newt_slowly

I manage the Google Maps listings for two local Amish businesses, as well as send the occasional e-mail for them when a supplier or other business reason requires they use e-mail.

They offered to pay me for my time, but I refused as I'm happy to help my neighbors. They seemed pretty uncomfortable with me helping without anything in return, so they pay me back in discounted products or labor of their own.

My dad had tinnitus and it bothered him relentlessly. He was constantly following potential new treatments, talking to doctors about it, etc.

I have it too. I've taken the approach of truly accepting it: "I will hear these sounds the rest of my life, and I'm truly okay with that". As a result it doesn't give me anxiety or bother me, and I find it helps it fade into the background. The more you focus on it (and let it bother you) the more it stays in the foreground.

I know the advice of "just learn to be okay with it" is easy to communicate but very hard to actually do. I found mindfulness meditation helped me learn to accept things without judgement, including the presence of my tinnitus.

If everyone pirated, the only people who would create content would be people doing it purely for the sake of art or their own enjoyment, far more people would be personally involved in creating art (in music for example, there would be far more people going to see local performances if there were less music produced as mass media due to loss of profitability), mass media would be reduced and more art would be local (and still physical), increasing the richness and diversity of the media landscape.

In my opinion, that would be a far superior world to the one we live in.

I'm not arguing the way we live our life is the way everyone should live theirs.

Just pointing out that this thread is echoing a false dichotomy of "many partners, no long term partnership" or "long term partnership, one partner". There is a third option, for people who want it.

This statistic to me seems like one of the most obvious cases of correlation not equaling causation. How about this hypothesis:

People who aren't good at (or aren't interested in) long term partnerships will tend to have more partners. Therefore such people may be more likely to divorce if they were to marry. People who tend to form long term partnerships won't tend to have many partners, because they have been busy being in long term partnerships instead.

Therefore having a high number of partners doesn't predict "relationship failure" but "relationship failure" predicts a high number of partners.

All this to say - if you're looking for a long term relationship, there may be reason to be cautious about folks who have not had stable long term relationships before, and as result had many partners as they may not be right for you. But it isn't because having lots of sex broke their pair-bonding mechanism.

I've had sex with more people (via swinging with my wife) since getting married than before, and I love my wife incredibly deeply, more and more each year that passes. Having more partners doesn't make me value her less, it has made me value her even more.

I completely agree; the same thing happened to me with me and my wife. The risk of marrying/pairing off early is that you can grow apart in your 20's, but the reward is that you can grow together in a way that I think is harder to do later in life. I feel that my wife and I grew from two individuals into one partnership in a way that we couldn't have replicated if we met later in life.

I can't relate to this - with most things I enjoy, the more I am able to do them, the more I want to do them. When I go without for a while, I forget about the pleasure something brings.

Backpacking for a year didn't get me "traveled out", it made me want to travel more.

I married young and certainly would have found a lifetime of monogamy challenging. At the same time, I don't believe I could have gotten the desire for different partners out of my system before marriage. It's an itch that doesn't appear it can be scratched. Fortunately my wife and I discovered swinging, and get the best of both worlds: a lifetime partnership built on a deep love and years of shared experience, and the occasional opportunity to have sexual variety.

"Almost certainly"?

We all have our hypotheses, and by all means promote yours, but do you really feel you have enough evidence to assign such a high confidence to yours? How do you reconcile it with statements like the following, made by the former director of National Intelligence?

"There are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom."

I was able to donate hundreds of dollars to Ukraine using the same credit card I use for everything else. What is special about crypto donations to Ukraine? I suspect that the fees of converting USD->BTC (or other crypto) and then the recipients converting back to UAH are higher than the <2% CC fee I paid. (I used a card with no foreign transaction fee.)

And with credit card, the donation recipient wouldn't be at risk of losing double digit percentages of the value donated if they didn't immediately cash out into fiat currency.

I also stopped using soap several years ago. I shower ~3 times a week, and still scrub areas like my armpits but only using water. As confirmed by friends and family, I don't smell. Granted, I've never had much body odor - I can't confirm this would work well if I naturally smelled more after heavy exercise.

I find it plausible that cleaning too much (or with chemicals that alter the microbiome) could be harmful and as such it doesn't seem worth it - following the precautionary principle - unless there were a specific indication to use soap for treating a disease or illness.

Chrome seems to me to be an example of how some users will never update regardless of how easy upgrading is. I can't count how many colleagues, when screen sharing, always have the red icon in their Chrome window showing that they need to update. It doesn't matter how easy it is - they just won't do it.

Just to be clear, this isn't an argument that as a result updates should be forced.

The implementation of such a system doesn't even need to send energy back to the grid at all - simply by having your batteries kick in to power your own load when they would otherwise maintain a reserve you are in effect providing power to the grid (that you would otherwise be drawing). The power is coming from literally inside your house, reducing the amount of energy that must be transmitted to your house from the grid.

If you only used your Powerwall for this program, and kept a 100% reserve otherwise, you would make $75,600 burning through the 37.8 MWh of throughput ($2 per kWh). That's a good deal more than the system cost, so to the extent that your system may wear out quicker, you are definitely being compensated more than enough to replace it when the time comes.

I recognize that doesn't address the situation where Tesla refuses to maintain the battery under warranty if you use more than 1 discharge cycle per day, but if the discharge is due to participation in a Tesla-involved program, that would be pretty poor optics for Tesla.

> So how can it be feasible to afford enough energy to "unburn" a century's worth of burnt carbon if we can't even get enough energy to avoid burning new carbon in the first place?

It isn't, and it won't be. Carbon capture is a pleasing myth we tell ourselves to avoid the massive and immediate actions that would be necessary to avert catastrophe.

We're addicted to fossil fuels, telling ourselves that when we eventually sober up we can undo the damage we've done to ourselves.

Since you didn't go into detail, I'm going to guess that you are referring to atmospheric CCS being widely deployed in the future. Unfortunately CCS is not and will not be practical. [1] [2]

I can explain my critiques in more detail if you clarify exactly what your argument is.

[1] https://manuelgarciajr.com/2020/08/09/the-improbability-of-c... [2] Comical, but fact-based take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8

It would be far to complicated to try and count every bit of emissions like this. Instead, the emissions are taxed at the source - when buying fuel. Therefore, the delivery company would be paying the carbon taxes, and they could choose to either pass those costs on to you, or to, for example, switch to electric vehicles to be more competitive against their rivals.

Either way, it changes your behavior, because if delivery is more expensive (to factor in the externalities it causes) you will either consume less, or pay more. This ultimately "attaches the emissions to the person getting the delivery" but in a far less complex and less game-able way.

Ten years? Just think of 60 years from now, a time that would be expected to be within the natural lifespan of children born today.

I don't know how people don't understand that we face, without exaggeration, an existential crisis.

You are basically acknowledging that technological development is a force that happens outside of our control, and that we are forced to keep up lest we be conquered by our neighbors. This is true, and it's what I believe also, but I don't see how you come to the conclusion that there is anything desirable or moral about this state of affairs.

Without us keeping the Amish way of life "subsidized", perhaps they would indeed have perished. And they would have gone willing, due to their belief system. It's remarkable that you can try to spin not being willing to participate in the technological-industrial system as "more odious than violence".

This comment from early March links to several.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fdf5fq/we_are_...

I don't think it is reasonable to compare other hostile environments to one where humans are literally incapable of being outside for extended periods of time. Even in harsh cold climates, it is possible to wear suitable clothing, or build a fire. That is simple, resilient, low tech and low carbon. Requiring a structure with AC and power is a much larger challenge.

Furthermore, a lot of the areas that will suffer from fatal wet bulb temperatures do not have the wealth to provide AC to everyone. This will drive mass migrations of people on a scale we have never seen before, destabilizing neighbouring countries (or more likely, leading to mass murder).

Finally, this is another positive feedback loop: more AC required -> more energy required -> more severe global warning.

When the combination of heat and humidity gets high enough (look up wet bulb temperature) then it means death for even fit young people, even when sitting in the shade with access to drinking water. We are thermodynamically incapable of surviving too high of web bulb temperatures.

Huge swaths of the globe will experience fatal web bulb temperatures multiple times a year by the end of the century. Very clearly this makes a region "unable to support humans".