zolthrowaway

I was able to quit after like a 5+ year pretty excessive habit. There were three steps that really helped me. 1) I removed all accessories from my home. I sold/gave away all of my pipes, vapes, e-nails, etc. 2) I started taking nootropics. For me personally, l-theanine, caffeine, and a multivitamin did wonders. Even if it's placebo (which I don't think it is) it really helped mitigate the appetite and fogginess issues for me. 3) Telling my friends I'm not smoking anymore. I established that I'm not smoking. A lot of them initially tried to get me to smoke. It's something they enjoy and I used to enjoy. I had to explain how I felt. The real friends stayed and others flaked out which is totally fine with me.

I do certainly understand the psychological addiction. It takes a toll. I definitely have unhealthy vices I'd like to cut back on, but for me personally, the steps above were enough to take me from waking up in the middle of the night to rip dabs to being totally sober. If you are interested in quitting, I would honestly recommend giving the above steps a try.

You're right. This is definitely low. I currently live in Pittsburgh. We hire our junior devs at about $65k starting with pretty good benefits. I threw Grand Rapids in a cost of living calculator and it had that salary at about $61k in Grand Rapids (5% cheaper). I'm pretty sure you could get entry level jobs in places like Cleveland and Rochester for similar costs. I haven't looked, but I'd be willing to bet you could get a similar starting salary in North Carolina or Virginia. Everyone is different and I don't want to knock anyone for being happy, but I personally would look to one of the other cheap COL areas if I was starting my career.

I totally agree this is the root of the problem. You wouldn't be giving out 50k loans for degrees that are looking at making 30k a year.

I think the big problem with this approach is that it disproportionately effects poor people. If person A studies underwater basket weaving but their parents cosign and have great credit and income, that's much less of a risk than person B who is studying engineering but has no assistance. 18 year olds have very little credit history or net worth so you are mostly looking at their parents situation. If there is a way to overcome that aspect, I would totally support the ability to discharge loans.

Many political philosophies believe THE fundamental purpose of government is to protect. Not performing the reason why people accept government in the first place means that the government has failed to do the reason it was created. It's not a legitimate government.

Your post and example is right on the money. This is incredibly scary and seems to be happening more and more as governments aren't allocating funds to do critical functions.

That's awesome. I personally used to be a daily smoker (like start the day with a bowl, end the day with a dab type smoker). It definitely was insanely beneficial for me at first. After about 5 years, it lost its magical effects for me because my tolerance was too high. I took an extended tolerance break and when I came back, something still wasn't quite right and I've been sober ever since. My productivity has increased and I'm feeling a lot better.

I hope cannabis continues to work well for you. For me personally, I hit this wall at around 5 years of daily smoking. I can't imagine how my life being on it's current trajectory without it though. It really was a big boon to my creativity, productivity, and life.

For those who have never tried or have only used prohibition era cannabis, sativas and indicas have significantly different effects. With the ability to choose your strains, you really can craft your experience. Cannabis can be a very powerful tool. Also, please, don't take this as an endorsement to go out and try it. That's a very personal decision in my opinion like whether to consume alcohol or not.

Although they were big, bulky, laptops I really liked the Satellites. They had pretty good spec to price ratios. I still have a 7 or 8 year old one that is running fine with linux. I have it hooked up to my TV. That laptop helped a broke college graduate start his career. A part of me is very sad to see them go.

This is a very reasonable and levelheaded post. I think part of the massive frustration is that Conservative policies often times seem to feel like dragging their feet. Like you point out, we very often times end up with sub-optimal solutions to serious problems. The cycle feels like problem presents itself, progressive solution proposed, conservatives don't want to address the problem, eventually problem becomes too big and a crappy "compromise" is put in place.

You are totally right that many of these problems are very difficult to solve. It's scary to put time and resources into things that may not work. We already are throwing so much money away into stopgap solutions though. The reason why I and many people feel frustrated with conservative policy is because it feels like they stall until we are forced into eventually doing "something" instead of implementing the full solution. Instead of saying, "hold on, do we really need this? Is this the best way to go about this?" it feels like conservative policy is to say "we will do everything we can to not spend money even if it is correct to do so." I totally get that this is a biased point of view. It's just an explanation as to why there is so much resentment of modern conservative politics.

There were waterproof phones with headphone jacks before the iPhone X. See some of the Samsung Galaxies as an example.

Bluetooth is lossy compression. There are plenty of reasons to still stick with AUX and the 3.5mm jack. It does make a difference in sound quality. Additionally if I'm traveling and forget my headphones, it will cost me $5 to get a pair to get me through the week. Bluetooth headphones are more expensive.

There is a guy who was able to fit a 3.5mm jack in his iPhone X. They just chose not to do it. It's not like having a 3.5mm jack excludes you from also having Bluetooth technology. We've had both in phones for years. Apple just wanted to sell more air pods. I'm not hating on Apple, they're a business, but to act like Bluetooth is a strict upgrade is just blatantly wrong and I will continue to use my AUX jack.

>What's wrong with using tons of oil?

Plastics are incredibly useful. Tons upon tons of bottles end up in landfills, oceans, etc. Even with plastic recycling, PET yields aren't 100%. There is only so much oil and eventually the plastics we have will cease to be recyclable.

I'm not trying to say that it's wrong to use a disposable plastic bottle from time to time. There's not anything wrong with having a case of water. But no one with access to clean water should primarily use disposable bottles. It's lazy and shortsighted.

Thanks for your honesty, man. This was an incredible read.

>U.S. colleges & universities spent $536 billion

I'm not sure this is the best number to use. This is what is currently spent, it is not how much we would need to provide a free higher level education option. The entire department of education budget is 70 billion [0]. Using Pennsylvania as a baseline, they have approximately 185 million planned for public education[1]. Let's round that to 200mil and multiply it by 50. This gives us a ballpark spending of 100 billion at the state level. So let's approximate 170 billion spent on K-12 and higher education last year.

We were able to fund our entire K-12 system and give money to public universities for under half that 536 billion figure. So yes, we may not be able to cover our current higher education bill with the defense budget. However, what we are currently doing is not the best or cheapest system. Someone could definitely come up with a free higher education proposal for half of that 536 billion figure. The system needs reformed badly. Everyone knows the costs of higher education are out of control. Using it as the baseline isn't fair IMO.

[0] https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/index.html [1] https://www.governor.pa.gov/governor-wolf-reaffirm-commitmen...

To add to this, WordML is super powerful. Modern .docx files are basically just big zip files. You can easily edit this and do some crazy things and MS Word will be pretty good about reflecting this in the editor. G-Docs can have some issues with modified WordML.

You can do some of these things in open formats like .odt and G-Docs will be better about this. However, there are still problems with things like pagination.

So overall, I think Docs is where you want to be unless you have some super niche use case. I don't have enough experience trying to do crazy things with Sheets to have an opinion on it vs Excel though.

My girlfriend is a NP. She does make a good living, but the amount of stuff she puts up with is something I could never put up with. I may be stressed about a production emergency or a looming deadline, but for the most part I work 8-4. She deals with long, changing hours and has told me stories that have made me physically ill just from the description. I'm not sure how they handle this. She's had to put up with this even before she got an actual job. Clinical took a toll on her even before she graduated. The fact that LPNs and RNs even go to work everyday with lower pay and crazy hours amazes me. My hat goes off to the medical profession. Our system may be a mess but the doctors and nurses are making a lot of sacrifices to keep people healthy and alive.

I understand you're talking about the reputation, but Linux UI has gotten really good over the years. Recent Gnome, Mate, and Cinnamon builds can be truly beautiful and the Ubuntu based OSes are legitimately beautiful out of the box. I've haven't used Ubuntu since 12.x, but even then it was a legitimately good looking OS, certainly better than Windows. Mint looks and functions intuitively for any Windows user. Anyone who says Linux UI is bad has either not used Linux recently or picked an obscure distro. I've used Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, CentOS, and Arch within the past 5 years and they've all been solid. I would take any of those out of the box over an out of the box Windows 8 or 10. Windows is basically non-functional to me without classicshell.

Windows as a main OS is a horrible experience IMO. I want a normal start menu. I don't want anything to do with the Windows app store which is full of 99% junk. I don't want most of the preinstalled bullcrap like the XBox app, people, Cortana, etc. I don't want automatic updates forced on me (especially when I can't even set reasonable working hours). Yes, I understand most of these things can be mitigated but it takes work. Prior to Windows 8, these things just worked.

I still have Windows installed but it is entirely to boot into Steam/Orgin/BattleNet. I'd rather not mess around with Wine since I already paid for a Windows key. But the Windows user experience has drastically gone down over the years. If you aren't a gamer, you should 100% be using a Mac or a ready out of the box Linux distro like Ubuntu or Mint. I absolutely hate what Windows has become and it is a miserable experience now.

I'm not sure that diversity is what we should be striving for in our reporting. Right now, you can get 50 hot takes from a million different outlets. The vast majority are optimizing their headlines and writing for clicks. They manufacture outrage because it is what will bring people to their site. You can easily find an article to confirm whatever views you have on a particular news event. I'm not sure this is a good thing. There is nothing that requires a digital news outlet to have any journalistic integrity. There are plenty that have had stories thoroughly discredited but are still spread around on social media.

I'm not saying that centralized news is better. I don't remember much of that. I am saying that people have a very difficult time determining what is factual and what is not. Diversity in news may not be a good thing for democracy when we bombard people with information and options and tell them to sort it out.

That's a really good approach. I hadn't thought about it that way. I think the issue is more with me as an interviewer than with the organization as a whole. We've been pretty successful with our hires in the past. Thank you for the replies. They have been quite helpful.

We're a middle stage startup hiring our first batch of interns. Up to this point, we've only hired full-time employees and a few contractors. I'm not sure outsourcing is really an option for us just based on our size. Thanks for the reply.

Thank you. I really like you're idea of coming up with a lower bound and scaling it up. I will definitely try to choose some questions like that.

I swam the 500 as my main event and was fairly decent at it. It is crazy how mental that race is. I found drastically different results based on who was doing my card (for those that don't know, longer events use a plastic number to show the swimmer and the ref what lap swimmers are on). I knew a couple of people who could hold a 1:10 100yd pace for a T30, but couldn't get a 5:30 on a 500. Swimming is such a weird sport and the people are even weirder (mostly in a good way).

The last mile problem [0]. A rail system could work for a very densely populated area, but there is way too much sprawl. It's part of the reason why cars are basically seen as a necessity in the US.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)

>A 16 year old can waste his or her life by this age if he or she does really badly in school or smokes weed and gets caught.

I agree with the vast majority of your post, but I would say this part isn't super fair. Maybe I'm reading too much into this part, but outside of exceptional cases, we do give minors the chance to recover. I know people who had high school GPAs in the low 2s, that went to community college for 2 years, transferred to a solid university, and have a good career.

At least where I live, your records are sealed at 18 unless you have been tried as an adult (which is exceedingly rare). You can definitely recover from an offense, but it is going to make things harder.

Yes, a 16 year old doing some (alleged) unethical behavior should face some consequences, but no 16 year old should have their life ruined. Intelligence and maturity are not coupled.

I put together a new computer this week. Everything new but I still have my 760TI in it because I'm not paying $1000 for a graphics card. You can get a 1050 reasonably priced still, but that's more of a lateral move than an upgrade for me. Here's to hoping the market returns to normal soon.

You're definitely right. I'm just feeling idealistic this morning :). I hope you enjoy your build and it goes well. I'm getting my 1600 this week.

I agree with you, and you are right. However, most people aren't making decisions about what types of chips to use in a data center. It would be wonderful if the people in those positions explored non-Intel options. For the average consumer, all we can do is choose which company we buy a CPU from every few years. People buying Ryzen chips incentivizes AMD to keep making chips and stay in the market. Competition is good for consumers. I totally get that it is a lot more complex than that, but I personally feel like it's the best we can do as the average consumer.

Vote with your wallet. That's really the only thing that you can do. Intel is too comfortable in their position as market leader. Until they start to feel some pressure, they have shown they don't really care. I know AMD is not a perfect company either, but I elected to buy a Ryzen processor for my upcoming build. People need to at least consider the competition without defaulting to "I need a processor, I buy the latest Intel chip."

Yes, I know that most people don't build new PCs or upgrade their processors that regularly. Yes, I know that many people don't have much of a choice because they have some requirement that currently ties them to Intel. However, those that do have that choice, should remember this debacle the next time they are buying a CPU/system (even if they are not doing it for awhile). Intel is hoping they can sweep this under the rug, we can't let them until they make amends. Do not buy an Intel chip until they've proven they will do better. I am not endorsing AMD either. You can still vote with your wallet by not buying anything at all. If enough people put off their upgrade, it would put a dent in Intel's bottom line. Things won't change until it hurts them financially.

The problem is (at least in part) the two party system. It really helps fuel the us vs them mentality. It allows people to write off people's opinions with a broad stroke. For example, "Oh, that person is Republican. They must be racist and hate poor people," or "That person is a Democrat, they want everything handed to them and an authoritarian state." Both of these statements clearly do not represent the average person on either side.

Opinions are a spectrum, but we are constantly blasted with the extremist opinions on both sides. Social media has only amplified these issues. Extremists generate many responses from both sides and thus a lot of eyes end up on these opinions. Talk to your neighbor. Regardless of their political affiliation, they're probably a pretty decent human being (obviously there are outliers). Just try to remember the person you're talking to is a human being and their opinion is probably more nuanced than you give them credit for.

I don't have a horse in this race, but what about pyrite? It has most of the aesthetic properties of gold (which I think everyone agrees is where most of the value comes from), but almost none of the value. Pyrite is a real, physical thing that will not disappear tomorrow. However, it has almost no value.

I guess what I am trying to say is that there is a lot more that goes into value than utility. That's why I do not think that people always act rationally. Clearly there is something irrational about people's relationship with gold that makes it valuable. I don't see why crypto cannot have a similar irrational evaluation. Sure, it could go "poof" tomorrow, but I don't know if that will stop people from seeing it as valuable.

Could a windowless vehicle help this? If the car is in control, there's really not any need for windows. I know we are a very long way from that level of autonomous cars, but I don't think motion sickness is the biggest hurdle we will need to overcome. There is room for a lot of creative solutions.