Salespeople in US are experts in in-person verbal negotiations, just like the sellers on a Istanbul's Grand Bazaar. If you let them, they can and will employ all the dirty persuasion and negotiation tactics that you may or may not be aware of. Anything that is not illegal can and likely will be done to you. For example, not providing the complete information about the car is not illegal, lying is (sometimes) not illegal. Stressing you out is not illegal. Adding overpriced optional features to the car and not mentioning that they can be removed at no cost is not illegal. Making you wait a lot for no reason to make you tired is not illegal. You get the idea. It is very important to have a verbal communication for using full power of negotiation skills salespeople have. In-person conversation is the best - it is possible to read body language, easier to build rapport, but phone works well for some scenarios, too.

There's a related set of stories Avery Pennarun tells about the culture shock of being an American in Korea. One of them is about some online ordering service you can use that's sort of like Amazon. With Amazon, when you order something, you get a box with multiple bar/QR/other codes on it and, when you open it up, there's another box inside that has at least one other code on it. Of course the other box needs the barcode because it's being shipped through some facility at-scale where no one knows what the box is or where it needs to go and the inner box also had to go through some other kind of process and it also needs to be able to be scanned by a checkout machine if the item is sold at a retailer. Inside the inner box is the item. If you need to return the item, you put the item back into its barcoded box and then put that box into the shipping box and then slap another barcode onto the shipping box and then mail it out.

El conocimiento es un fin en sí mismo. No busques la implementación práctica.

The biggest transition for me when I started college was learning to get organized. There was a point when I couldn't just remember everything in my head. And having to constantly keep track of things was distracting me from whatever task I was doing at the moment.

So I tried various forms of todo lists, task trackers, and productivity apps. They were all discouraging because the things to do kept getting longer, and there were too many interrelated things like past meeting notes, calendar appointments, idea lists, and lab notebooks, which were all on different systems.

I gave up and started just tracking in a single text file and have been using it as my main productivity system for 12 years now. It is so essential to my work now, and has surprisingly scaled with a growing set of responsibilities, that I wanted to share this system. It's been my secret weapon.

Success largely boils down to a simple distinction. It’s glaringly obvious once you see it, but also easy to find ingenious ways of ignoring it: do the real thing and stop doing fake alternatives.