[butILoveLife]

>It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics.

You know what else works really hard? A washing machine. Hard work alone doesnt create value. I could give you a spoon and tell you to dig a hole, or I can teach you how to use a Digger.

[beambot]

Some things are hard because you overcomplicate them. Some things are hard by their very nature.

Unless you are a Claude Shannon type, adding fundamental new knowledge to humanity's corpus is generally actually hard - at least in science & engineering. If you feel differently, I look forward to reading your groundbreaking papers!

[butILoveLife]

Weirdly, I do have my contributions to science. I run a pretty popular blog, 250k-1M users per year.

Academia will refer to my stuff. Various levels of the US government use my data.

To be honest, I think I got lucky + I was a (hardcore) Stoic for a decade + my hobby was scientific.

[Aurornis]

> You know what else works really hard? A washing machine. Hard work alone doesnt create value.

My washing machine creates a lot of value for me. The time it saves me is incredibly valuable.

Most machines that work really hard are valuable because they free up time.

This wasn’t the clever burn you thought it was.

[butILoveLife]

Its a line from National Lampoon's Xmas Vacation.

[WalterBright]

Value is what you're willing to pay for something.

Laundromats aren't particularly profitable businesses.

[bdangubic]

Laundromats are the best business there is and are extremely profitable and seldom to never go out of business - you should look this up, it is fairly fascinating.

[WalterBright]

The laundromats around here closed down years ago. Not a characteristic of extremely profitable businesses.

There are a couple of strip malls nearby that have vacant rentables, vacant for years and years. Nobody has thought to put an extremely profitable laundromat in any of them.

[bdangubic]

This is anecdotal - look this up outside of your strip malls. It has the some of the lowest failure rates of just about any business and 20-35% ROI

[WalterBright]

I've heard that laundromats are used for money laundering. This may explain their profitability, but it's a front, not a business.