into someone with a high value network, but most of the people going to networking events are going to the events because they don't have a high value network.

An exception would be mixers for interns and juniors; few people have a developed network at that point, so even those with a couple good contacts are interested in expanding, and there's a lot of potential.

"Networking", in the abstract, can be good for finding a job. As they say, it's who you know not what you know.

That being said, industry networking events, like conferences and such, are almost not at all useful for that purpose. In my experience they're mostly used for B2B sales (which is a kind of networking, I guess).

Why not just cold-message people from a potential employer when you’re applying there? Works way better than it should, and is more targeted than talking to people 99% of who you‘ll never see again, at an event.

They're not free because they consume your time, which is valuable.

> going vegetarian reduce one's environmental impact

Mmm, yes and no.

It depends where your meat comes from. If you buy meat the way it's produced in the US where you have great big sheds full of cattle in the desert with everything trucked in, then yes.

If you want permaculture, you absolutely must have livestock.

If you want arable farming of any sort, you absolutely must have livestock.

The whole thing breaks down very quickly if you don't have grass and clovers growing in fields, and ruminants eating them, breaking down the tough cellulose, and then shitting it out and trampling it in.

I have a friend who calls LinkedIn "a rolodex that other people keep up to date".

There is some value in posting on LinkedIn, but the real value is that you can go back and find people who are weak connections when you are looking to hire, purchase services, or ask favors.

I think everyone should join LinkedIn and connect to every one of their colleagues that they would work with again. Then, once in a while, keep that connection alive by sending a message or commenting on a post.

It's a long game, but will pay dividends should you ever need to chat with them.

Definitely all the posting and activity on there seems very strange and is not something I’m remotely interested in participating in. But recruiters have often found me through LinkedIn and connected me with jobs, so it’s still useful overall and I keep my profile up to date.

>what the entirety of LinkedIn is for

Signalling allegiance.

I agree, but also the context matters. Reading news about sports is basically always entertainment, with an exception of maybe betting, to make better bets. Reading news about housing market can get me in a better position to buy my next home for cheaper, or strenghten my negotiation position.

News consumption impacts political decision making, like who I want to support or oppose in local, state, and national elections.

That seems a pretty high impact decision we want all the members of our society to be making on a regular basis.

The thing about writing is that there are dozens of reasons to do it, "it's fun" being one of them.

Or comments on blog post aggregators

Feels like a pretty tidy parallel to luxury beliefs. Luxury activities would fit, especially since some of these are the activity equivalent to the belief.

Why?

IMHO, churning is clearly profitable if you pay off your card every month, will hit the spend requirements organically and are organized enough to cancel to avoid annual fees in the second year. Some people dive into manufactured spending to hit the required spending, but then you really need to consider the time invested.

The question is more about if the rewards are meaningful. I think it's actually worth doing a bit of churning to get exposure to different banks and figure out which one you like... might as well get paid for that. But after a certain point, I value stability and routine more than $300 to jump through hoops... and I'm not going back to Chase no matter what they want to pay me.

I feel like it's hobbies with an element of virtue-signalling.

Profit is useful. Views, likes and comments have zero value. That's why e-celebs with millions and millions of "followers" can't sell more than a dozen coffee mugs when they try to make money from it.

No, the author actually says: Acknowledge that they are hobbies.

Yeah, I think "vanity" is not totally the right term here, but I do think they have a point that there are diminishing returns with staying up on the news cycle.

For instance, I think there is a difference between reading some news daily and consuming only news. My father was in the latter category growing up -- I never really saw him read a book, but he was always reading a paper or listening to/watching a news program. Personally I find that I get more from reading books as they're afforded the space to go into depth on a topic. I think the author is trying to point out that that surface level news consumption is fine but probably not as beneficial as we might want to tell ourselves.

The one thing I've found most helpful news-wise, though, is that I find that it's one of the better ways to learn a foreign language to an upper-intermediate or advanced level. I relied heavily on RFI and other news outlets when learning French, with the added benefit that you're often getting international news the media doesn't report on here in the US.

The given definition of vain is "if they don’t lead to something more important (e.g. profit)". I don't directly profit from reading the news, it's true. I'd have to make quite hand-wavy arguments about why it's beneficial. We can also list activities such as friendship, dreams, appreciating beauty, and feeling excited as non-profitable. Then there's having aspirations: what do we gain from that? Without goals, we could save a great deal of time and effort. Striving for profit, then, is a vain and non-profitable activity because of the unnecessariness of everything.

You are reading too much into choice of term. The author explains their rationale for using "vanity" quite clearly:

> In business, a “vanity metric” is a statistic that sounds good but is not very useful.

It's not about you being "vain" for reading the newspaper, it's just a parallel to another widely used term the author co-opted.

More like a desire for dopamine.

This page - a bit of barely styled text on a plain background - also doesn't work without JS at all. Even though this is not a SPA, the essay text is just there in HTML response. I know I'm yelling at the clouds here, but I find this slightly annoying (why do I need to run code to read this?).

Yeah sorry, those are vanity features \s