commonturtle

It honestly seems like technology affects older generations more than newer ones. Look at the people most susceptible to fake news online, vast majority over the age of 50. Younger people understand how the internet works; you can’t trust everything you read online.

Wonderful post. I really enjoy the authors other posts as well, would recommend his blog.

Why not just give it to charity?

I have an Ikea Skarsta: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/skarsta-desk-sit-stand-white-s5....

Pretty affordable and well made standing desk (~$250). The only problem is having to crank the desk up and down can get tedious after a while, but I'd rather do that than shell out $2k for a motorized standing desk.

I guess this is what inspired the pneumatic tube systems in Bioshock: https://bioshock.fandom.com/wiki/Pneumo_Tube.

Interesting idea. With populations increasingly getting older in the west, the future belongs to the old. Helping them live better lives is a great opportunity.

Wow, Jolla is still around. I thought they must be dead by now. Has anyone used them and can comment on how usable Sailfish OS is? I can only seem to find reviews from 2014, which is a century in cellphone-years.

Well then, you should try this Iranian dessert made with... Lamb neck meat: https://www.tasteatlas.com/khoresht-mast :)

From what I've heard the meat just blends into the dish and gives it richness without really giving it a 'meaty' flavor. I'm just trying to find some restaurant near me that serves it.

You could 25x their budget and everything would still suck. Money is not the problem, competent governance is. Until they fix that the public should refuse any further tax increases.

In England you'll find references to 'the corn laws' and 'the corn exchange'. Corn meant any kind of grain. I believe it still does in some places, and what is called 'Corn' in the New World is called 'Maize' everywhere else.

More on this subject from actual historians: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2tn77o/what_...

I'm 29, following the rule of thumb where you have (your age)% in bonds and (100 - your age)% in stocks.

Is 30% too much or too little from your experience? I can understand people preferring stocks at the moment because bond yields are so low. But that won't be the case forever :)

I'm skeptical of these UBI experiments in general, because they don't take into account that widespread, permanent UBI will change people's behaviour in very different ways from a small, temporary experiment. How do populations respond when they are guaranteed $2k / month forever no matter what they do? Do they simply start asking for $3k / month after that? Does the median individual stop working and watch TV all day, or do they do amazing creative things?

One crazy experiment we could try: Give Finland (they've run a small-scale UBI exp before) $1.2 trillion to run a nationwide, long-term UBI experiment on their whole population(5M (pop. Finland) * $24k / year (UBI payments) * 10 years = $1.2 trillion).

Make the decision about UBI based on what happens in Finland after 10 years. Not perfect, and it will never happen, but certainly would be a more trustworthy indicator of UBIs real effects on a society :)

Just index funds for now. ~70% in some Vanguard world index fund and ~30% in bonds. But I'm planning on doing some research on some microcaps as well. For individual investors with sub-$1M portfolios microcaps are one of the few places where we can seek alpha.

Why is this surprising? I also think that buying the latest smartphone is a waste of money, but every two years I find myself upgrading to the latest iPhone anyway.

These seem to be questions rather than problems. Also I'm not sure 'hardest' is the right dimension to look at. 'The World's Most Important Problems' would be a more useful list.

Does it really matter if they are fraudulent? Most advertisers measure (and are willing to pay for) conversions, not clicks. So even if there are lots of fake clicks, the number of purchases wouldn't change.

If advertisers have to pay for more than their conversion rates justify they will stop advertising on reddit which forces reddit to solve the fake clicks problem.

I think at the 600 mile range electric cars would seriously start to get tempting. 600 mile range + supercharging (something like +30% charge in 1h) and I'd buy in a heartbeat.

Have there ever been government interventions that have managed to improve anything in a situation like this? It seems to me like every new technology has its detractors trying to ban it or limit it in some way.

People thought reading and writing would rot our memories (don't have to remember things anymore), radio would kill reading, TV would atrophy our brains (it was called 'the idiot box' while I was growing up), video games would lead to violence, and so on. All of the dangers were vastly exaggerated.

It's probably a bit of both luck and success like everybody else.

Switzerland is an expensive place. PPP adjusted it probably ends up being ~$15/hr, similar to Seattle, etc.

I used DayOne for a while, then moved to Windows which it doesn't support. Now I just scribble notes in OneNote.

I would prefer working from an office just because of the benefits of collaboration. For generic cookie cutter projects WFH works well, but IMO complex large projects can be executed much faster by a co-located team of people.

Finding an alternative to the social part of college is the real challenge. The transferring of knowledge is already commoditized and available freely online.

Really interesting article. Still two questions about the economics that I don't understand:

1/ Why no economies of scale? Why aren't there companies that own 100k machines throughout the country?

2/ Why don't the venues run their own vending machines?

Super intelligent AI. IMO there's at least a 30% chance we will create an AI that surpasses the intelligence of humans by 2050. What then?

Great read. Inflation has become one of those numbers where we assume the definition is reasonable but it often breaks down when in contact with reality. In this case the basket of goods used to calculate the CPI didn't match the goods the author's business needed.

I was planning a trip to Sealand a few years ago; apparently you can negotiate trips with the 'Prince of Sealand', and even acquire a Sealand passport for yourself.

But then it turned out the fort is in somewhat bad shape and getting on and off can be a bit hazardous, so we ultimately decided against going :)

If you enjoyed this you may also enjoy the five part series on how bread is made by the same author. It was a long read (~2 hours for the whole series) but I learnt a lot from it: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

This is the key question. Even if nuclear is made ultra safe, a single bad event (which is likely if we build hundreds of thousands of reactors world wide) can raise so much paranoia that future investments in nuclear can be affected.

I have no idea how you could solve a problem like this.

Wow, that is an incredible story. One day, when / if I have a big enough house I'll build my own octopus aquarium :)