BayAreaEscapee

My uncle was a private pilot. He used to take me flying from time to time.

I remember him saying that it's legal to fly without a map, but it's not legal to fly with an outdated map. If you have a map, it must be up-to-date.

Everytime this "the insects are dying" thread comes up, people come out of the woodwork with anecdotes like this.

But I am one of them! I remember getting my first car in the late eighties and scrubbing tons of splattered insects off my windshield every time I went to the gas station.

Now I barely even notice them.

Antecdote is not data, but I certainly believe people when they say the insects are dying.

Did anyone else get to the end of this article and ask themselves, "So why did the article's author think Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment?" I felt I reached the end of the article without it substantially addressing the headline.

Or maybe I'm just not deep enough.

In fairness to the restaurants, Uber Eats and its competitors take a pretty good chunk of the price of the food. Restaurants run on thin margins. The commission that these food apps demand can make the difference between the delivery being profitable or not profitable.

Plus, the restaurant loses the ability to completely control the experience the customer gets. If the pizza sits around for half an hour before it gets picked up, gets to the customer cold, and then the customer complains, how is that the restaurant's fault?

I'm not negating your point: it is a pain and a risk to install a dozen apps. But I also understand why they do it.

For anyone who loves the feel of these Model M "clicky" keyboards, a company called Unicomp purchased the rights and still manufactures them and even has USB versions.

I own one and I love it.

https://www.pckeyboard.com/

I don't disagree with your argument, but I think your statement "In the whole of the USA, there are only 80,000 accredited investors" is not quite right. According to this MSN article, "To be considered in the top 1% of net worth, a household needs combined assets totaling over $11 million." [1] That means there are about 3M households that have at least $11M.

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/what-net-worth-is-co...

It doesn't matter. If she has bank accounts abroad exceeding the threshold, she's obliged to file just to disclose her foreign bank accounts.

That's also true for California. I established tax domicile in Nevada before expatriating.

Alternate source without paywall:

https://www.fa-mag.com/news/the-world-s-rich-and-powerful-ar...

You speak like someone who hasn't found themselves in California's 13.3% tax bracket.

> Side note, the Economist is a rag.

Many years ago, before there was so much news on the Internet, I used to subscribe to The Economist. It was kind of expensive for a magazine: it was about $150 a year if I remember correctly. I used to devour it every week, and considered it to be a highbrow, accurate and unbiased version of the news from a European perspective.

Now, I agree with you that it's just a rag full of drivel. Whenever I read The Economist now, I wonder, "did I change, or did The Economist change?"

There is a service called privacy.com that does something similar. You can open and close new cards easily. I use it all the time for sketchy web sites.

http://privacy.com

The whole argument of this article seems misplaced.

There is enormous demand for both temporary and permanent housing in many places, and to some degree it is fungible. If it wasn't Airbnb, some other agency or company would be servicing the need.

The only solution to the underlying problem is to allow construction to meet the underlying demand.

And the author's premise that short-term housing is more ethical than long-term housing just makes me think he has an axe to grind.

I don't disagree with our premise against people being inherently good. I personally don't think that a universal basic income will solve all the problems that its proponents think it will solve.

But I don't think your example about rape in occupied Germany is a great example. The citizens of the Soviet Union suffered greatly, and it is estimated that about 26 million of them died during WW2. I have no doubt that the minds of those soldiers were filled with thoughts of rage and revenge, and probably felt that the perpetrators of the war somehow deserved it.

Bank of America stopped doing virtual credit card numbers a few years ago.

I think Citibank allows you to do it, but I have no personal experience or knowledge.

I have a card from Capital One that allows virtual credit card numbers.

Privacy.com is a service specifically for this issue. It allows you to generate lots of virtual cards and even use fake names so you can't be tracked so easily.

I don't want to contradict your experience, I'm sure it's real as you describe it.

Are you aware that California Penal Code sections 530.5-530.8 require the law enforcement agency in the area of an identify theft victim to take a police report?

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...

Buffet probably only needs the fence and security because of his success. If he were an average Joe of no notoriety, he could live there without the security.

I'm going to second the Sinclair method, which involves taking naltrexone or nalmefene. I started with the Sinclair method at the same time I started participating in SMART recovery online meetings. I only drink alcohol about once a week now and only in moderate quantities.

Here are some links for anyone interested:

https://www.amazon.com/Cure-Alcoholism-Medically-Eliminate-A...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EghiY_s2ts

If there was a severe drop in hash power, the mining difficulty would also drop. If it dropped very low, a single computer using CPU mining would be enough to mine a block every ten minutes (as Satoshi himself did after he first created Bitcoin).

In the long run, as long as even a single person has an interesting in mining, a new block will be mined (on average) every ten minutes.

An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, “only a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”

The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”

“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”

“Millions – then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

(not my story, original author unknown)

No air conditioner is going to be 100% efficient. You're still going to consume a fraction of the heat energy being transferred from indoors to outdoors. Unless your home is powered by 100% green energy, you're still indirectly adding carbon to the atmosphere.

Back in the day (when we had to go to school uphill both ways), I met a banker who told me, "whatever your bank is charging you for a bounced check, it isn't nearly enough". Then he described how the system worked: the actual physical check had to be sent back from your bank, to the Federal Reserve branch of the receiving bank, then to your branch of the Federal Reserve bank, and then to your bank. Not electronically: I'm describing the movement of the actual physical paper check. So, there was a real cost to everyone for a bounced check and of course the person who wrote the bad check should pay. That makes sense.

Of course, this makes no sense in a world of electronic transfers via ACH. The banks that are still charging $35 for a bounced transfer are engaging in something barely more legal than theft.

I don't know if this works for anyone else, but in Firefox I can switch to reader mode and then reload the page. Then I can read the whole article. This only works with nytimes.com and a very small number of other sites.

I had employee stock options in two companies that had a high growth rate. I lived very simply and saved more than half my take-home pay. I did have a high salary.

I did it: I retired at age 40 with a net worth of about $5M. That was eight years ago. I diversified most of it, but I made two concentrated bets with a fraction and both of them were home runs. Now I'm above $5M. I have enough money to do whatever I want and my withdrawal rate is less than 1% annually. (I don't have expensive or flasy taste.)

One of the things that I didn't expect (but that this article and some other sources hint at) is that I would fall into a trap of consuming a lot of alcohol. I recognized my problem and dealt with it. Now almost every day is alcohol-free, and I only drink when with other people who are also drinking. (For anyone struggling with a drinking problem, I urge you to try something called the Sinclair Method, which involves taking naltrexone or nalmefene. [1][2])

I don't really have much of a fixed address and spend 95% of my time abroad. I usually like to stay in a place for several months or more at a time. This sometimes involves long-term visas. Throwing money at immigration attorneys will solve a lot of those kinds of problems. Many countries have visa programs for self-employed or self-sufficient people. If not, you can always enroll in a language program and get a student visa to study the language of your host country.

I also spend several months a year just traveling around to new places and visiting old friends.

I enjoy my life. Sometimes at moments I miss my job in Silicon Valley. Then I realize how much grief and pressure it was, and I'm thankful for the life I have.

At this article's author states: you have to know what you are going to fill your life with once you leave the working world. If you don't fill it with something positive, negative things will fill in.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Cure-Alcoholism-Medically-Eliminate-A... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EghiY_s2ts

Yes, I had that impression too. If my memory is right, that's how Reagan broke the Air Traffic Controllers' strike: many of them were military reserve members, and so Reagan fired them as civilians and then recalled them to active military service where they were subject to the UMCJ.

It's certainly am impressive result.

But I laughed a little when the article said, "it still need (sic) at least 30 years for the technology to come out of the lab." Isn't that the whole history of the nuclear fusion industry? Every bit of news I've seen about fusion my whole life says that fusion is 20-30 years out. In 20-30 years it will still be 20-30 years out.

I do the same thing.

Often, I'll look at what kind of comments are made on HN to decide if the article is even worth reading.

I agree with your position that lots of web site are annoying in the way they load slowly and display lots of nonsense, ads and overlays and awful UIs in addition to the article itself.

Once in a while someone here will take a swipe at the primitive layout of Hacker News. But I love the utilitarian layout of Hacker News. It's simple, clear, uncluttered, fast and intuitive. Saying that it looks like 1992 isn't a meaningful criticism.

People care about status at least as much as their raw level of purchasing power.

A 25-year-old American man in 1960 had more status in society than a similar man today.

States have a unfavorable opinion of having another state's homeless population shipped to them. I'm aware that Nevada been sued several times by California cities for busing their homeless one-way to California.