geomark

It's fun to read stories like yours and others here. A lot of us probably have similar. I think I enjoy telling mine because each time I retell it I get a little bit of that great feeling again of suddenly being able to buy what I want at the grocery store.

About mid-way through high school the family business went bankrupt and all assumptions about how I would go to college evaporated. So instead I ended up going to an electronics trade school on a student loan.

I did not have to pay tuition until after graduation, but I did have to pay all my living expenses myself. Had a minimum wage part time job from which to make rent, bills and food. Could barely afford to eat.

Got turned onto a store called WareMart that sold mega size boxes of really cheap products. A fellow poor schoolmate showed how to buy a huge brick of fake Velveeta cheese, giant tub of margarine and a potato-sack-size bag of elbow macaroni to make super cheap mac-n-cheese. The secret was to boil the macaroni for a long time so it would absorb a lot of water and get huge, then add a scoop of margarine and slab of cheese. You could eat for weeks on one purchase.

It was disgusting. But I lived, and finished school.

Upon graduation I had three offers at weekly salaries for more money than I had ever held in my hands. When I cashed my first paycheck I went to the grocery story and filled the basket with steaks and grilled one every night. Man, what a feeling. Despite making tons more in later years I have never felt so rich as when I spent that first paycheck.

Childless friends tell me they won't have kids because they are too expensive. I tell them they are thinking about it wrong. They own a house and talk about it as their best investment. Well, kids are an investment. A high risk/high reward investment for sure. But possibly the greatest investment they will ever make, due at least in part to the reason your friend mentioned.

I've had some luck building toy websites for the main purpose of trying out or practicing some tools or skills. Most recently was a site where I was semi-automatically collecting stock price data, creating and posting stock charts and attempting (unsuccessfully) to identify buy opportunities. It was on the domain BuyTheDip.com. After I was done dabbling the site just sat for a few years until a buyer approached with an attractive offer. It was during the Wall Street Bets frenzy so I think it might have been related. Now the domain redirects to a Discord group, so I guess they just liked the domain name.

Point being, you might just keep building and dabbling and score a winner now and then.

Right. Just like the force between opposite charges. That's how I've always thought of it.

Small nit - I think it is actually called electrostatic force, at least when we are talking about charges at rest.

This probably isn't the right place for this question. But the right kind of people will be reading this thread so I will ask it.

In college physics my teacher insisted that, despite gravity being popularly referred to as a force, it is not a force. Weight is indeed a force, but gravity is more like a field. I understood it like this: Say you have a point mass in an isolated system. There is certainly gravity all around that mass, but there are no forces anywhere in the system. Not until another mass is introduced into the system do you have any forces. It is apparent from the formula for force since then you have that new mass times the acceleration of gravity.

Or is this just being pedantic and does it even matter?

"Thinking of Physics" is pretty great. Thanks for the rec.

What a great approach. The easy social studies courses are made so horribly boring that it drives students to study the hard sciences.

Any titles you can recommend?

I'm homeschooling my kid and have been using sample problems from both Russian and Singapore math. But I only have a single source for Russian math problems, which is a pdf of a paper by a Russian educator who taught in the US and then wrote a paper comparing the two educational systems.

It's interesting because he talks about how algebra is a big scary subject that is introduced late in the American system, while in Russia they start doing algebraic-type problems early in primary but they are solved with pictures. So when algebraic notation is introduced later it's just a next step to the types of problems that students have already been solving.

Here in Thailand they sell those chunks of alum at village shops. Called สารส้ม in Thai. Villagers follow the same routine, swish it around in a bucket of dirty water to settle it out. Photo on the page at this link: https://pantip.com/topic/38053321

I am homeschooling my kid and this Secret Life of Components series is part of our Design and Technology curriculum. We've always done a lot of making and building, and Tim's practical knowledge of so many things really expands our know-how.

Humans aren't a natural phenomenon?

What you say is true, but I wonder what you mean by "failed it's people". Because from what I saw it wasn't just really poor leadership. It was the prevalent attitude of individualism above everyone else that made things really bad in many western countries. People failed themselves. And great leaders aren't going to change that culture.

Tangentially related, this brought to mind the study that showed a reduction in myelination in young children who were exposed to "excessive" screen time. [0]

[0] https://neurosciencenews.com/screen-time-brain-changes-15161...

Yeah, that's a good example of how the rich can get away with anything in Thailand. In most places if you kill a cop the cops make sure you get what's coming to you. But here even the cops can't get justice for other cops if the perp is the brat son of the ultra rich.

Smuggling luxury cars is a big thing in Thailand. There is a 200% tax to import them. There are busts reported in the news now and then. Sometimes it's a shipment of "used" car parts which is really a container of disassembled super cars shipped in to be reassembled and sold. Sometimes it is cars imported by alleged students who were studying overseas and can bring back the cars they were driving for only a 30% import tax.

The police aren't much use for enforcing laws in Thailand, especially against the rich kids.

I'm interested in how you got the account back. My kid lost access to the email address on the account. It wasn't stolen, it was a school email address at an old school. Replies from Roblox support have been very slow and not helpful - just instructions on how to recover using the email on the account (as if they never read the original support request).

I took a course in college called "European Political Thought" and one of the texts we had to read was the bible. Reading it cover to cover revealed a number of surprises to me. I had to go to church as a kid so I knew the basics but I was never very religious. The best moments in class were the uncomfortable reactions of a few of the students who were clearly quite religious.

A "massive over-investment of time", indeed, unless you are doing it for college credit ;)

Agree on the peer reviewing in non-degree courses. I never got spammy-looking reviews, but I did get ridiculous reviews where one reviewer would grade high, another low and a third make no effort and just say "pass". It was clear that many had no clue what they were talking about or made zero effort. No way I would settle for that in a paid course.

I'm pretty sure this is sarcasm. But I never know these days because a lot of people actually avocate things like this. After seeing what happens to most people after they receive a lot of free stuff, especially large sums of money, I would never advocate something like this. There's also the rather obvious issue about how it would be paid for but, again, there a lots of people who think you can just print money out of thin air forever and nothing will ever happen.

As some siblings have commented, it's probably the failure to get back and document it. But the desire for job protection is not uncommon. I saw it when I worked on testing satellite power converters at a large aerospace company. There were procedures and paperwork for everything, but the test procedure for one series of power converters did not work. Only one technician knew how to actually test them. He led me through it, and he had plenty of time to update the procedures, but refused to do it. It was gross and obvious what he was doing, but somehow he was allowed to get away with it. There was no union.

I believe you meant eletromagnetic compatibility (EMC).

Having experienced, in a couple of very different countries, the difference between public and private housing and healthcare I know which one I prefer.

No experience as an insider in academia so can't comment on that.

I don't think that word, capitalism, means what you think it means.

What does a "run on BTC" mean?

The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. We are all subject to it. Requires constant vigilance to avoid it.

Many people, although not enough, have had similar experiences. I feel fortunate that it happened to me when I was still a kid. The local newspaper reported a story about the adventures me and some neighbor kids had during a flood in our little town. It was exaggerated and bogus. That made an impression on me. Several times later in life I saw the same thing happen. My assumption these days is that most news stories range from being somewhat inaccurate to totally bogus.

Yeah, I thought Asimov was all over this long ago. Also see "Machines Like Me" by Ian McEwan for a recent go at sentient androids.

Brings to mind the MRI scans of the thighs of an elderly athlete versus an elderly sedentary man https://www.bettermovement.org/blog/2012/use-or-lose-looks-l...

Does anyone know if the thresholds for being "overweight" and "underweight" have changed over time? I mean, with so many people getting heavier and heavier has the standard crept up so that "underweight" isn't even skinny anymore?

That has been my experience, having ordered a hundred or more items in the last couple of years.