bamfly

I read "preppies" as something very different from what you intended, at first, and was really confused, but also got some really funny mental images out of it.

Popped-collar-lacoste-polo madras-shorts-wearing dudes whose only survival skills are knot-tying, trying to get by in the apocalypse. LOL.

In the US, I think making soda expensive enough that bundling 32oz of it for an extra $0.75 with fast-food combo meals stopped happening, and free refills became uncommon again (they were rare as recently as the early 90s! You paid per cup, or you bought a pitcher, like beer!) would probably do some good.

There's not much to write. I tried it for about two weeks, consistently, approximately no cheating: nothing but candles for lighting, no "screens", period (save, like, double-checking the alarm on my phone for the next day right before bed—but no browsing, no messaging, none of that, total use measured in seconds once the sun was down). No TVs or computers whatsoever. By night two I was already getting to sleep much earlier, and sleeping better. The effects of the experiment hit fast and strong.

You can still: read, write, play music, play card and board games, lift weights to some extent (I didn't—a bit contrary to the getting-tired, plus I just didn't keep it up long enough to build in anything like that, though nb you probably don't want to be attempting max-weight lifts in low lighting or otherwise doing anything that's not very-safe) or do many bodyweight exercises, take walks or run (night walks are nice!), talk, do limited chores or cleaning, plan meals (assuming written recipes, or books), and so on. There is a ton of stuff to do by candlelight, or in no lighting (including, ahem, partner activities). You won't run out of stuff to do if you've got any kind of varied tastes in activities at all—but you also won't be doing stuff so extremely engaging that it keeps you from noticing when you're tired.

If I'd kept it up, I'd have found a way to listen to "the radio" (but actually streaming or flacs or whatever) and had exceptions to the no-screens for, at least, setting that up initially. Goal would have been to still barely look at the screen, though: set an album or a few albums or a long playlist of podcast episodes or old radio show episodes (some of these are really fun!) to play, and mostly leave it alone. I'd also have probably made an exception for e-ink book reading devices, provided no cheating by using them to browse the web—that seems well within the spirit of the thing, to me, and unlikely to veer back into hyper-stimulative or way-too-bright territory.

Things I noticed:

As mentioned, full-room lighting is stupid-bright. Way brighter than needed, and that's an understatement. Made me recall some of my older relatives' long-owned houses and how many rooms didn't have built-in lighting, but just had a switch-controlled outlet with a lamp attached—even just having the light come from somewhere lower made the room less intensely-bright, all else being equal. That seems far saner to me now, than what's normal in new houses. Are you trying to take daytime-like photos indoors at night? No? Then your lights are probably way too bright, likely by an order of magnitude, than what's remotely necessary. There's no way that's not affecting sleep—right?

You do need to have a way to carry one or more candles. You don't want to have dedicated candles lit in every room (including bathrooms!) unless, I dunno, you have people over maybe. Could probably safely remove a lot of this need with a small number of very-dim night lights (some are way brighter than a couple candles, though! Gotta shop carefully) without ruining the whole exercise.

Candles are painfully bright if they're your only light source, they're nearby (say, you're reading), and you look right at them, even in passing. Very unpleasant. If I'd kept it up, I'd have had to find a way to shade them somehow.

In fact, though, to keep it up longer-term, I'd have had to find or build an electric alternative. Unscented candles that don't smell like absolute ass (once you've smelled anything other than the common petroleum-based ones, those smell like a chemical waste dump) are fairly expensive to burn, are a fire hazard (obviously), and harm air quality even when they're a relatively-decent material. Most e.g. portable camping lights are far too bright and are a too-cold temperature to replicate candlelight. I expect I'd have ended up building a few little battery-powered lanterns with the dimmest warm-temp LEDs I could find, or maybe even dim and under-driven filament bulbs to get a smoother light curve—they'll last a long time if you run them way under-spec, and the inefficiency hardly matters at powers that low.

One persistent change I've made as a result of this is having a very-dim-bulb warm-temp floor lamp (some cheap Ikea thing, with about the dimmest warm-temp LED bulb I could find that'd fit it) for my office. It's the only nighttime lighting I use in there, most of the time—rarely use my overhead light. Point it at the wall if I just want to avoid stubbing my toes on things, aim it almost at me if I'm reading. It's more than enough light. Been meaning to swap out the end-table lamp bulbs in the bedroom with something about 1/4 as bright, but keep forgetting.

Another thing is that the past is a little more relatable. I've lived with candles (if not long—but it's enough to notice some things!) and know the pain points and really get and appreciate tools & design features that were built with them (and oil lamps, rushes, all that stuff) in mind, in a way I didn't quite so well before. Stuff uncommon now that used to be somewhat-common, like family read-alouds of novels make more sense to me now (not only were books more expensive, so you might have fewer of them—it takes way less lighting for one person to read, than for five, which really matters when light is expensive! IIRC the Brontës were supposed to have done a lot of this, but I gather many people did)

What makes it hard to keep up is life. In the Winter, especially, even if I'd tried to keep doing this, I'd have had to set a cut-off later than sundown, no question—you can't realistically go no-electronics-or-lights at like 5:30PM. Nobody else lives like this. (Almost) no place you go with others at night is like this. Chores pile up during the day because stay-at-home spouses aren't the norm anymore, so by the time you have even a second of free time it's already night, or else you've deferred all the chores to night, and adding friction to those is not fun. Going out after dark anywhere (say, grocery shopping) kinda screws it up. It's just fairly inconvenient given that all of life is now built around having day-like lighting available at night.

However, I think getting a good chunk of the way toward it is feasible, and would probably bring many of the same benefits.

> More annoying to keep clean?

Looks shitty if it's even slightly dirty, gets dirty if you so much as look at it, requires very thorough cleaning to make it look good (no smudges or streaks).

Means you don't do your own cleaning—like, at all. Once-a-week housekeepers can't keep a mirrored coffee table looking tidy. Probably also helps if you have whole rooms you barely use, but even dust'll have it looking shabby faster than, say, wood. If you buy such a piece and do your own cleaning—and especially if you actually use it—you'll probably regret it in a matter of days.

It's the kind of thing someone without that can only own (without it looking way worse than almost any alternative material) if they're so dedicated to it that it'll be the thing people remember about them. "Aunt Gertrude and that damn table. You remember that? Wouldn't let anyone touch it, and damned if every time you came to visit, she wasn't cleaning it. She had a whole process. Drawer of different towels, three or four cleaning bottles she had to put on in order. One time my kid touched it with a cookie-greased hand and she saw me getting the Windex, nearly bit my head off."

I've found it remarkably useful, despite often being a bit tongue-in-cheek.

The insight on mirrored surfaces was especially interesting. I remember seeing a staged photo of some Trump kid & spouse with their own kid playing in a living room with a spotless mirrored table and was like "oh, hey!" Lots of fun bits like that.

... Actually, the entire Trump thing was fascinating with Fussell's instruction guiding one's experience of it. "Prole" fit on expensive suits. Middle-as-fuck taste in home decor ("if you're rich it means everything's huge and covered in gold, right?"). Still haven't figured out how much of it's genuine and how much of it's an affectation for marketing/personal-branding reasons.

He got his hope-for-the-future "Class X" all wrong—just an upper-middle youth fashion wave, mostly—but otherwise it's still a surprisingly-useful tool for analysis, considering how old and half-jokey it was.

Same—though I didn't used to do that back when 1) I had a whole lot less money, and 2) I used cash way more often.

Now, if I have cash, it's almost always because I intend to spend it, usually for some purpose or activity or over some time period. It's not going back in the bank. Any left over or if plans change, I'll just spend it on whatever. It's "already spent". If it leaves the bank account, it's gone.

Relatedly, I've found my life-long "sleep problems" go away very fast if I stop using electronics or electric lights after sundown.

Go figure, you light up rooms with hundreds of candle-power like it's friggin' daytime, and have world-class entertainment of most any kind available at the press of a button like you're living in a World's Fair crossed with Vegas crossed with a Red Light district crossed with a video game arcade, and it's hard to sleep and you don't feel tired as early as you do if you don't do those things. Live like it's pre-war (more or less) and the problems vanish. Who'd have guessed?

Hard to keep that up in a modern world with two working adults who need to Get Shit Done at night and zero other people you know are living on that kind of schedule—plus, Winter nights are way too long—but it worked. Sun goes down, read or play cards or whatever by candle light (I found two beeswax candles next to each other were enough to read by—and you'll quickly figure out why really-old fireplace mantles often had mirrors behind them, if you didn't already know!) for an hour or so, and the yawns are coming hard and fast, time to go to bed.

Shit for air quality, so, that's a problem. Never did find a cheap battery-powered warm-light not-brighter-than-three-or-four-actual-candles lantern to replace the candles with, while I was trying it.

Once you're used to it, whole-room lighting seems blindingly bright and totally insane. Interesting for getting another perspective on ordinary modern life.

My pet-hypothesis is that part of the problem isn't the tech per se, but that office workers do parts of jobs that would have been the specialty of several different people before, say, the 1980s. And not only that: they switch between those, and aspects of their own job, much faster than before.

A person who had two kinds of tasks to worry about in a given day in 1975, might have twenty today—technology didn't so much eliminate work, as allow it to be more concentrated. Someone's still doing the work, it's just five people instead of twenty-five, and none of them as is focused or specialized as before. Everyone's a secretary now, in other words—plus whatever else they do. Everyone is the mail room. Little bits of jobs like project management or plain ol' management get devolved down to ordinary workers. And so on.

Popular literature of years past looked more like those trashy-cover, cheaply-made, deteriorating, fits-in-a-suit-jacket-outer-pocket-without-wrecking-the-drape, thin genre novels you sometimes see carefully preserved in bookstores today, that never saw a hardcover printing (LOL, why? Pick one up, and 99% of the time they're clearly hastily-written formulaic crap), than Hemingway or Melville (the latter of whom, famously, had to be "re-discovered" in order for us to recognize his name today—he'd vanished from pop-consiousness very fast). Or "penny dreadfuls" (similar deal) before that.

Forster was British and was poking fun at his own national character (if it wasn't him it was... Maugham, I suppose? Definitely British). You'll note how it's not really clear they come of better-seeming, overall, and the "punch line" amounts to a complaint about the British. [EDIT: and, go figure, another common characterization of the British is that their humor is often this sort of thing]

And there's usually something to those stereotypes, even if assuming they're true of everyone is plainly not a great idea.

I once read something by... someone... EM Forster, maybe? About how a key difference between the British and the French is that, in an emergency, the French may handle it capably enough but will be freaking out the whole time—then carry on like it never happened; while the British will be cool as a cucumber and act like a life-and-death emergency is a minor inconvenience as they handle it, but then never shut up about it for the rest of their lives.

[EDIT] I wanna say the example was a mishap on a ride somewhere, and he wrote something to the effect of "by the time they get where they're going, the French will have forgotten all about it, while the English will only have just begun what will become an excited, endless retelling of the tale". Except I'm sure he worded it better. Fairly sure it was Forster. Somewhere in his (extensive) essays and articles, I think.

So was I :-)

I find basically all social media sites too confusing to use, starting with when I first attempted to use Facebook around 2010 and couldn't figure out where the hell anything I posted "went" or where anything I saw was "coming from" and couldn't figure out the distinctions between various pages or types of posts. I'm told by a longer-time user buddy that the UI made a lot more sense in the early, .edu days.

I spent years not realizing Instagram posts could have more than one image. Now they have videos, too—are mostly videos, even—which just seems wrong to me.

Twitter confuses the hell out of me. Tiktok is constant frustration, if I try to use it.

I swear, I'm not even that old and was definitely not old when I first encountered a lot of these sites. IDK how they're so successful when I find their UIs totally unusable. Must be a me-problem, I guess. I manage to figure out shit like Paradox Games UIs without too much trouble, and they're regarded as exceptionally dense and hard to learn, so it's not a general problem of mine with all UIs.

The initially-too-high offer plus downturn in his stock value right after, meant a deal structure that damn-near doomed the company anyway (tons of debt).

Best-case (for him), Twitter as we knew it dies and he manages to turn the burnt-down ashes into something profitable enough to overcome that hurdle. Twitter per se cannot reasonably get out of the hole he's dug for it.

Though, arguably, the brand itself was a huge part of the value, and he just threw that in the trash.

You know a guy's going down a weird path when all defenses of his behavior amount to "I know the last twenty things he's done have looked insane and none of it's made any money, but he's got a secret genius plan, I swear! 5D chess!"

Seems like you've got a solid math grounding. If you're looking to expand on your history knowledge, I'd recommend taking a look at Creasy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifteen_Decisive_Battles_o...

> him on drugs.

Hey isn't he still majority owner of SpaceX (Jesus, there's the X again, somehow that hadn't dawned on me yet)?

Doesn't a huge proportion of their income come from government contracts?

Aren't there... you know, some laws about that exact thing?

Oh who'm I kidding, only the peons have to sweat about their lives being ruined by getting high on the weekends. Rich people are too good for that, of course.

Besides, he's probably got bullshit prescriptions for most of it.

I heard some pal of his (owner of the big MMA league or something? IDK, some other Saudi-loving guy I gather, I don't know much about combat sports) interviewed on NPR a couple weeks ago and he was still saying Musk is a business genius (but he also had some weird "once someone's in the circle, they're in the circle, and Musk's in the circle" thing going on, like from goddamn Meet the Parents—dude was a living caricature, the interview was fawning but the guy was just an absurd human being).

Look, everyone makes mistakes, but the whole Twitter thing, from the beginning, has been the equivalent of hiring a fry cook and then he sticks his fucking hand in the fryer, on purpose, on day 1. Then he sticks the other hand in.

You wouldn't say that dude's a genius chef—or, if he ever was, he's either gone nuts or is on way too many drugs to trust with anything. Or both.

> ("country club membership", really?)

Yeah, I know. I wasn't raised part of that class and don't hang out with many people in it, either :-)

Books I've read on the topic and the handful of people I know in it, yeah, that's just what you do if you're in That Set. Country clubs.

Seeing a lot of $25-45 (USD) used price.

Used books are awesome. I have north of 500 books and I doubt more than 50 were purchased new. Only that many because some of my relatives want Christmas and birthday wishlists every year, but won't shop anywhere but Amazon and think it's weird to buy someone a used book as a gift (I'd rather have 2-3x as many books for the same money, but hey, I'm not the one paying, so whatever, I guess).

Then we should:

1) Explicitly fund research with public dollars, then, not make people who need drugs that aren't even very new fund it.

2) Stop paying to fund everyone else's research (I think this is about 90% bullshit, seeing as other developed countries have strong drug research sectors and I doubt that's solely because of their sales in the US, but even if it's not bullshit—why the hell would we do that?)

Every time someone tries to defend the status quo, they seem not to notice that they're defending a very shitty version of what they're advocating for, even if all their claims are true.

Every other developed country imposes price controls on at least parts of the healthcare industry. Drugs are just about always on the list. Either directly, or through monopsony power.

$300k (household) isn't upper-middle, before the term became diluted to mean "middle, but with a little left over every month"—the upper-middle of Fussell's Class and The Official Preppy Handbook

- Good private school for a kid or two (guess what one of the bribes to Thomas was...). Not gonna get away with much less than $25k/yr/kid, there, and it goes up from there.

- Long vacations expensive places a couple times a year (again...)

- House somewhere nice (notably, however, the public schools can be shit, which saves a little money here)

- Country club membership, or similar

- Don't have to do, at least, the ~50% of chores you hate the most (you pay to have them done). Ditto the worst parts of childcare.

- (optional, but recommended) Attendance of fancy functions (esp. e.g. charity events–what's the point of it all if you don't feel fancy?)

- Second property with housing on it (doesn't have to be lavish, but can't be quite as shit as a hillbilly fishing shack, which even poor country folk sometimes have)

- (optional, but recommended) Any money left over after that.

That's gonna be $400k+, household, in a cheap but not crazy cheap market (who wants to be fancy in truly bum-fuck nowhere? Though your vacation property might be there...) in 2023. Bare minimum ([EDIT] that won't get you much of the "optionals", I mean, and the rest is gonna be teetering right on the edge of having to start cutting items—and then, only if you're somewhere relatively low COL).

You aren't living, to a certain social class, if you start having to sacrifice much of that. That's how you're supposed to live.

> Your idea of being an expert because you majored in a related topic is amusingly misinformed as well. You are kidding yourself.

Never claimed to be an expert. I'm also not "grotesquely misinformed", unless the bar for "merely misinformed, but not grotesquely" is so high that at least 99% of people are "grotesquely misinformed" (which... IDK, maybe, in that case, I guess?). Not an expert, though, and, didn't claim to be.

I have no idea why people are taking any of what I've written as "voting for President is bad and you shouldn't do it". I must not have written clearly, yet cannot find what's drawing that reaction anywhere in my posts (but maybe it's there and I'm just not seeing it!). I think I've just written about the best use of limited time & attention: smaller, and earlier in the process, is most effective; and how voter behavior instead reflects polar opposite priorities. Everyone voting in every election would, of course, be ideal (I mean, for me, just certain folks voting in every election would be ideal, but you get what I mean).

> In small, local elections, your vote has a more transparent relationship to outcomes. But those outcomes tend to be inconsequential.

I'm going to be blunter than I usually am on HN, because you're in dangerously-wrong territory and I'd hate for anyone to run with this outside of HN, for making decisions about voting or political participation: this is super fucking wrong. Local election & initiative outcomes matter a ton.

I would encourage anyone who doesn't find themselves seeing, very clearly, why, after a few moments' though, to spend some time over a few days looking at national headlines—not just the one or two top ones, but a bunch each day—and marking down which levels of government are active in or generating each story (yeah, I know, I advised mostly avoiding the news in favor of books, but this is a decent way to do some informal statistical analysis). And that's just what makes national news! Consider which levels of government you interact with most. Which police patrol cruisers do you see most—the FBI? State bureau? Highway patrol? Probably not any of those, and I bet that was an ascending list least- to most-seen (while omitting the ones probably see more than any of those, by a large margin—city & sheriff, say?). School budgets and hiring administrators. Which levels of government are banning books? Very-local, or sometimes state. Who's setting library funding, running the closest 20 parks to where you live, hiring the government officials and setting their policies? Zoning rules? Who's running your utilities, or responsible for collecting your trash? There's so much and it very much matters.

> I get that, but a solution to that problem — on my mind — doesn’t involve people voting less regularly in Federal elections, but rather getting folks to vote more regularly in local elections. Separating the two seems arbitrary — federal elections have more money behind them than local, so awareness is greater. That’s a solvable problem, and one we’ve seen tremendous gains on in the last 15 years.

I'm not saying "avoid voting in some elections", I'm saying the voters who only turn out for the big ones probably have some wrong ideas about where their time and attention is most-effectively spent, and which bubbles they fill out on the ballot or taps they make on the screen are most important. How many can tell you one thing about any state judge, say, (for states that elect judges) on that presidential ballot, but can rattle off all kinds of crap about both major presidential candidates? Priorities are skewed the wrong way. It's just an observation about how voter attention tends to be focused on the wrong things. That top-line vote every four years matters more for getting people out for the down-ballot, than it does per se.

> inexorably led us to a place where vast segments of the populace haven’t been paying attention, and assumed “both sides are the same”, and now we’re in a real pickle, Federal policy-wise.

I don't think paying less attention to the news gets us there. Plenty of folks I know who hold that (deeply silly) "both sides" opinion pay a lot more attention to the news than I ever have, certainly.

Again, I think we'd be better-served, and have a better electorate, if those folks mostly stopped watching the news and started reading more books. However, I admit that this is impractical to apply broadly, as a huge proportion of US adults can't profitably read even slightly-complex non-fiction texts and get much out of them—but for an individual not in that cohort of barely-readers, it might be a good change to make, if one of their reasons for following the news so much is to "be a better voter & citizen". More books, less news (very little, infrequently, possibly except local news).

A whole lot of people in-fact only turn out for the "big" votes, is the problem.

> Every four years, the presidential election is on the same ballot as all the other local elections.

Yes—but a lot of people skip most or all other votes, including some more-local ones that usually aren't part of that vote. I'm saying placing so much importance on voting for president is misguided.

> However, you can only consider the effect of a presidential vote to be zero if you also consider the derivative in calculus to be zero. In terms of the presidential eletion, we aren't voting as individuals, we're voting as a state. Your vote matters.

I'm... gonna stop addressing this point in public here, for reasons unrelated to what's correct. It's one of those topics probably better avoided outside small circles due to what amount to, I suppose, marketing reasons, if you will. Probably shouldn't have brought it up.

Let it be known that I never claimed it's bad to vote in a presidential election. Everyone should definitely go vote any time they can, especially those in a forum where they're statistically more likely than average to vote the way I would. Every vote is extremely important.

> > for most people

If you're able to e.g. turn the news into money or other real advantages, or desirable (to you, at least) outcomes that wouldn't have been possible otherwise, you're one of ones who aren't covered by "most".

> Your idea of "value of a single vote" is grotesquely misinformed.

Most of my positions on the relative efficacy of various voter behaviors in the US system of government are heavily informed by my having been a poli-sci major in the US, and spending a fair amount of time studying those directly and absorbing expert analyses of them.

Admittedly, some of those are unpopular—people love voting for the President (and then ignoring school board, city, and county elections, and not participating in any political parties).

shrug

We noticed a correlation between worse treatment and worse behavior, and course-corrected. The trouble was that even going wildly the opposite direction made things better... but just a somewhat-nicer circle of hell, and achieved only at immense time-cost (consistent long stretches of positive 1-on-1 attention, regardless of behavior, amounting to hours a day per kid, were necessary to have any notable effect) that wasn't going to be tenable long-term while keeping all the other plates of life (and we've got a pretty damn easy one, otherwise) spinning—plus, you can't really do that when they're in school, and neither can the teachers. And that still wasn't enough to get us out of hell, it was still really bad.

Meds (& therapy—but if this miss that for a couple weeks, nothing bad immediately happens, while if they miss the meds even one day...) did the trick. Amazing. We can just tell them stuff, and they mostly listen. We can talk to them about something they just, moments ago, did that was wrong, and they know what we're talking about rather than being genuinely confused, and will not just commit to do better, but will actually try and maybe not immediately repeat the behavior, even entire minutes (LOL) later, and almost never start to just absentmindedly do it again while we're still talking to them about it. Punishments or harsh reprimands are (and were, after we caught on to those being not just ineffective, but counter-productive, even in very mild forms) reserved for immediate safety problems that can't wait for a touchy-feely approach, or many-times-repeated bad behavior, and don't usually result in hours of backlash-behavior later, as they used to, and do usually have an overall-positive effect. They notice straightforward natural-consequence-type correction and respond to it, rather than its having zero effect whatsoever.

But, yes, we can add 2 to N for worsening treatment being the opposite of helpful for (at least our) unmedicated very-ADHD kids, for sure. That was definitely something we saw.

It's not about the scope of the power of the elected official, it's that the effect of a presidential vote may as well be zero—it's about the power of the vote. A vote for, say, school board may also have near-zero power, but is nonetheless thousands of times greater. A vote in a presidential primary is also far more likely to have any effect whatsoever, than a vote in the general, both because it's smaller and because decisions there determine the entire course of the rest of the campaign, and of the general election.

I care plenty about reproductive rights, FWIW, if that's what you're getting at. It's nonetheless the case that a person who votes (only) in one local or state election every four years is doing their civic duty better than someone who votes (only) in every presidential election—but voter participation patterns treat the presidential vote like it's the very most important one to get to. Most people stay home for some elections, and from a how-best-to-spend-my-limited-time-and-effort perspective, most of them are getting it wrong (unless you factor in other things, like how much social pressure there is to go to vote for president vs. how much there is to get to the polls for other elections).