agent008t

No, that is terrible.

1. Spending years of your life earning enough money so that you can begin to live at some later date is not a good way to live. Tomorrow is not guaranteed, and even if it was, you will be different and everything and everyone around will be different.

2. Human beings are not meant to live away and disconnected from everyone else. We are community creatures, even if not always very social.

I do think people overall would be happier if it was culturally, socially desirable to be, or at least come across, as humble, and consume little, especially the more resources you have. Think Warren Buffett -- maybe he does spend a lot on himself, but at least he does not come across as if he does and he certainly does not brag about it. The opposite of Instagram culture. Anyone going against this would see fierce backlash, reputational damage etc.

A new religion of sorts.

Perhaps then people would not feel the need to keep up with the Jones' as much, always feeling as if they don't have enough, worrying about their status. Once people have enough, they can have more choice in what they work on, and perhaps the economy can restructure towards more activity that actually makes people's lives better.

As is, people can't seem to stop even using Meta products or X or buying Tesla cars, despite most people likely having poor opinions of the people at the top of these companies. I do not really understand why. It is easy, these companies have no moats, there are easy alternatives, and it would change the world.

An economy does not need mass demand.

It can easily reorient itself (and arguably, already has) to serving the demand of a small minority of asset owners rather than the majority of people. E.g. people building luxury yachts and working to maintain them, working in luxury restaurants, maintaining luxury gardens etc. instead of working in roles that improve the lives of the majority.

Because most people are working on things that improve the lives of the asset-owning minority and not of the majority, the standard of living of the majority is not improved, they have to work more for less.

How many high-paying jobs today actually do anything that benefits the 'common man'?

By late 2001, Amazon share price collapsed by 94% from it's peak in late 1999! It did, however, fully recover by late 2009.

By 'fastmail masked', you mean an email on the fastmail domain, right? I.e. something123@fastmail.com? So that if there is a problem with your domain, you can still login to your registrar even if they want to say verify your identity by sending a code to your registered email address?

How do you/they deal with presumably all of their peers doing the opposite?

I have also been thinking about this recently.

The big difference/problem I think is the social aspect. With AAA at least you can expect large numbers of people enjoying them at the same time, so you can share the experience with others (and even then, good luck finding anyone IRL to relate to if you're 35+). People tend to be social creatures, and are largely driven by what 'everyone else' is doing. It's amazing how peoples' tastes miraculously change depending on what their peer group is at.

But if you discover some gem of a game from 1997? You will unfortunately likely feel quite alone playing it.

I don't really have an answer to this. I somewhat envy the game streamers that have a small community around them, so they can play some old game live and get the experience of enjoying it with others.

Also, most people in Western Europe / US care more about how things have changed for white collar / educated workers in their country/block.

Look up other writings by Seneca, e.g. On Peace of Mind. They are great too!

Can the whole supply chain of modern technology operate with zero carbon emissions?

Is Monkey Island 2 even possible to beat without a hintbook?

I enjoyed Monkey Island 1 a lot, but with 2 there was a combinatorial explosion of items/locations, and it just seemed too difficult/unfair. I got the impression they wanted you to have to call the hint phoneline.

Thanks, haven't heard of those RPGs and they look interesting.

The original does play very well. The PS3 version allows to speed up time 3x, which is very useful to make some grindy battles less grindy.

I do not think it is a test of nostalgia, rather a test of time - I have been playing many of these games (and new games, too) for the first time recently.

It is amazing what some games managed to do with the limited graphics capabilities of the time. Metal Gear Solid 1 used a colour palette so well to hide the graphics limitations. Many games shined with clever use of pre-rendered backgrounds (FF7 is one of them, but also the Resident Evil series come to mind).

Even from an earlier time, Monkey Island is all the funnier for the pixelatedness. System Shock 1 is still amazingly immersive and atmospheric (and was way ahead of its time!).

I think part of what makes games from late 90s so special is that the tech was good enough to allow plenty of creative freedom, but still simple enough to allow for relatively small teams with relatively small budgets to make the games and add their personal touch to them. That is why Deus Ex 1 is much more personal than the later more polished installations etc.

On PC or on PSX? The version on PSX had a very different feel to it, partly due to very different kind of soundtrack. Both are good though.

The soundtrack is also amazing!

I was once in Kanazawa and randomly walked into the phonograph museum. They had a room there where you could pick an LP from a pile and play it on a phonograph. I grabbed one from a box at random, and the music was amazing - I had no idea what it was at the time. Turned out it was the Macross DYRL OST. That got me hooked.

Crows also pass on their knowledge.

Life comes with a lot of suffering inseparable from it. Different paths in life we can choose result in different kinds of struggle we onboard. Meaning is defined as what makes it overwhelmingly worthwhile.

A lot of religions/philosophies - Stoicism, Buddhism, Christianity etc. - are great for dealing with these problems for yourself, assuming you are already here. None, however, inspire the creation of new life to deal with this stuff. E.g. "Virtue is the highest good and its own reward" is great, but why create new life to have to deal with this if it can be avoided? It becomes circular and meaningless.

Any kind of dopamine-based pleasures are also somewhat degrading to one's humanity once you realize you're effectively being the mouse pushing the button, and are certainly far removed from having any meaning. What difference does it make how fast you were running on the hedonic treadmill if you're going to die?

If life is full of tragedy, why make more of it? So that you could still have love surrounding you when tragedy strikes? How is that not selfish but OP's view supposedly is?

Yes, I agree with you that you have to create some meaning in your life, make up something and convince yourself to believe in it, because there is hardly another option.

Actually, that's a good point - why is there no HN IRC?

Have you written about your FI/RE story anywhere? Would be interesting to read. E.g. which SWR, did you end up moving somewhere cheaper, what do you do day-to-day now? How have you found actually living on your withdrawals - has it not caused more worry? How do you avoid the FOMO of seeing your former colleagues pressing on?

Anything like this in the UK?

I find this surprising. Did we not just have a pandemic, where people had to have fun without 'going out' and spending money? It was great to see so many people gathering in parks etc. instead of going to restaurants.

I found it very strange and sad that after the lifting of lockdowns people went right back to the way things used to be. Did we learn nothing? Such a squandered opportunity.

What happened to just meeting up in a street or at someone's place and 'hanging out' informally? At what point did it become near-obligatory to have a sit-down dinner or 'go out' to enjoy the company of friends?

Just out of curiosity, and it may sound random, but does &T mean anything to you?

Thank you - I doubt it has much to do with interest costs though. 1450 before Covid to 1750 now pretty much matches CPI exactly, so in real terms rents have remained the same. Not that it makes paying it any easier, of course - rents and house prices are still outrageously high.

Could you give some numbers on this please? Really curious.

I am seeing rental yields still under 3.5% (zones 1-2, Victorian terraces converted to 1-2 beds).

It does not really say if any areas are exposed though. You can have near flat elevation but a very exposed path.

It all went to shit the moment 'timeline' became 'feed'.

Does your wife have to wait for you to fall asleep before she does something she wants to do but you have little interest in? You could just watch these lectures together - instead of, say, watching the news.

I want to be able to control youtube on my TV with my phone.

If I were to, say, plug in a laptop to an HDMI port on my TV and run Brave on it. Is there any way to easily control playback on it with my phone? I.e. send videos to it, pause, skip etc. Some way of mirroring what I am doing in Brave on my phone?

Moto G31(w), running Android 11.

Tried loads of GCam versions, the one that worked best was LMC8.4R8. Camera and Night Sight work amazingly well, and all 3 cameras are supported.

For videos however I had to use mcpro24fps. I don't recall the details now, but basically videos from stock camera app looked far blurrier than the photos, suggesting a software issue. It turned out to be some denoising feature that is on by default with no option to switch it off. You can also try it out by installing Open Camera, enabling Camera2 API and disabling Noise Reduction in Processing settings.

Unfortunately, I have not found a way to record slow-motion (high-fps) videos without the noise-reduction blur.

Another thing about the Moto G phones is that they seem to often come with the compass uncalibrated to the point of being useless. Here are some instructions: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/moto-g31/Compass-application-fo...

So in other words, great hardware at an amazing price let down by lousy software.