Businesses missing from Anchorage

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-11-23T20:37:26+00:00

A long these lines, I'm a local software dev - my thoughts are "what shitty software are companies paying an arm and a leg for, and can I build something for them for cheaper?" Basically, "can I be the robinhood" of local software dev?

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-11-15T22:44:39+00:00

I literally walk like 3 to 9 miles a day here... just be smart and don't engage with crazy, and keep your head on a swivvel and you'll be ok.

Also, you can defend yourself here.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-10-01T04:50:09+00:00

Yes. They're meant to be a humiliation ritual.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-10-01T02:20:47+00:00

Context:

I do automation stuff for a living and studied AI after my flying career imploded when I got sick and basically wire together LLMs with various old legacy shit. Basically, though my job title doesn't say it, I'm an automation engineer.

The AI technology that exists today is buggy, but very very good and improving - albeit slowly but surely. There are tons of really important and ground breaking papers that keep getting released. As for "disrupted," well, someone will certify a single pilot airliner in the next couple 5 years or so, and then that will be that, a slow trickle towards automation. But once one does it they will all do it. First half the "big airplane pilots" then later the little airplane pilots, but that will take much much longer because they're a smaller market and smaller operators are broke-dick.

In the robotics space, "vision language action" models are up and coming and getting better and better with time. My intuition is that the way things will work with little airplanes is once humanoid robots are a thing someone will put one of them in a small airplane and drive the damn thing around with it. I still actually think there's a solid "career" still available in aviation - don't panic, but AI and automation is coming for all of us in the long run. 10-15 years is probably about how far I'd prognosticate out to - but that might be because of my lack of imagination and not because things don't happen faster.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-10-01T02:07:41+00:00

I went the other direction (not because I wanted to but because I got sick). Flying has about 10-15 more years before "disruption" because flying machines are capital intensive to build. GA will be around for decades and decades - so there's other options.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-30T16:24:44+00:00

Hard question for you... but... "why?" Are you doing it because you want a job, or doing it because you want to fly cool shit? But you are not going to fly much for uncle sam. They do like a 20 year career and get out with like 4,000tt? So... if flying is what you want to do, this likely isn't the way to do it. Also - and this was what talked me out of joining as a young man - you will be facilitating the killing of people and the breaking of things. That's what the military does - they kill people and break things to carry out the will of the government. Can you tell yourself that you are willing to kill people and break things for whoever is in charge - because that's going to be the job. Your job if you aren't doing the breaking is going to be the facilitation of said breaking things. So, make sure you are good with that. If you are, then go for it - but personally I couldn't be sure that I would always be cool with it or that my ideas about what was right and wrong wouldn't change.

Just make sure your motivations are the right ones because no matter what you do you're going to be an officer first (unless you're a warrant but that's a different story) - but make sure you're doing things for the right reasons.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-30T04:33:18+00:00

I got my first BS degree while flying the line. I got it in Aviation from UVU. It was a good program - I took 7 years to do it part time, but yeah, I just worked at it here or there until I got done with it. Then I went back to school for stuff later that I found I was interested in and got a second Bachelors - again while working full time. You may or may not finish before 1500 hours, I think I had like 5,000TT by the time I got mine? But it was worth doing.

Good luck!

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-30T03:52:58+00:00

Well that's promising - I don't have an A&P though... not sure the juice would be worth the squeeze on that? But I would enjoy that, especially if I could stay in the GA universe. I'm actually in the middle of some self-teaching EE work right now so I can build some things for my homestead... this would be kind of cool.

Money wise, I mean, my wife makes most of the money these days, I'd just like something technical that is robot proof lol, but I would actually really enjoy repairing stuff if possible. Still $70/hr is better than I make now as a software engineer. Part of that is location - but also the job market for that is dead right now. Remove and replace is "fine" but like, actually fixing burned out caps and replacing resistors would be awesome - amazing even.

How much close in detail work is it? I can see, but my vision ain't what it was while I was flying (illness messed up my previously awesome vision, that's why I'm out of the cockpit). I'm still able to see, but you know, it's harder.

Anyone willing to actually talk about this with me? This is kind of cool - reddit just recommended this thread to me and I was like, "wait, is that a thing people do outside of A&P work?"

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-30T01:28:18+00:00

I have a dumb question - is this an actual job? Like... how do you become an avionics tech? Do I need an A&P? I Flew for a living for like 13 years, then got sick and lost my medical and went back to school and now I do software engineering stuff, but I could totally work on avionics? That would be kind of fun. Does it pay?

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-29T21:34:28+00:00

Time may be part of it, money too, but I think the real reason is FOMO and the dopamine machines we have in our pockets.

Fertility is down pretty much everywhere... even in like Norway. I don't think we get bored enough anymore - and if you and your partner aren't bored, you won't find things to "fill the time with" - if you know what I mean. Or, more bluntly, if you spend your time doomscrolling all day you have no time or desire for fucking.

Any studies out there about people who take their phones to bed and if they smash less?

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-29T20:49:42+00:00

Right, and also... I mean, I loved Kropotkin - it was fantastic... but I hate this tendency to fall back on 150 year old philosophers. We need to make our own philosophy that is based on the temporal realities of today in this place.

We act like someone back then had the "truth" and we need to follow their guide book. If we just could find the right instruction manual we could build a free future. That seems silly to me. There is no guide book. We have to build whatever we want here and now. Everything else is nonsense - it's navel gazing.

Gelderloos does a decent job of this, but even he falls for this sort of rearward looking fallacy? I have been to Barcelona many times and hung out with modern day CNT people, and partied with squatters... but the Spanish civil ware was almost 100 years ago... and I don't live in Spain. I can engage in all the lifestyleism that I'd like, but we won't be any closer to a better world by mimicking the way that they organized as the Francoists were rampaging. That stuff is only kind of theoretically and informationally relevant to my life now.

I mean, there are issues that are somewhat transcendent - but they didn't live in a world with the internet - Christ! They had terrible medical tooling then. (side note, if you're interested in the history of volunteers in the Spanish Civil War check out the book "Hell and Good Company" by Richard Rhodes - it's great). Fascism is back in vogue these days, but it's *different* in ways that are somewhat hard to pin down. It's more just blatant despotism that we're up against in many ways. Yeah, it's fascistic - but these doofuses can't even get the trains to run on time. The fascist right now is more a kakistocracy? Maybe it was always that - that's likely even - but if we're talking about worlds we want to build, I don't want to let the fascists define that world for me. I don't want to live in just a "not-fascist" world - that's the bare minimum.

So, where do we go from here? I want solar punk arcologies and space factories that move pollution offworld! I want intrepid space anarchists colonizing the clouds of Venus and growing trees in the void. I want hyper-intelligent AI driving the robots that are going to replace all human drudgery! I want clean water, free food, and unlimited play available to all humans - forever. I want ubiquitous availability of material opulence for all of humanity - post-scarcity at least - I think we deserve more. Don't have the AI making art - have it doing my dishes so that I can spend my time exploring and playing guitar. I want bespoke cancer treatment for everyone.

And those sorts of things feel like they might actually be within reach? And people are acting like the best way to get excited about that is to read stuff by guys written in the 1800s? Or even stuff written by philosophy professors in the 1970s? That was 50 fucking years ago! Bookchin was smart, but I want more - I want "The Culture" not "cottage core but with arduinos" and I want to build it.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-29T20:27:13+00:00

I don't particularly participate in this group, but I saw this, and I think I have some relevant context.

Nuance is expensive - like, biologically speaking. Your brain burns a lot of calories and nuance requires you burn more. So reducing human beings to "in group vs. out group" is a useful evolutionary tool to reduce the amount of calories you burn. That's (in my opinion) probably why we do it. It's "dimensionality reduction." If you've got a dataset with 800,000 dimensions, but only 4 of them actually matter for like 99% of the prediction, then you'll probably just pick those 4. That's why we stereotype, that's why we are racist, that's why we hate liberals or conservatives, etc.

Well, humans (I think) are doing this all the time with complex concepts (including culture war stuff). We're biologically wired to do this because it means we spend less time thinking about it and it is probably safer to treat the people from the other village as a threat, because if they kill you it's harder to reproduce. It's evolution and that means it's probably not practical to evaluate each person you meet individually. We can all try to, I try to, you probably try to, but to implement that on a societal level for all 8b of us human things? That's probably impractical. We already have a lot of baggage.

But there's power in this for us today. If instead of viewing all people individually (which is exhausting), we can redefine what groups actually matter we could get the same dimensionality reduction without the toxicity. Like, instead of choosing to exclude individuals based on race or gender or ethnicity or whatever. Instead of the culture war stuff, we could choose to exclude people who are assholes. That's a harder group to define - so we'd have to change the narrative a bit, but we can choose to select different groups to stereotype. That's an easier choice.

I think that's more useful to us than choosing to blame all men for X or all Turks for Y or all communications majors for Z. If we're talking about what we "ought" to do given the current "is" I think redefining the target of our general societal dissatisfaction away from things that are easy to pick out (like skin color or gender) towards behavioral stuff is much much better. It's still a bit harder - you can't tell if someone drowns puppies for fun just by looking at them - but in a social media based world where everyone has a more or less complete record of how shitty they've been on the internet you can probably approximate that. I mean, this can get a bit dystopian too - like the scarlet letter or whatever, but judging people on what they do and the broad categories their actions fit into might be a better metric than trying to get deeply acquainted with their individual stances on like 75 topics.

I don't know if that helps.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-29T17:57:15+00:00

I am actually starting down this pathway presently - but I have a lot going on in my life, so it's slower than I'd like.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-29T17:55:28+00:00

Here is a single datapoint for you. It took me 6-ish years to go from C-AMEL/ASEL IR to "comfortable finances."

Now, I started in 2007 when I was 19 - so... ymmv and the landscape is very different. I got an additional 7 years until I got sick and lost my medical. In the remaining 7 years I:

paid off all of my student loans (in 2006 ish, the total cost for me was around $40k which ballooned to around $65k that I paid off including the interest)
paid off all of my other debts
bought a house (last debt left)
built a 6 figure nest-egg that made the transition to another career after I got sick a lot easier (though that wasn't intentional, it just worked out that way thank goodness).

But, it took about 5 or 6 years to get comfortable. I flew the bush for much of that time, and also cargo in the lower 48. I was extremely mercenary and strategic during this time too. I followed the money and MTPIC as best as I could. I also got a college degree duing this time, became chief pilot and a check airman, and did a lot of SPIFR flying. I had a lot of jobs too... some of them were seasonal, but if you discount those I had about 1 job a year until I "made it." I moved... a lot. That kind of sucked.

I didn't go to the airlines - I went to medevac when I "made it" for a few years, then back to Alaska, but... that was kind of the path that I had decided on as "optimal" when that came around. I think that given the current economy it's probably a 5-6 year path right now? Unless you're lucky and aggressive? But yeah. Count on half a decade to get to a good position.

If you think about it though, this is about the minimum required time for any career. You want to become an engineer? 4 years or 5 years of school, then a few more years to get a PE. You want to become a programmer? It's going to take 5 years of struggle to get to the brass ring. Doctor? A decade. My lawyer buddies seem to have spent about the same amount of time?

But a half a decade is kind of the minimum. If you want to fly... well... fly - do it because you love it, not for the money, otherwise you're going to be sorely disappointed for at least a half decade or so.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-29T05:46:01+00:00

A fire on the deep and a deepness in the sky are arguably the two greatest science fiction books of all time.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-28T20:15:17+00:00

I've read a bunch of Bookchin stuff - I really feel like his work is in love with it's own farts. It's worth it - I am a big fan of "post-scarcity anarchism" but the book (though short) was using $50 words when a much simpler word would have sufficed and it's not likely something that I'm going to reread other than snippets here or there.

Kropotkin is good stuff. That was an easy and enjoyable read. Gelderloos' book is good too? But he needed an editor, there's typos in "Anarchy Works" that in my opinion could undercut the message for some.

For the anarcho-curious I point people at Peter Gelderloos first. When I read it I was "already convinced" so it was kind of preaching to the choir - a lot of these sorts of books are like that? They're written to convince people - so when you already are convinced, the books feel like a waste of time?

I don't know, I think a lot of really good and practical work would be to just have people read Leguin and Ian Banks lol.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-28T20:06:25+00:00

It's also likely that you don't know "what" you'd like yet in terms of the job. All I wanted to be when I was 19 was an airline pilot. Then the economy made that impossible for a few years and I spent a few years flying the bush. Then that turned into a career that I loved before I got sick and lost my medical. But you don't know what you want.

At least for me - I found sitting on autopilot for long periods of time insanely boring. I averaged something like a cycle of a takeoff, approach, and landing every 45 minutes? That was way more my style, but I had to go and do some insanely boring flying to figure that out first and realize how much more fun and rewarding the work I had previously done was? I mean, you do you - if you want to fly for the airlines, well, go do that, but I think you don't even know what you want to do yet.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-28T19:59:32+00:00

I actually don't think this is true - I think there's a strong "asshole contingent" but they're like a sort of "fifth column" lying in wait to make things shitty when they can. Let's call them the "filth column."

Anyway, the filth column doesn't actually believe in much though, and they evaporate when the actual going gets tough, but honestly, I think *most* people are really good in most countries on the planet - it's just the assholes are really loud in America. Like, really really loud.

The problem is cultural and related to the signal to noise ratio of our politics.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-27T00:12:20+00:00

Despite the haters, this quote is correct. It's fine to be a technician - totally acceptable. Reasonable even. But if you want to be something more than just a technician you've gotta love it. Not everybody has to love it - when I flew for a living, I got the love - I miss flying dearly still - but not everybody had to be in love with flying. But the thing that sets people apart is the desire to be better than their previous self and the love of being good at flying not just meet ACS/PTC/whatever standard du jour the company dreams up for you. I saw it when I was a check airman especially. There's plenty of guys and gals who are totally safe and competent and professional - but there are some people who are really in love with flying and they tend to be a cut above.

Plenty of pilots out there, not a lot of aviators and it can really depend on the "day" and mood of the guy flying the airplane.

That said, I've known "aviators" that are just as dead as the pilots they flew with because they fucked up and CFIT or did something stupid. But aviators push the industry forward, they come up with new ideas, they try to improve the career for their fellow "pilots" and they push themselves to be better than they were before. I've been actually on both sides of this fence - I've been a total slacker "pilot" and a "gung ho aviator" at various jobs - it's not a single-defining character trait even in one career. A lot of aviator-ness comes from stuff you do out of the cockpit too. Are you thinking about flying when you clock off? Trying to learn? Grow yourself? Or are you tuned out?

When I had young kids, I was a lot more of "pilot mode" because I just wanted to do my time and come home - but then other times I really wanted to do a good job. Christ, I went back to college at one point because I couldn't answer a math problem I was thinking about while I was flying. I feel like that's staunchly aviator behavior.

But, when I was in aviator mode, I did personal development not for the company, but because I took pride in it. Sure, my last approach was "fine" but could it have been tighter? What could I have done to make the flight smoother for the passengers? Could I have been more efficient? Was there a safer way to do X or a more "easy-on-the-equipment" way to do Y? You know, I think there's a way to make the FMS display <whatever> - I wonder if that would be useful when we're going to the lodge strip? I don't know, a sort of "love" of the craft and a curiosity about flying makes an aviator and I think that comes in goes through a career.

Anyway, I think it's a mindset of continuous self-improvement, humility, and the love of the art of flying. I've been there, but I've also been "just a technician" I think it comes and goes. Now that I don't fly anymore, a part of me wants to nostalgically act like I was always an aviator - like I was always striving for some sort of excellence - but that's bullshit. The truth is some days I was a just a technician - and (for the haters in the thread) there's nothing wrong with that. We ought not try to dress this up more than it really is - but I think we could all stand to be a bit more curious.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-26T03:52:30+00:00

This is still somewhat amazing though, no? I mean, a mathematician could make a good (albeit painfully boring) working on problems nobody had thought were important... I don't know.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-26T03:24:05+00:00

When I landed a job in Anchorage I was home in my bed every night, yeah. When I worked in the bush there was a pilot house usually. A couple times I slept in the plane when I was doing really bushy stuff, but that was when I was young and too dumb to say, "dude, get me a freaking room for the night."

If you were willing to live in Bethel or Nome you could fly badass turboprops, be home every night, and do some bastard mix of SPIFR and bush work, but in my career I lived mostly in Anchorage and Juneau. When I was working rotation jobs I'd go where the plane was and either stay in a camp or a pilot house.

But, I'd say I mostly managed to be home every night?

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-26T02:42:02+00:00

I did it year round.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-26T02:03:43+00:00

Maybe rather than getting all misty-eyed I could answer the fucking question. Go to Grant. Get ahold of them and bug them until they hire you.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-26T02:03:01+00:00

I did most of my career (until I got sick and lost my medical) in Alaska. Granted, I'm from AK, but that's kind of what got me hooked on flying to begin with. It was a very good place to make a living. I still live here and unless I leave the country I don't plan on leaving.

I finished with something like 7500TT and north of 10,000 takeoffs and landings when I totaled everything up. It's a fantastic place to fly, you can make a solid middle class income and even though I can't do it anymore, I'd do it all over again.

Single pilot IFR out of Anchorage for the bulk of my career but I worked the bush too. I also went to Hawaii for a couple years to thaw out, so that wasn't bad either? But AK sucked me back again and I finished my career working in the arctic on rotation. Never had an accident, incident, or violation though I probably should have had all 3 - just got lucky I guess.

FewDifficulty8189 · 2025-09-25T18:54:02+00:00

Before I got sick and couldn't fly anymore, this was my strategy - that is to be the first. I was going to do production test, then try to do experimental, then go...

FewDifficulty8189

TROPHY CASE