@skibidist are you genuinely a street beggar? Or did you mean it as a lizardman option?

@TheAllMemeingEye This Tweet represents the spirit of my answer. I was surprised to find it, because I thought I was just being weird, but apparently the sentiment is more widely shared.

Proposition: running a small business that will suffer hardship if a single client doesn't pay is indistinguishable from street begging

@skibidist what good/service does your business provide? And why do you feel it's like begging if you have one main customer?

@TheAllMemeingEye You do the work, then it's all up to the client whether they pay or not. Going to court is impracticable in most cases (either the client will eventually pay anyway sooner or they are insolvent anyway) so you send reminders, cope and seethe.

The similarity with begging is that you are asking someone to give you money and they can either give you money or ignore you. The difference is that you have some legal claim to the money and the moral high ground.

I was in this situation doing software dev, fortunately not anymore.

@skibidist ah ok, that makes sense, good to know things are going better, what are you doing these days instead?

@TheAllMemeingEye I'm living off savings and building an enterprise software product with the goal of accumulating capital.

I'm gonna take a wild guess that manifold has a disproportionate amount of philosophy / science / engineering researchers

philosophy / science / engineering / humanities

@TheAllMemeingEye Putting apples and oranges in one basket I see

@skibidist sure, they're not identical, but they all have the shared qualities of doing academic work to discover new knowledge, hence their categorisation together

@TheAllMemeingEye I used to do scientific research, but I'm a software engineer these days.

Both are interesting in their own way, but to be frank there's precious little "discovering new knowledge" in most software development. Plenty of puzzle solving, weighing tradeoffs, etc, but in many ways it's more akin to carpentry than doing science.

@DanHomerick fair enough, perhaps I should have split engineering off, in my mind I was mainly thinking that there is a lot of fuzzy overlap between discovering natural laws and discovering/designing new technologies, but yeah I guess you could say the same overlap applies to crafting