tyjen

This reminded me of a strategy that Thomas Edison and Salvador Dalí utilized to facilitate creativity. They would sit in a chair while holding a metal object and allow themselves to fall asleep. Imagination and creativity flourished during the cross over from wakefulness into sleep; then, when they'd fallen asleep, the metal object would fall from their hands onto the floor waking them up and recording any useful creativity.

Speaking from an American food perspective, my family avoids grocery stores and unhealthy processed foods. We receive almost all our food directly from farms and fishermen, the other products we buy wholesale from smaller companies that emphasize quality and lower added costs. For example, a 25 kg bag of oats for $60. We've substantially improved our quality of life and lowered our costs. Like with many areas within American society, the quality is there if you're willing to figure it out.

Wish you didn't delete what was an accurate depiction of HN's general response in relation to the posted topic. Was spot on.

I'll try to keep my rant shortish.

I can speak from serving in the military and as a military spouse, and can without any hesitation, state that being a military spouse is more challenging than being an active-duty military member in the long-run. I came from a fatherless, disadvantaged household, dropped out of high school, and the military provided opportunities I would not have had access to otherwise.

While in the military, I met my civilian wife, who later on joined the military herself and I exited service to finish university with the intent to apply to medical school. This seemed reasonable to a young idealist at the time. Everything was lining up, then she was stationed in a remote area with a less than stellar university. The university I transferred to not only did not have chemical engineering but did not accept around 2 years' worth of mathematics and science courses; so, I was forced to change majors if I wanted to graduate before she changed stations. I didn't care too much about the ramifications from a career perspective, because medical school was my end game.

A couple of semesters before graduating, she was promoted early, and we were scheduled to move. I would not graduate on time.

We moved to an even remoter area with a worse university. Basically, it was a community college with university credentials. Was forced to repeat some courses, again, and was forced to take this university's required general credits, again. It was at this juncture, I decided to give up on pursuing medical school. We could not afford the application process from where we were stationed to fly around to medical school interviews (each would be 7+ hour flights) and the situation difficulty was compounded with having a child. Even if I were accepted, I would not see my child or wife regularly for 4-5 years.

The whole fiasco drained and wasted what are largely considered to be prime productive years and left me feeling like I was caught in a hamster wheel with no meaningful career trajectories in sight--too much work and effort with for no foreseeable benefit. Plus, most spouse programs target women and preferential hiring practices are for low-impact positions without meaningful promotability. There is an additional degree of isolation for male spouses, when most of your potential spouse community are women.

I decided to quit traditional career aspirations and there was a fairly deep depression period, but I climbed out of it by focusing on ensuring that my child would have access to education and economic opportunities that I would've never dreamed about during my childhood. By the time I finally graduated with my bachelors, I had over 200 credits due to all courses I was required to take between the several universities I attended and had tutored people in math and chemistry as a university side job. When the local schools available to our child were poor, I used my overeducation and tutoring skills to home school. We pinched pennies to purchase fixer upper homes and I learned to remodel homes in between moves to earn an "income" that provided enough flexibility to wholly support our child's extracurricular activities in both money and time.

The self-sacrifice paid off. Our child is graduating high school 2023-24, scored a 1580 SAT, and will be competitively applying to the best schools in the country. She will escape all the worries I faced at her age, so mission success on that front. My wife has a very fruitful career trajectory in her respective military service. Post-child life for me will be making up for lost time. I'm not worried, because I've made decent money from flipping houses and have not lost or diminished my competitiveness or desire to learn. If anything, those characteristics have increased due feeling slighted by my lack of traditional opportunities across time. Looking forward to the future as I transition back to focusing on myself.

I'm assuming you're referring to predominately the enlisted side? This also isn't a jab at enlisted people in general, just that many enlisted people come from economically disadvantaged positions in life. And, yes, many of them can yield a behavior that is questionably dedicated, but the people who continue to stay in are largely dedicated and others are rooted out in time.

It was obvious this was coming down the pipeline in Amazon's streaming life cycle. Even before this, they were injecting their own original content adds (skippable) at the start of every movie/show. I would unsubscribe again if possible.

Party loyalism requires selective ignorance.

Current leadership is ringing what's left from one of the world's most recognized brands while retreating from Disney's original defining ethos that helped enable them to build and captivate audiences across generations. It's a sad display.

Many people follow celebrities/public figures/politicians who market Threads as the new "Digital Town Square," or themselves like a "curated" space that conforms to their beliefs, and the ability to silence people who deviate too far from their beliefs. Those same aristocrats are not informing their followers of the privacy dangers, because they also benefit from a commoner's privacy loss. Most common people aren't thinking about the potential consequences on the individual or societal level, because the dangers are not marketed at a similar scale and it's not something the average person thinks about without strong external influence.

I imagine the jet stream is pushing it all south.

Oceans will not die, their biological makeup will change and adapt to new conditions.

I decided to see if your "death rate" claim was accurate; but, found conflicting evidence that the mortality rates in US prisons are generally lower than the general US population, "The mortality rate of state prisoners in 2018 (319 per 100,000) was lower than the mortality rate for the entire adult U.S. population (1,110/100,000) even when adjusted for age, race or ethnicity, and sex (419/100,000) [0]." Also, mortality rates for federal prisons are lower than state prisons [1].

Could you point me to a reliable data source for Chinese prisoner mortality rates? A ~19/100,000 mortality rate would be an amazing achievement.

[0]: https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2021/aug/1/us-departmen... [1]:https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/msfp0119st.pdf

An author and journal rating services evaluating merits across time. While poor scientists become evident to competing authors in their respective fields, a policymaker or journalist may not take the time to figure out if the results are meritable or a background of the authors and utilize the results to support their position. In a perfect world, these authors should be filtered during the "peer review" process, but the process seems... corrupted?

Sadly, this doesn't even include the studies with authors who produce poor experiments and theories, or go out of their way to prove their results; effectively, generating additional scientific publication waste we have to sift through to find genuine material, or worse off, that people then use to create policies impacting large populations that are doomed to fail in the long-run. The image this creates for me, is building a house on quicksand.

I think that I'd rather enjoy that aspect.

The insurance claims representatives interfacing with customers follow a script and will often select car price comparisons lower than your specific cars value. In the US, the insurance company should also pay exactly what the equivalent replacement car is worth, but if the customer isn't paying attention it leaves room for them to profit. If the customer complains with supporting evidence, then the insurance will act in accord with the law, but if the customer is unaware or doesn't care, then that's a win for the insurer.

I imagine similar situations occur in Austria or Germany, wherever people and profit are involved really.

I would avoid letting your insurance "take care of you" if your car is totaled. Insurance companies push through these transactions fast and loose, of course to their monetary benefit and your detriment. For instance, my insurance company's proposed settlement offer to take care of my totaled vehicle was about ~$5k less than the what I negotiated with the at-fault driver's insurance company.

I'd recommend reviewing up your local laws and negotiating accident settlements with insurance companies yourself unless there are physical injuries involved or need to take someone to court.

They've been my go to VPN service for years, since PIA was bought out, so this is a welcomed surprise. Hope it's as good as their service.

Fight fire with fire, train an LLM to respond on your behalf.

You probably know this having watched the documentary, but I'm just adding context for others.

It's primarily because many American tribes try to maintain religious beliefs in conflict with an immigrant identity. Although, evidence points to most of the earliest American humans immigrating across the Bering Land Bridge ~20,000 years ago. The religious stories tribes tell depict that they came from American caves, soil, water sources or other nature-related points of origin.

It's religious-based denialism, no different than what other major religions do when their beliefs conflict with reality.

Alcohol's ill effects have been known for awhile, but alcohol companies continuously undermined studies that would conclusively demonstrate it. Basically, unless you're older and have a certain type of heart disease that alcohol may help, the costs of alcohol are always greater than the benefits. Then again, this is up for the individual to decide, whether they believe their perceived benefits outweigh the potential health costs. At least now, they can make a more informed choice knowing the risks involved.

Yep, we're the same with steaks and coffee. Buy a terrific cut of meat from the local butcher and cook via reverse searing or sous vide.

My family and I went through the coffee experimentation phase while living in Seattle. Prior to this we simply bought coffee from an assortment of shops or huts, narrowing which local vendors produced the most consistent quality cups. After calculating the costs, relative to the quality though, we swapped to trying various beans from local roasters and home brewing methods--some of which took considerably more time and effort than what's reasonable for a single cup.

Presently, we use a Moccamaster and purchase beans from a small-scale roaster on the West coast, even though we moved to the East coast. We swap bean type based on seasonality and try "new" beans to see if we want to rotate them into our normal lineup. Matches our lifestyle and provides consistency in quality. Maybe we're just becoming old and don't want to risk a bad cup from a vendor as well.

The wife still buys her pumpkin spice latte one-pump with soy milk once a year on the first day of fall.

Seems like it's higher than it "should" be with GPU mining winding down due to difficulty maintaining profitability. Then again, companies will generally behave with an asymmetric pass-through if they figure it will not impact sales enough by pricing out consumers--prices increase like a rocket, fall like a feather type deal.

Let's see though:

- 1080 TI (2017) = $699 = $845 (22' price counting inflation)

- 2080 TI (2018) = $999 = $1,178 (22' price counting inflation)

- 3080 TI (2021) = $1199 = $1,311 (22' price counting inflation)

- 4080 16GB (2022) = $1199

I don't know when GPU mining really started to popularize, but there was a significant leap in pricing from the 1080 TI and the 2080 TI. When you roughly account for inflation, it's about on par with current pricing.

Looks like they could trim prices to 1080 TI levels, but I don't see that happening unless sales slow a bit.

Also, I'd like to add, I used general Consumer Price Index to figure this out, so it could vary if inflation did not impact the GPU supply, manufacturing, transport, and other influencing factors similarly.

"The whistleblower also says Twitter executives don't have the resources to fully understand the true number of bots on the platform, and were not motivated to."

I imagine this hurts Twitter's defense against Musk from pulling out of the takeover deal, or, is this whistleblower's account inadmissible?

I think people who immigrate from countries where they're the majority to countries where they're a minority encounter racism/ethnicism/colorism for the first time and assume their new country is racist. However, they overlook or underappreciate the racism in their original country because it rarely if ever impacted them. In several cases, they may even imply that racism in their country is okay, because it's their country of origin and want to maintain its "purity." But, I definitely agree that countries like the US, UK, or Canada are less racist than average, but seem more racist because it's overemphasized in media.

Also, as an aside mini-rant, I'm not keen on the concept of race, because it's a very fuzzy and nondescript concept compared to ethnicity or color. Race isn't a meaningful term and is mistakenly used to describe nationalities, religions, ethnicities, or other communities inappropriately.

Malcolm Gladwell is the quintessential professional sophist. I remember attempting to read 'Blink' after it was recommended, and I could not force myself to finish it. His (continued) popularity taught me a deep lesson regarding humanity at the time.

Yep, I don't believe many would be the quintessential ideal candidate to extract wisdom and most would yield sporadic valuable insights, particularly if they're not adapting well into their advanced years and excessively in discord with changing social norms. It could be a matter of parsing through insights to separate the valuable from the archaic.

We're living in an era where expert level information is easily accessible on virtually every subject on mobiles devices. The reliance for an elder's traditional wisdom is collapsing, accelerated by the obsoleteness of their information relative to a rapidly-changing society. It turns out that Grandma's apple pie wasn't that great, or Grandpa's advice on job hunting isn't a very accurate, or helpful, in today's job market. Plus, add in the complication of newer generations moving away from their family's home area with greater frequency, decreasing contact time between parents and children, and grandparents and grandchildren.

I think the weird transitional part still lies ahead, when people born after the internet age become elders. Currently, our elders lived in a time where their elders were valued, so they're met with a hostility that didn't exist for their elders in situations where they probably expect respect or appreciation. It must feel frustrating.

Negative aspects aside, I believe there will still be value in elder wisdom. Not necessarily through traditional knowledge transference on subjects evolving day after day, but on how to navigate the stresses of a modern life, developing/recognizing healthy interpersonal relationships, and adapting to change. Transferable life skill knowledge that isn't necessarily taught in school or from busy parents. This can be passed on to grandchildren or mentoring children growing up in challenging situations via volunteerism. But, like the author pointed out, reliably tapping into this seems challenging.

America's vieux riche spend exorbitant resources to muddy the waters of classicism and racism to prevent collective action. Look at the parent companies that own large swathes of media assets and look at what they push for information. Class issues are often reframed as race issues to disrupt collective action. This isn't to suggest there isn't residual overlap from historical racism, but there is a clear intention to prime Americans to believe most issues stem from racism rather than classism. Which leads to the issue you point out, Americans lack knowledge of classism, and I would suggest that they're overexposed to framed racism to avoid acknowledging classism.

The unfortunate consequence is developing political policy solutions that do not solve the underlying problems, which create additional problems. This seems ideal for vieux riche, who are insulated from the problems. Not to mention, that you generally require significant amounts of money to successfully run for public office. The rich are the gatekeepers of American society and want to maintain it that way, even if it causes chaos for people lower on the social hierarchy.

ADHD medication is an excellent example illustrating the potential "wiggle room" differences between generics and brand drugs. The composition is similar enough to meet FDA generic drug standards, but the rate at which the generic drug mechanisms distribute the drug differs and potentially decreases treatment efficacy for many patients.

Though, I do wonder if Vyvanse becoming a generic brand will help solve this dilemma, because the release mechanism is tied closer to the individuals metabolism via hydrolysis of an amino acid rather than relying on release rates set by minor manufacturing differences.