agent008t

Just want to mention that the moto camera is made FAR worse by the software.

E.g. video on my moto would always be blurry due to bad de-noising settings used by stock software. mcpro24fps allowed me to take dramatically better videos. The difference was HUGE.

Same with photos. Custom gcam roms, after a long time of trying different ones and tweaking, gave me dramatically higher quality photos. Again, night and day difference.

So the hardware is fine; they shoot themselves in the foot with the software.

At the same time, there has not been a housing crash. Surely if you have to lock in the current rates for 30 years, property prices must come down significantly (to the point of a crash), all else being equal?

So therefore, does that mean that the housing market is just frozen, i.e. number of transactions is way down? That does not make a lot of sense either, as some people need to sell and some need to buy. People would also likely rent out their properties instead of selling, so rents should be coming down too.

So then, are we in a suspended 'just-ran-off-the-cliff' situation waiting to look down, so to speak? Is a crash in house prices/rents/both around the corner?

It's not about an objective level of means, but more about one's relative standing and its security.

Take a modern young couple in a place like NYC. Having to work incredibly hard in an uncertain job - both of them - never too far from being unable to pay rent (or mortgage, although that now tends to come later in life). Meanwhile bombarded by ads of all kinds (and people they see around, both in real life and online) to have consumption of a certain level just to maintain the status quo of their social standing.

Add to that a complete lack of positive vision for the 'developed' world but plenty of negative ones. A complete lack of any sort of utopian thinking. Including the fact that whoever does end up having children will end up with those children later having to support all the pensioners.

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So in a way, the poor are more secure in their poverty than the young people in the middle, and therefore they procreate. So do the more wealthy that are secure in their wealth.

Also, get an animal (a cat or a dog) and be friendly with them. A cat coming over of their own volition and purring in your lap is a powerful reminder that you don't need to accomplish anything to be a valid human being. Cats are great teachers.

Read philosophy (Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne) to get more perspective and further internalize these things.

Meditate to get more awareness of what you are thinking and to further learn to be ok with non-doing and non-striving.

How do you get this evaluated? Is it an expensive/time-consuming process? Do you have to spend several nights sleeping in some strange lab?

This reminds me of the parable of the Rabbi and the goat. Creating a problem, and then looking forward to its resolution!

Will that make your job / tasks a lot easier or more fun? Why are you looking forward to this or are excited about this in particular?

It will make some things a bit more convenient, but why is it particularly exciting?

What do you plan to do after that? Not having to do something is great, but do you have a particular positive agenda that makes you excited to think about?

Why? Some new hardware may get announced, but surely these have been getting progressively less exciting every year for decades. Hardware has been 'good enough' to not be that exciting any more for more than a decade.

Metal detecting

Policenauts; Snatcher; Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake; Metal Gear Solid; Escape from Monkey Island; Deus Ex; System Shock 1 and 2

There are loads of them. In fact, it is very rare that a genuinely good game would feel 'aged' going back to it or discovering it for the first time. 'Blockbuster' games that were only ever popular because of some great special effects (graphics, multiplayer etc.) would of course age very quickly - just like similar kinds of movies.

The idea is that romantic relationships are a side-effect, pursuing them head-on is often the wrong approach. It is better to set up your life in a way that makes them more likely, and to forget about them being any sort of goal.

So yes, get hobbies that you are genuinely interested in, but cultivate ones that can be pursued in a more social way and that have a decent representation of the demographic you're interested in. Then be open and friendly, but don't actively look for romance. Get the rest of your life in order in that manner and it'll happen as a side-effect.

The problem of course is that it is easier done in certain cultures and environments than others. E.g. probably much easier in some slower university town in continental Europe than in some busy car-centric US city. Also easier if you have a more relaxed working life than a busy career with only barely enough free time to eat and sleep. And if people are generally are more open and social and are not all holed in in their apartments online.

Arguably, in a lot of the developed world the culture and the environment has become very unconducive for such things, especially in the last 15 years. Watching older European movies from the 70s, you can really see how much things have changed.

Surely pursuing philosophy would be a better advice than pursuing religion? Religions do tend to include some philosophy but with a lot of mysticism and other stuff thrown in, and the philosophy itself is often not very well thought through. Why not just go for the philosophy itself? Stoicism could be a great start with Seneca's "Letters from a stoic".

Who says you are supposed to enjoy the journey? As a trivial example, 'the journey' of studying for an important exam is hard work, and you would enjoy playing video games instead a lot more. But by focusing on the destination and enduring hardship, you ace your exam, which has a massive effect on the rest of your life. Was the destination not worth it?

Have you not described just another goal to pursue, but in this case one that is very long-term and leaves you so busy you have no time to contemplate anything else? Also, is it that it really eliminated all doubt, or is it that you had no other realistic choice once the children were born?

What happens once your children grow up and leave? You are back in the original situation, except worse - the relationship with your spouse has now likely deteriorated, and you have now likely neglected your hobbies and interests (and often even your health) to the point you don't even know how to live by yourself anymore. Most parents do not seem to deal with that well, trying to hold on, pushing for grandchildren etc.

It does not seem like a solution at all, just a more extreme version of 'we keep grinding, hoping we'll achieve X and then we'll be content forever, only to find merely emptiness on the other side' where you voluntarily choose to intensify your grind dramatically and leave yourself no alternatives.

In fact, just substituting 'by having kids' with another such activity that dramatically intensifies your grind and leaves you no alternatives seems to work just as well. "My answer was found by [going on a trek through the Sinai desert/giving everything to charity and going to live on a homestead away from civilization/circumnavigating the world on a small boat]. For me, one of the absolute best things about it was that it eliminated all doubt: I now had a 100% crystal clear main quest that trivially answers, 'what should I be doing right now?' if I'm ever not sure. Everything else in life is just a side quest"

I think it has to be full-time parenting.

Ok, but so to start with one necessary good - how is housing to be allocated? Who gets to live in the house that is overall most desired, and who gets to live in the one that is overall least desired in a given community?

...and it has been significantly higher than 2017, 2018, 2019.

Scroll down to cumulative excess mortality charts that make this clearer.

Note that this is all-cause mortality, not just COVID. I found this unexpected given the big difference in the news coverage and policy in 2022 compared to prior years.

But are we really post-scarcity on nearly every measure?

Take nice housing in a nice town in a nice location (good climate, pleasant nature, far from the industrial complexes churning out the post-scarcity goods, good culture which takes time to build). Who gets to live there and why? Who gets to travel there to spend a few weeks of their year? These are not all identical - some are more desired by more people to make them more scarce. So you naturally have scarcity.

Furthermore, the current production levels and resource management depend on productivity. And productivity depends on incentives. Take away the incentives (in an absolute 'sharing economy' you speak of), and suddenly you will have an increase of scarcity in places where you thought scarcity to have been solved.

And yet, there is no significant migration from the US to the European social democratic countries. Why not? Latvian population shrunk by a quarter since 1990.

I am genuinely curious, as this often comes up in these discussion. Often, an argument would be that moving away from family and friends to a country where you do not speak the language is difficult. And yet, millions of people move to the US, which is a lot more difficult. So why not?

Replace churches with a secular alternative, with trained psychologists instead of priests, 1-on-1 brief sessions instead of confession, and mindfulness meditation instead of prayer.

Ensure everyone in the community participates by giving local tax incentives (i.e. cut council tax by X%).

I think people today desperately need a 3rd space, a local community and a sense of belonging, and this will provide both. Ensure that people living locally, with different backgrounds, see each other once a week, which would naturally lead to some communication. The 'priest' will be in a good position to provide pastoral care, be able to help people that are lonely or otherwise struggling. Many would be willing to help struggling people locally, so in many ways it is a coordination problem which this would solve.

I feel like by becoming less religious we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and lost some very good things along with the bad. It does not have to be that way.

Switch to mobile played a larger role I think. People used to browse on PCs with mouse pointers and keyboards, now they do on phones with touchscreens.

Self-improvement is great, but also be aware that this is a systemic issue. A great many men (and possibly women?) today feel the same way:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskMen/comments/z60i2x/what_is_the_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskMen/comments/z6m1g6/there_is_a_m...

So just be aware that this is not a personal failing of yours, it seems like more of a norm.

The fact that Thanksgiving is not a thing in Europe.

Also, at some point Google started penalizing them a lot in search results, hurting discoverability. Without new blood, existing ones mostly withered away.

Any entry points / tutorials to get started?

Could you please elaborate on what it is useful for?

Even better that he invested it. I see it this way - he is perfectly entitled to use the claims on others' labour and resources for his own pleasure. Instead, by investing, he uses the claims to get others to work on projects that create more real wealth for others to enjoy! That seems like virtuous behaviour to me. Very unselfish.

Sure, giving the money away may or may not be more virtuous (depends on who gets it and what they do with it). But surely you would agree with me that spending it on one's own pleasures is less virtuous than either of not spending it, investing it productively or giving it to loved ones?

You can but, say, on HN, I believe most people have generated their wealth by providing a services for others.

I do not think rich people are necessarily virtuous. I do think that there is virtue in a wealthy person that does not spend their wealth on personal consumption.