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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 14th, 2024

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  • Minor nitpick: he was Captain, not Chief.

    And him trying to pass for straight was some of the funniest scenes in the show:

    Guard: It just seems like you wanna be with Jamie-Lynn. I mean, you keep talking about her thigh gap.

    Captain Holt: That’s my favorite part of a woman. There’s nothing more intoxicating than the clear absence of a penis.




  • Because so much depends on the income tax based on the tax year. We calculate our taxes based on our annual income. Our qualifications for government benefits (subsidized housing, food, healthcare, financial aid for universities) are keyed to our annual income, as reported on our taxes. Many programs, even for richer people, also look to income: tax credits for electric cars, specialized retirement accounts, etc.

    And because lying on your taxes is a serious crime, many private banks and landlords use those annual figures as proof of income for loans, credit cards, long term leases, etc.

    It just pervades how we think of money, on an annual basis.



  • It wouldn’t be a 30% higher electrical bill overall. It would be 30% more for whatever power you’re using for this specific device, which, if it’s ordinarily 10W while in sleep and an average 100W while in use, and you use it 50 hours per week, or 215 hours per month, that’s a baseline power usage of 21500 watt hours in use and 5050 watt hours from idle/sleep/suspend. Or a total of 26550 watt hours, or 26.5 kWh. At 20 cents per kWh, you’re talking about $5.30 per month in electricity for the computer. A 30% increase would be an extra $1.60 per month.



  • Many kid movies raise some troubling implications about personhood and moral agency with anthropomorphized non-human characters (Toy Story and life/death/abandonment, what do obligate carnivores in Zootopia eat, etc.).

    But Bee Movie inexplicably just dives right into it instead of leaving it unexplored on the edges. If the bees are fully intelligent beings with rich inner experiences, what moral obligation do we owe them? It’s a mess of a concept.


  • All this is just saying that you personally put more weight on the things that are better about later adulthood than early adulthood or adolescence. And that can be your choice, but it doesn’t have to be everyone’s choice.

    You acknowledge that the health and friendships piece gets harder with age but push back against the idea that it inevitably gets worse. But averaged among all people, things will tend to get worse, and some people who actually experience that deterioration will conclude (as is their right) that things were better when health and friendships were easier.

    But we also make new relationships as we get older. Is life better when you have a grandparent? Or when you have a grandchild?

    These aren’t symmetrical. When you are a young person who loves your grandparents, you haven’t actually mourned a loss of a grandchild you personally knew. On the flip side, when you have a grandchild you might also view that relationship through the lens of a lost relationship with a deceased grandparent. In other words, only one of those experiences is 100% good, rather than a bittersweet mix of good and sad.

    Not to mention, plenty of people will never have grandchildren. To them, the mourned loss of a grandparent is the end of that road. There’s no replacement on its way.

    Put it this way: if given the opportunity to wake up 10 years in the past, in your body of 10 years ago, how positive or negative would you view that? Plenty of people would vote on different sides of that, and that’s OK to have different views based on one’s own experiences.





  • I interpret it to be more about the weight given to different pros and cons about different stages in life.

    Some people really, really prize autonomy, and don’t get to experience that until pretty late in life. For these people, the stifling limits of adolescence, without their own money or independence from parents, can be miserable.

    Some people really, really prize being free of responsibilities. To this group, sometimes adulthood comes with too many challenges and responsibilities that they find independence to be stifling.

    Some care about physical health, which may correlate with younger ages.

    Some love the ease of friendships in adolescence and early adulthood, and long for that dynamic when they realize that making new friends or maintaining existing friendships gets harder after 30, and even more so after 40.

    Some feel very strongly about the loved ones they’ve lost since their childhood, and wish they could’ve appreciated those shared experiences more in the moment.

    And we all have different experiences. I have no idea if my best years are ahead of me or behind me, but I could see an argument in either direction.


  • This all or nothing thinking often just turns into an excuse for doing nothing.

    I can make a better world by making things better in my immediate vicinity, without dying for it. I can help one person at a time, and it might not scale to some kind of globally noticeable improvement, but it can still a difference to each of those people, and was worth whatever effort or sacrifice involved.


  • Yeah, I end up trying to run to the cadence of music, and so I don’t run to music.

    Well you can always just put together a playlist of your preferred cadence for that particular workout. I’m usually a 180 steps per minute kind of runner, so I like 90 bpm songs.





  • It works if you can build up the relationships and reputation, which will depend heavily on the industry and the job.

    I know two people who do this, and they have jobs that allow them to.

    One is an emergency room physician. His shifts are staffed through a middleman at 3 different local hospitals, and the nature of the work is that he just does work during the shift and doesn’t bring any home with him or continuing onto the next shift he works. He gets paid very well when he’s working (average annual salary of an emergency physician in the U.S. is about $375,000 per year). And occasionally just lines up a long sabbatical, does volunteer work overseas (Doctors Without Borders/MSF), and takes time off for himself and his family. He basically budgets a $200k lifestyle and takes unpaid time off. But his pathway basically required him to just dominate school, from kindergarten through a bachelor’s degree and 4 years of medical school, and then put in his time as a resident.

    Another friend of mine works as an electrician and lighting crew member on TV shows and movies. He always has to line up his next project after the current one ends, but occasionally can line something up in the future so that he can take a calculated 3-6 months between projects. He’s got a good working relationship with some producers and directors, so he basically knows he can find a job anytime with whatever production those people happen to be working on. Whenever he has enough cash, he can go and travel, timed out to where he’s not paying rent for an unoccupied apartment. Then he lines up another gig, signs a new lease, and then continues working. I think he lives very frugally on the job (I think stuff like food is covered when filming on location, so not a lot of out of pocket expenses for food/drink while working), and saves money that way.

    With that, I think there are a few opportunities to think through which careers might actually allow for this.

    Project-based jobs, where people work for a few months or a year towards a particular project completion, might be good for intentionally taking gaps between projects. I wonder if construction and similar industries would allow for this. Academia often has formal sabbatical policies, too, but that’s relatively late career.

    Personal independent gigs can do this, if you can earn enough money doing it (so, like, not Uber and Doordash). Some people do contract design work, create independent art, write essays and op eds for different publications, etc. If you’re paid by the job, taking a break doesn’t really hurt your “resume,” so to speak. Even some who are expected to publish on a defined schedule can get ahead of the curve by producing a bunch of work for publication on that schedule (some webcomic authors and social media influencers are known to do this).

    Jobs where you are employed by some firm but actually work for a client that hired your firm might also be a good candidate, if you have the seniority and flexibility and credibility to just take unpaid time off while still being on the books and website as an employee. I know people who took off a year of parental leave as lawyers, but it really depends on practice area and firm culture whether that will permanently hold them back on career growth.

    Jobs that are basically shift work are designed so that no one person is totally indispensable or non replaceable, which gives the worker the flexibility to leave without hard feelings, and come back whenever they’re ready. My emergency medicine friend probably fits in this category. But also, maybe any kind of 24/7 coverage job sorta fits this category, too, in health care, IT, critical infrastructure, etc.